[New York, September 24. Image via Getty]

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel (R) speaks with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (L) as they attend the United Nations Security Council meeting during the UN General Assembly at UN Headquarters in New York, NY, September 24, 2009. AFP PHOTO/Jim WATSON (Photo credit should read JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images)

• Robert Bork gives an interview about Sonia Sotomayor, declares his favorite Justice is Clarence Thomas and basically acts like such a huge douchebag that he makes Scalia look cuddly. • The Supreme Court ruled today that Valerie Plame and her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, can sue the whole government for outing her secret spy life, but not the individuals that actually did so. • Elsewhere in the government, women are joining the FBI and making their way up its ranks in ever-greater numbers. • Khadijah Williams spent most of her childhood homeless or nearly-homeless, but worked her ass off in school and is going to Harvard. • U.S. Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice recalls her own days as a female athlete and encourages women to send in their athletic pictures in celebration of Title IX's anniversary tomorrow. • Wired imagines that some day we'll be able to inhale our birth control, and not in a scary "the atmosphere is filled with poisonous chemicals" kind of way. • There's a consumer survey in which the characters from Mad Men ask you questions. No one cares what the survey is about. • Sometimes, women are sexually assaulted on cruise ships and there's not much that anybody does about it. • China is finally admitting that it has both an HIV problem and a number of sex workers, so they're trying to educate the latter about the former. • If you pay the site ManBabies $10, they'll swap a baby's face with a man's face and you'll get to be icked out. • It turns out that the most popular ways of measuring BMI actually overestimate the BMI of African-Americans, since it was designed around white people. It's like the SATs, only after you take this test, everyone calls you "fat." • Old married people who still really love each other show brain activity just like young people who just fell in love. As though you couldn't just look at an elderly couple holding hands and tell that. •

JASON: Ugh. I am awake.

MEGAN: I feel you there. I was about to say how it gets worse the longer the week goes on, and then I realized it's only Tuesday. I might cry now.

JASON: Both of us are home sick today. It's a Christmas miracle.

MEGAN: Oh, damn, that sucks. I'm glad I didn't ask you guys if you wanted to get dinner last night.

JASON: We would have declined politely, but it's always nice to have someone thinking of you when you're sick.

MEGAN: I have a biohazard suit somewhere in my car, I think, let me know if you need a chicken soup delivery or something. Otherwise, we should probably discuss Caroline Kennedy's tattoo, which I think — despite being published in the New York Post — is another piece of annoying evidence of how conservative D.C. really is. Also, sexist: tell em Ben Nighthorse Campbell didn't have a tattoo or two.

JASON: Well, remember how worked up everyone got about Elizabeth Kucinich's piercing? Didn't she have a navel piercing or something? You note how I barely remember? That's because I lived in Richmond, WHERE EVERYONE HAD A TATTOO OR A PIERCING.

MEGAN: Tongue piercing. At least then the subtext was that Dennis was getting more blow jobs than the average male D.C. political reporter, present company exempted since I'm sure you and your wife have crazy hot sex all the time. Except when you're sick.

JASON: Not tongue studded sex, and I'm fine with that. My wife has a tattoo on her back (of Eve sitting naked bestride a giant apple) and a navel piercing. Both obtained in Richmond. (My friend Amy gets credit for the art of the tattoo. I was at work one day when our manager Dave came in on his day off, and he was all: "I have to SHOW you something!" And I said, "What, what?" And he lifted up the leg of his pants to reveal a tattoo of a flaming spork on his calf. And I said, "It's a flaming spork." And he looked at me and said, "It came to me in a dream!" Capitol Hill's culture is more conservative, yes. But it's also the culture of a unfrozen idiot caveman. Everything terrifies it. About the only thing it's okay to be out of the closet on is sci-fi fandom. And of course, it's not okay to be out of the closet on being gay.

MEGAN: Flaming spork, huh? Is "dream" some sort of Richmond code for "LSD-induced haze"? But, to the point, I know people in D.C. that speak of their love of sci-fi in D.C. in hushed terms more befitting an admission of a love of S&M at a White House Christmas party. Actually, that probably happens a lot.

JASON: At least on the GOP side.

MEGAN: But no one admits to being gay in D.C. — you can catch a Hill staffer with a dick in his mouth and he'll still try to tell you he tripped.

