In a Friday morning column, Gail Collins expressed glee at the looming GOP debate (which occurred Saturday night), and took a shot of mockery at Gingrich’s claim that his advice was not at all lobbying or an attempt to influence congress. Collins wrote:

Newt, on the other hand, is always good in debates if you like extremely pompous people who appear to be practically levitating with their own sense of personal wonderfulness. During the last outing, Gingrich’s most fascinating moment came when he explained why the mortgage lender Freddie Mac paid him $300,000 in 2006. First of all, it had nothing whatsoever to do with lobbying, or attempting to influence the Republicans who happened to control Congress at a time when there was talk of clamping down on the way Freddie operated. Just put that out of your mind.

Scarborough appeared to agree with Collins’ ridiculous assessment of Gingrich claims, though former RNC chair Michael Steele quickly pointed out that maybe Newt’s assertion isn’t that far off the mark; claiming that the former GOP House Speaker was paid to advise Freddie Mac and they ignored his advice.

Guest panelist Major Garrett made the most salient and reasonable point about this whole sordid mess, reminding fellow panelists and viewers alike that using the housing crisis as a political football is a disingenuous game in which no one wins. He appropriately assigned bipartisan blame by saying:

Folks, remember what you wish for and you ask for bipartisan consensus. Sometimes it’s ruinous, and there was a bipartisan consensus, home ownership was not only the definition of the American dream, but long-running economic vitality. We created a bubble in this country. It’s not just the community investment act, it’s the end of Glass-Steaggall. The securitization and monetization of mortgages that brought us to where we are now.

Kudos to Garrett for correctly proclaiming that the credit default swap mess is neither a GOP nor Democratic problem, and to point fingers simply at George W. Bush, Barney Frank or Newt Gingrich misses the mark.

Watch the clip embedded below, courtesy of MSNBC:

Donald Trump

In an enraged, often grammatically questionable letter, Trump laughs at Collins’ “storytelling ability and word usage” while parenthetically praising himself– “(coming from me, who has written many bestsellers).” He returns to Collins, calling her use of the word “birther” “derogatory,” at least the way she used it, but not before going once again into detail of his “evidence” that President Obama was not born in America:

He has not been able to produce a “birth certificate” but merely a totally unsigned “certificate of live birth”-which is totally different and of very little significance. Unlike a birth certificate, a certificate of live birth is very easy to obtain. Equally of importance, there are no records in Hawaii that a Barack Hussein Obama was born there-no bills, no doctors names, no nurses names, no registrations, no payments, etc. As far as the two notices placed in newspapers, many things could have happened, but some feel the grandparents put an ad in order to show that he was a citizen of the U.S. with all of the benefits thereto. Everybody, after all, and especially then, wanted to be a United States citizen.

He concludes his screed with a truth: that any journalist who found definitive proof that President Obama was not American “would become the hottest writer since Watergate, or beyond” (he is, we’ll venture a guess, referring to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein with the “Watergate,” and the Teapot Dome Scandal with “beyond”). But his letter ends with no ill will, and instead urges Collins to join the cause. “Open your eyes, Gail,” he pleads, “there’s at least a good chance that Barack Hussein Obama has made mincemeat out of our great and cherished Constitution!”

The letter, with all the flair and drama that make Donald Trump Donald Trump, leave us with only one major question: what would a world in which Donald Trump had an active Facebook profile be like?

Where did Maddow and her producers come up with the notion of a “smoochy, smoochy love bubble” you ask? Well maybe it was Ryan’s interview with Glenn Beck in which Rachel Maddow is not very happy with the mainstream media, or more to the point, the mainstream media’s promotion of Paul Ryan’s new budget that he calls “Pathway to Prosperity.”

In five minute segment on her show last night, the MSNBC host methodically took a part many of the core economic assumptions to Ryan’s budget proposal, many of which seem optimistic at best, delusional at worst. But it wasn’t Ryan that caught the majority of Maddow’s ire – it was the media’s “smoochy, smoochy love bubble surrounding” the Wisconsin Congressman. “>both men literally shared “I love you.” But Maddow’s target was more than the Fox News opinionators, it was the balance of media that, according to Maddow, paid little to no attention to the actual numbers in the budget; actual numbers that she calls “laughably weird or wrong.”

