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"If you send a kid to [public] school in D.C., chances are that they will end up in a gang rather than graduating."
Those are the wise words of Sen. Jim De Mint, a South Carolina Republican and voucher supporter.
Is that why my 8-year-old came home sporting that tattoo today? And I thought it was just a stick-on.
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With none other than Michelle Obama! After nine years of stubbornly holding off on appearances with well, anything that is not a saleable accessory (not even so much as a cabana boy), Oprah caves on the cover of her magazine, O. The dish:
Winfrey also has an interview with the new First Lady that addresses everything from the joys of White House pie to Obama's decorating philosophy, which seems to have a lot to do with sofas. "I want comfortable sofas," said Obama in the interview. "You've got to be able to make a fort with the sofa pillows! Everything must be fort-worthy."
As a child who constructed obstacle courses and secret islands from couch cushions, that's kind of an awesome sentiment (will the cushions, like the new White House playset, be engraved with former presidents' names?). More remarkable, however, is that Oprah may have actually realized that someone is more bankable than her. Barack Obama certainly holds his own as a magazine cover sales god, but Michelle is giving both her husband and the megastar who campaigned for him a run for their money--appearing on sellout covers from Vogue to People (the O photo boasts a rare sleeved Michael Kors look). Oprah acknowledged as much in the magazine: "people do judge a magazine by its cover, which is why it's important to me keep the cover of this one looking fresh," said Winfrey.
Snap! Lipstick Level: 95. Both Madame Os probably still buy their own gloss—but watching richer-than-sin Winfrey trying to hustle a little extra cash on the side is surely a sign of the apocalypse.
Earlier: Introducing the Lipstick Level: A Recessionometer
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Ann Coulter and Keith Olbermann are in the midst of an inane catfight about who got the better Cornell education. Coulter wrote on Wednesday that:
Keith didn't go to the Ivy League Cornell; he went to the Old MacDonald Cornell. The real Cornell, the School of Arts and Sciences (average SAT: 1,325; acceptance rate: 1 in 6 applicants), is the only Ivy League school at Cornell. ... Keith went to an affiliated state college at Cornell, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (average SAT: about that of pulling guards at the University of South Carolina; acceptance rate: 1 of every 1.01 applicants).
As a fellow Cornell grad (something I say without much pride in this particular instance, because they're both acting like buffoons), I feel the urge to jump in with some fact checking.
For starters, Coulter's numbers are off. As Olbermann countered on his show, the latest data from Cornell is that the acceptance rate for the Ag college is one in five—the same as for A&S. More ridiculous is Coulter's claim that only the College of Arts & Sciences is part of the Ivy League. The connotations of the phrase "Ivy League" are as numerous as the popped collars adorning their campuses, but the literal meaning is a sports conference, like the Big 10. Not only are Aggies like Olbermann just as welcome on the Cornell fields as Coulter's cohorts, but they were actually better represented on the 2008 football team (44 Aggies, 38 Arts), according to Cornell's Director of Athletics Communications Jeremy Hartigan.
Olbermann's not taking the high road, though. In his condescending response, he emphasizes that if "poor Annie" was from outside New York (she is—Connecticut), she "probably paid 8 to 10 times" for her Cornell diploma what he did for his. That's true, but it has nothing to do with which college within Cornell she attended. Since only New York state residents get the tuition break for the "contract colleges" like Olbermann's (they're not technically "state" colleges, as Coulter called them), she would have paid more than Olbermann no matter what.
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Emily, since I know you've been covering how marriages have been affected by the recession, I thought you would be interested in this little development: ABC has commissioned a sitcom about a Wall Street exec turned unwilling stay-at-home dad. According to Ad Age, the show stars Kelsey Grammer as a "Wall Street millionaire unhorsed by the collapsing economy and forced into a 'Mr. Mom'-like role at home with the family he hardly ever saw."
ABC is also developing a second show about beleaguered bankers, called Canned, which is about a group of twentysomething investment bank casualties. And Dana, you'll be glad to know that luxury coffee brands are already an object of loathing for the Canned kids. Says Ad Age:
Two brands singled out for particular scorn in the pilot episode are Starbucks and its Clover, the ultra-high-end stainless-steel coffee machine Seattle start-up Coffee Equipment Co. was selling for more than $8,000 per unit to well-heeled coffee aficionados before Starbucks acquired the brand for its stores last March.
If ABC thinks they're providing cutting-edge entertainment by lampooning Starbucks, they're probably facing a creative recession as well as a fiscal one.
