To Olbermann’s credit, his recent feudin’ words (he recently called Schultz a “supposedly liberal commentator”) did not bleed over into his tweets about the Ingraham flap, keeping the focus where it belonged, on Schultz’s words:

There is no excuse for any political commentator calling any woman a “slut,” least of all Laura @IngrahamAngle

He also responded to the predictable notion from some liberals that Ingraham deserved what she got:

@FiftySeth @IngrahamAngle Trust me, I know all about her words. You want to call her Xenophobic? Crass? Unintelligent? Fine. “Slut”? No.

The faint defense seems reasonable, until you realize that Olbermann and Ingraham used to date each other(!):

Olbermann dated Ingraham briefly a decade ago. “There were a few problems,” he told me. “There were a few things that I could see were going to be impediments. Oddly, they were not political things.”

Olbermann, of course, has been accused of having his own problems with women, and some of those chickens came home to roost last night. Olbermann wasn’t ready to apologize for calling Michelle Malkin a “mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it,” but he did take time to defend the remark, and engage in some passive-aggressive sparring with Malkin over it. Sorry, Keith, she’s married!

But when confronted over his transphobic remarks about Ann Coulter, Olbermann did express some regret. A little over a year ago, Olbermann responded to some Coulter remarks by saying, “If this guy wants to live his life as a woman, I’m gonna back his choice up 100%.”

Granted, Coulter had, herself, just questioned Olbermann’s own sexuality (and that of then-Countdown contributor Richard Wolffe), as well as made a cruel reference to Olbermann’s deceased mother, but as Olbermann now realizes, “It’s not a question of what THEY would do, it’s what WE do.”

At the time, Olbermann didn’t apologize, or respond to criticism over the remark.

When confronted about it last night, though, he expressed regret:

@thisdaydreamer @juicefernandez Agreed. I was out of bounds to even dance around that.

I wasn’t exactly sure this was an apology, but when Kate Doak (a contributor to my personal blog) also confronted him, asking “why have u used Transgenders as punchlines to slander others in the past?” Olbermann replied,”I was wrong to do that, and I apologized for it here.”

He’s apparently not ready, though, to reconsider his treatment of Carrie Prejean.

His willingness to admit he was wrong about Coulter does show some progress, but his inability to see that the way he expresses his hostility toward conservative women (explanations aside) has become a low-hum version of Schultz’s offense is a problem, not just as a human being, but as a liberal. One of the basic pillars of liberalism is the recognition, and protection, of the humanity of others. It becomes impossible to defend anyone’s humanity if you routinely fail to recognize it yourself, even in those with whom you disagree.

Schultz, as my friend Greta Van Susteren observes, seems to get it. Perhaps Keith Olbermann is on his way, too, but he’s not there yet. When you’re a political scrapper, it can be hard to admit when you’re wrong, but as Schultz demonstrates, if you do it right, people can be surprisingly forgiving.

The Blaze‘s Nick Rizzuto kicked off this round, tweeting a link to a Blaze post on Monday’s viral video missive, adding:

After @keitholbermann is through running (what’s left of) Current TV into the ground, we’ll revisit this.

The irony here, of course, is that the point of the story Rizzuto tweets is that declarations of just this type are the stuff that crow-eating is made of.

Olbermann then responds to Rizzuto by mocking his tiny…follower count, and arguing that Beck, who’s still on TV, has already suffered career death:

@Nick_Rizzuto “we” being your massive list of 243 followers who hang on your master’s every belch

@Nick_Rizzuto besides which, he’s already bleedin’ demised

It’s unclear where Beck stands on the issue, but Keith Olbermann is very invested in the idea that he and Beck are not the same. In some ways, he’s right. Beck is the guy who calls women who use Planned Parenthood “hookers,” and Olbermann is the one who makes fingerbang jokes about Carrie Prejean. Got it.

But with the duo crossing paths on their respective ways in and out of television, each trying to establish a new beachhead for his brand, they’re starting to resemble Bele and Lokai, the Star Trek characters who are locked in eternal combat because they don’t like the way the other guy wears his makeup. Come to think of it, that was a pretty good episode.

First of all, the contents of Journolist were intended to be private and off-the-record. While Daily Caller may have a fig leaf on the off-the-record thing if the emails were leaked by a 3rd party (a mighty big IF when you consider that a Daily Caller reporter was on Journolist), that doesn’t make it right.