NY Times columnist Gail Collins joined Maddow to discuss this further, which you can watch below, courtesy of MSNBC:

Naturally, there are supporters of each. The New York Times’ Gail Collins goes for Social Network because she is “in awe that people could make an enjoyable film about the start-up of a Web site,” while her colleague David Brooks chooses Grit “on the basis of the young girl at the core of the movie.” So which film has the edge in this competition?

True Grit appeals to all: “I like the movie fine, and you’re welcome to like it too. But there’s a subset of older fans who want us to know — aggressively, emphatically, citing chapter and verse — exactly why The S.N. is such a great movie, an important movie, a movie for our times, says Karen Stabiner in the Los Angeles Times. We should likewise ask whether younger movie fans will even watch True Grit. Call it a “remedial exercise,” because it acts as the “antecedent” to The Social Network‘s “glossy and gee-whiz fun.” At a time when “everything is instantaneous,” Grit is “the cinematic equivalent of the Slow Food movement, and just as tasty.”

Actually, Social Network does, too: Who knew that “the origin of the massive digital domain was a complex and layered tale worthy of our attention,” says Daniel Hubschman in the New York Post. It has a lot more going for it, too, with an “extraordinary cast and crew” who al shine. “Rarely can a movie be both specific and universal in its themes, but The Social Network is at once about a band of misfit geniuses who stumbled upon fame and fortune and an entire generation of young adults reaching for its piece of the American Dream.” That’s a solid recipe for the year’s best movie.

Maybe there’s room for an outsider yet: “True Grit will definitely get a boost from being the last, most-talked about movie, and probably from being the film Academy members took their families to see in theaters over the holidays,” says John Lopez in Vanity Fair. And while some argue Social Network is “too dark for the Academy,” it is still the “‘It’ film of the moment.” Voters and critics are rightfully scrutinizing and examining the virtues that the two films extoll. “So, which does the Academy prefer: nobility quietly extolled, or tragedy lamented with bravado? Who knows, maybe it will be The King’s Speech after all.”

Apparently Beck was of a similar mind on Friday when he opted to devote this week’s “Founding Friday” show to the women. Are you waiting for a punchline? I don’t have one. Other than Beck’s remark that either they had bad artists back then or really ugly people.

I’m not sure what it says about the state of education and media (and Hollywood…ahem!) in general that Glenn Beck is leading the charge to (broadly) inform the country about women’s roles in the founding of this country but there you have it. Glenn Beck hear me roar! Here’s the link if you want more background on women’s suffrage. Watch the segment below.

Let’s start with State By State: A Panoramic Portrait of America, a terrific anthology edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey. This book is, first of all, a fantastic reference (and as a Canuckian I have found it helpful more than once). It literally goes state by state — from Alabama to Wyoming — with gorgeous, personal and all-around delightful essays by lit luminaries like George Packer, Josh Ferris, Sarah Vowell, John Hodgman, Heidi Julavits, Susan Orlean, Jhumpa Lahiri, Alexander Payne, Jonathan Franzen, and however many others make up 50. There is a great photo gallery, plus per-capita factoid tables at the back (Utah is the youngest; New Hampshire has the most roller coasters; South Carolina has the most violent crime; Wyoming guzzles the most gas; West Virginia is fattest and most toothless; Montana has the highest military recruitment rate). It will make you want to road-trip across the country and spend ten years doing it. — Rachel Sklar

Parting the Waters: Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement 1954-63 by Taylor Branch

I’ve always been a fan of contemporary history and no book makes me feel prouder about the American experience, oddly enough, then to read about the Civil Rights Movement and Dr. Martin Luther King. Branch’s book is practically a day-to-day retelling of the move from Jim Crow America into the heart of the Civil Rights Movement. The work of King and other civil rights leaders created the model that all later movements (women’s rights, gay rights) would borrow and create “the language” of social change in the U.S. Living just outside of Washington, D.C., I drive by the Lincoln Memorial probably four times a week and it still takes my breath away to see the Memorial, but also think about King speaking before the assembled crowd in 1963 giving his epic “I Have a Dream” speech. Branch’s book isn’t beach reading, but I still love to pick it up and thumb through the pages reading about people who really did change modern America. — Michael Triplett

*****

Apparently, I own a lot of books that could be considered patriotic – particularly if you’re willing to include titles that push the boundaries of political advocacy. I’ve got The Reader’s Companion to American History and The People’s History of the United States. The Americans and These United States. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, Meacham’s American Lion. I’ve got the Federalist Papers, and Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men.