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When I wrote about “sexting” a few weeks back, I wasn’t fully persuaded that the consequences of having your naked photos floating through the ether were really all that dire. We live, after all, in a Girls Gone Wild era, in which being photographed nude is often treated as little more than a rite of passage. This Ohio story—in which a mom claims that her 18-year-old daughter, Jessie Logan, was driven to suicide by a sexting incident—is a really sobering one. The young woman sent a naked image of herself to her boyfriend, and after a breakup he evidently sent it on to hundreds of students. After that, says her mom, she was teased and called names, eventually started skipping school, and killed herself last July. Certainly this starts to look more like cyber-bullying when kids are passing around an image and tormenting someone. But it’s also clear at least from this account that neither the school system nor the legal system were able to do anything about it. I’m still not persuaded that charging Jessie Logan or her boyfriend with a felony would have saved her life. But I am starting to think that this is a much more pervasive and serious phenomenon than I had first believed.
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Willa, I checked my favorite desi blog, Sepia Mutiny, and they, too, are trying to figure out if Ickitt is a South Asian name. (I called my dad, but he'd never heard of it. "Maybe it's Tamil?" he suggested. A Google search came up empty.)
I love bonkers celebrity baby names as much as the next person, but M.I.A.'s holds a special place in my heart. I'm biracial, like lil' Icky, and naming me was a bit of a chore for my parents—they ended up going with "Nina" because it's nonspecifically ethnic and, perhaps more important, can be pronounced by all parts of the extended clan (no Rs or Ls to trip up the Chinese, no Ws and Vs to frustrate the Indians). I've often wondered how I'll extend this multiculti balancing act to the next generation, but maybe M.I.A. has the right idea—just put together a few syllables that sound ethnic, and call it a day.
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Abigail, is "the main problem" really that "Rush is preaching to the choir"? Isn't there something slightly lacking in the message itself? I think Obama's budget is problematic, relying as it does on implausible growth rates. I worry, as does Nobel Prize winning Macroeconomist Edmund Phelps, that the stimulus might prolong the recession by diverting resources from productive activity to rent-seeking. But I certainly don't expect anyone to listen to Rush Limbaugh when he starts talking about fiscal restraint or the limits of state power.
This is a man who evidently believes our government so efficacious that it can transform the political culture of a foreign society, so beneficent that we ought to let it monitor our phone calls without even the flimsiest pretense of oversight. This is a man so inspired by his faith in the federal government that he was happy to invest $2 trillion on a war the moment Washington deemed it necessary. When Rush Limbaugh says the new guy is being irresponsible with taxpayer money, it just looks like rank obstructionism. Because, you know, it is.
Of course the White House wants to promote Rush as the kind of person who opposes its economic policy. The implication is that if you think spending billions of dollars on something vaguely defined as "green jobs" is kind of dubious, you're probably a sexist incoherent cigar-smoking overweight white dude with an overdeveloped taste for OxyContin. He's not helping.
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Here's an unfortunate story from my neck of the woods: Next week, the Ohio Supreme Court will hear the case of a woman who says she was fired for taking extra restroom breaks to pump breast milk.
The company—Totes/Isotoner—isn't commenting, so we only have the side of LaNisa Allen, who
said she began taking the extra breaks at 10 a.m. after she found her 10-minute scheduled break at 8 a.m. was too short and she couldn't stand to wait until her 11 a.m. lunch break.
About two weeks after she started taking the breaks, an agency supervisor came into the restroom and told Allen she was breaking workplace rules. She was fired by a Totes supervisor that afternoon.
The company prevailed in both the trial and the original appeal, arguing that "breastfeeding doesn't legally constitute an illness or medical condition" that it needs to accommodate.
Now, as a conservative, I usually support the right of businesses to establish their own workplace policies. But I don't defend a company's dumb policies, and that's what this seems to be. Do they allow employees to take smoking breaks? If so, how do you justify allowing smoke breaks but not give a woman a few extra minutes to pump? Do you have to clock-in/clock-out to use the restroom? (Yes, I've heard of places that are so draconian.) Also, I suspect that the lawyers making the arguments that breast-feeding doesn't constitute a medical condition are either men or maybe women who've never arrived at work with a breast pump in tow only to realize that part of the device is sitting at home on the kitchen counter. I can assure you it's painful.