The Olbermann emails center around his treatment of Carrie Prejean, and of then-Senator Hillary Clinton. Some highlights:

The Nation’s Katha Pollitt began the group’s rant. “He and Michael Musto did this whole long riff about beauty contestant Carrie “opposite marriage” Prejean’s breast implants, stupidity, breast implants, tacky clothes, earrings, breast implants. They went on and on about how she was “part plastic” and pathetic.  You’d think they were celibate vegans who spent their lives zen meditating.  It was just a whole TV humiliation of her, and it made me feel sorry for her, which wasn’t easy,” Pollitt said.

…Julian Zelizer, a Princeton professor and CNN contributor, said Olbermann’s root problem is his misogyny. “I can’t take him anytime. I think to write off his mysogyny as limited to Musto is just not accurate. That very much defined much of how he talked about Clinton as well as others.”

What pisses me off here is that I have consistently, respectfully, and fairly pointed out that Olbermann’s series of sexually-charged attacks against Prejean were unacceptable, and were undermining his otherwise excellent work. My Mediaite colleague, Rachel Sklar, also called Olbermann out during the 2008 campaign for his comments about Hillary Clinton, comments for which he apologized.

I can’t speak for Rachel, but I know I got nothing but hostility from my fellow liberals, who didn’t see the use in defending Prejean, or in criticizing Olbermann. Better to let him sit there and get smelly, instead of telling him he’d stepped in it. All the while, these same folks were happily outraged about it behind the scenes. This is not strictly a liberal phenomenon, as you don’t see very many conservatives rushing to denounce Andrew Breitbart in public for smearing Shirley Sherrod, do you?

Keith Olbermann, meanwhile, frequently uses Journolisters as guests and contributors on his show, a gravy train that might now end. Aside from Dave Weigel, possibly, Olbermann has shown little desire to be disagreed with.

Last year’s pageant filled up a good month’s worth of the news cycle thanks to Carrie Prejean and, seemingly in the hopes of replicating that proud moment in cable news history, the F&Fteam are investigating whether Fakih, the first Arab-American Miss USA and one-time morning zoo pole dance champion, deserved to win. Woolard seems to think so, although Brian Kilmeade in particular showed concern that she was fed a question on the Arizona immigration law– which she answered quite intelligently, for a beauty pageant contestant!– to make sure she didn’t win.

When Woolard noted that she was expecting the question and fully prepared to answer it, Kilmeade asked: “Why were you expecting the question?… Do you feel as though that maybe they wanted to make sure you didn’t win, asking you a question that there’s no way to win because it’s so polarizing?” It is polarizing, she admitted, but explained that she believed part of the job was answering difficult questions. “I think you need to know what’s going on in your world and your nation,” she said.

Continuing the barrage of difficult questions, Kilmeade asked her about the deadly combination of “bathing suits and high heels,” and how she can walk in them. “Do you feel that Miss Michigan won fair and square?” Asked a sympathetic Steve Doocy moments later.

To Woolard’s credit, she was gracious in defeat and insisted that she believed the Arizona law question was fair game, though her behavior in being all over Fox News today (she did an online interview and a segment on America Live in addition to this) might belie her words. Aside from her personal actions, however, there is something concerning about the fact that (a) the Fox and Friends crew seem to be setting up an alternative universe where the real Miss USA is a pro-states’ rights, anti-illegal immigration Middle American beauty, and not an Arab-American strip contest winner and (b) they care enough– or think their audience cares enough– to make this competition at all an issue.

Video below:

Woolard offered: “I’m a huge believer in states’ rights. I think that’s what’s so wonderful about America. So I think it’s perfectly fine for Arizona to create that law.” And just to make sure she didn’t become the next conservative pariah (a la Prejean), she added a tolerant, if not banal, bon mot at the end, saying that she was “against racial profiling.”

