Miller's ex-fiance, Michael Scanlon, pled guilty to conspiracy charges relating to his business partner, Jack Abramoff, and the man they had both worked for, former Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. By then, Scanlon and Miller had broken up, rather dramatically. Miller in Howard Kurtz's profile:

"The day before her bridal shower, Miller says, Scanlon called off the wedding. They reconciled, Scanlon backed out again, and three weeks later he married a 24-year-old waitress from [a] Delaware resort town."

According to a 2006 front page story in the Wall Street Journal, Miller's "jilting" motivated her to help bring down Scanlon, and, by extension, Abramoff and eventually DeLay, who eventually resigned.

Miller is not the most sympathetic character: besides being DeLay's image-maker, she worked as a flack in the State Department in the lead-up to the Iraq war, and defended the Republican rent-a-mobs during the 2000 Florida recount. And yet it's hard not to see how her story — by both her own actions and the way she's been portrayed — has been heavily shaped by her gender. Miller didn't respond to requests for an interview to talk about this aspect of her experience. Still, the whole affair ticks off so many stereotypes that are used against women in public life, and whether or not they're true in this case, they still made me wince. Among them:

1. She's a ballbuster. Kurtz says she got through a job interview for DeLay by telling herself, "Don't show fear." In 2004, Miller famously cut off a video interview with her then-boss, Colin Powell, on Meet the Press, either because it was going long or because Tim Russert was going to ask a hardball question about the rationale for the Iraq war. The Washington Post wrote of Miller at the time:

In just six months on the job, Miller, 33, who controls access to Powell, seems to have made more enemies than usual among the reporters who cover the State Department. "Her manner is brusque, abrasive, demeaning," said one, asking to remain anonymous so as not to be frozen out of interviews with Powell. "She's not doing the secretary a service; she's doing him a disservice."
...

In 2001 Miller was working as press secretary to then-Majority Whip Tom DeLay when she lashed into Post Magazine writer Peter Perl while he was doing a profile of her boss, screaming: "You lied! . . . You betrayed him! You twisted his words! . . . We don't know you. You don't exist. . . . You are dead to us." A DeLay spokesman told us yesterday, "Tom thinks Emily did a fine job for him."

2. She's a blabbermouth. Kurtz's profile today:

Miller does have a tendency to over-answer questions. "I just have no filter, and I really need to work on that," she says. "If it's in my head, it comes out of my mouth."

She also claims to have been manipulated by faux-empathy when the FBI craftily sent two female agents to interview her:

The FBI contacted Miller months later and arranged an interview with two young female agents, who questioned her on matters ranging from Scanlon's strange use of different first names to his work for the tribes. Her lawyer had warned her to limit her answers, but Miller says she babbled on after the agents commiserated with her romantic turmoil. The lawyer chided her afterward: "You won't shut up!"

3. She cooperated with the FBI because she's a woman scorned.

This has been the stickiest part of the story. In the thicket of business deals and lobbyist favor-trading, the "hell hath no fury" storyline was certainly sexier and more digestible. It's a retelling that Miller disputes, telling Kurtz, "At the end of the day, what do I get? I get to be known as the woman scorned, forever?"

4. She is (now) needy and vulnerable.

Miller is all about her softer side now. "I was so ambitious in my 20s and early 30s. I worked all the time," she tells Kurtz. "It was all about success and power. Somehow I thought that would make me happy, and make me feel good about myself." Now, she is writing about DeLay returning to Dancing With the Stars and about unabashedly wanting to find a husband.

Miller has also been fighting her portrayal in a new film about the Abramoff scandal starring Kevin Spacey. She tells Kurtz that in the film, "I'm a bitch, I'm materialistic, I'm bad in bed."

Women like Miller test the outer boundaries of my feminist solidarity. Is there evidence that she was not the most discreet or pleasant person to deal with, and that she represented the most machine-like, lobbyist-friendly streak of Washington politics? Yes, very much so. Was her role in the scandal blown out of proportion (Abramoff has blamed her for his jailing) in part because the bitchy, wronged-female revenge narrative was so saleable? Also yes.

In the meantime, Miller says she's tried to start over, this time with "a sense of empathy and compassion for others who are struggling." Everyone deserves another chance, right?

Sideswiped By Scandal, Trapped By the Past [Washington Post]

Related: Behind Unraveling Of DeLay's Team, A Jilted Fiancée [Wall Street Journal]
Fox News: Conservative Women Are More Scrutinized By the Media [Feministing]

The opening article discusses how loaded the term actually is:

Always the words "good hair" evoke stories, stories containing memories of childhood, memories of being teased, memories of people from a dominant culture touching your hair, asking questions. Stories of sitting in the kitchen near a hot stove on a Saturday night, while your mother pressed your hair for church the next morning, you flinching as she pulled the comb through.

Stories of the time you cut off all your hair and a boy in the back of the school bus said you looked like a boy. And you turned around and punched him. You remember your hair freshly shampooed and flowing in the summer breeze because that was the way you dried it then, before blow dryers, before relaxers.

In the interviews with everyday women, you see an interesting narrative begin to emerge. Namely, no matter what type of hair crowned your head, there were going to be problems.

Queen Aishah, a comedian, shares a painful memory of a friend deeming her hair unkempt:

One day my girlfriend in the seventh grade, she gave me a comb for a present. It broke my heart. To this day it brings tears to my eyes. I didn't cry then but my heart sank in my stomach. She gave me a comb in front of my seventh grade class.

