Newsweek’s choice of cover art for its Sarah Palin issue has managed to generate controversy for three days now, finally prompting a response from the editors.  The salient passage:

To note that choosing that particular photograph has ruffled a few feathers is perhaps an understatement. Palin denounced it—and us—to her million-strong Facebook following last night. “The choice of photo for the cover of this week’s Newsweek is unfortunate. When it comes to Sarah Palin, this ‘news’ magazine has relished focusing on the irrelevant rather than the relevant,” she wrote on her fan page, adding, “The out-of-context Newsweek approach is sexist and oh-so-expected by now.” She also told ABC’s Barbara Walters that she found the cover “a wee bit degrading.” Others, like CBN’s David Brody, said our cover was a new low: “biased and sexist at the same time.”

Today, Newsweek’s Editor Jon Meacham has responded to critics. “We chose the most interesting image available to us to illustrate the theme of the cover, which is what we always try to do,” Meacham said. “We apply the same test to photographs of any public figure, male or female: does the image convey what we are saying? That is a gender-neutral standard.”

As with June’s controversy over Sarah Palin’s toenails, the issue here isn’t so much sexism as it is contempt for the erstwhile vice presidential nominee as a serious public figure.  Indeed, the “theme of the cover” could not be more clear:  Palin’s a buffoon.  Why, it’s right there in bold text:  “Sarah” (not “Governor Palin” or even “Palin” but “Sarah”) is a “Problem” one must “solve.”  Lest one miss that not-so-subtle message, the subhead goes on to inform us that “She’s bad news for the GOP — and for everybody else, too.”

Now, as regular readers are painfully aware, I’m not a big fan of Palin.  I thought she was a disastrous choice for the nomination from the instant it was announced and hope very much that her brand of silly populism isn’t the future of the Republican Party.

Then again, OTB is a journal of opinion, not a news magazine.  You come here to read the signed analysis of our writers whereas, presumably, you read Newsweek for detached roundups of the week’s most important events.

It’s odd enough for Newsweek to have two opinion pieces on Palin, an out-of-office politician who’s peddling a book she almost certainly didn’t write, in the issue.  Let alone that they’re both negative.  (”Palin’s Base Appeal” by Christopher Hitchens and “Gone Rogue – How Sarah Palin Hurts the GOP and the Country” by Evan Thomas.)  But to add insult to injury by choosing to portray Palin on the cover in a way that they would never use for any other former governor or vice presidential nominee — male or female — is beyond the boundaries of objective journalism.

Yes, Palin posed for those photos.  For Runner’s World.  What she was thinking when she agreed to pose for the cheesy ones with the flags — which have very little to do with running or fitness — I don’t know.  At the time, I wrote that “Palin has crossed the line from politician to pop culture celebrity,”  an assertion of which I’m even more confident today.  But, again, that’s a fair point for political commentary, not for an outlet purporting to be covering the news.

UPDATE:  Until seeing some traffic to it in my referral logs, I’d completely forgotten about the “Newsweek Sarah Palin Cover Outrage!” from October 2008.  That one featured a non-airbrushed close-up of Palin’s face and a Jon Meacham cover story titled “She’s One of the Folks (And that’s the problem).” I sense a trend.

Andrew Sullivan passes along word that The Advocate “one of the oldest titles out there -  will now become a 32-page insert in Out.”  Which is apparently published by the same conglomerate.

Rather clearly, gay-oriented media are having the same troubles as other titles for the same reasons:  Increased costs, loss of advertising revenues, and competition from the Internet chief among them.

One imagines, too, that the mainstreaming of homosexuality means that there’s simply less reason to subscribe to magazines about being gay.  Not only are there plenty of gay-oriented blogs, ezines, forums, and the like but gay culture is part of the larger culture now.  Maybe not so much in small town America but certainly in the big cities.  And, more to the point, in mainstream magazines, movies, and television shows.