These last two – a collection of the founding documents of our nation and a fictionalized tale of a corrupt elected official – have corollaries that are also in my collection. These corollaries, with twists on those two themes, are my recommendations. — Philip Bump

A Cartoon Guide to the Constitution of the United States by Eric Lurio

In the summer of 1987, my family took a trip around Lake Ontario to Toronto. This was the 200th anniversary of the ratification of the Constitution – an event that lacked the fanfare of the nation’s bicentennial only outside of the world of academic historians.

Being a nerdy kid and an American history buff, someone gave me this book, published specifically for the anniversary. A comic book-style deconstruction of our nation’s most important document, I read it voraciously as we made our way into Canada.

It wasn’t trivial. It may have been made accessible using a cartoon format, but it dove deep into the decision-making process behind the document and the legal battles that refined its implementation. I learned about the battle of Wilkes-Barre, Marbury vs. Madison, and each of the Amendments. The book was clearly designed for folks with a decent awareness about history; occasional pop quizzes asked the reader to, for example, “explain the Emperor Norton.”

It’s out of print now, having made only one run on the presses that year. But it’s available used online, which is where I got my copy a few years back. It’s on my bookshelf, ready to entertain the children I’ll one day have in the back of a car I’ll one day own (assuming, God willing, that they’re nerdy and history buffs). They’ll have one advantage – they’ll be able to simply look up “Emperor Norton” to get a perfect score on the quiz. I had to wait until kids a few years older than me invented Google.

–

All the President’s Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein

Dissent, while important, is not the highest form of patriotism. The highest form of patriotism comes from ensuring that the nation’s decision-makers (that is, the voters) are informed about their decisions.

All the President’s Men, in detailing Woodward and Bernstein’s slow, meticulous, sputtering uncovering of the Watergate scandal and the role of the Executive branch in exceeding legal limits, is a fascinating read. (And a great movie – that you can watch instantly on Netflix.) But it’s also an important historical document detailing both the perfidies of our nation’s leaders and the efforts of independent (albeit well-equipped) citizens in revealing the truth.

Their methods are archaic; the crisis the nation faced fades more in our memory each year distant. The message, though, remains – and it’s one of particular interest to those in the media. It is this: There is always more that can be learned about how our government functions, and it’s incumbent upon us to learn and share it. Whether it’s the corruption of a President or the decisions of a municipal decision-making body, we are all required to be informed about the nation we live in.

What Woodward and Bernstein accomplished made them rich and famous. But it also made our nation stronger, more transparent, and, on the whole, better.

What is more patriotic than that?

*****

To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
This book hardly needs any introduction. Fifty years after publication, the novel remains a classic with striking relevance in what is a far from post-racial America. The idealist protagonist Atticus Finch manages to instill a sense of hope, despite being a fictitious character. You’ll find yourself wondering why more people don’t have the same kind of mentality: if Atticus can look past race, why can’t we? Furthermore, many of the book’s words from 1960 ring true as if they were written today: “sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whiskey bottle in the hand of–oh, of your father.” While the book definitely points out the country’s flaws, the overall tone will leave you more optimistic than any speech President Obama can muster.

What’s So Great About America, by Dinesh D’Souza
A distinguishing characteristic about this book is that it is written from an immigrant’s perspective–with D’Souza having come to American from Mumbai, India. Staunchly positive, he argues that the United States, “once an experiment unique in the world, is now the last best hope for the world.” The book touts the unsurprising American ideals of liberty and justice for all–but what makes it interesting is how it also points out the simpler things that are often overlooked by those who were born and bred here. The roads are smoothly paved, the phone has a dial tone, the grocery store carries “every imaginable product.” When D’Souza asks a fellow Mumbai man why he wants to go to America, he gets the reply: “Because I really want to move to a country where the poor people are fat.” And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what makes America great. — Mediaite summer intern Meenal Vamburkar

*****

Men Of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book, Gerard Jones’ book on the birth of the comic book, is a great American story. Lower East Side immigrants creating a new art form, small town kid creating Superman to make himself feel better about his father being murdered, companies using these heroes to help get American kids (and adults) through the war, etc. It’s my great American story. — Jedd Katrancha

