• According to a Gallup poll released earlier this year, New England is the least religious region in America, which is partially why Evangelists are targeting the apathetic Northern states. Some Christian denominations view New England as a "mission field," and MSNBC interviews several missionaries seeking to convert those living in and around Boston. From a New Englander born and bred: Good luck with that. •  The Georgia man accused of attacking an African-American woman outside of a Cracker Barrel while screaming racial slurs has been released on bail. Troy Dale West Jr. faces charges ranging from false imprisonment to cruelty to children, but no word yet on whether he will be charged with a hate crime. •  Soon after the election, 67% of Americans reported being "optimistic" about the future of race relations. But the so-called "Obama effect" didn't last long, and the percentage of optimistic folk has already slipped down to 56, which is only one point higher than in December 1963. • In his new memoir The Audacity to Win David Plouffe, who managed Barack Obama's presidential campaign, says Obama seriously considered asking Hillary Clinton to be his running mate. He writes; "[W]hat surprised me at [our first meeting to discuss the vice presidency] was that Obama was clearly thinking more seriously about picking Hillary Clinton than Ax and I had realized. He said if his central criterion measured who could be the best VP, she had to be included in that list. She was competent, could help in Congress, would have international bona fides and had been through this before, albeit in a different role. He wanted to continue discussing her as we moved forward." • A U.S. District Court judge has dismissed another one of Orly Taitz's birther lawsuits. She asked the court to demand President Obama produce more documentation proving that he was born in the United States and to shut down the federal government and hold an election if he couldn't. The judge said it was unconstitutional for the courts to "effectively overthrow a sitting president." • Obama For America sent out a link to a commercial paid for by the DNC that features Sarah Palin's various health care lies followed by a clip of her saying "quit making things up." • The House Democrats healthcare reform bill unveiled today says, "Only private premium dollars can be used to provide abortion coverage. Where abortion coverage is provided, funds for this purpose must be segregated from other funds, including affordability credits," which won't satisfy pro-lifers who say private premiums and government subsidies given to low-income Americans can't be isolated and segregated. • New York Governor David Paterson has signed a bill that enhances the penalty for injuring an abortion provider, staff member, volunteer or patient. The legislation is a response to the shooting of Dr. George Tiller, and makes physically injuring someone obtaining or providing an abortion a class E felony rather than a misdemeanor. • Scientists in New Zealand are working on developing an ice cream called ReCharge that will help relieve the side-effects of chemotherapy in cancer patients. The "medical dessert" uses active ingredients from dairy products to relieve diarrhea, anemia and lack of appetite. • Susan Finkelstein, the woman accused of trying to trade sex for World Series tickets, will be given two tickets to Game 3 by a Philadelphia car dealer and the host of Chio in the Morning on WIRED-FM. • According to the CDC's Prevention's Mortality and Morbidity Weekly Report released today, 11 percent of the U.S. population reports not getting enough sleep. 12.4 percent of women say they don't sleep enough compared to 9.9 percent of men. • A study by Trojan ranks the University of South Carolina as the nation's top university in sexual health. The ratings were based on a poll of students conducted on Facebook and data from on-campus student health centers. One big element of the school's sexual health awareness program are peer-to-peer groups sponsored by Student Health and Violence Prevention. • Ahmed Muhamed Dhore, a Somalian who claims he is 112 years old, says he has realized a "dream" by marrying a 17-year-old bride. He has married five times before, but three wives are dead. Dhore already has 13 children, the oldest of whom is 80, but says he would like more with his new bride, Safiya Abdulle. •

Image via Peter Rivera's Flickr

Of course, that's sort of her job — to serve the President, not the coddle the big egos of her mostly-white, mostly-male colleagues. And, by all accounts, she does a damn good job making sure Barack Obama hears the voices he ought to hear — including the ones who counsel him to think beyond the status-quo advice of the typical white, middle-aged male operative. It's probably unsurprising that there are people who consider her to have stepped on their toes, or that the people who feel that way are mostly white men.