Nell Scovell, one of a handful of women who has ever worked as a comedy writer for David Letterman — or any of the late night comic talk shows — contends that an atmosphere of sexual harassment routinely exists on those shows:

Without naming names or digging up decades-old dirt, let’s address the pertinent questions. Did Dave hit on me? No. Did he pay me enough extra attention that it was noted by another writer? Yes. Was I aware of rumors that Dave was having sexual relationships with female staffers? Yes. Was I aware that other high-level male employees were having sexual relationships with female staffers? Yes. Did these female staffers have access to information and wield power disproportionate to their job titles? Yes. Did that create a hostile work environment? Yes. Did I believe these female staffers were benefiting professionally from their personal relationships? Yes. Did that make me feel demeaned? Completely. Did I say anything at the time? Sadly, no.

Here’s what I did: I walked away from my dream job. The show picked up my option after 13 weeks; then, about two months later, while looking for a nicer apartment, I realized I didn’t want to commit to a yearlong lease. I’d seen enough to know that I was not going to thrive professionally in that workplace. And although there were various reasons for that, sexual politics did play a major part.

As Rachel Sklar points out, Scovell isn’t some unsuccessful woman blaming her woes on her sex: “She created the TV series Sabrina, the Teenage Witch and has written for Coach, Murphy Brown, Monk, N.C.I.S., Charmed, The Critic, The Simpsons and Newhart. And Late Night with David Letterman.”   Indeed, as Scovell notes in her piece, she was the story editor for Newhart when she was hired to write for Dave.

Melissa McEwan, Don Surber, and Ed Driscoll all bring different perspectives on this but still agree this was sexual harassment.  So do I.

But here’s the thing:  I don’t know what you do about it.

Letterman controls these people’s careers, so for him to have sexual relations with them is problematic and opens him and his company up for lawsuits. Sexuality creates incredible tension and problems in a workplace.  Ideally, then, we would just treat each other as colleagues rather than as potential romantic partners.  But people like this spend an inordinate amount of time at work and attraction does happen. Supervisors and subordinates not only become sexually intimate but fall and love and build lives together. It happens all the time.

In larger offices, this is reasonably easy to fix.  People can move laterally to avoid senior-subordinate relationships.  But in a small team like a 14-person comedy show staff?

Scovell’s solution is to hire more women.  She reports that there are currently zero women working on any of the major shows (Letterman, Leno, and O’Brien — no mention of Colbert and Stewart).   But, as a practical matter, having zero women markedly reduces the chance of sexual harassment!  With more women on the staff — something that otherwise seems a no-brainer given the number of women in the audience — there’s more chance for relationships to form and resentments to foster.

So, there’s the law, human decency, and the way things ought to be.  But there’s also human nature and the power of romantic and/or sexual attraction.  These things often conflict.

Andrew Sullivan says Olympia Snowe can do pretty much whatever she wants, “Because she has more Democratic support in her state than Republican, and the combination makes her impregnable.”

She’s 62 years old, for goodness sakes. Surely, if she were planning to have children, she’d have done so by now.

Andrew Sullivan illustrates his latest post with this photo:

It’s a amusing question made unintentionally more clever by omission of an apostrophe.

Morehouse, the top historically black college for men, has issued a new dress code of which Bill Cosby will approve but gays groups do not.

Since he was named as president of Morehouse College in 2007, Robert M. Franklin has stressed the importance of defining education broadly, well beyond courses. He has been talking about the social and ethical obligations of those who are studying at the elite historically black college. Of late he has been calling for students to have “five wells” — to be “well read, well spoken, well traveled, well dressed and well balanced.”

Last week, the idea of being “well dressed” became much more specific, with the start of an “appropriate attire policy,” under which Morehouse is joining a small group of colleges that have in recent years adopted dress codes. Morehouse’s policy is generally being well received by students — and college officials stress that 90-plus percent of students are already in compliance. But the policy is getting some criticism from gay students over the idea of regulating dress, and specifically for banning the wearing of women’s attire.