*****

Confession: I had not heard of Dream Makers, Dream Breakers: The World of Justice Thurgood Marshall, by Carl T. Rowan, before last week, when I published this by Danielle Belton, aka The Black Snob. She calls it “one of my favorite books to this day” and apparently it’s a Black History Month reading list staple. Belton points out it’s an every month staple, too; I will add to that that it’s probably a legal staple as well, and as a former lawyer the combo was enough to put it on my Amazon holiday purchase list. Buying books is patriotic! Anyway, Publisher’s Weekly called it “richly readable” and it said it was a six-week PW bestseller. Maybe Glenn Beck can help make it popular again!

Speaking of Glenn Beck, I can’t believe that’s the launching point for me to mention Gail Collins and her fabulous America’s Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines, but since it’s one of Glynnis MacNicol’s favorite books that seems natural. Oh wait it’s also natural because she *just* wrote about it while writing about Glenn Beck and his teachings about the Founding Mothers. Quoth Glynnis: “A few years ago Collins penned America’s Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines a highly engaging (highly recommended) survey of the under-reported, fundamentally integral, vital, and frequently deadly role women played in the building of this country. Want to talk about the sort of American history that doesn’t get taught enough in schools you can start right there!” Here’s Glynnis’ take: “With her usual, often revealing wit, Collins has created a hard-to-put-down read that will leave you with not only a deep, and sometimes jarring, appreciation of the often terrible struggles women faced for most of this country’s history but also enormously grateful you were born late enough to miss most of it. Needless to say, just like her NYT op-ed columns, it’s also great fun.” Gee, sounds like a book I’d like to read! What, I haven’t read it, you ask? Nope – I bought it….and then lent it to Glynnis. She loved it so much I couldn’t take it back. She then loaned it to Melissa Lafsky. Paying it forward! Glenn Beck would be so proud.

For those of you feeling a little punchy this weekend, go ahead and wrangle over The Thirteen American Arguments: Enduring Debates That Define and Inspire Our Country by Howard Fineman. Some of the questions argued about: Who Is A Person? Who Is An American? What is the Role of Faith? What Can We Know and Say? Stuff you can really sink your teeth into. I love the idea behind this book — that we are constantly evolving and refining the answers, or at least caring enough about them to think, talk and passionately argue about them. And they are relevant as hell, too — “Who is a person?” has come up as recently as the BP Oil Spill, with BP’s corporate personality being raised as an issue in payback, liability and related issues, as well as at the beginning of the year when the ban on corporate political spending was lifted by the Supreme Court. If you think about it, the past year of intense political wrangling over the Tea Party and health care and immigration and pretty much everything can come down to these arguments (“The Terms of Trade” “War and Diplomacy” “Who Judges the Law?” — a Wise Latina? — “The Environment” “Presidential Power” “Debt and the Dollar”) — Fineman published this book in early 2008 but wow do these issues still have this country wrangling today. — Rachel Sklar

Collins notes that there is a rising trend to make viral videos a central part of campaigns beginning with the release of “Demon Sheep,” though Alabama has perfected the medium. “There is quite a lot of this sort of thing going on this campaign season,” she notes. “You raise enough cash to film an outrageous ad. Then you post it on the Web and pray that it goes viral, gets mentioned on the cable talk shows and draws in enough donations to put the thing on TV.” And it’s giving candidates that didn’t previously have much of a chance a great shot at winning their party nominations, especially in Alabama.

Collins points out the successes of Alabama candidates Dale Peterson and Tim James after their idiosyncratic videos became national sensations. Describing the Peterson (who is running for Alabama secretary of agriculture) ad as “the overall effect is like being cornered at a party by an eccentric neighbor who thinks the garbage man is spying on him for the federal government. It’s extremely popular.”

For James, a gubernatorial candidate who went from straggler to one of several front-runners after his “Language” ad (opposing giving drivers’ license tests in different languages) went viral, the ad became the centerpiece of his campaign’s success. Chronicling the campaign’s problems before the ad, Collins argues:

But I cannot emphasize how totally beside the point all that is. “Language” went viral. “This is the first election in a long time where the fate of the campaign really did change on a single ad,” said David Lanoue, chairman of the University of Alabama political science department.