(h/t Real Clear Politics)

Ashley had previously stated that she believed the Bible was clear that homosexuality is a sin, interpreting the statements in the Old Testament as “If man lies with mankind as he would lie with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. They shall surely be put to death and their blood shall be upon them.” She later spoke to her local NBC affiliate to clarify her statements, and isn’t stepping back. Asked whether she could remember the passage in the Bible that condemns homosexuality, she says yes, only to mutter to herself a bit and answer hastily, ”it’s in Leviticus,” and restates that her belief that it is a sin stems from being Christianity. The funny thing about this isn’t even that she can’t remember a statement she claims to know by heart several seconds before, it’s that Leviticus is in the Old Testament, which the New Testament more or less completely disavows (that’s what the whole “let he without sin cast the first stone” part is about, though she may have skimmed that), but maybe we’re expecting too much from her. Watch her response below:

You know who would have prevented Ashley from making a fool of herself and having the pageant disassociate itself from her? A sassy gay friend.

For the uninitiated, “tool” is another derisive term for the male member, shall we say “unit,” which seems to give added meaning to the still they used in the actual Palin segment.

At first blush, the joke evokes the kind of outrage it was obviously intended to. The left has long been unable to crack the code that allows the every utterance of a Rush Limbaugh to explode in the atmosphere and hang over the media landscape like a radioactive cloud. This smacks of that kind of attention-seeking behavior.

Be that as it may, the question I asked myself after that initial reaction was this: Who calls a woman a “tool?” It doesn’t even make sense. It’s like calling a fern “ornery,” it just doesn’t work as an insult.

In today’s media climate, it’s rare to see someone succeed without resorting to name-calling, and the well-executed takedown is certainly a popular enough feature. Still, when you result to nonsensical vulgarity, aren’t you really saying more about yourself than your intended target?

This bit was short and stealthy enough that it probably won’t make it onto Palin’s Facebook radar screen. If it does, though, I’ve got some grade A “satire” ready to go.

When Oprah asked Sarah Palin about Levi Johnston’s Playgirl shoot, she said, “I call it porn.” But is it?

The NSFW pictures prove that Levi didn’t show us everything — so to speak — and the pictures don’t include any frontal nudity. The pictures of the 19-year old are no more explicit than what you’d see on an episode of Nip/Tuck and less (homo)erotic than an Ultimate Fight Championship match. Some shower shots with a strategically-placed towel, a naked backside and some steamed-up mirror pics. That’s it.

While porn doesn’t have to be erotic, it usually does need to be explicit. As Justice Potter Stewart said in his concurring opinion in 1964 obscenity case, “I know it when I see it.” It’s hard to know what Justice Stewart would say about Johnston’s soft-core erotica, but he probably wouldn’t consider it porn either. Not sure what he’d say about Carrie Prejean’s videos.

Glancing at the Johnston pics and perusing the free parts of Playgirl.com, it’s easy to think that the porn threshold has been raised and that beefcake pics of a 19-year old baby daddy just aren’t that shocking. You can see more explicit pics on a Google image search of almost any random phrase.

Johnston’s decision to strip for Playgirl follows an oddly common script: young person without much other talent taking advantage of a few minutes of fame — or desperate for a little money — and posing naked before the cameras. Women have been doing it for generations and Johnston is just putting his spin on the rather sad tale.

Johnston has gotten a lot of attention in gossip and entertainment world, but also plenty of buzz in the gay press and blogosphere. At Advocate.com, the gay news and entertainment site acknowledged that it had been all-Johnston, all-the-time and asked Playgirl marketing director Daniel Nardicio – who founded DList.com, the gay social networking/hook-up site — about Johnston’s gay appeal. Nardicio’s response: “It’s because he’s hot! And it’s political.”

While his being “hot” is still up in the air, there’s not doubt that he’s political even if we don’t know a thing about his political beliefs. He was thrust onto the public by Palin and he instantly became a celebrity, even though his only claim was having gotten the candidate’s daughter pregnant.

Now, he’s a 19-year old with a kid who has a famous grandmother. His own meth dealing mom just got sentenced to jail for three mom, the grandmother is trashing the father on Oprah, and all he has to show for it is a fickle gay fanbase and some Playgirl shots in a towel.

So, is it porn? Probably not to most people, not even most people in Palin’s support base. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a little sad, especially when you consider how Johnston ended up stripped down to a strategically-placed towel.

Warning: If you’re easily offended by depictions of “inappropriate” situations, don’t watch this. Also, NSFW.