Here are some of the policy’s features:

• Caps, do-rags and hoods are banned in classrooms, the cafeteria and other indoor venues. Do-rags may not be worn outside of the residence halls.
• Sunglasses may not be worn in class or at formal programs.
• Jeans may not be worn at major programs such as convocation, commencement or Founder’s Day.
• Clothing with “derogatory, offensive and/or lewd messages either in words or pictures” may not be worn.
• “Sagging,” defined as “the wearing of one’s pants or shorts low enough to reveal undergarments or secondary layers of clothing,” is banned.
• Pajamas are banned in public areas.
• Wearing of “clothing associated with women’s garb (for example, dresses, tunics, purses, handbags, pumps, wigs, make-up, etc.)” is banned. (Morehouse educates only male students.)

William Bynum, vice president for student services at Morehouse, said that the clothing rules are part of a broader agenda to develop students’ minds and “social consciences.” He said that Franklin, the president, has pushed President Obama’s idea that there should be “no excuses” for black men in an era when one of their own has been elected president of the United States.

Even the opposition from gay groups has been mild.

Kevin Webb, co-president of Safe Space @ Morehouse, a gay-straight student alliance, said that under Franklin’s leadership, the college has been more committed to equity for gay students than ever before, and that “as an openly gay student, I feel privileged to have matriculated now.”

Webb said that gay students are divided about the dress code. But although he will not have to change his style, he said he was bothered by the new rules. For many gay students, fashion is an important part of self-definition, he said. “Once you try to stop people’s expression, everything that is unique about people is going to start to crumble, and you will produce robots, and we wouldn’t want that, would we?”

A few gay Morehouse students do dress in women’s clothing sometimes, and Webb said that should be allowed. While all Morehouse students are covered by the new clothing policy, Webb said he was bothered that a specific rule singled out a style popular only with some gay students. “I think this borders on discrimination,” he said. “While someone can say that it applies the heteronormativity of other students in terms of do-rags and sagging of pants, I can also say that there are gay people who sag their pants and wear their do-rags, but you don’t find people here who identify themselves as straight walking around in feminine garb.”

If male students wear feminine clothing, he asked, “what impact does it have on how intelligent they are, their grade point average and how much community service they do?”

He also questioned the idea that someone who wears more formal clothing is necessarily a better person. “We are focusing too much on the exterior,” he said. “If you put a clown in a suit, he’s still a clown.”

Webb is right, of course.  One can be intelligent and dress like a slob — or someone of the opposite gender.  Conversely, one can dress like an executive and still be a fool.

But Franklin is carrying on a longstanding tradition at places like Morehouse.  Because it was harder for a black man to be considered intelligent or worthy of respect, a culture developed where black men of a certain station tended to dress much better and pay more attention to his manner of speaking than white men of similar status. It’s not as true as it was even twenty years ago — it’s been half a century since Brown and a generation since the Civil Rights Act of 1965 — but vestiges of that tradition remain.  Most black professionals in their 50s or older still tend to pay more attention to their clothing and public image than their white counterparts.

Franklin, Cosby, and Obama clearly want to keep this culture alive.  They realize that young black men running around with their underdrawers showing not only hinder their own chances for advancement but reinforce negative stereotypes.

Beyond that, Morehouse sees itself as something unique.  Being a “Morehouse Man” is more akin to being a graduate of the Citadel or VMI than of, say, one of the Ivies.  It’s a brand, not just an institution of higher education. And they want Morehouse men to project an image of success and professionalism.  And, it would seem, manliness.

I’m getting the distinct sense that Slate’s Double X spin-off is some sort of elaborate spoof rather than a smart, female-centric magazine.  Yesterday, via Julian Sanchez, I came across their insipid advice column saying it pushed the “limits of friendship” to expect one’s friends to not leave you for dead after you’d been administered a date rape drug.  Today, via Jason Kottke, I see that they’re experimenting with drinking like the cast of “Mad Men” to see how it would impact running their insipid magazine.

Apparently, these women have no previous exposure to alcohol, no understanding of how alcohol affects the human body, and no concept of elapsed time as portrayed on a one-hour drama.

The gals are completely hammered after a single morning Bloody Mary and act like a bunch of sorority girls at the ensuing meeting. (Scientific disclaimer:  Not having witnessed their meetings otherwise, this may be completely normal and not an effect of alcohol.)  This, despite the fact that they’re still drinking said beverages during the meeting. (Incidentally, I don’t recall any of the boys of Sterling Cooper drinking Bloody Marys during the workday — much less during morning staff meetings.)