I really wanted to beat her up. She had wrapped the comb like a present. It was wrapped like in Christmas paper. I said, "Oh, I got a gift." Because we didn't have gift exchange in [our] house. [Then] I was like, "Oh my God! What did she get me?"

And then everybody busted out laughing. It was homeroom. It was an embarrassing thing.

Shenee' Harris remembers the influence of pop culture on her hair choices:

I just remember wanting to wear it straight. I thought it would look good. When you look on television and in the media, even the cartoon characters, the women have long, flowing hair. The Smurfette had long hair. Miss Piggy had long hair. I liked my hair to be bone straight.

Avis Jones-DeWeever remembers the pain of conversion:

My earliest hair memory was sitting in front of the oven and dreading the ritual of getting the hair pressed with the two jar tops over my ears [to protect them]. And my mother takes the hot comb and that sound, sizzzzzzzzzzzz! The heat and the pain of getting burned from time to time. The little torture that black girls go through in terms of the first experience — pre-perm — in an attempt to straighten their hair.

Then we eventually graduated to an actual hairdresser, where you still had the hot-comb experience. Hold your ears back. You were on edge all the time. You could feel the heat as the comb approached your scalp. Not only could you feel it, you could hear your hair literally frying as they are pulling the comb through. The heat of your hair touches your face or neck. It's hot. It's not comfortable. It has to be done quite often to maintain the effect.

Sadly, even black girls with straight hair can't catch a break:

They used to call me "black China girl" because they didn't understand why my hair was straight, why it was slick. They would ask me am I biracial. "No," I would say, "both my parents are black!"

Certain people would only like you because of your hair texture. Some girls would want to fight you because of your hair texture. They would never come out and say it but they would do things like pull your hair. Or just not like you because they think you feel you have something better than them. It made me want to cut my hair at about the third or fourth grade, at the stage when you are sensitive to what people think about you.

And yet, despite all the emotions wrapped up in how we wear our hair, there is still hope that we can instill in others the confidence we lacked growing up. Liz Nolan, a 65-year old salon owner, remembers always thinking her hair was never good enough:

When I was growing up, one side of my family was very fair-skinned. As they said in the olden days down South, where I was born . . . if you had straight hair and light complexion, you were pretty. Nice looking. I was born with kinky hair. So I remember going to the beauty salon trying to get my hair straight as possible. They were using all this grease on my hair. I used to have to come home and take a towel and take it out so I could look like my cousin. I wanted to look like my cousin because they told me my cousin was very pretty because she had good hair and I didn't have good hair.

Nolan goes on to discuss how her perception of her hair changed as she grew older, and how she felt called to become a beautician to reinforce to women that they are beautiful - regardless of how they choose to wear their hair. But the most compelling proof of how we can reverse this ideology comes from Nolan's braided seventeen year old daughter, who says, simply:

I always liked my hair.

You Grow, Girl! [Washington Post]
Getting to the Roots of 'Good Hair' - Queen Aishah[Washington Post]
Getting to the Roots of 'Good Hair' - Shenee' Harris [Washington Post]
Getting to the Roots of 'Good Hair' - Avis Jones-DeWeever
Getting to the Roots of 'Good Hair' - Greer Jones [Washington Post]
Getting to the Roots of 'Good Hair' - Liz Nolan [Washington Post]
Getting to the Roots of 'Good Hair' - Phantasia Nolan [Washington Post]

• 80s supermodel-turned-businesswoman Elle MacPherson will star in the CW's Beautiful as an 80s supermodel-turned-businesswoman. The show revolves around models living in agency housing. It'll be MacPherson's first television gig since her stint on Friends. [THR]

• Barack Obama started wearing a Jorg Gray wristwatch instead of his Tag Heuer — and the private label, which had only been marketed on the corporate gifts market, promptly launched Barackswatch.com to make the best of the endorsement. Stay classy, Jorg Gray! [WWD]
• Robin Givhan, longtime Washington Post fashion critic, is departing New York City for Washington in order to cover the First Family beat. She'll still write a weekly column on fashion, but in her new surroundings, the scope will widen to include "politician[s] looking especially appalling." [WWD]
• Anna Wintour, who has always been a strong supporter of designer Olivier Theyskens, lashes out at Puig fashion group in her April editor's letter. Puig fired Theyskens before his contract with the house of Nina Ricci was even up. Of course, Wintour's support doesn't mean Theyskens will automatically ascend to a similarly good position: Phoebe Philo, who left Chloé in 2005, has always enjoyed Wintour's good graces, and she's only just about to settle into a design role at Celine now. [FWD]
• Jessica Joffe is going to be in Katy Rodriguez's fall campaign. [Vogue UK]
• Agyness Deyn and Albert Hammond, Jr., they of the Vogue Valentine's Day photo spread, are no longer an item. [Daily Intel]
• Is it still news to anyone that editorial work is not remotely remunerative? Here is yet another industry person, Betty Sze of Models.com, to give the good word about the bad pay. Condé Nast, says Sze, pays new models about $150 a day, and more experienced girls can expect to net about $250. Those rates actually set the curve for editorial pay in the rest of the industry: three of the last half-dozen eds I've done didn't pay at all. I will say this of Condé Nast: if one of their titles is shooting you in an out-of-the-way location, unlike other media conglomerates, they send a car to take you to the airport. Which is rad, because LIRR and MTA are two acronyms you do not want on your mind when you're trying to make a 7 a.m. departure at Kennedy airport, and dropping $100 on cabs to take you to and from a job that's gonna pay $200 (after your agency's cut, when you get paid in three months, if other expenses your agency assesses in the meantime don't eat it up entirely) makes no sense. The idea is to do editorials to work with good photographers and generate enough buzz to book campaigns (or, at least, catalogs) but that second, crucial step to financial solvency is a lot tougher than anyone makes it sound. [Fashionologie]
• Collabs between designers and mass-market retailers are on the rise this season — I'll give you one guess as to why. (Starts with "R"!) [WWD]
• Urban Outfitters has been unveiling an unusual number of collaborations, particularly with lesser known, cutting-edge designers, this season. But that didn't stop their design team ripping off a sandal design by Hayden Harnett. They even copied the name. The New York designers called their shoe the "Camille" — Urban's offering is the "Camilla." [Fashionista]
• Palm Beach's retail environment is struggling under the twin curses of Bernard Madoff and The Recession. [WWD]
• Lakme fashion week in Mumbai has a bunch of designers — and a Barbie-themed show. Because what world fashion week is complete without that? [FWD]
• The Lauren Conrad Collection is no more. Funny to think that you couldn't sell an entire line of boring jersey dresses produced by a girl whose claim to fame is playing herself on television in this economy. [P6]
• In somewhat more disappointing news of reality star fashion projects, House of Harlow, Nicole Richie's jewelry line, sold out online before it even reached stores. Alas, she plans an empire: "I'm focusing on my brand right now. There will be a maternity line, a clothing line, shoes, belts, everything!" [People]