Is Carrie Prejean really, “Still Standing,” as her book title suggests? Because to MSNBC, she just may be in fact sitting down, or apparently being picked up in an embrace by a jilted ex. Or, of course, taping herself…

MSNBC’s entertainment correspondent Courtney Hazlett was a guest this afternoon, and Monica Novotny asked her about Prejean and her media blitz. And Hazlett didn’t hold back. “A sex tape could be the best thing that’s ever happened to this girl,” she said. “The reason we have Paris Hilton, the reason we have that Kardashian girl is because they got caught with sex tapes.”

Also: “Carrie Prejean is either the smartest thing in the world…or, she’s not.”

The TMZ pictures and phone call with Prejean’s ex came up as well. “I woudn’t be surprised if she called up that ex-boyfriend and said, ‘Hey this is TMZ’s phone number if you want to tell them your side of the story.’”

I’d be surprised – Prejean is a 22-year-old that wants to sell books, yes, but is proving to be in over her head when it comes to the media. Moments like this and others on MSNBC seem to be taking joy in kicking a person when she’s down.

She’s now a public figure, so she’s made herself a target for criticism, but this begins approaching the line of going overboard.

No video yet on msnbc.com…if you find we’ll post.

Do you have a pick for Chyron of the Day? Email me at Steve@mediaite.com. Check out all the past Chyrons of the Day here.

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Guess what – he made it sexual.

The key phrase from the interview – “Larry, you’re being inappropriate” – was interpreted a slightly different way by Trump:

Inappropriate is more of a sexual term, as far as I’m concerned. I mean, inappropriate? He asked a very, very easy question and I was surprised that she just didn’t say, ‘Hey, listen, I can’t answer that question.’ Instead she wants to walk off the stage? It was very surprising. It was really very strange to watch it.

A little creepy, but let’s move on. In Prejean’s book she takes one swipe at Trump, saying he personally picks the women he finds the most attractive to advance the Miss America competition. Trump denied in, but added, “I happen to have very good taste when it comes to beauty and I do pick people.”

As for the future of Prejean, Trump said, “I think Carrie really needs a little bit of guidance.” Sounds like an understatement.

Also, is this sort of interview the norm for Showbiz Tonight, HLN’s 11pmET entertainment show? Brooke Anderson‘s baiting questioning is worse than an Access Hollywood interview. The amount of “exclusive” mentions, both on-air and in the lower third neared double digits. Say what you want about CNN and their news focus, but HLN gets very non-news by the end of prime time…

Here’s the full “exclusive” interview:

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Author and preachy solo sex tape performer Carrie Prejean found that out last night the hard way, as she fell prey to the ‘tough’ questions from King and almost walked off set.

What really seemed to irk Prejean were King’s incessant questions about why she agreed to the settlement – not, he stressed, what was in the settlement. According to Prejean, her reason for agreeing to the settlement was equally confidential, for some reason. “Larry it’s completely confidential and you’re being inappropriate,” she said.

A somewhat stunned King moved on: “Inappropriate King Live continues, Detroit, hello.”

As he took a call from someone who introduced himself saying, “I am a gay man and I love pageants,” Prejean could be seen mouthing to someone off set that she was “going to leave” and removed her microphone. But she didn’t take out her IFB earpiece, so when she seemed to have a change of heart and stayed sitting in her chair, she could hear King asking her what she was doing and spoke loudly in response, presumably so a studio mic would pick up what she said. The whole thing was bizarre, and only made more so by the fact that she was back after the commercial break for a couple final minutes.

Here’s what happened when King returned:

King: You don’t want to take phone calls right?
Prejean: Yeah that was the agreement you had with my publicist, so…
King: Oh. No one told me. I didn’t know. I didn’t know we weren’t supposed to take phone calls.

The whole thing is much more awkward on video, and is only made more ridiculous by the fact that, while Larry King is a legend, he isn’t known for nor did he present her with hard hitting questions. Then again, it wasn’t exactly the comfort of a Sean Hannity interview.

Here’s the key part of the interview (and as a side note: the new CNN.com is getting very aware of giving the people what they want – the video below was promoted on the homepage and is headlined “Carrie Prejean gets mad!”):

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He signs off the segment, in which he discusses the sex tape that features Prejean “by herself,” with a two, then three, fingered “Girl Scout” salute. Where to begin?