The gals then have martinis at lunch. This is completely kosher: Roger Sterling did this frequently during the first two seasons of the show. But, unlike the silver haired name partner in the fictional advertising firm, the ladies of our virtual magazine are now completely unable to have coherent conversations.

Now, I tend not to drink much during the workday. On rare occasions, I’ll have a beer or two at lunch and sometimes I’ll do some more writing after a 5:00 martini on a Friday. Afterward, I function reasonably well doing intellectually demanding work. Then again, I’m not a novice drinker. And, like the more serious drinkers on “Mad Men,” I’m well over 200 pounds. It’s not polite to talk about women’s weight but I will boldly conjecture, having seen the video, that Hanna Rosen, Emily Bazelon, and the other Double Xers go considerably below that.

This, naturally, matters. Consider these charts from Virginia Tech:

Leave aside the issue of legal limits for operating a motor vehicle, which are the subject of some controversy. We see that small women are generally “significantly affected” by the first drink and even women in the 140-pound range are quite heavily intoxicated by the third drink in a relative short period. By contrast, a 200 point man doesn’t reach the .10 level until the 6th drink!  And notice that there are two charts:  There’s no gender equality in this game.

Rosen says “The Mad Men do this 40 times a day.” No. They don’t.

My wife chides me all the time for picking nits with logical inconsistencies in television shows and movies, telling me I should just suspend my disbelief because IT’S JUST A TV SHOW. So, perhaps I shouldn’t cast any stones on that front. Still, I’m fully cognizant of the fact that a one-hour television episode typically does not represent one hour in real time. Indeed, violating this convention is what made “24″ novel. A typical “Mad Men” show takes place over a week or more.

Don Draper and Roger Sterling might have six drinks over the course of a very long workday that extends deep into the evening. But they’ll have had maybe 2 or 3 in the course of a two hour lunch, be completely sober in time for the 5′oclock cocktail, and then pace themselves throughout a long evening during which they’ll have a very heavy meal rich in protein. Metabolically, there’s no reason they can’t maintain that pace indefinitely without being significantly impaired.

Overall, the show does a realistic job of portraying alcohol and its abuse. The junior staffers, apparently not having built up their tolerances, are frequently rather inebriated on the show by the end of the day. As the Double X ladies giggle about over lunch, one of the senior execs is depicted as a drunk who winds up fired after embarrassing himself because of his problem. Another major character is a recovering alcoholic who falls back off the wagon to his peril. Early in the current season, an executive is maimed and his career ruined by a stupid, alcohol-inspired act of an employee.

It’s not all fun even on a show that seems to glorify the good old days of being able to drink at work.

Lucinda Rosenfeld, advice columist for Slate spin-off DoubleX, tells a girl whining because her friends ditched her after she’d been slipped a date rape drug at a party and then refused to come see her at the hospital to get over herself.

Yes, overnights at the E.R. are the opposite of fun. So are disastrous drug trips. (I had one in my twenties, which pretty much sealed my fate as an illegal-substance ninny.) But only nuns make it out of youth without a few ambulance rides.

Here’s a little secret. BFFs are great when you’re upset about a boy/sick cat/whatnot. But there are limits to friendship—limits that don’t apply to our romantic partners or close family members.

After getting some angry emails, she adds:

I know many of us assume we would jump out of bed after that call. But how many of you would actually, honestly get out of bed and get dressed at 4 a.m. and drive to the hospital to keep your close friend company while she recovered?

Julian Sanchez, apparently not realizing this was a rhetorical question, responds:

Everyone.  No, really.  Everyone I know. I could pick a number at random from the last dozen dialed on my cell phone and I have no doubt the person would show up if it were me. They might not be cheerful about it—I might not either—but they’d do it. But I tend to favor friends who are, you know, human.

He’s equally dubious as to the original post:

Friendship?  Jesus, that’s the minimum I’d do for someone I barely knew in a situation like that. Hell, it’s the minimum I’d do for someone who’d taken some drugs on purpose in an attack of poor judgment. It’s what any remotely decent, adequately socialized person would do.