[November 5, 2008. Cartoon by Tom Toles, via the Washington Post]

An archive of Mr. Toles' cartoons can be found here. A print of this image can be purchased here.

• After Palin names Escada as her fave brand, the creative director is gracious: "If she does wear Escada because she likes it, I mean, I’m honored actually. It’s not politics; it’s clothing, after all. No? She’s an attractive woman, so why not?" [New York Mag]
• Fashion's totally in the tank for Obama — but we knew that. [WWD]
• Halloween update: Blake Lively was Cleopatra, Martha Stewart was Medusa. [Sassybella]
• Andre Leon Talley: "Fashion may not be the most important thing in life, but it definitely helps you get through it," [Philadelphia Inquirer]

• Adidas launching high-end SLVR line. It'll include sportswear, accessories and shoes — but no activewear. [WWD]
• Stella McCartney introduces kid-friendly windows. "Using just colouring pencils, Gary Card will create over-layered drawings of animals, dinosaurs, superheros and fantasy inspired characters on children's wardrobes in his typically naive and charming signature style." Just what you want to see on your six-year-old's Christmas list! [VogueUK]
• SJP's new "Twilight" perfume: just a coinci-dink that it jibes with the teen vampire flick? Synergy! [Fashionista]
• Georgia May Jagger's "style" includes derby hats, shiny leggings. [ElleUK]
• Prada's costume jewelry is gorgeous, as expensive as real jewelry. [Fabsugar]
• Goodwill tries to change its image for the recession; but why? [NY Times]
• Not shockingly, Anand Jon's defense lawyer says he's innocent. [Breitbart]
• Suits make the man. [Forbes]
• Timberland moves into video blogging to woo young men, who allegedly like that sort of thing. [Business Week]
• The first YSL retrospective is kicking off in San Francisco and sounds amazing: "The clothes, displayed in a gallery with low lighting and the feel of a giant walk-in closet, are stunningly beautiful: A 1988 Van Gogh "Irises" jacket embroidered with 40 pounds of sequins and beads. A 1997 garden party of a gown with a thicket of pink and green organza flowers, leaves, semiprecious stones and satin ribbons. A 1990 coat flocked with flame-colored rooster, pheasant and vulture feathers. The black wool dress with satin collar and cuffs worn by Catherine Deneuve in the 1967 film "Belle de Jour."" [LA Times]
• Supermoddle Jacquetta Wheeler comes from a huge Tory clan! [Daily Mail]
• These descriptions of the Australia costumes are totally overcoming our initial resolve not to see it: "Ms. Martin did extensive research for the costumes. She studied archival images and newspapers from 1930s and ’40s Australia and interviewed descendants of the original ranchers around Darwin. 'Whether an indigenous stockman'— or drover — 'wore socks with his boots when he rode a horse, that’s something you either get through a snapshot,' Ms. Martin said, 'or something you have to go talk to the people who lived there about.'" [NY Times]
• The new Chanel Unlimited bags, in a "glossy gray canvas material," sound grotesque. Opines Fashionista: These are totally Karl's answer to Prada's nylon bags. But worse, because they're plastered in not just one, but many logos." [Fashionista]
• Yeah it's barely past Halloween, but if you have "questions" about Holiday attire, The Washington Post will help you out. [Washington Post]
• Rosetta Getty expands her line, beloved of her celeb friends. Nice work if you can get it! [WWD]
• Is it just us, or are these new Helena Christensen ads for Agent Provocateur really unsexy? (Oh yeah, prolly NSFW.) [Daily Mail]
• Rochas names Marco Zanini creative director; he'll show his first collection for the the fall/winter 2009 season. [WWD]
• Princess Di's threads go under the hammer for charity. [VogueUK]

The Madonna thing came, at first blush, with so much that was good: glad rags, vintage stores, granny sunglasses, costume jewels, trench coats — that Salvation Army insouciance, which, any real student of fashion and culture will tell you, Madonna had just stolen from everyone else. The Madonna thing came with clear directives: Express yourself, be yourself, winner take all.