James is now one of the front-runners, despite a last-minute crisis involving a rumor that he believed the state was spending too much money on the University of Alabama football coach, who makes $4.1 million a year. Which James vigorously denied wanting to cut. It’s the businessman in him.

She also gives us some fascinating trivia. For example, did you know that it was actually the man behind “Demon Sheep” who came up with “Language”? Given that the ad actually does have some serious cinematography– James pops up sometimes unexpectedly from behind doors and even uses the advanced “Kinski spiral” cinematography technique to add tension and mystery to the scene– it makes sense that it would come from the mind of a professional.

The campaigns of both have continued as scheduled, with Peterson so proud of his ad that he has a “The Man Behind Our Viral Campaign Ad” page on his website and James cranking out a new ad close to every week (he even leaves the house in this one). With Alabama primaries scheduled for next Tuesday, expect even more wacky online antics as Election Day nears, as they seem to be working like a charm.

“Every single moment that we are stroking our beards and gazing at our navel and thinking about the world we’d like to be and singing ‘Kumbaya’ is another day we’re not punching Bill O’Reilly in the nose.”

That’s New York Congressman Anthony Weiner auditioning for…? It’s unclear. Though it must irk him that had he not dropped his run for mayor last year he’d probably be firmly installed in Gracie Mansion at this point.

However, that doesn’t appear to be stopping Weiner in his sometimes “nutty” pursuit of the political spotlight. 2012 state of mind? Meanwhile, Weiner also revealed the real reason he joined Twitter: “I follow Twitter for the Tea Party and just show up to fuck with them.” Kidding! (We think.)

Ruth B. Mandel, director of Rutgers University’s Eagleton Institute of Politics, delivered the welcome address. As these events go, the lecture adhered pretty closely to the listed start time of 7:30, and Mandel gave a good introduction. She gave Collins deserved praise for having “a serious wit” (while an admiring audience member quietly added, “She sure does,”) as well as how she “cuts through the crap.” (Speaking of the audience – being a 22-year-old male at a Gail Collins lecture made me something of an outlier among the crowd, if you can believe it.) There was a scary moment at the end of the intro, when Mandel fell while exiting the makeshift stage, but Collins checked in with her and reported that Mandel was fine – and that she wanted everyone to stop looking at her. And from there, the lecture began.

In her talk, Collins traced the history of American women back to the earliest colonial settlements (similar to another of her books, America’s Women), noting that in pre-American Revolution times, women were well-respected. Unfortunately, this changed after the war when population became more concentrated in cities, a time Collins described as “the most restrictive period for women in American history.”

It was a slow climb upward to respect from there, though women broke through in a few extraordinary cases. Collins cited Dorothea Dix, who counseled female prisoners only to find most of them were mentally ill rather than actually criminals, and Elizabeth Jennings Graham, who, with the help of gloriously mutton-chopped future President Chester A. Arthur, got public transportation services in New York City integrated in the strikingly early year of 1854. Even the suffrage movement, which Collins said ultimately passed because a young Congressman changed his vote to yes at his mother’s request, was insufficient, because women still lacked an economic presence.

So when did “everything change”? Legally, Collins argued, the biggest changes took place between 1964 and 1974. Birth control pills became more widely available, and as a result, applications by women to law school and other graduate schools skyrocketed. Just as important, however, was a souring 1970s U.S. economy. The standard of living in America dramatically increased after World War II’s stimulation of the nation’s economy, and once that standard couldn’t be supported by a single paycheck, Collins said middle-class families faced two options: “lower your expectations,” or have the women go to work. Women went to work.

Collins closed in a fashion she admitted was a bit unusual for her as “a professional complainer:” she expressed deep appreciation for the advancements of women, saying that even if she had the choice, “I wouldn’t live in any other period in the history of the world.” A nice sentiment to be sure, and a well-earned moment of thanks from Collins, but I can’t help but feel I like her best when she’s poking fun at the absurdities of the modern world, rather than marveling at its wonders.