You’d think.

My grad school buddy Wayne, a retired Green Beret, says that men make what he terms Bozeman, Montana friends.  We may move across the country and fail to keep in touch but, if we were to get a phone call in the middle of the night from one of them after not hearing from them for three years saying, “I’m in jail in Bozeman, Montana and need you to wire me $2000,” our only question would be about how to get him the funds and we’d be on the phone to Western Union two minutes later. Women, by contrast, tend to make more intimate connections and to be more likely to hold grudges over things like not having heard from somebody in three years.

I think that’s right in the aggregate. But, surely, most women would come to the aid of gal pals who have been drugged and taken to the hospital.  No?

One of the emerging memes over the holiday weekend has been the dissatisfaction from gays that President Obama has paid lip service to their issues but not exactly gone out of his way to take a strong public posture on what they consider to be the most compelling human rights issue of our time.  There was a big dinner, which Obama spoke at, and a decent sized march, which Obama did not attend.

Andrew Sullivan, author of one of the seminal mash notes to Obama during the primaries, was hugely disappointed in the president’s speech, which he terms “highfalutin bullshit.”

He says he will end Don’t Ask Don’t Tell but he has done nothing, and he offered no time-line, no deadline for action and no verifiable record that he has done anything, despite his claims that he has.

He says he is ending the HIV ban, but it is still in force, a year and a half after it was signed by George W. Bush and passed by massive majorities in both houses.

He says he favors equality for gay couples but said nothing tonight to support the initiatives in Maine or in Washngton State or the struggle in Washington DC for marriage equality. That’s a test of real sincerity on this matter. He failed it.

He says he wants to end discrimination in employment even as he is firing more gay people solely for being gay than any other employer in the country – as commander-in-chief. And if an employer is firing gay people all the time, is it tolerable to accept as a response that he will stop doing it one day – but gives no time-line at all to hold him to?

Sully gets that there are other priorities at the moment — and still enthusiastically supports Obama on a whole range of issues — but feels that the gay agenda is being ignored.  And he mostly blames gays themselves, notably the leadership of the Human Rights Campaign, which hosted the speech in question and is, in Andrew’s estimation, “a racket” to garner power and attention for the leadership while constantly asking its membership to bide their time.

John Aravosis has similar complaints but is in a less forgiving mood.  He, too, is angry at HRC:

I like HRC, I know a lot of people who work there, I’ve defended them when others in the community have been highly critical of them. But it is criminal that any gay rights organization would invite an embattled president to their dinner, giving him political cover for repeated broken promises and slaps in the face to our community (like the DOMA incest brief), and then get absolutely nothing in return. HRC’s actions only feed the suspicions of critics who say that the organization is more interested in fundraisers than in advancing our rights.

Steve Clemons complains the White House website, which is usually pretty fast, took its sweet time in getting the speech online and is totally ignoring the matter on the main page, which is instead given over to more pressing matters, such as the birthday of First Dog Bo.

And, apparently, some unidentified White House staffer dismissed all this with some rather unkind words: “Barack Obama is doing well with 90% or more of Democrats so the White House views this opposition as really part of the Internet left fringe.”  NBC’s John Harwood adds,  “For a sign of how seriously the White House does or doesn’t take this opposition, one adviser told me those bloggers need to take off the pajamas, get dressed, and realize that governing a closely divided country is complicated and difficult.”

Aravosis, who runs a gay blog in addition to his regular blog (which sometimes focuses on non-gay issues) and Jane Hamsher (whose blog is not gay) are not amused. For its part, the White House denies that the quotes represent their views, noting that some of their best friends “we’ve held easily a dozen calls with the progressive online community because we believe the online communities can often keep the focus on how policy will affect the American people rather than just the political back-and-forth.”

I’m surprised that anyone is surprised by any of this.  Obama’s whole career is built on a mastery of talking in such a way that people on opposite sides of issues come away thinking he said exactly what they wanted to hear.   During the primaries, he made it quite clear that he was opposed to gay marriage and otherwise downplayed gay issues, speaking only in benign platitudes about tolerance.  There’s simply no way in hell that he’s going to spend substantial political capital on an issue that will energize the opposition, further erode his support among independents, and gain him very little with the Left.  Indeed, he’d actually alienate a substantial part of the black base, which is quite religious and anti-gay.   And, frankly, he’ll never do enough on this issue to satisfy the “Internet left fringe.”