From street fashion to Vogueing to sexual liberation and religion, Madonna has touched upon a broad range of subjects. But who among us has not? Later came "Madonna as the extremely shrewd CEO of Herself Inc.," writes Stuever; and after that: Madonna and Child. Then, about 10 years ago, Madonna got into Kabbalah. She "became the sort of insufferably enlightened old lady who is only too happy to tell you what she's too good for. She's like those women you run into at play groups and the farmers market, only she is worth $600 million," writes Stuever. He recalls a Madonna concert in which she sang "Imagine" by John Lennon:

"'Please listen to the words of this song,' she ordered us. 'We have to change the world.' She said this as if the audience had never before heard "Imagine" or thought about the lyrics. When you give Madonna your money now, what you're buying is a thrilling opportunity to bask in her audacity: You must listen to me. We must change the planet, together, each one of us. I have to get on my jet now."

Stuever admits that "Madonna is someone you have to hate in order to love." Apparently, part of being a Madonna fan is complaining about how terrible her music is, and then working out to it. And now, beyond the divorce rumors, what's making news is Madonna's face. "Experts are called in, diagrams are made, and nobody seems to say, well, she's 50 you know," Stuever writes. And this is an interesting facet of the Madonna mirror; this will be a tricky chapter in Madonna's book of life: The one in which we realize that if she is no longer the sprightly, mouthy young thing she once was, we must not be either. If we're disappointed in her for not being a perfect, mythological icon — for being (gasp!) human, who do we really have to blame?

The Age Of Madonna: Touched for a Very Long Time [Washington Post]

The Feminine Mistake [Wash Post]

MEGAN: I'm pretty sure it's just going to rain the entire month of April.
moe: I'm pretty sure I don't want to have anything to do with this job today.
moe: It's not raining here though.
MEGAN: Well, whatever we get you get, I think, so just give it a few hours. If it doesn't work, I'll drive up there and then it will definitely rain.
moe: Anyway I think we have to talk about John McCain calling his wife a cunt.
moe: Yeah, AGAIN.
MEGAN: Yeah, kinda.
moe: I would rather talk about Chris Hitchens calling Andrew Sullivan a lesbian.
MEGAN: Well, we should parse that for the second.
moe: Okay, commenters: by the news roundup post I am REALLY incapable of anything but reflexive absurdist counterintuitiveness.
MEGAN: Does a man no one in their right mind would want to fuck calling a gay man a lesbian make that an insult? Because, frankly, given the choice of the two of them and my carpet getting munched, it's Sully FTW.
MEGAN: And I've met both of them.
moe: And everyone knows John McCain is a dick, and everyone knows he has a huge temper, and his utterance, while one that I'm sure stung at the time and surprised onlookers, was very much in keeping with that reputation. And being sixteen years ago, and existing as it did as one of millions of moments that make up a marriage, I ...just...did not think it was that big a deal. I mean, it shows his vicious, nasty side, yeah. Am I further offended because the word he used was "cunt"? Not really. He has anger issues. He's insecure. I've seen worse and been called worse. It's fucked up, but seriously, when you talk as much as John McCain, you run out of four letter words. I dunno, I was just utterly ...whatever.
moe: I am insensitive, what can I say.
MEGAN: No, I mean, I guess I agree with part of that. Plus, when combined with trollop? The man was in the Navy, swears like a sailor and OBVIOUSLY he can't deal with losing his hair because he's rocking the combover to this day.
moe: The coldness and the naked insecurity of it was kind of interesting. But the word "cunt"?
moe: Right, also, "trollop"
moe: By "trollop" you're just laughing.
moe: "Cunt" seemed like an afterthought.
MEGAN: That said, if anyone I was dating did that, he wouldn't just have trouble raising his arms above half mast.
MEGAN: Trollop would be fine, though. Cunt would make me seethe.
MEGAN: But I'm sensitive. A guy I was dating in the fall "jokingly" called me a whore in a text message and I went into full-on blind rage.
moe: It's like, "oh crap, my antiquated put-down makes me look older than my thinning hair...fuck you, you...CUNT"
MEGAN: In fact, I wrote a post about it
MEGAN: And cunt won.
MEGAN: As the word a dude should never call you.
MEGAN: But, also, I'm sensitive about my makeup application skills, I think I've mentioned. So between the cunt and the makeup insult, I would probably have cried.
moe: Yeah well...I don't generally date verbal abusers. Though I actually don't think anyone at this point could call me a whore in any way that wasn't ironic. Also, I don't think anyone I have dated has ever been that mad at me, except when we haven't really been dating, which is kind of sad in its own way.
MEGAN: The emotion I most often feel at the end or after a relationship is annoyance. Like, I just get annoyed instead of mad, and that doesn't tend to provoke anger.
moe: Yeah, I dunno. I feel bad, now, calling attention to her misuse of foundation. I do not feel bad, however, using the word "tranny." I dunno. God I have cramps. Okay: so the real crime of that exchange is that if there is truth to the perception that Cindy is some sort of trophy Stepford wife, and John McCain, war hero etc. etc. was just sick of his Stepford wife ragging on him for being an old geezer, and also sick of any number of other things that happened that day, which is, I guess, probably the truth, then yeah, it's a statement that would sting. But...