Here’s the segment. Keith’s salute is at the very end, and doesn’t appear in MSNBC’s version of the clip:

The gesture is either a fairly obvious attempt at shock humor, or an accidental one. Given MSNBC’s history of thinly-veiled entendre, and the context here, I’d say it’s the former. It’s ironic that he uses a Girl Scout salute as the fig leaf since, unlike the Boy Scouts of America, the Girl scouts don’t discriminate against gay people.

The joke is likely to delight many of Prejean’s detractors, embittered toward her over her support of California’s Proposition 8. Just as surely, it will offend many others who observe the double standard that Prejean points out in the segment. I find it emblematic of the wrongheadedness of the anti-Prejean narrative.

The Carrie Prejean story began with an honest answer to a divisive question at a beauty pageant. Asked if she believed that same-sex marriage should be legal in all 50 states, she stated her personal belief that marriage should be between a man and a woman, but also said that she was happy to live in a country where people can choose “same-sex marriage or opposite marriage.” As Jake Tapper pointed out, this position hews closely to that of President Obama.

She was immediately and viciously attacked by Perez Hilton, the judge who asked the question, using vile misogynist slurs. The rest of the media piled on by mocking her use of the term “opposite marriage,” elevating her to the status of media martyr. It was only then that she became useful to the National Organization for Marriage, and decided to support the dissolution of thousands of legal marriages.

The response to this was to make fun of her breasts, compare her to a Nazi and a dog, leak R-rated pictures of her, and now, delight in the revelation of this sex tape. The point of this is supposed to be to expose her as a hypocrite, which eludes me somewhat. She’s a model, so how do breast implants and sexy pictures make her a hypocrite? The fact that she sent a sex video to her boyfriend doesn’t make her a hypocrite, it makes her an awesome girlfriend. No, the real point was to embarrass and humiliate her. The effect was not to silence, but to amplify her.

What makes Carrie Prejean a hypocrite is her insistence that she wants to protect marriages by supporting laws that destroy them. If the left had focused more on that, and less on destroying her personally, Carrie Prejean would be a dim memory now. Instead, they get to be wrong right alongside her.

Prejean has a tell-all book out this week, and there are rumors of a sex tape floating around. Yeah, a sex tape.

The first step by Hannity was to establish exactly what was on this supposed sex tape. “I was all by myself, I was sending a boyfriend at the time who I loved and cared about video of me,” Prejean said. Ok – solo, so…not exactly a sex tape, but it doesn’t fit her established M.O. either.

> Update: Well that wasn’t much of an exclusive – she was on the Today show this morning as well.

Prejean has a book out this week, “Still Standing,” (which has a cover that looks a lot like Sarah Palin‘s) and Hannity has a reason to be excited for its success – he wrote the forward. Here’s what you’ll find in this new publication. “People have heard bits of pieces of the liberal media’s version of it but basically its for Americans who believe their beliefs are under attack,” she said.

Also, there’s advice for young girls. “Nothing is private anymore, nothing is private, with Facebook, with MySpace, with all that going on you have to be so careful,” said Prejean. Also, apparently with solo sex tapes.

Hannity, presumably to cheer her up, tried to put himself in her shoes. “If there were pictures of me, I’ll be honest, I’d be melting and falling apart,” he said. (Wait, there’s one picture of Hannity that might have some people falling apart.)

Look, Prejean has gone through the media wringer, and sure, some of that is self-inflicted. But a point driven home by Hannity is a good one – she’s 22-years-old. “I make mistakes just like all of us make mistakes,” said Prejean during the interview, and that’s true. But she’s working from a standpoint that mistakes like this aren’t in her repertoire. Will she stick around the media spotlight? We’ll see – Joe the Plumber hasn’t exactly disappeared, and Prejean has that extra something that Joe never will.

Here’s the full interview:

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It’s the weekend, which means it’s time to separate the chumps from the champs in Mediaite’s new “Winners and Losers” — our scorecard of who rocked and who flopped in the week’s headlines.

This week’s contenders include: President Bush, adding “motivational speaker” to his resume, Sarah Palin posting an online resume, and Jay Leno, who might be wise to start updating his resume. Our picks below:

The Bronze Loser: Jay Leno

NBC was fine to let the talk show host tank at 10 pm (The Jay Leno Show now trails cable shows we’ve never heard of). Afterall, the un-funny and un-watched chat format is still a better deal than producing pricey scripted programming. But now local stations are paying the price for the network’s cheapo strategy! The LA Times reports Leno’s crap ratings are dragging down NBC affiliates who rely on that big network “lead-in” to keep an audience. If things don’t turn around, Leno’s late-night legacy could be eclipsed by the dreaded “Leno Effect.”