Meanwhile, California’s Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, “has signed two gay rights bills, one honoring late activist Harvey Milk and another recognizing same-sex marriages performed in other states.” Go figure.

Andrew Sullivan:

The survival of my own marriage is entirely in the hands of the federal government. I have no right to stay in my own home with my own husband – just the government’s permission until they choose to revoke it. Gays do not have core constitutional rights in America. They have no right even to a secure home. And this president is in no hurry to do anything about it.

There’s no rational basis for allowing Britney Spears but not gays to get married.  And I agree that gays who got married in the handful of states that allow or allowed it but live in a state that does not are in a bizarre state of limbo.

But when was the last time that the federal government — or, for that matter, a state or local government in the United States — intervened to deny consenting adults the right to live together in the same domicile? Further, how are Andrew and his husband any less protected in that regard than Megan McArdle and Peter Suderman?

What “core rights” are being denied Andrew owing to his sexuality?  Certainly, not his freedom of expression. Or any of his other First Amendment rights.

Are there laws of which I’m unaware that make it harder for a gay man to buy a gun?  Can troops be quartered in gay homes?  Do police need a warrant to search them?  Do gays not get jury trials?  The right to an attorney?  A jury?  Are gays charged higher bails or punished more cruelly and unusually?  Can gays not vote?

Indeed, aside from the right to marry a person of the same sex — which is denied to heterosexuals as well, albeit with disparate impact — what rights, core or otherwise, are denied gays?

UPDATE: In the comments below, PD Shaw surmises that Sully is making an oblique reference to his current immigration status limbo which, Alex Knapp suggests, he would not be experiencing were he married to an American woman.  This, though, is an issue with bureaucratic discretion in enforcing an outdated and silly law, not gay rights per se.

Similarly, Steve Verdon notes that many municipalities limit the number of unrelated individuals permitted to share a domicile.  But that’s neither an anti-gay measure no even a “nanny state” issue but rather locals seeking to maintain the quality of their neighborhoods.  One doesn’t buy a single family home in the suburbs with the intent of living next door to 37 migrant workers sharing three bedrooms.

Former President Jimmy Carter quit the Southern Baptist Convention more than eight years ago because of its refusal to ordain women as pastors (rather odd, since the policy had been in place since the early seventeenth century origins of the Baptist faith based on the example of another follow with the initials J.C.).   To make sure people noticed — since he had long stopped having anything to do with the SBC — he sent out 75,000 letters.

Over the weekend, Carter apparently reckoned people forgot about this (and, I must confess, I had) he up and quit again, this time via op-eds in The Guardian and The Age. (The latter was published a week ago but, owing to the confluence of the International Date Line and a lot of famous celebrities dying, nobody in the United States noticed until yesterday.)

But I digress.  I bring this up not because I much care about Carter’s religion, having neither a dog in the fight nor interest sufficient to warrant exchanging a rodent’s hindquarters for his views on the subject, but rather because of the extraordinarily bizarre explanation given.

At its most repugnant, the belief that women must be subjugated to the wishes of men excuses slavery, violence, forced prostitution, genital mutilation and national laws that omit rape as a crime. But it also costs many millions of girls and women control over their own bodies and lives, and continues to deny them fair access to education, health, employment and influence within their own communities.

Now, I can’t vouch for Plains, Georgia.  But I’ve lived in plenty of communities where Southern Baptists predominated.  In all of them, prostitution and rape were against the law.  Girls went to school and the doctor.  Women had jobs and influence.  So far as I know, their genitals were intact.

The impact of these religious beliefs touches every aspect of our lives. They help explain why in many countries boys are educated before girls; why girls are told when and whom they must marry; and why many face enormous and unacceptable risks in pregnancy and childbirth because their basic health needs are not met.