MEGAN: She did have a lot of foundation on, and for no reason that I could tell. She seems to have otherwise-lovely skin.
moe: Sixteen years later they're still together and she's gone through a lot and she's proud of her country and she wears too much makeup. It's terrible that society does to our women, sure. But sometimes we do it ourselves! Or have a professional do it. I professional applied my makeup the last time I was in a wedding. It was cringe-inducing, so I had to wipe it off and start over.
moe: I hated that woman.
MEGAN: That happened to one of my friends! It was like 1/4 of an inch thick! Her mother talked her into it. I don't like her mother.
moe: Here's the story of how in Israel "makeup artist" is just another code for "mossad"

MEGAN: She was just taking out her own insecurities on you.
MEGAN: Wait, just like John McCain.
MEGAN: I love when I can work something like that back in.
moe: You're good with the segues. I'm trying to figure out a way to work in all those weird online psychological tests Nick Kristof has been pushing.
MEGAN: Oh, yeah, those have been around for ages. We're all racist.
MEGAN: Basically.
MEGAN: We all clutch our purses like Barry's grandma.
moe: I actually couldn't even figure out how to work the first one. And then the second one said I implicitly showed a predisposition for Obama followed by Hillary followed by McCain.
moe: It took me 20 minutes of clicking and feeling like a retard to figure this out.
moe: Sometimes when you know something implicitly
moe: You should just leave it at that.
MEGAN: So, we implicitly like attractive people, have issues with our moms but still love them and mistrust scary old people? Sounds about right.

MEGAN: I'm sure you saw this, but it's now official that young people want old people to vote for Obama because the New York Times wrote about the trend.
moe: Oh, no see, but they advanced the trend: now it's grandchildren influencing these endorsements! Wisconsin governor Jim Doyle finally capitulated to a seven-year-old.

The two adult sons of Governor Doyle, 62, both black and both adopted, spoke to him with fervor about Mr. Obama's vision of a multiracial country. Then Mr. Doyle's young grandson piled on.

"He's a complete Barackomaniac," Mr. Doyle said in a phone interview. "When I asked him why, he said, 'I think he's really going to work hard for us.' I thought, that's it through the eyes of a 7-year-old. 'He'll work hard,' and 'for us.' "

"I'm glad they're interested in something other than their own self-interest and partying."

MEGAN: Well, you know, when they can pay them these days.
moe: Hey speaking of, Tina Brown thinks the election is like a reality show and that Clinton will end up the survivor. Wait, and speaking of Brits, most of them seem to like Obama. John Cleese wants to get a job writing his speeches! And also speaking of Brits, we still haven't talked about Sullivan/Hitchens.
MEGAN: I'm still confused about the icky straight man calling the HIV-infected former barebacking through personal ads gay man a "lesbian."
9:35 AM
moe: Here's the clip.
MEGAN: Wait, what the hell?

MEGAN: I thought the whole POINT of being a lesbian-in-a-bad-way was that you were meaner and more forward than us girlie-girl straight girls.
MEGAN: But it just means you are forgetful?
MEGAN: Or a whiner?
MEGAN: Christopher Hitchens: Still drinking.
moe: Maybe we should petition him to make "bonerkiller" his new miscellaneous put-down. And I know this is only tangentially related to anything, but this piece on how Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama's cousin Dick Cheney were born the same year was pretty cool, and I meant to link to it, and then I didn't because...Moe Tkacik: Still drinking.
MEGAN: I have to say, I still love articles that point out that Bush and Cheney never served in Vietnam
MEGAN: Also, good for Jeremiah Wright.

moe: Oh god, now weigh in on two things while I go find a more flattering mea culpa picture of Cindy McCain. The Washington Post is officially the best paper in America, and yes, journalism is dead.
MEGAN: I love how CBS is going to cut actual news operations in order to keep paying Katie Couric who nobody likes anyway to anchor a newscast filled with content provided by others.
9:50 AM
MEGAN: Also, the Weingarten story that won? Amazing. There's a little Asian man who plays a Chinese violin in the subway who no one notices but his music is beautiful and haunting and I always give him money and everyone else walks by. Chinese violins are, like, impossible to keep tuned and notoriously difficult to master, and it would make my morning to hear him even when I hated my job.
moe: One thing that's great about the Post is that, you know, they all know how to report stuff there, so if enough people land on good shit one year...a bunch of people you've never heard of can all win Pulitzers! And I say you've never heard of them only in the sense that they've never been personalities, like, on Gawker. And they don't write for the "Most Emailed List" because...the Most Emailed List isn't on the homepage! Sigh...if only "quality journalism" could make any $$$
moe: And yeah, I liked that story a lot. I like most things he does, though.
MEGAN: Oh, and if you haven't read the violinist story Gene won for, it's here.
MEGAN: Yeah, his features are always really good. He gets through the editing process with his voice intact.
moe: Well he is the editor. He used to be Dave Barry's editor at the Miami Herald. I don't think I know that from reading Dave Barry but. Here's something stupid Gene did that I linked to yesterday that no one commented on but you should check it out sometime bc it's funny.
MEGAN: No, if you haunt his chats, he's actually edited! He refers to his editor as Tom the Butcher.
MEGAN: I remember reading that!
moe: Man, I wish Tom would butcher me a little bit.