JASON: Generally speaking, yes, most significant Richmond dreams are chemically induced. Well, it's like that dude who paid a cop twenty dollars to have it off. What was his name again?

MEGAN: Bob Allen. God damn, why do I remember these things? Let's not forget Larry Craig, though.

JASON: You remember those things because you used to write for Wonkette. But, yeah, Bob Allen. This guy will take his whole insistence on not being gay all the way to the Supreme Court. He'll be gobbling Alito's dong, and testifying, "I hate this! I don't know why it's HAPPENEEEEENG!" But, look, I think we all got a little covered with spermatazoa yesterday... Can I just mention that we live in a world of HERO PUPPIES?

MEGAN: But what a great transition to the Supreme Court non-case over Barack Obama's citizenship. I'd bet more than a few not-gay Republicans would've gobbled Alito's dong to get that case heard. Yeah, I'd rather talk puppies, too.

JASON: Just leave that link there for the Jezebel Nation (who got a shout out in the Peanuts Christmas Special) to click on when they need to feel like secret, cuddly, heroic forces are at work in the world. The Obama citizenship case proves just how far you can come in life when you have the right motivation. The folks behind these suits are hopeless, paranoid, dumbasses, and Clarence Thomas was there for them in his hour of need. You know Souter, I think, originally denied the petition. Thomas was all: "You know? I'm going to allow this!" Antonin Scalia probably got misty-eyed: "Look at my idiot protege, he's gettin' to be all grown up!" Then he probably babbled a few sentences in Latin to the false gods of his Opus Dei crackpot religion. "Semper ubi sub ubi!" Then he was wracked with Saint Vitus Dance. AND IT WAS ANOTHER TYPICAL DAY AT YOUR SUPREME COURT!

MEGAN: You know what's hilarious? One of my friends was trying to argue to me that if they had just shown the crackpots his original birth certificate, none of this would have happened and I was like, they're crazy. Are you kidding me? They probably would have lit it on fire, run out of the room and begun screaming about how they now had evidence that it doesn't exist.

JASON: Or they would found something, anything to brand it counterfeit. You see, evidence does not shut these dimwits down. Adding exculpatory material to the pile just excites them anew. They need to be ignored, or sent out to sea on ice floes (which is currently illegal, I think, or they'd have solved social security by doing it with retirees).

MEGAN: Mike Madden took one for the team and went to their press conference yesterday. His reporting, I think, proves your point.

Two and a half hours later, as dentist-slash-lawyer Orly Taitz harangued reporters for not investigating whether Obama's mother was actually dead, that hope had been obliterated. It was crushed by a torrent of half-baked legal theories, vague platitudes about the Constitution and sinister "facts" assembled by a collection of true believers so extreme that even Michelle Malkin wants nothing to do with them.

JASON: I'm sure Malkin wavered for a second or two.

MEGAN: Dude, seriously, Latoya and I were talking about this last week! We're not sure whether the other commentators on the right are just so crazy now that her crazy seems reasonable, or if she's actually been becoming somewhat reasonable lately. It's a little scary. I'd ask you to hold me, but you're sick. I mean, when this is the competition:

At one point, [Taitz] asked why the government had fined broadcasters for Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction," but didn't intervene to force the media to report on Obama's allegedly phony birth certificate. She claimed Obama holds passports from at least four countries, compared him to Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, equated the "controversy" about Obama to Watergate, and finished her tour-de-force presentation by saying that if Obama can claim he's a U.S. citizen and win an election, then so could just about anyone. "If a person can become a presidential candidate only based on his own statement," she said, "then somebody like Osama bin Laden, theoretically, can come and write a statement, 'I'm eligible,' and we should put him on the ballot, too?"

JASON: It's an airtight case! OF UNSHUNTED HYDROENCEPHALITIS, anyway!

MEGAN: You know the world's gone mad when the AP is reporting that Susan Rice is trying to set up her own fiefdom at State, which is just, like, either Susan Rice has gone completely insane or Ron Fournier is typing while giving Cheney a rim job again.

JASON: Wha? Susan Rice?

MEGAN:

As Secretary of State-pick Hillary Rodham Clinton and U.N. envoy-choice Susan Rice separately visited the diplomatic agency's headquarters in Washington's Foggy Bottom neighborhood, persons familiar with the transition said that Rice wants to install her own transition team inside the department.