But these aren’t countries run by Southern Baptists.  In rural Alabama and Mississippi, girls start and finish school at the same age as boys. Young women now outnumber young men in our colleges and universities.  Arranged marriages have never been part of our culture.  To the extent “their basic health needs are not met,” it’s because of poverty, not religious dogma.

In some Islamic nations, women are restricted in their movements, punished for permitting the exposure of an arm or ankle, deprived of education, prohibited from driving a car or competing with men for a job. If a woman is raped, she is often most severely punished as the guilty party in the crime.

In Southern Baptist towns in the United States, women show a hell of a lot more than their arms and ankles. They’re required to go to school up to age 16 and are strongly encouraged to graduate high school and go on to college.  Women work outside the home at tremendous rate.  Rape is abhorred and the rapist is severely punished, often in extracurricular fashion.

The same discriminatory thinking lies behind the continuing gender gap in pay and why there are still so few women in office in the West. The root of this prejudice lies deep in our histories, but its impact is felt every day. It is not women and girls alone who suffer. It damages all of us. The evidence shows that investing in women and girls delivers major benefits for society. An educated woman has healthier children. She is more likely to send them to school. She earns more and invests what she earns in her family.

A goodly number of Western countries (although, granted, none with large Southern Baptist populations) have women prime ministers and presidents.  In the United States, including the South, women governors, senators, and other high office holders were quite common long before Carter quit the Convention (the first time).  We’ve had three female Secretaries of State, a woman National Security Advisor, a woman Attorney General, a woman Secretary of Homeland Security.  We’ve had two women as vice presidential nominees and one who came close to getting a major party presidential nod.   Sarah Palin, despite rather little experience or demonstrated expertise, seems to be the enthusiastic favorite for the Republican presidential nomination among Southern Baptists.

There are plenty of reasons to pick nits with the Southern Baptists.  But the depredations of radical Islam are not among them.

Baptist photo by Flickr users djking under Creative Commons license.

GQ has a rather weird piece about something that may or may not be a trend:  High school kids using the Internet to extort sexual favors.  This one has a twist, which I’ll lot Conor Friedersdorf summarize:

Tony Stancl, an 18 year old high school senior who created a fake female identity on Facebook, flirted with male classmates by Internet chat, and successfully encouraged hundreds of them to send along naked photographs. These he kept on his computer. The unluckiest victims were subsequently blackmailed. The made up female would threaten to release the photographs unless the boys performed oral or anal sex on “my friend Tony.” Some boys agreed, and allowed that to be photographed too.

Conor has an excellent disquisition on the culture that allows high schoolers to casually get photographed nude and send said pics to complete strangers.  It’s worth reading.

My thoughts upon reading his precis, however, were not so much to the issue of the photographs per se but the fact that some significant number of high school boys allowed themselves to be blackmailed into gay sex rather than have nude photographs of themselves revealed.    Let’s just say my reaction precisely mirrored that which President Obama would have upon being told additional troops were needed in Afghanistan.

I’m in rare agreement with John Hinderaker in finding Sonia Sotomayor’s explanation for her infamous “wise Latina” line less than plausible.

I want to state up front, unequivocally and without doubt, I do not believe that any ethnic, racial or gender group has an advantage in sound judging. I do believe that every person has an equal opportunity to be a good and wise judge regardless of their background or life experiences.

What — the words that I use, I used agreeing with the sentiment that Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was attempting to convey. I understood that sentiment to be what I just spoke about, which is that both men and women were equally capable of being wise and fair judges.

Of course she was disagreeing with Sandra Day O’Connor.  Of course she was arguing that someone with her background would be more able to empathize with women, minorities, and the underprivileged than your average rich white boy who grew up to be a judge.  Why deny the obvious, especially when it’s so obvious as to be banal?

What’s more fascinating to me than this controversy, though, is that so many bloggers and Twitterers are closely following the hearings as if they were other than a mere formality on the road to all-but-certain confirmation.  As Senator Lindsey Graham put it to her yesterday, “Unless you have a complete meltdown, you’re going to get confirmed.”

Why pretend otherwise?

Photo: Reuters Pictures

CSM Teresa King has been selected to head the Army’s Drill Sergeants School, becoming the first woman in that prestigious slot.