• John McCain called his wife a "cunt" sixteen years ago. The full quote, in response to Cindy's "playful" mention of his male pattern baldness, was: "At least I don't plaster on makeup like a trollop, you cunt." I have to give him bonus points for using the word "trollop" and also, calling her out on what looks to be an unhealthy relationship with Mary Kay, and by the same token I have to give Cindy bonus points for adopting a Bangladeshi child, weaning herself off painkillers and throwing all that addictive energy into applying nine coats of foundation. (And what can we say, Meghan: she comes by it honestly.) [Wonkette]
  
• Spike Lee is really glad he made Do The Right Thing, otherwise Barack Obama would have taken Michelle to see Soul Man and America's greatest union would have been jeopardized. Also: the "Clintons would lie on a stack of Bibles." [NY Mag]
  
• 61% of historians agree that Bush is the Worst President Ever, according to an unscientific History Network poll of 109 historians. And just how did he go about pulling that off? Well, he combined "the paranoia of Nixon, the ethics of Harding and the good sense of Herbert Hoover," in the words of one historian, and applied laserlike focus to doing "only two things well," explained one of the survey's "most distinguished" historians. "He knows how to make the very rich very much richer, and he has an amazing talent for f**king up everything else he even approaches." [History Network]

• We now interrupt our regularly-scheduled broadcast of John McCain's speech on the success of the troop surge to report on mortar fire hitting the Green Zone! [Think Progress]
• The Washington Post's Dana Priest, who won a Pulitzer two years ago for revealing the existence of those secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe where torture — which is not the same as torment! — is allowed...won another Pulitzer! For revealing that Walter Reed Johnson hospital is not much better! Dana Priest, incidentally, is female. [Wash Post]
• But the Post won other Pulitzers, unfortunately none for their courageous effort to legalize Ecstasy, but one for Gene Weingarten, who IMHO should have won a long time ago for this epic and eerily prescient masterpiece on the state of education in America.

My makeup-addled mind has discovered numerous ways to make the most of this idle time spent applying and removing makeup/clothing and doing hair, and now it's time to share those secrets with you.

Buy a shower radio. No, I am not together enough to have one myself. I don't even have a fucking radio in my house. If I did, maybe I would have showered already. And listened to Marketplace, which I really miss from the days when I had a car. Ha, ha, ha, if only I had a car so I could listen to the radio; that is the kind of thought that makes me really proud to be a girl.

Get Your Makeup Tattooed On. This is something Tracie and I are always threatening to do. When we are drunk, of course. Just on our lips; even when I'm wasted I don't like the idea of a needle lining my eyes. But your lips are durable, and constantly shedding so it wouldn't last that long. Oh, what? Like this is such a much better use of time!

Air: God created it for a reason. And that reason is to dry your hair. WITHOUT THAT BLAH BLAH BLAH-RING IN YOUR EARS SO YOU CAN'T HEAR THE BOOK-ON-TAPE. You are listening to some book about Islam and the economy, or something lofty where the information is more important than the prose, I am sure. This is another thing I have never actually done. But I would! If I had to ever look/sound presentable.

ColorStay Lipstick. Buy this before the Chinese discover it is made of lead! Because it really cuts down on the amount of time you spend reapplying/worrying about reapplying lipstick. Most likely because it is made of lead.

Read about wars before squeezing your pores. I've found that, being a girl — and you know how it is hard for girls to comprehend military strategy type stuff — it is easier to keep my facts straight on defense issues if I go squeeze my pores immediately afterwards, with my various rogue pores representing Middle Eastern trouble spots. Like for instance: Iran and Iraq and Saudi are the nose, with Saudi vaguely representing the easiest place to get oil, then Israel is this hormonal pimple in the middle of my left cheek, and then there is this terrible hard-to-reach zone next to my left nostril where blackheads really just dominate the entire region and I would spend more time working on it if only I could see anything there: Afghanistan.

Could You Last A Day Without Make-Up? [Times of London]
Making Up Is Hard To Do [Washington Post]

Anywhere: Hey, Charlotte. Nice tits. Sincerely, a guy.

Charlotte Allen: Hey, Washington Post forum moderators: I thought obscene comments were supposed to be filtered out of this forum? How did this one get in?

We make no assertion here that brain mass relates directly to intelligence. As scientists, we must at all costs avoid the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc. To argue that women are dumber because their brains are smaller would be no more intellectually valid than asserting that just because someone is 6 feet 7 inches tall he is more likely to be able to dunk a basketball than someone who is 5 feet 3.

So call this one a tossup.

3. Extremely Empirical Data

According to the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, N.J., women, on average, score nearly 50 points below men on the Scholastic Assessment Test, the national college entrance exam.

Some studies point out that once women are in college, their performance is equal to, or even superior to, men's performance. We accept that fact, and applaud it warmly, but we must recognize it for what it is. Unscientific.

Unlike an exam administered anonymously, graded by computer and field-tested over generations to eliminate bias of any sort, performance in school is perforce a manipulable measurement. It is a measure not of raw ability, or of intellectual capacity, but of a mishmash of qualities that include diligence, organization and diplomatic skills. It can be affected by factors as extraneous as one's consumption of fraternity beer, or one's skill at coquettishly elevating one's stockinged thigh in a manner calculated to be pleasing to the professorial eye..

Charlotte Allen On Outlook Article, Reaction [Washington Post]
Sex And I.Q.: An Apologia [Washington Post]

As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day's horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:

"This is just like Pearl Harbor," one of the men said.

The other asked, "What is Pearl Harbor?"

"That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War," the first man replied.

At that moment, Ms. Jacoby said, "I decided to write this book."

We are all complete dumbasses incapable of even the most moderate level of knowledge retention, much less concentration. The computer on which you are reading this blog is rotting your brain. We have fooled ourselves into believing there is no piece of information worth knowing that can't be distilled into a pithy blog entry, because no piece of information longer than a pithy blog entry seems capable of finding a viable market of readers these days, and the market always knows best; this country certainly did not come into the position of consuming 25% of the world's resources on 5% of its population by ignoring that.

But hey! We can still make this a post that mainly hates on men: do you think dude culture is more hostile to knowledge, or lady culture? Dudes definitely have the "arrogant" market cornered. But our magazines are so much dumber.