The Bronze Winner: The New York Mets

Despite having a new $850 million dollar ballpark and the second highest payroll in baseball, the Mets managed to have a horrifically bad season. (Meanwhile, their two biggest rivals are a game away from facing off in the World Series.) But it turns out the Mets made at least one smart investment this year — with swindler Bernie Madoff! Yes, it looks like at least two of the team’s accounts actually made money atop the pyramid scheme — 48 million bucks to be exact! If they aren’t sued for the full amount by actual Madoff victims, they might consider investing in players who don’t suck.

The Silver Loser: Carrie Prejean

After being dumped for “contract violations,” the former Miss California turned anti-gay activist is suing the organizers of the Miss USA pageant, alleging they revealed “private facts” about her (which the pageant is taking to mean her boob job). But the pageant production company has turned around and demanded their boobs back, or at least the $5,200 they say they loaned her for breast augmentation surgery. Maybe Carrie legitimately thought her implants were still “private facts” after her bikini strut on national television. Maybe she still thought so after her pre-surgery topless photos surfaced. But after this counter-suit, it’s safe to say the jig’s up.

The Silver Winner: Jon Gosselin

Yes, things still suck for Jon Gosselin. TLC is suing the former reality dad blind after he put the breaks on their gravy train John and Kate Plus 8. Courts today forced him to repay $180,000 he took from his and his future ex-wife’s joint bank account. And a former babysitter now claims he’s been hacking into mom-of-8 Kate’s emails. But he still came out a winner this week, because thanks to Richard Heene, he’s no longer the most hated dad in America!

The Gold Loser: Sarah Palin

The former Alaskan governor is certainly a prolific Internet presence, but she sure isn’t the most savvy. She proved her lack of social media prowess this week, joining LinkedIn (the boring professional’s answer to Facebook) under the misnomer “governorsarahpalin.” And apparently she’s interested in “job inquiries” and “business deals.” What? (In her defense, she was shrewd enough to leave 4 of the 5 colleges she attended off her resume.) If internet persona is any indication a future online campaign strategy, best of luck in 2012!

The Gold Winner: George W. Bush

As part of his post-presidential legacy project, W. is hitting the speaking circuit later this month. No, not NATO or the UN, but right where he belongs: at $19 motivational seminars for regular folks! The “Get Motivated” events, described as a “motivational mega-show that packs more inspirational power than a stick of dynamite,” are the perfect venue for the former motivator-in chief. After all, he successfully motivated an entire generation of voters away from the Republican Party.

In fairness, they didn’t go the Fox News blonde fembot route; women made the calendar based on ideology and accomplishments, though it’s unclear what Prejean has done aside from oppose gay marriage and get hit by a Perez Hilton witchhunt for it.

Here’s the roundup:

Pat Buchanan’s sister Bay Buchanan; Carrie Prejean; Clare Boothe Luce herself; Representative Michele Bachmann; Why You’re Wrong About the Right coauthor S.E. Cupp; CURE president Star Parker; Phyllis Schlafly; pollster Kellyanne Conway; Ann Coulter; Virginia pol Kate Obenshain; right-wing publisher Marji Ross; and Hot Air founder/political commentator Michelle Malkin.

Foxnews.com has a slideshow of the calendar here.

Here’s a “behind-the-scenes video of the 2010 calendar shoot:”

This avoidance of cameras (Fox, or otherwise) seems to be a theme for the Value Voters people: according to Politico not even O’Reilly’s address will be open to cameras. Video of Rosen’s exchange below. UPDATE: And video of MSNBC’s similar struggles can be found here.

Judd Apatow was going to be on the cover of Time this week (and he’s still in the issue for his latest film Funny People), but health care is on the tip of everyone’s tongue so the funnyman got subbed out for President Obama in a lab coat. It’s entirely possible that if we picked up this issue of Time we’d learn nearly everything we need to know, or could stand to know, about the ongoing health care debate. But where’s the pop?