That’s why I liked this moment, from a Q&A session after her prepared talk. An audience member asked about her time as opinions editor at the NYT, the direction she wanted to take the section, etc. Collins said she had a goal to include more non-political topics on the op-ed pages, but interestingly, she also talked about reading old opinion pieces from the paper, Specifically, she singled out something she’d discussed before – the suffrage movement – and noted the NYT took a stand against it up until almost the moment it passed. She said she liked to hang up pictures of the men who headed the opinions section in those days, and hold imaginary conversations with those men who’d opposed giving women the right to vote: “Hi, guys,” she liked to say. “I got your job.”

That’s when Gail Collins is in top form.

Their superstardom is a very bad development, even though there is no reason to believe either is ever going to be elected to a position where they could do serious damage. (If Sarah Palin was seriously planning a presidential run, do you think she’d have agreed to be speaker-for-hire at the Wine and Spirits Wholesalers of America Convention at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas this week?)

The problem is that they’re all wow and no substance. Palin is living proof that you can be popular without having to try very hard. It appears she’s never going to respond to all the pundits who urged her to go back to Alaska and read up on current events. And Bachmann’s fame has increased by leaps and bounds despite the fact that she, um, makes stuff up.

Gail Collins of the New York Times weighs in on last week’s joint Sarah Palin/Michelle Bachmann rally and the larger ramifications of the Palin ‘wow’ factor. Collins, who has published two (excellent) books tracing the history of American women from the Mayflower to present day, says that after Hillary transformed herself in order to win the New York Senate seat “some of us hoped that it might be the beginning of a new era…Maybe some of the next generation would also have a wow factor.” Instead what the public got was simply the wow factor with no substance, namely Sarah Palin.

Collins’ larger concern, however, is that Palin is setting a bad example: “Ambitious pols who have never once been mentioned in a presidential interview, or brought a shrieking crowd to its feet, must be looking for a way to get into the act.” And Palin, argues Collins, has demonstrated that the quickest way to do so is to “act a little nutty.”

As much as I enjoy and admire Collins I think it is perhaps a little unfair to blame Palin exclusively for all this nuttiness. The insatiable blogosphere and a media industry desperate for the traffic (ie ad dollars) that generally follows nutty headlines is at least as culpable for the current tone as Palin…if not more so. As to Palin’s wow factor, well you can’t argue with that, Palin is very wowy. And whether you want to admit it or not, she made a few cracks of her own in the glass ceiling. The (at this point desperate) hope going forward is obviously that the next serious female politician to emerge on the scene will have the substance to match the wow.

First, Jon Stewart’s much-talked about “epic” parody of Beck on his show last night, which I actually didn’t find that funny, primarily because, as I’ve said before, Beck is really the only person who can do justice to Beck’s unpredictable theater/buffoonery. But I digress. This was followed (in real life, also) by Stephen Colbert’s utterly terrific and hysterical takedown of Beck’s recent, controversial advice to churchgoers (video below). When was the last time anyone warranted a Comedy Central double-hitter, as it were?

Then I came across a random Peggy Noonan reference to Beck in her column this week (she’s long thought him insane). Then there’s Matea Gold’s feature on Bill O’Reilly in this week-end’s LA Times, much of which pivots on O’Reilly in relation to Beck. Meanwhile, I caught Gail Collins on Brian Lehrer‘s WNYC talk show, during which Lehrer made reference to Beck in terms of health care reform voters.

The topper, however, has to be this article, which was chatted to me earlier, about how Glenn Beck is the Lady Gaga of cable news. Admittedly, I did remark to a colleague a few days ago how awesome it would have been if Gaga’s telephone hairdo had been replaced with the Mao phone!

So! What’s the conclusion here beyond the fact Glenn Beck is certainly very zeitgeisty? I wrote back in January that is was starting to look like Beck was being taken seriously by the mainstream media. And I think that’s probably true to some extent — ratings talk. But I also suspect Beck has two viewerships: the people who watch him and take what he says to heart (and although that generates great ratings, it’s still a relatively small slice of the population…about 3 million on average), and the media “elites,” who I am starting to suspect are secretly a bit in love with him.

I use the word love loosely (obviously) but there’s definitely an emerging general recognition on the part of the media that he is a genius at what he does (we mock because we love!). But also because he is by far the best content provider out there. The fact very few people in the media would admit to agreeing to his views appears to be taking a backseat to the chalkboard/Mao phone phenomenon. Something which became clear during Beck’s interview with Eric Massa one journalist on my twitter feed noted that it would be a good time for burglars to target journalists houses since every one of them was watching the “tickle fight” spectacle. There’s something to that. Beck has captivated the media as much (or more!) than he has the country at large — the 5pm time slot also jibes well with office hours — and I suspect a lot of his recent success, and the increasingly frequent mention of his name in mainstream places may be as much the result of that fascination as it is the result of Beck’s mass appeal.