The profile, written by Robert Draper, delves into Jarrett's early life of relative privilege and stifling realities.

The fast track laid out for Valerie Bowman - a Massachusetts boarding school, then Stanford, then a law degree at Michigan, then marriage and work at a corporate law firm - was one she pursued without either resistance or zeal, "kind of like an automaton," she told me. While Jarrett's family rejoiced when Harold Washington was elected mayor on April 22, 1983, the atmosphere at her nearly all-white firm the next day was one she would remember as "polite silence." Four years later, as a 25-year-old community organizer was wading into the tumult of her hometown, Jarrett, then 30, decided at last to reconnect herself to it. She quit both her marriage and her job, and in 1987, as the mother of a 2-year-old daughter, she went to work for Mayor Washington's corporation counsel - relinquishing her high-rise office for a cubicle in the city law department.But like the "sibling" she had yet to meet, Valerie Jarrett had found a path of her own.

It was in city government that Jarrett came to know and befriend the then-Michelle Robinson and Barack Obama, getting closer to the couple even as she experienced her own meteoric rise in Chicago business and social circles. And, then, her friend Barack decided to run for the U.S. Senate. Jarrett was skeptical.

"It was a lousy idea," Jarrett said as she recalled the decision by Obama, then a state senator, to run for U.S. Senate after he was trounced two years earlier in a bid for Congress. "He called and said: ‘I want to come over. Let's invite my closest friends. There's something I want to bounce off of you.'

"Well, Michelle had already told me what it was. She said, ‘So we're not in favor of this, right?' ‘Absolutely not!' ‘That's the right answer!' We conspired against it for all the obvious reasons.

But Barack convinced her, and she stuck by him, including when he asked her to join his campaign for the Presidency in 2007 at the advice of his finance chair, Penny Pritzker. Not everyone agreed. Obama's Senate chief of staff, Pete Rouse, wasn't keen on Jarrett's expansive role, and his campaign manager, David Plouffe, openly disliked her. So much for "No Drama Obama." David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel come across as decidedly cool to Jarrett, as does spokeman Robert Gibbs.

Why? Rahm Emanuel got steamed that she talked to the Bushie she was replacing before he talked to his counterpart. Plouffe and she "tangled" over campaign strategy, which he now says she "wasn't terribly involved in." Pete Rouse didn't like her wide portfolio. Axelrod focused on the strength of her personal relationship and advice to Obama over her job-related qualities — and pointedly doesn't invite her to his Wednesday "hard core politics" meetings at his house, which just sounds kind of dickish, if you ask me.

On the other hand, the piece is filled with Jarrett's champions, from the women on staff at the White House and the campaign (like Pritzker and Anita Dunn) to staffers of color, who felt that their advice about how to speak to minority communities was often ignored by the white dudes up front.

It was Jarrett who strongly encouraged Barack Obama to give his race speech - convinced when other senior advisers were not, says Dr. Eric Whitaker, a close friend of Obama, "that he could actually pull off the speech," and that in the wake of the incendiary Jeremiah Wright tapes, now was the time to do it. Numerous campaign officials credit Jarrett, along with the communications director Anita Dunn and Stephanie Cutter, Michelle Obama's chief of staff, for helping to rehabilitate Mrs. Obama's angry-black-woman image. (Three staff members say Jarrett encouraged the future first lady to focus on military families.) According to Clifford Franklin, one of the campaign's African-American media consultants, "Having Valerie at the table kept African-Americans and Hispanics and women at the forefront of our outreach - where before it had been an afterthought."

And there's more than simple encouragement, nonetheless recognized by some people who worked on the campaign.

"But within the campaign, Valerie had been saying, ‘You guys, you're not getting this issue right,' " recalls a top official. "And Obama communicated to his senior advisers that he thought we were a little gun-shy on race issues; that the reality was, he did look different. There were also African-Americans on our staff, some in relatively senior positions, who were clearly upset that we had not consulted them in the response. And she actually organized a meeting to discuss it.