Mediaite Grade (B): We’re not sure if Obama is (a) staring off into space, (b) gazing optimistically, (c) watching anxiously or (d) listening to somebody talk about something really boring — Hey, maybe they’re talking about health care.

All in all: Too much white space. Strange palate of blues. And we would have known it was Time‘s “Health Care Special Report,” even if they didn’t tell us so in block caps twice on the cover. But seriously: Now is the time to talk about health care, a topic that tends to get really boring really fast. If Time wanted to make this health care report really special, they would have jazzed up the cover.

The Economist pans-out from the health care debate to draw attention to the greater pressures on Obama right now; economic downturn, economic recovery, Afghanistan, Iraq, Bud light, Blue Moon — health care is just one of many pressures threatening to make or break his reputation these days. Sounds kind of like First 100 Days redux. Maybe international readers didn’t have to suffer through all that legacy talk the first time around?

Mediaite Grade (A): We can’t blame The Economist for replaying 100-day coverage because, the American news media was a little premature and extravagant back in the spring. Plus The Economist’s cover is playful, and handsome to boot. The stars and stripes scheme beautifully balances the foreground and background, playing off Obama’s shirt and tie to keep him looking crisp — not at all a cardboard cutout (as we’ve seen so many times before). And we especially love the baby blue, because nothing says ‘crunch time’ like baby blue.

What’s a beauty queen doing on the cover of the National Review. Not just any beauty queen, but ex-Miss California Carrie Prejean! Oh, silly us — we forgot that beauty pageants are where all the substantive marriage debate is going on. And don’t worry, health care makes an appearance on the top right: A doctor gets swept away by a mysterious tentacle, labeled “Obamacare’s Threat.” The tracking here is way too loose. Just one of many problems…

Mediaite Grade (D): Regardless of each of our own political predilections, surely we can all come together and shudder at the double negative on the cover of the National Review: “Why gay marriage isn’t inevitable.”  William F. Buckley, Jr. would mess his pants if he saw that sort of writing on the cover; “[W]e are, without reservations, on the side of excellence (rather than “newness”) and of honest intellectual combat (rather than conformity),” no more.  Although, for what it’s worth, we’re pretty sure that WFB II would have really dug that sensual text-wrap around Carrie’s leg.

Remember that New Repubic cover shot of Obama and Hillary’s would-be she-man-child, HillarAck? Well, Hillary and Barack are on the cover again, joined this time by Biden, Rahm, Richard Holbrooke, Tom Donilon and Jim Jones. But somehow the fun police at TNR found a way to make the Happy-Fun crew look like demon spawn.

Mediaite Grade (B-): Dear, The New Republic, please send more androgynous freak children because your foreign policy cover is terrifying. The photographs at the bottom look like stills from Apocalypse Now. And we’ve never seen Obama look so evil.

We have to say that we don’t mind the absence of health coverage on the cover, especially when we’re getting “Who Runs U.S. Foreign Policy?” Or as the National Review would say, ‘Who’s Not Uninvolved in U.S. Foreign Policy?’

COVER WARS WINNER: Say what you want, but The Economist cover is thoughtfully designed, simply put and, on the whole, flawlessly executed. Obama appears to understand the gravity of his own situation more than anybody else; none of the flat, non-living Time Obama, or the glaring, hellfire New Republic Obama. Plus, baby blue takes guts.

Quick postscript for the National Review: Get a design director. Fast.

The paper’s ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, said in a blog post that “reduced traffic played a big role” in the decision. Fred Hiatt, the editorial page editor of the Post, told the Washington City Paper that “his traffic had gone way down.”

Welcome to the new media age, where news has become a popularity contest!

Page views have long been the metric of success at online institutions but thus far mainstream papers have been mostly able to avoid pandering to the click-through. No longer, it would seem.

This is a “historical marker” says the the Washington City Paper “the first time that a major personnel decision has hinged so squarely on Web hits.”

One imagines this is also just the beginning. Now that a person’s output and “influence” is measurable down to the tiniest minutiae reporters are slowly becoming brands unto themselves and less bricks in the wall of a larger institution. Perhaps the day is not far off when every newspaper, struggling for online relevance, institutes its own internal power grid as a way to keep track of who is valuable and who is not. Or experiments with a payment system based on pageviews a la Gawker. Thanks to the power of Google analytics, it’s every man for himself!