Such a move by an incoming U.N. ambassador is rare, if not unprecedented, because the job is based at the United Nations in New York, where Rice already has a small transition staff, the sources familiar with the incoming administration.

The push by Rice, an early Obama supporter whose position the President-elect wants to elevate to a cabinet post, is also a signal that she intends to use her influence with the new president to play a more significant role than previous U.N. envoys, they said.

You'd think Rice might know things like that it doesn't work that way, having worked at State before.

JASON: Interesting. I'm afraid I haven't the knowledge on hand to grasp the full implications of that. The Obama administration has a different conception of U.N. Ambassador. The article casts this fundamentally at odds with Clinton. And it may! Of course, I suppose Clinton can do little else than accept the way Obama chooses to set his foreign policy team up. I take issue with "cracks" in that they've actually not yet appeared, figuratively.

MEGAN: Well, but if it's just two people having meetings, there's no story! There must be a fight! They have to still hate each other! What else will they talk about?

JASON: I'm afraid that this probably goes back to what Media Matters calls the Clinton Rules For Journalism. Say, a house burns down in Clinton's neighborhood, but firefighters manage to save everyone inside. The headline the next day is supposed to read, "CLINTONS NO HELP AS FIRE CAUSES EXTENSIVE PROPERTY DAMAGE."

MEGAN: For real, though, what else aren't they going to talk about? Charlie Rangel's new ethics problems? Ha! He paid his son $80,000 for doing nothing? So what!? Not going to step down from his Chairmanship because, he says, "I don't think reporters should be in the position of removing Chairmen.”

JASON: Getting your son money for doing nothing is an ethics violation? For white people, it's called Late Night Shots.

MEGAN: Hey, Doolittle took heat for it. (His wife, not his son). And so did DeLay. From Rangel, even. When did the lions of the Democratic party start emulating the Republicans we all despised 4 years ago?

JASON: When they took power!

MEGAN: Damn Lord Acton for nailing that one.

• Now that it's been a full year of shitty economic news, we are officially in a recession and have been for a year. Aren't you glad to know? [MSNBC]
• The market is not glad to know, and it slid almost 700 points after learning the obvious. [NY Times]
• In other obvious news, Condoleezza Rice doesn't plan to give much advice to Hillary Clinton. What advice she does give, we're guessing Clinton doesn't plan on following. [MSNBC]
• Bill Clinton is pretty happy about Hillary's nomination, though. [Real Clear Politics]

• White people at CNN just don't know 'bout Susan Rice, our soon-to-be Ambassador to the UN. [Think Progress]
• Joe Biden gave his first post-election speech today, so people wouldn't forget that he's about to be VP. [Politico]
• Palin talked, too, at a rally for Saxby Chambliss, so people wouldn't forget that she wanted to be VP before she wanted to be President. [Politico]
• Saxby Chambliss pervily grabbed himself some incestuous tween side-boob in a new commercial. [Indecision 2008]
• The Department of Homeland Security is more fucked up than watching Saxby Chambliss feel his tween granddaughter's breast. [Boston Globe]
• LGBT rights organization Impact-Florida plans to protest Governor Charlie Crist's (fey, if not gay) marriage this weekend, because protesting breeder weddings is a good plan to get more voters on your side. [The Sun Coast News]
• The cherub-faced Chairman of the FCC, Kevin Martin, wants to force the winner of a new wireless auction to set aside a portion of its win for free, porn-free wifi. Apparently, Republicans are all into not regulating the market until it comes to porn, when they get are regulatory up in there. [Silicon Alley Insider]
• Former Clintonista Phil Singer thinks Chris Matthews should get off the air if he's going to start campaigning for Arlen Specter's Senate seat. [Politico]
• Tina Brown thinks Rachel Maddow should get the coveted Meet The Press chair, among other, non-boring people. [Daily Beast]
• With Hillary Clinton's imminent resignation from her Senate seat, two names keep popping up: New York Attorney General Andrew "Shucking And Jiving Is Not A Racist Term, I Swear" Cuomo and Bill Clinton. And you thought nothing could get you to vote for Bill again. [The Hill, CNN]