"And that's not just a process thing," the adviser said. "Because moving forward, the candidate made it very clear to us that we were just a bunch of white people who didn't get it - which, by the way, was true."

This, in fact, is exactly what diversity is supposed to bring to a work force: a different way of looking at a set of issues that is not just helpful, but necessary.

Jarrett was also instrumental in organizing one of the more interesting photo ops and discussions of the Obama Administration to date, in which she brought together Al Sharpton, Newt Gingrich and Mike Bloomberg during the commemoration of Brown v. the Board of Education in the Oval Office. Other staffers thought the idea was amusing, while Jarrett and some of her supporters thought it was important.

When I talked earlier to Robert Gibbs about the gathering, he mentioned something that I now relayed to Jarrett: "If you would've started out a line by saying, ‘Reverend Sharpton, Newt Gingrich and Mayor Bloomberg walked into the White House together,' I would've thought it was the start of a joke." But the press secretary had also said, "I think it shows how important she thought that event was that it ultimately got on [Obama's] schedule." Of course, Gibbs wasn't exactly saying that he thought such a meeting was important - which, judging by the measured smile on her face, Jarrett seemed to understand.

Pressing the point anyway, I asked, "If you hadn't suggested that this meeting take place, do you think anyone else would have suggested it?"

Jarrett looked across the table at her friend, the White House communications director, Anita Dunn, who had dropped in on the interview. Dunn stopped taking notes and flashed Jarrett a look of abiding doubt.

"Probably not," Jarrett then murmured.

"Probably not?" exclaimed Dunn, who had been virtually silent until now. "Absolutely not!"

Dunn, as stated, is one of Jarrett's supporters in the White House (other than the Obamas, who could not have been more effusive in their praise of her to the Times Magazine reporter Robert Draper). And Draper heard much the same from other senior African-American campaign staffers.

Without Jarrett, these officials said they believed, their opinions and the often-legitimate concerns voiced by black leaders like Sharpton would have been thoroughly disregarded by the white-dominated senior staff. "There's a cultural nuance that they just didn't get," one such African-American staff member told me. "And the landscape of our campaign is littered with hundreds of stories where she intervened and voices got heard and decisions got made that might've gone a different way."

I think maybe Plouffe, Axelrod and Emanuel ought to worry a little less if Jarrett's got designs on their turf and a little more about whether listening to her will help them better serve the President.

The Ultimate Obama Insider [New York Times]

MOE: Hey we can sort of start now if you want, though I'm still mostly reading through stuff. I just bought some beer because I think I'm the soberest person in Philadelphia right now. (The Eagles won a REALLY CLOSE game with the Rams today.) But here's something fun:

Mr. Rove said Mr. Schmidt’s increased authority — which came about after what amounted to a coup by Mr. Schmidt and other McCain aides with ties to the 2004 campaign, that gave him equal status with the campaign manager, Rick Davis — has been the best thing to have happened to Mr. McCain.

Oh God, Karl Rove. How do you do it, Karl Rove? You secure the election of a president so incompetent and widely loathed he decimates your party, then you leave the business for the media. Once in the media you commence bashing the media. You bash the media for asking questions about — not reporting, just asking around about — a rumor.

MEGAN: I am well on my way to non-Eagles-related drunkenness and I still cannot believe Steve Schmidt. Or Karl Rove. Like, seriously, did we watch the same speech? Only I thought it totally bombed and I talked to a shit load of Republicans at the wake today and people thought it fucking killed.

MOE: The sordid details of which are clearly, creepily reminiscent of the (much more easily refutable) rumor you disseminated to nastily defeat your boss's rival in the 2000 Republican primaries. And eight years later, said rival's distance from your old boss being the single-most compelling trait for Republicans to safely rally around, your old cronies take over his campaign, choosing a running mate whose most salient characteristic besides her nice bod is that she was the only member of the shortlist with a dearth of accomplishments deeper than that of your old boss in 2000, and then exploit the scurrilousness of said (much less obviously mendacious) rumor about said running mate's "personal" life to smear the "media"… (And who is paying for this? The media. "I'm not in the media, I'm around the media" is I believe how Rove put it…)

MEGAN: I wonder, honestly, if Rove even takes himself seriously at this point. I mean, the Palin Blake Slate is one of the reasons she was chosen.