On the other hand, can working mothers help their own cause by being proactive with their employers, explaining upfront what their needs are and how easy it would be to accommodate them? Offer some flexibility? (As in, "I can be here 15 minutes early/stay 15 minutes late, but I really need this block of time in the middle of the day.)
To me, it behooves both the company and the employee if the company has a clear policy on what it can accommodate, and if the employee is vocal and upfront about her needs. What do others think?
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The maybe heinous, maybe hilarious polka-dotted dress was just an opening salvo. MIA's named her newborn son and it's a doozy: Ickitt Brewer. Perfunctory research (i.e., me IMing South Asian friends and asking culturally insensitive questions) suggests this is not a standard moniker, though a commenter on Perez Hilton, who I am obviously in no position to judge, claims, "I just spoke to my friend who is of Indian descent (M.I.A. is Sri Lankan, which is basically Indian [SIC]) and he said that it is an Indian name except she spelled it differently than the norm." I'm sure one of the tabloids will "get to the bottom" of this soon. In the meantime, anyone with any knowledge of playground tactics might want to do their kid a solid and not saddle them with the nickname "icky-poo" for the rest of their life.
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Jessica, your "lipstick level" post this morning about the recession-proof success of Nespresso coffee machines strikes a guilty chord in me. I hate the Nespresso company as an addict hates her dealer. After receiving one of their machines as a (very generous) housewarming gift, my partner and I have gotten strung out on Nespresso, which is environmentally wasteful (the little one-per-cup aluminum capsules are unrecyclable), unsustainably farmed (like most coffee on the market), wildly overpriced, and reprehensibly delicious. Their "upscale" marketing campaign is a mailbox-clogging annoyance, transparently designed to flatter the consumer for her "exclusive" taste. (I chuck their glossy magazine in the recycling bin so fast that I never even noticed George Clooney was the spokesman.) And I don't know what "customer loyalty programme" that BBC article is talking about—maybe it's only for Brits?—but after two years of ordering boxes of those little foil capsules (like a software giant, Nespresso works to insure there's no cross-platform use of its product), we have yet to be offered a discount of any kind. No matter the quantity you order, each capsule costs the same (a price that now tops 50 cents per cup). I periodically resolve to go back to my old stovetop coffeemaking method, but ... the stuff is just so damn good. Maybe the knowledge that this smug company is prospering even in the recession will be enough to wean me off their coffee at last, if only out of pure consumer schadenfreude.
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Hanna, as bizarre as it may seem to you, the way you feel when you listen to Rush Limbaugh is the way a large portion of the country feels (me included) when they read the Washington Post editorial page—amused, slightly terrified, and in shock that there are people who really think that way. Rush gets about 20 million listeners a week on about 600 stations—which may or may not justify White House acknowledgment but are pretty impressive numbers nonetheless. Especially when compared to certain plummeting newspaper sales.
As crazy as it may seem, there are still a few people in America (at least 20 million of them) who don't think government intervention is the solution to every problem. Or that it's a coincidence that every time Obama unveils a new package of regulations stocks on Wall Street descend into further freefall. And earlier, when you were wondering "whither the movement"against terrifying appointees like Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius has gone"it's gone to Rush and to talk radio. Why? In part because no major mainsteam newspaper is going to do any investigating in that story. Why is that? I don't know. I assume it's because journalists don't believe the fact that Sebelius supports (blandly labeled but truly gruesome) partial-birth abortion is something that compromises her credibility as a lawmaker. Conservatives do. But maybe that's an incorrect assumption of journalists on my part?
The main problem (although probably good news for you) with that movement of the conservative voice to talk radio is that Rush is preaching to the choir—not to Congress. Until conservatives find a way to get their message out to a larger audience, they're going to have a hard time gaining any ground. But until then, Limbaugh won't be going away. He's one of the only sources that's providing information on the issues conservatives care about—information that they're not finding in the mainstream media and maybe never will.
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There's good news all around in today's lipstick level, both at the high and low ends. Predictably, Wal-Mart is doing incredibly well, but according to the IHT, it's actually exceeding expectations. Also doing well: niche teen stores like Hot Topic. Apparently the desire for zebra-print leggings remains high even during times of struggle.
Also in the black? YSL. According to Miles Socha at Women's Wear Daily, YSL has become profitable by emphasizing store sell-through rather than loading up boutiques with merchandise. The company is led by Valerie Hermann, a "driven but fun-loving" CEO. Part of the reason that YSL is doing well seems to be their increased brand visibility. Socha notes, "YSL is ranked number-one within Gucci Group in terms of editorial credits, prorated versus advertising investments."