Of course had Froomkin known he was living and dying by pageviews he could have avoided the problem altogether and embraced the business model favored by his new employer: all boobs all the time!!

Photo by Remo Casilli, Reuters (via Vancouver Sun)

Two high-profile stories about the intersection of racism and the Republican Party are exploding all over the internet. The flap over comments at Free Republic and the Young Republicans’ election of a new president make for a sour cocktail this weekend.

Most of the heat is being generated by this Vancouver Sun story about the comments on a Free Republic article featuring 11 year-old Malia Obama:

“A typical street whore.” “A bunch of ghetto thugs.” “Ghetto street trash.” “Wonder when she will get her first abortion.”

These are a small selection of some of the racially-charged comments posted to the conservative ‘Free Republic’ blog Thursday, aimed at U.S. President Barack Obama’s 11-year-old daughter Malia after she was photographed wearing a t-shirt with a peace sign on the front.

You might think that this is the same as the lame attacks that Bill O’Reilly levels at commenters on DailyKos and/or Hot Air. There are key differences. The Sun report says that the offensive comments overwhelmingly outnumbered those critical of the vitriol, but the real problem is this:

After attention from other blogs, the thread was suppressed and placed under review, but before long it was returned to the site intact, and attracted a new series of racial slurs when the original complaint email was posted publicly to the site, with the sender’s email address intact.

So, they knew about the comments, put them back up, and apparently made the complainer a target for harassment. Very ugly. Eventually, they took it down again.

As disgusting as this story is, it didn’t stand to hurt Republicans that much on its own. Freepers are not exactly considered the bellwether of mainstream conservative thought.

Then, even after an impassioned plea by very young Republican Meghan McCain, the Young Republicans elected a new president with serious racism problems.

The Young Republicans faced a stark choice at their convention in Indianapolis yesterday as they chose their next leader: a center-right twentysomething interested in greater outreach, or a self-described “true conservative” who is almost 40 and spent last week dealing with Daily Beast reports about her beliefs, which are, at best, often hateful, and at worst, downright racist. The delegates, in a vote of 470 – 415, chose the latter.

Fair or not, the effect of these two stories is devastating. Already on Twitter, I’ve seen comparisons of the Freeper story to the Letterman/Palin feud, with liberals asking where the conservative denunciation is. The Young Republicans story serves to neutralize the “few bad apples” rationale on the Freeper story.

As a liberal with a lot of conservative friends, I hate to see conservatives get painted, en masse, with this brush. While this makes them understandably defensive on the subject, that defensiveness can lead to tone-deaf handling of these situations. While some liberals’ idea of the GOP as the Ivory Soap of racism is way off the mark, many conservatives are also in denial about their party’s race problems. The truth, as they say, lies somewhere in the middle.

On the issue of racism, the truth can be elusive. I think there’s always more racism, in general, than white people think there is. On the other hand, I think there’s a lot less of it in the Republican Party than most liberals think. Part of the perception problem that the GOP has today is that the Democrats have a black President. Where else are the racists supposed to go? Just because most of the racists belong to one party doesn’t mean that that party is mostly racists.

Still, when your party stands in opposition to policies that are seen as benefiting minorities, this kind of thing can really be damaging.

I’ll tell my liberal friends exactly what I told conservatives who asked me where the liberal outrage was on the Playboy story: Give it a minute. This story broke on a Saturday afternoon. Two of my conservative friends who write for very influential blogs just heard about it this morning, from me.

To my conservative friends, I hope their reactions, and those of the Republican leadership, veer away from the kind of persecution complex stuff that Newsbusters’ treatment portends, and closer to this. This story is already drawing attention from media heavy-hitters like Jake Tapper, Major Garrett, and David Shuster. The conservative response can be a big win.

As for the Young Republicans, I think Meghan McCain’s got their number.

Update: The plot thickens. Gawker reports that Chris Parry, the Vancouver Sun reporter who broke this story, was also a blogger for Daily Kos, and has suggested, in the past, posting hate speech and blaming it on conservatives (Gawker repeats this claim by the freepers, but I haven’t found anything in Parry’s DailyKos posts to back this up). This does little to change the facts in this story, as Parry could hardly have pulled, then reinstated, the offensive thread. It might mean a rough week for Parry, though. Parry responds here.