MOE: Nah, he can't possibly. I actually find him more amusing than offensive at this point. Although maybe that's just because I read Safire today.

MEGAN: I did not read Safire today. I honestly feel like reading columnists is like a job that I don't get paid enough to do.

MOE: Don't let it hurt your teeth too much.

MEGAN: Honestly, at the point at which he says that Broder was the only fair pundit in attendance that night, it's hard to gag while I'm laughing so fucking hard.

MOE: And in shades of Friday's "Wow, I can't believe I'm going to calm myself down by talking about Bill O'Reilly," I entreat you to calm yourself down, after taking a gander over there, with the soothing relative sanity being preached by Chuck Krauthammer.

MEGAN: Oh, wait, he said something true:

The McCain acceptance speech reads better than it was read.

Oh, wait, here he's back to teabagging McCain:

That called for McCain to set aside his longtime reluctance to recount publicly his wartime suffering.

Ummmm, you know, except for his FUCKING MEMOIRS.

MOE: Oh shit, I am starting to find Palin so relatable though! Back in Wasilla they used to call her base of support the Liquor Cabinet.

MEGAN: Man, I would totally vote for the Liquor Cabinet.

MOE: Oh dear, and here her ex-brother in law admits he used a Taser on his 10-year-old son.

MEGAN: Ugh, that is super lame. Also, did you notice that after her announcement, she took her bouffant-y twist out? One of my reporter friends was like, she wears it like that to seem taller, she's gonna have to take it out for the campaign, McCain isn't tall enough.

MOE: Oh God Janice Min Janice Minnnn I'm boycotting you now:

“She out Obama’ed Obama with her speech,” said Janice Min, the editor of Us Weekly, who said the criticism of its coverage would pass soon enough. “She came on like a supermom who is not going to take a lot of guff from anyone. The way media works now, it is impossible to separate the personal from the political, and I think her role as a celebrity — how she does on that level — could have a significant effect on the election.”

Yeah I noticed it; I believe they decreed it to be Hepburn-esque in the New York Post. Here, exhibit five.

MEGAN: I didn't tell you! David Carr interviewed me for that piece at the Vanity Fair-Google party... and didn't use my quote. But it might be because I was drinking enough that Ana Marie Cox was like... um, what are you drinking? Because I was sort of lapping her on her alcohol acquisition. That's not the best sign, probably. Ok, I've found my first reason to be actively and yet completely unreasonably against Sarah Palin, other than the whole anti-choice thing: the use of multiple exclamation points:

"New administration finally allows new input, fresh ideas and ENERGY to work with the public to shape this city!!!"

MOE: Ok and I've found my first reason to reconsider my general assertion that the media hasn't been overstepping:

And yet, you get the feeling that at the end of the day, she could shake out that lustrous mane (longer than any other major female U.S. political figure's) and get it on with her man. She wears skirts that are quite form-fitting and often goes without stockings. As ZZ Top might say, she's got legs, and she knows how to use 'em. When Sen. John McCain introduced her at an Aug. 29 campaign rally in Dayton, Ohio, she was wearing open-toed red patent leather shoes.

That is the resident fashion critic at the LA Times.

MEGAN: Um, fucking gross. Also, I have peep toed pumps, that obviously means I'm a fucking whore.

MOE: Well you're obviously a fucking whore. But so am I and I have three pairs of shoes, everyone knows that.

But, oh my God and she is totally the Britney Spears of MILFs.

Palin held her baby in her arms as the warden drove a short distance around the facility, said corrections director Joe Schmidt, who sat next to Palin. A few days later, the governor got a warning from her public safety commissioner that someone had complained that she did not strap Trig into a car seat for the ride.