Dumb And Dumber: Are Americans Hostile To Knowledge? [NY Times]
The Dumbing Of America [Washington Post]

Maybe so!

"Many of us tried to make monogamy work," Wagner says. But monogamy, she says, often seemed to throw the baby out with the bath water, so to speak. Its practitioners would break off "perfectly good relationships" just because of intellectual incompatibility, for example, or because one partner liked ballet and the other liked bowling. Doesn't it make more sense, polys ask, to keep the good parts of a relationship, and find another boyfriend who likes "Swan Lake"?

The compartmentalization of affection: It's completely at odds with today's Disney Princess/Coldplay-lyric view of marriage, in which your spouse is your lover, best friend, therapist and Wii buddy, and you also have identical taste in movies.

But as people are increasingly expected to self-actualize clear to the grave, what are the chances that they'll pair up with someone who is on the exact same path of discovery?

Thought: Maybe you can have it all. You just can't get it all from the same person.

It's the thought that illustrates a paradox in polyamory: Its practitioners have astonishing optimism for humans' endless capacity to love, to share, to forgive, to grow, to explore. But that optimism seems rooted in a cynical belief that the monogamous are stuck in a myth, one that leads to cheating, unhappiness or divorce court. They believe, as do some evolutionary biologists, that most humans do not have endless capacity to be faithful to just one person.

There's a vague aura of entitlement to polyamory. The concept that one deserves complete romantic fulfillment seems a decidedly Me Generation concept.

Nicole, James and Rebecca acknowledge that a group marriage requires work that a monogamous one does not. "At first, I felt interrupted all the time," says Rebecca. "We all have different communication styles."

"Sure, if I'm putting the baby to bed for two hours while they're having hot sex, I get annoyed," says Nicole. "But it's not because they're having sex without me. It's because I'm really tired and I've been putting a baby to bed for two hours."

Pairs With Spares

MOE: Good morning, Beltwayista! Today is the Potomac Primary. And while this would under normal circumstances it would be kind of hard to write about yeetttttt anooother set of "news analysis" pieces saying "If she loses tonight Hillary has to win in Ohio and Texas and add three more states to the union and at win at least two our of three them, too to counter Barack's momentum" or "If Obama wins tonight it's actually still meaningless" the Washington Post did us all a favor today by running this work if pure genius, which is to say, the pure genius of dumbasses on the street.
MEGAN: I love dumbassery! Washington is not filled with smart people!
MOE: Oh, I found it to be an uplifting, half-informed sort of dumbassery. But maybe because the closest we got in New York was this piece on how the Democratic primary had split the (retarded) (pointless) (It shames me to say I not only know who these people are but have been to their really bad parties) DJ duo the Misshapes.
Read that and tell me you don't feel better about the man on the street wisdom in DC.
In New York, you are actually expected to know who those people are.
MEGAN: Please, this is my favorite quote of the day: "Yes, a lot of our cheerleaders are very, very into Hillary. We talk a lot about it in government class. They are over the top about it. They are like 'Hillary! Hillary! Hillary!'" What can the Misshapes have on that?
MOE: No, you're right, it was actually very smart and counterintuitive of DJ Leigh Lezark to predict that if Hillary wins, "Bill Clinton will also somehow be in the mix."
MEGAN: Gosh, you think? Aren't they, like, totally married or something?
MOE: I'm so glad that she gets to vote, but not the Langley high school cheerleaders.
MEGAN: No! The one who said this can: ""[Ron Paul]'s anti-government. People our age hate the cops mostly.""
MOE: Ha ha, but that's the cute part about the DC residents. They all know the cockamamie weirdos. Like how that girl doesn't want to vote because she feels like she hasn't informed herself enough and then goes and brings up Alan Keyes.
Also, what about the black McCain supporter at the Omni hotel who goes by the name of "St. Paul"??? I kept looking for a first name...nah, it's just "St. Paul."
MEGAN: Or the whole Gravel discussion in which they've all seen his trippy commercial but pronounce it "not, like, that good."
MOE: "It's a close-up on his face, and he's not doing anything for literally a minute." Nick Marinakis is talking about those bizarre Mike Gravel videos on YouTube. "Then he goes and picks up a big rock, and throws it in a lake." He's talking to his friend, Ben Waldin. The two are standing outside of Waldin's K Street NW apartment building and waiting for Super Tuesday guests to arrive. It's a little after 9 p.m.; a few friends are already upstairs drinking beer and watching the primary vote tallies and the unfolding duel between Clinton and Obama.
MEGAN: I mean, is it sad that primary watching is a major social event here?
MOE: Dude, when was the last time there were SO MANY AWESOME EXCUSES to drink on Tuesday? Not since 1968 or whatever unless you're into World Cup. And it is Super Tuesday. But another thing I like about this story is that it seems like they're all discussions Post reporters actually overheard, because otherwise they just would have sent them out one night to gather it all up. I can definitely assure you that even if I left my house the chances of me overhearing a conversation about Mike Gravel's Youtube videos would be .... like winning the Powerball. I don't even really understand the conversations I overhear here though bc they all seem to concern bands I don't know. Or maybe they're parties I don't know? Not political parties, but like parties at bars that have special brand names. ANYWAY. I suppose we should move on. Readers, if you want a fun time this morning, read about the couple at the Parcel Plus in Reston. Moving on...
Insurance companies are evil!
Blue Cross is asking for help from doctors to screen out patients with pre-existing conditions. Sometimes they manage to hide them, those sneaky little malevolent seekers of health care!
MEGAN: Goddamn doctors! Seeking to protect patient confidentiality? What can they be thinking! It's much more important to determine whether or not I mistakenly forgot to add in that I occasionally take medications for acne so that when I get skin cancer they can rescind my coverage!
(Yes, i disclosed that on my BCBS health insurance application last fall, worried about that exact consequence).
Also, it's like not a single person at the headquarters of a health insurance company that does fucking boneheaded shit like this has watched or read the news, paid attention to a Presidential debate, listened to a person they cover or done anything to remove their heads from their asses this election year when people seem strangely concerned with the 47 million Americans who lack health insurance.
I mean, fuck? If they'd done it in 2009...
MOE: What I love is that Blue Cross is STILL TECHNICALLY A NONPROFIT.
All Blue Crosses are, they just happen to have a few thousand for-profit subsidiaries.
MEGAN: Well, the company is a nonprofit. Its executives are, you know, not.
MOE: I mean, it's interesting what's happened to health insurance. It's an industry in which a lot of the giants were formed in the Great Depression to meet social needs as opposed to shareholders' desires and at this point their paperwork is so voluminous, their formulas are so complicated, their negotiating teams and brokers are so well-trained and well-remunerated it's hard not to say: hey look! The free market, it failed here. It created the same thing as a bureaucracy, but more costly and less efficient. It's more complicated than that, of course; the worst bureaucracies, the most inefficient systems, are the ones that like insurance that sort of hybridize private sector practices and public sector duties. In Philadelphia, where one particularly big branch of Blue Cross insured about 60% of the region, insurance was one of the few areas in which it was still possible to get kinda rich. The insurance company was all part of the local political machine.
9:33 AM MEGAN: I think it's completely true that the health insurance system is the biggest market failure of this decade. I mean, how is it not cheaper to cover birth control than pay for pregnancy, but many companies do just that. But the lack of vision among all the (current) candidates on how to fix it other than just turning over to them more money and providing them, maybe, with more regulation (which has been really successful thus far) is just depressing.
MOE: Well, one of the issues I take with Michael Moore is that you really can't go vilifying the insurance industry without taking a good look at the fucking pharmaceutical industry. The biggest tragedy to me is that health care is arguably the sector in America staffed with the highest ratio of bright minds: greed. Your average surgeon, your average microbiologist, your average DNA researcher or drug discoverer or pediatrician — none of those guys get into it for the money. And they're the indispensable ones here. I guess it's as much as the problem as it is the solution. Ugh... it makes my head spin though.
Should we talk about something more uplifting?
MEGAN: Sure!
MOE: Like pimping? It's hard out here for a...whatev.
MEGAN: I just look at that whole thing and roll my eyes. Which makes my head hurt. Does Hillary playing the Mom card work with voters? Had anybody heard of David Schuster before this? Is Schuster young enough to use that kind of played-out slang? Did Chelsea care?
MOE: Do you care if Chelsea cares? I don't care. Oh, did you hear her voice on the news last night? I just remembered that. She sounded really soft, and tired. She said her mom was way more fiscally responsible than her dad, which was funny because it sounded true, even though her mom has a lot more things to potentially spend money on. But as for whether she's being "pimped out" or whether that is some grave offense to say so, I vote NO. That is all.
MEGAN: I'll vote for that, too.