• Barack Obama made it official with Tim Geithner today, announcing that he will nominate Geither to the Treasury Department. Former Treasury Secretary Larry "Math Is Hard For Girls" Summers is headed to the top of the White House Economic Council and Berkeley economics professor Christina Romer will head the Council of Economic Advisers. Betcha she does math pretty well. [NY Times]
• Former Joe Biden aide Ted Kaufman has been appointed to fill Biden's Senate seat for two years, at which point everyone in the state assumes he'll quietly step down and let the currently-deployed Beau Biden run for it. [Associated Press]
• Susan Rice, who most people thought was about to get dicked over when it leaked that Jim Jones will head the National Security Council, is actually in the running to be our Ambassador to the U.N. [Washington Independent]
• Former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack swears he's not in the running to be Secretary of Agriculture. [Washington Post]

• Obama aide and transition co-chair Valerie Jarrett has her first graduation speech almost totally written, but it still makes her sound kind of like a cool woman to know. [NY Times]
• Speaking of cool women, Moe Tkacik fucking breaks down the financial and auto industry crises, and you'll be smarter for reading it. [New York Magazine]
• And now that she might not be running against one of them anymore, Republicans all just love Hillary Clinton. [The Daily Beast]
• Alan Colmes is leaving Hannity and Colmes but not Fox News. Yeah, Hannity's feet really do smell that bad, but he's got a contract through 2012 so somebody is buying stock in Odor Eaters. [USA Today, Politico]
• In the mean time, we're rescuing Citibank, and the Dow is going up but it's all only temporary because it's not the end of the financial fall-out anymore than today is the end of Alan Colmes. However, if you're a Citibank stockholder, it is the end of your dividends for three years. [NY Times, NY Times]

MEGAN: In continuing my streak this week of mornings completely sucking, the power company has informed me that I will be paying for power oday but not receiving any, so I am writing you from a very loud coffee shop where children are welcome. And, apparently, caffeinated! And you thought I wanted to die when I didn't know where my car was.

SPENCER: This week has really shaped up into your own personal stations of the cross, hasn't it? What happened with your car?

MEGAN: It was towed. Since New York City can't make me pay taxes and revenues are down, they're towing fucking everything now. They didn't take my knee high boots, though, and, apparently, they enjoyed the sound of my alarm for quite a while. I plan on wearing the boots in celebration.

SPENCER: Did you get it back from the impound lot or take the bus home?

MEGAN: (At this moment, in violation of this coffee house's ban on cell phone conversations, the man behind me is conducting one. Fucking kill me). Oh, no, I got it out of hock, after 10 days they would sell it!

SPENCER: Aee, this is why YOU SHOULD NEVER TALK ON THE PHONE. Only text-based communications are welcome. Never use your phone for voice communication

MEGAN: Anyway, if we're going to relate this to politics, can we call the rumors of Hillary as Secretary of State a big game of D.C. telephone?

SPENCER: And here's the tragedy. HRC will never be Obama's SecState — just ludicrous to consider, what with the backbiting and undermining, completely alien to Obama's management style thus far. HOWEVER. HRC has all the skills necessary to be a good secretary, even a great one: she has a massive international stature, she's fluent in the details of strategy and the larger picture, she knows how to be persuasive and she learned about management — what works & what doesn't — in the WH. But if you were HRC, would you rather:

• a) spend a couple years in an Obama administration, where you probably will clash with your boss, and that will lead him to fire you, or
• b) have the chance to pass the Clinton-Baucus Health Care Act of 2009, fulfilling a lifelong dream of improving people's lives in this country, and going on to spend your remaining years as a Senate baron?

MEGAN: I'm thinking Clinton should hitch her star to the Kennedy bill, because Baucus didn't make any friends pulling that shit this week. What is the Senate Finance Committee chair doing issuing a health care reform package without any input from the Health Committee chair? Nonetheless, yes, that is the real question: does she want to take full advantage of the Senatorial Retirement Home, or do something exciting and really change some shit. Because State is way overdo for some structural reforms, and this might well be one of the more exciting times to be Secretary of State, given where Obama wants to take our foreign policy.

SPENCER: Well, I don't understand the politics of health care, I have Ezra Klein for that. I'm just making a general point about what she can accomplish in the Senate.

MEGAN: Also, she's reportedly in Chicago. No, I understand that, it was just mostly a way for me to point out what Baucus is doing, besides issuing a health care plan that's in opposition to many of the principles of Obama's, which is legitmately at this point mostly Clinton's from the primaries.