Palin dismissed the complaint as petty, and the commissioner, whom she appointed, took no formal action. But the incident shows the degree to which family and politics are bound together in Palin's career.

MEGAN: Yes, I mean, shoes do not equal whore, like, wtf is the LA Times fashion critic talking about?

MOE: Um, is that really what "the incident shows" Washington Post?? Or does the incident show that SARAH PALIN IS A TERRIBLE MOTHER WHO NOT FOR NO REASON AT ALL LEAKED AMNIOTIC FLUID ALL OVER THAT PLANE (or whatever.)

MEGAN: Ok, well, that doesn't say back seat or front seat, plus it doesn't mention whether she was breast feeding or not. I dunno, I got kicked out of a bar for being there with a pregnant friend who was like I JUST WANTED ONE GLASS OF WINE. Also, my vagina leaks a lot, particularly when I'm ovulating. I'm like sloppy, annoyingly wet.

MOE: Ugh that is so annoying. Didn't they read the story about how you can actually binge drink during pregnancy so long as you only do it a few times a month or so?

MEGAN: I don't know, they were complete assholic assholes about it.

MOE: OOOOOOH maybe you are just female ejaculating all the time like those women in those other stories who have orgasms all the time and have to strap miniature vibrators to their underwear just to get through the day????

MEGAN: Nah, when I was a teenager, I went to my doctor and she said it was normal. Like, it's my body being like IMPREGNATE ME!! But, fuck that bitch, I have an IUD.
Anyway, so if she got 600 votes in her first election and 900 in her second, then despite what Mitt Romney said, she didn't get as many votes in two elections as Joe Biden got in Iowa.

MOE: Hahaha oh Mitt Romney, please watch him now in this clip I made of that speech — well actually I had Nick McGlynn make it, thank you Nick — but I sat through the speech for the purpose of conveying in 42 seconds how insane it was. And I was pretty sure that crap about Biden getting fewer votes was, in Noonan parlance, "bullshit" but thanks for that.

MEGAN: I heard that and I was like... yeah, there's no way that's true. I used up 90 percent of my internet connection Wednesday night proving it.

MOE: Yeah, the thing that sucks about these Republicans is that they don't care if you fact-check them. I really wish Plouffe or whoever could just get up and say something equally outrageous and blasphemous like…hold on…like how about, "Sarah Palin ran a town that is smaller than many high schools!" Oh wait, that's true, hm, or like, what about "Sarah Palin's fiscally conservative policies managed to sink that tiny little town into enough debt to buy a brand-new Prius for every household in it TOO BAD HER HUSBAND IS THE TOOL OF ALL THOSE STUPID OIL COMPANIES." Ughhhhhh but that would also be true I think!

MEGAN: Oh, shit, another convention story I meant to mention: I met David Gregory in a Starbucks. He's replacing Matthews and Olbermann as anchors. Only, back at Wonkette (now erased in this server migration), I posted this video of him dancing to Mary J. and my friend Eric Brewer tracked him to a video of Obama dancing on Ellen and he had a poll about who was better and Gregory won. So, I was like, hey, so, like, I did this video of you and Obama dancing and he was like, oh, I totally saw that. And then I blushed and got totally awkies.

MOE: Well in lieu of lending credence to the scurrilous rumor I heard about Palin's heroic son in the Army I am going to ask you if you read today's Filkins piece in the Times Magazine about how Pakistan has turned into the Minneapolis of the Terrorist Convention and part of that is flaky Benazir Bhutto's fault for thinking it was a good idea to arm the mujahadeen back when we also thought that was a good idea, oh and did we mention history and that repeating itself thing, as comforting as it is to know that people make the same stupid mistakes and repeat all the same fuckups even in places where the average citizen doesn't consume a metric tonne of alcohol every month, it is not very comforting at all actually. Here it is. Obama was good on this issue the other night with O'Reilly, incidentally, not that O'Reilly had any idea.