He took a seat in a booth with two Russian girls, but he kept looking to the stage, where she was dancing. Meeting his eyes, she thought, "Who is that old foreigner? Does he have any money?

Murray's thoughts were more lyrical."As I caught her glance, I felt she was drawing me into her very soul," he writes in his 2006 memoir, "Murder in Samarkand" (called "Dirty Diplomacy" in the 2007 U.S. edition). "She looked lost and anxious, like she really didn't want to be there. She defied the impossible by exuding, at the same time, such ripe sexual attraction and such innocent vulnerability. Her body invited sex while her eyes screamed, 'Save me.' "

So now they are together, albeit broke, in London; she made a play out of her life story, he sold his memoir rights to A Mighty Heart director Michael Winterbottom.

She doesn't love him; he doesn't ask her to; he wonders if she's incapable of love; she doesn't know; he adores her; it's probably fair to say his teenage children do not. He babbles on just like any expat dude about cultural relativism to excuse his philandering. But it doesn't matter, he's found true romance, and heroism. If only that were true. Does he think it's true ? You hope he doesn't. You'll never know until she leaves him.

Great story, though.

The Envoy And His Navel Liason [Washington Post]

Paris Hilton has nothing to do with the war. She is not a cause, or a consequence, or a byproduct, or anything else to do with the war. But in her vapidity, her ridiculousness, her unashamed ignorance and narcissism, she suggests to the world that the values we project through means such as war are not decent, serious values. The image of Kim Phuc said to us, "Here is the war, look at it, it's horrible." The image of Paris Hilton, seen in the context of Ut's earlier photograph, says, "Oh, is there a war on? Really? Like, whatever."

Uh, yeah sorta, says Ut, who saved the life of Kim Phuc, who is now 44 and runs a charity. As he tells the UK's Telegraph:

'It's a strange feeling because I know I will never take another photograph that's as good as this - not as long as I live. When I look at my photograph of Kim and my photograph of Paris Hilton, I think they are both good pictures, in their way. I suppose the big difference is that I grew to love Kim, whereas... well, frankly, I don't give a damn about Paris Hilton.'

Poles And Decades Apart, Two Silent Screams Issue Discomfiting Reverberations [Washington Post]
Nick Ut: Double Negative [Telegraph]