“This is a male-centric part of the Army,” says Sergeant Major King, noting that her appointment “shows that the Army is emerging and … they don’t have any reservations about putting the right person where they need to be.”

Women have made major inroads into Army leadership since ranks opened in 1976, but top ranks remain partly barred. The Army has 57 women serving as commanders or generals, representing about 5 percent of the commander corps. But the overall percentage of female officers – 15 percent – exceeds the percentage of women in the active-duty ranks, 14 percent.

Most gains have come in the rear echelon, ranging from public relations to human resources – primarily because women are banned from combat positions. The first female four-star general, Lt. Gen. Ann Dunwoody, for example, heads the Army’s materiel command.

Actually, Dunwoody is a General; “Lt. Gen.” is the way civilians and Air Force types (but I repeat myself) abbreviate the three-star rank of Lieutenant General.

King acknowledges that the drill sergeant appointment is a special case, representative of the toughest glass ceiling to break: the tight-knit world of the infantry soldier.

Uh, no.  Every branch has drill sergeants; the vast majority of drill sergeants are not infantrymen.

King was among the first female recruits to train alongside men when she joined the Army out of high school, in 1980. She began her career as a postal clerk in Germany, spent two years as a drill sergeant, and later joined the Pentagon, hand-picked by then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney.

Her first major leadership test came on 9/11, when she served as first sergeant of the 18th Airborne Corps’ headquarters company, responsible for 500 infantrymen, 22 sergeant majors, four colonels, and a slew of other officers. “They didn’t care if I was a female,” she says. “When I told them to move out, they did.”

That’s an incredibly misleading paragraph.  The HHC may be “responsible” for those officers, in a service support sense, but neither its First Sergeant nor its CO “tells” colonels to “move out” in anything but the administrative sense of letting them know what the schedule is.  (I was briefly the XO of an equivalent unit in my artillery battalion.)

Despite her years of experience, King says she was “amazed” when tapped to lead the school, saying she never thought it was an option. She says Fort Jackson’s commander, Brig. Gen. Bradley May, risked ruffling feathers in appointing a woman to the prestigious role.  “More doors are opening in the Army,” says King. “It’s like I’ve always been saying: If you hold people to standards and enforce them and know there are no impossibilities, all things are possible unto you.”

This is indeed a major development and the breaking of a glass ceiling.  It is not, however, a sign that the combat arms are about to go co-ed.

Nearly as noteworthy: Not once did the article mention that King is black.  Have we finally gotten to the point where it’s no longer news that the military has blacks in leadership positions?

Since his departure from the Washington Times, Stacy McCain has become perhaps the most skilled attention whore in all the blogosphere.

Yeah, I just wrote that. And put it on the Internet.

In seeking to explain why Ken Layne and Andrew Sullivan seem to loathe Sarah Palin and, in particular, make sport of her Down Syndrome suffering infant son, Trig, Stacy puts forth a pop psychology theory in four part harmony involving gay psychology, the fear of spinsterdom, and tips for hunting hillbillies.

Taking Ockham’s Razor (or, in the case of certain residents of West Virginia, Ockham’s Toothbrush) to the problem, however, a simpler explanation arises:  They do it for the same reason Stacy writes posts like this one.

First, regardless of intelligence and education, people have prejudices based on their own experience and tend to judge people who don’t conform to their expectations rather harshly.  Sarah Palin does not dress, talk, or act like a governor — much less a vice presidential candidate — is supposed to.

Second, saying outrageous things that cultured people aren’t supposed to say out loud is an excellent way of attracting and sustaining attention.  Holding forth the view that Sarah Palin chose to carry Trig to term after learning that he had Down Syndrome, just like everyone assumed all along, is not going to get you many clickthroughs.

Illustration: Chris Madden Cartoons

Correction:  An earlier version of the post had Sullivan, Layne, and Ana Marie Cox pushing the Trig Palin birth origin conspiracy story.  In fact, Layne merely reprinted a cartoon involving Trig Palin. I don’t think Cox had anything to do with this at all, aside from being the original Wonkette.