MEGAN: I keep meaning to watch the O'Reilly shit, but my parents don't have cable. Anyways, anyone who elects Zadari deserves what they get, sort of like how I feel the overwhelming majority of people who either voted in GWB for a second term or — more likely — didn't fucking bother to vote better not now be bitching about their adjustable rate mortgage, I tell you what. Even people in Pakistan know he's a Thaksin-level corrupt asshat — and they probably have some idea who the fuck Thaksin is, too. Also, I object to the assertion that I consume a metric tonne of alcohol a month. That's why I mostly drink wine and hard liquor, to keep the tonnage down.

MOE: Oh god yeah Thailand, we could discuss that too, and Freddie and Fannie, THE NIGHT COULD LAST FOREVER. But what's hot right now? I thought the Times magazine story by Frum on Republicans and income inequality was interesting, if namely for its incongruity following a week during which the proverbial Bullshit, as Janice Min so eloquently pointed out, triumphed so decisively over Shit That Actually Matters.

MEGAN: Wait, income inequality? Get yourself some fucking bootstraps, yo. Does anyone even fucking know what bootstraps are?

MOE: Whoa, the origins of all the Palin kid names! Turns out that taken together they all come together to mean "CANNY ATTEMPTS TO DEFLECT OBVIOUS CORPORATE BEHOLDENNESS BY INGRATIATING SELVES TO NATURE FETISHIZING IDIOCRACY" or just "FLAGRANT POLITICKING RIGHT FROM THE START." Fuck I somehow didn't realize Sarah Palin married Todd because she was knocked up. That is so rouge cou.

MEGAN: I mean, it's like a month, tops that they knew. Chances are, like other super-Catholic friends of mine, they boned a little early and found out a couple weeks after the wedding regardless.

MOE: Nah nah Track was born eight months after they eloped "to save money." I dunno, it's funny. God, who gets pregnant the first time they have sex? Well, I have a friend whose parents did, but how crazy. Oh man it's getting late though I guess. And there's still so much! Damn the weekend for being over.

MEGAN: Well, luckily, I opened a magnum of wine! I got plenty of time!

MOE: Ok i'm getting another beer. Dogfish 90 minute IPA, not that they're sponsoring me. Not that i would LET THEM.

MEGAN: I've got a Yellowtail Cabernet. I am not going to pretend if a winery wanted to sponsor my blogging I would deny them the opportunity, but I would rather it be something non-corporate like Guglielmo or Hecker Pass, two of my favorite family wineries.

MOE: Ugh are we too far-gone — and too far down on the moral authority pay grade — to weigh in on Biden's belief that life begins at conception? Because personally I am inclined to say "well sure it does, so what" but you all know how paranoid I am about seeming "flip."

MEGAN: I mean, Biden's a Catholic, that's the party line, right? I just don't buy that. I don't believe it in the slightest. I'm not sure I believe in a soul. Potential life? Ok, maybe, but all evidence is that plenty of potential lives are ejected regularly from women's bodies. I just... I just don't buy that a zygote is A Life.

MOE: Right, well the "soul" is a different matter. As I think we might have discussed before, there's a genuine debate within the believers in souls as to how a soul could be formed at conception, then split into two separate souls two weeks later. Anyway "Life" …bacteria is life. Now human life is more important than animal life, but ughhhh if embryo life or fetus life was as precious as regular fully formed human life you would think there would be a huge public health campaign to finally put an end to the mysterious plague that silently kills as many as one in four humans before they even have the chance to get heartbeats! But there is not. And now I am tired.

MEGAN: My sister's fiancé was just asking when I was going to bed. I could stop drinking and try that out.

MOE: Yeah this is the longest Crappy Hour ever already I think. I've been drinking really slow and am still tired and I think that is a sign.

MEGAN: Ok, so, I'll check you at an abortion-esque ungodly hour on Tuesday.

MOE: Oh, but that David Gregory story was awesome.

MEGAN: There's nothing like embarrassing oneself in a Starbucks full of Republicans to make embarrassing oneself on the Internet seem totes minor.