Keeping your brand solid is something that Nespresso, the "upmarket coffee capsule" from Nestle has done quite well. They've built their entire marketing campaign around George Clooney. But that's not all! Advertising analyst Jim Boulton tells the BBC:
The marketing material [for Nespresso] at every touch point is polished and has data capture at its heart. ... Consumers are automatically enrolled in a loyalty programme, and receive a regular glossy magazine that re-enforces the notion that consumers are members of an exclusive club.
I guess everyone wants to join a club that involves fantasizing about waking up next to George Clooney. Thanks to the Cloon and his upscale caffeinated beverages, today's lipstick level is a 70.
Earlier: Introducing the Lipstick Level: A Recessionometer
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I feel compelled to comment on this Miller-McCune article Emily
mentioned primarily because it opens with my fiancé calling Sarah Palin
"tremendously sexy." (I expect someone to bring this up during the
"should anyone object" portion of our wedding.) I'm also curious as to
whether it really was Palin's sexiness that diminished her in the eyes
of the subjects. As sociologist Christine Whelan suggests, it's possible that if these students were directed to focus on the appearance of any
woman in a leadership position, they'd adjust their opinions of her
competence downward. Would an ugly woman be judged more or less
capable? Is it best to be average? Do quirky glasses hurt or help?
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Of all the Barbie-at-50 stories, I found the one in today's New York Times "Antiques" column the most poignant. Here is Barbie robbed of her role as a spark for feminist rage, and turned into a series of federal agency acronyms "OSS" (original swimsuit) or "NRFB" (never removed from box). Her expression in that box—placid and sardonic—reminded me of a great essay by Margaret Talbot on Bettie Page, another pinup reduced to kitsch.
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Obama announced yesterday his continued commitment to vast reform of the health care system: "This time, there is no debate about whether all Americans should have quality, affordable health care-the only question is, how?" In some sense, universal health care is already a reality for Americans, according to Marilyn Barrett at the Huffington Post, who argued earlier this week that our nation's emergency rooms serve as health care for the uninsured. But a national study released this week found that sick patients in the ER have to wait nearly six hours, on average, for a hospital bed. Even more upsetting, black patients must wait about an hour longer, the study found, than patients of other races. Half of the sickest black patients (those in the ICU) had to wait more than six hours for a bed-a delay that previous studies have linked to a higher death rate-compared to 37 percent of patients of other races. (The study's author, Jesse M. Pines, wrote for Slate last year about how ER waits are killing patients.)
Factors other than discrimination, such as class and severity of illness, may explain the longer wait for blacks. Still, the study calls to mind the wrenching scene in What is the What, in which Valentino Achak Deng, freshly escaped from a long and brutal robbery, waits 14 hours in an empty emergency room for an MRI, then finally decides to walk home-still undiagnosed and untreated-at nearly 4 a.m.
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I don't know if the White House is being cynical or not in puffing up Rush Limbaugh's importance. The Bush people did the same with Michael Moore. As Howard Kurtz reports this morning, Limbaugh does have a 60 percent favorable rating among Republicans. And there's no doubt Rush is loving it, going on and on about how the White House is "targeting" him and making him into a "demon." For my part, I can't believe we are having any kind of serious discussion about Rush on the front pages of newspapers and the White House briefing room. (Kathleen Parker grudgingly addresses here.)
If any of you have not yet read his rant at the Conservative Political Action Conference last weekend, you should do so. (But don't watch, as it will eat up 85 minutes better spent organizing a closet.) Limbaugh's put-it-on-the-gravestone-motto is "conservatives don't check principles at the door." And what are those principles, exactly? Hard to say, in any specific terms. The speech opens on a dumb Stalin joke, followed by a dumb irreligious St. Peter joke about how God is actually Limbaugh. He does a lot of ranting about big government and socialism. His main gripe seems to be that Obama portrays America as a "soup kitchen" [Translation: in a recession] when really it's a kick-ass country. The overall spirit of the thing seems to be "I'm persecuted, and loving it." My favorite line, translated with stage directions by his own Web site: "John Kerry [BOO] who served in Vietnam[LAUGHTER]. Now that's poetry.
In his dishonest rage, his simplified politics, his ability to turn otherwise intelligent 20-year-olds into frothing morons, Limbaugh is a classic demagogue. I see what the White House is trying to do, but this is not exactly a moment when you need to be extra-creative in making Republicans seem like the loser party.