SPENCER: Whoa whoa whoa. Structural changes at State? Never happen. That was one of Condoleezza Rice's many attempts at doing something that failed. It would be nice if the Department bred, say, a more expeditionary Foreign Service culture, allowing diplomats to better partner with soldiers & marines in counterinsurgency, but when Rice proposed sending more diplos to Iraq last year there was practically a riot. HRC doesn't want that headache.

MEGAN: Well, but that's not a structural reform from the bottom up — and I'm not saying HRC would want to take it on — but the system right now is a jury-rigged system of outdated written test-taking and competitive (argumentative) non-interviews that aren't really reflective of the modern world or modern career paths. But, speaking of Condi... You had some stuff to say about her.

SPENCER: Yeah, I want to push back against any premature Rice-rehabilitation. She has not a single achievement to her name. It's crazy that she's so esteemed in Washington. She didn't do shit, except enable the worst foreign-policy presidency of all time and serve as the worst national-security adviser in history. She even comes across as a fool and a knave in the new Woodward book about the surge.

MEGAN: Well, in her defense, she was honored at Glamour's Woman of the Year awards for her contributions to microfinance grants for women in developing countries and her efforts to get rape made a war crime at the UN. I'm not saying it balances out — like, at all — but she did do some small important things.

SPENCER: I can't wait until a document called NSPD-9 gets declassified, so we can see for all time that she lied to the 9/11 Commission and tried to destroy Richard Clarke's character for his crime of pointing out how she dithered while al-Qaeda got ready to attack.

MEGAN: Ugh, yeah, that would be the stuff that doesn't balance out. She does appear to have been the biggest Bush cheerleader as opposed to pushing back when it was likely her job to do so. But there are women to admire, like Tammy Duckworth, who one can arguably say has suffered for Rice's missteps and might join the Obama administration as the head of the VA.

SPENCER: That would be great. I love Tammy Duckworth and wish she had won her House seat in '06. Much like it sent a signal to Vietnam vets for Reagan to put Chuck Hagel at the VA (I think he was deputy first), so too should Obama put Duckworth in charge of his VA. She's allegedly the only competent, non-corrupt member of Blago... Blagojev... whatever the name of the Illinois governor is, she's his VA secretary and is killing it. Also she skipped the line ahead of me flying out of Denver after the Democratic convention and I didn't mind. Speaking of flying, I have to go to New Orleans but should we say something about Bill Ayers on GMA.

MEGAN: I mean, I kind of wish he'd opened his yap a little earlier because he seems so un-terroristy that it would've stopped people in their tracks, maybe.

SPENCER: Did you notice how on-message and clear he was? I don't know who the douche interviewer was, but he kept trying to get Ayers to concede that there was something shadowy to concede, and Ayers wouldn't. Also, journalists: never start a question with "surely..." because it invites your interview subject to dismiss your premise.

MEGAN: That is some good advice. My advice: avoid hurricanes at all cost and if someone wants to see your tits, tell them you paid too much for them to let someone see 'em for 10 cent beads.

SPENCER: Some spider or something bit me right next above my left nipple so I don't think I'm going to flash my tits this weekend. Anyway, may your week of disaster come to a close and I'll find a red wine you like in New Orleans. Also expect drunk photos from either myself or travel companion Calderone.

MEGAN: I am greatly looking forward to those! But you should probably tell your girlfriend to stop biting your nipples so hard.

SPENCER: Honestly it's some kind of bug.

MEGAN: I don't really need to know about your role-playing sex games.

SPENCER: Oh but really quick self-promotion: You want a strong woman at the helm of Obama's foreign policy? Meet Susan Rice. And check out this quote Princeton's Ann-Marie Slaughter gave me:

Slaughter added that Rice’s potential ascendancy represented a milestone in gender equity for the foreign-policy community. “It is very important to women in foreign policy that Susan is not married to her job,” Slaughter said. “She has a great husband and two young kids, and she managed to balance it. After Madeleine Albright, whose kids were grown, and Condi Rice, who does not have a family, that’s a very important message to send. After all, most men in foreign policy manage to have families, too.”

That was my kicker in the piece and now I'm out.

MEGAN: I've heard from a number of people about her awesomeness, actually, so here's hoping her participation in the Obama Administration doesn't end with the end of his transition team. Be safe!