Video of Colbert’s spot below. In my opinion, so much funnier than Stewart, specifically because he wasn’t trying to be Beck. Also, best line: “Jesus was a trustafarian…you just knew is dad was loaded.”

Related: Your Moment[s] of Glenn

Technically, however, technically this is not a filibuster! Though the outcome — one person holding up legislation is quite similar. Senator Jim Bunningis technically objecting to a repeated unanimous consent request by Senate Democrats…”Withholding unanimous consent simply means that the Senate will have to hold procedural votes that it would otherwise waive in order to finish its work.” Red State (via Hot Air) explains the difference in rather exasperated terms:

Yet, news account after news account of his continued objection to this unanimous consent request report his actions as a filibuster. Politico, Roll Call, Fox News, CNN, and the list goes on and on. And the accusation of filibustering is even worse among Senators and Congressmen, as exemplified by the DCCC Chair, Chris Van Hollen and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. But it simply is not the case that what Mr. Bunning is doing is a filibuster under the rules, as anyone with a rudimentary understanding of the U.S. Senate fully comprehends…

Nevertheless! Bunning, thanks to a general ignorance of the term filibuster, is giving filibustering a bad name! WaPo’s Ezra Klein thinks Bunning is doing the world a favor: “Senate reform, however, could have no better friend than Bunning. Last year, ending the filibuster was a quixotic blogger obsession. Now it’s the subject of a petition by the Senate majority whip. Former Republican majority leader Bill Frist says his colleagues are ‘overdoing’ the filibuster. This is how change begins, and without Bunning making clear exactly what the problem is, it would be impossible.”

I’m not sure “quixotic blogger obsession” is a fair description, actually, since Rachel Maddow has been railing on the filibuster for weeks now. This is Maddow from two weeks ago discussing the problematic filibuster with the New York Times’ Gail Collins.

Meanwhile, Gov. David Paterson of New York, who is mired in a controversy over a racetrack casino contract, demanded that The New York Times produce a list of all the things that are not going to be in a Paterson profile being prepared by the paper so people in Albany will stop speculating that there will be sex in it.”

– NYT columnist Gail Collins debates “who has the most awful political culture, Illinois or New York?”

Truth be told, I have been waiting all week for Gail Collins to weigh in on the (latest) Gov. Paterson scandal. Is there anyone better at nailing the utter absurdity of Albany? Why doesn’t Collins have a NYT.com blog?! Focusing on New York State politics, perhaps. She would be so good at it (not something that can necessarily be said about all the writers of the Times‘ op-ed page). Another glorious excerpt below.

In their recent primary, Illinois Democrats — who should know the importance of a lieutenant governor — voted to give their nomination for the No. 2 job to Scott Lee Cohen, an excitable pawnbroker.

Cohen spent millions on campaign ads. Which apparently interfered with his ability to make regular child support payments. Also, he seems to have underestimated the chances that a run for statewide office would draw attention to the fact that he was once charged with holding a knife to his girlfriend’s throat.

So he withdrew from the race in a tearful press conference. At the Hop Haus Tavern. During the halftime of the Super Bowl.

And what a fifty years! The opening chapter is packed with enough jaw-dropping anecdotes about the restricted lives women lead that it’s hard to believe so much change could occur in one lifetime, though thanks in part to the recent success (obsession for some) of Mad Men, the first hundred pages of the book function as a sort of companion piece to the show. You can read more on the book here. In the meantime, Collins was nice enough to take time out to answer Mediaite’s 5QQ (five quick questions). Enjoy.

1. How do you get your first news of the day?

I download a digest version of the Times and listen to it on the way to work.

2. The “either, or” question (you gotta pick one!):

Stewart or Colbert?
Colbert

Twilight or Buffy?
Buffy

Albany or D.C.?
D.C.

Palin or Bachmann?
Palin has certainly given me more columns although Michele is coming up there.

Eleanor Roosevelt or Gloria Steinem?
Gloria would want me to say Eleanor Roosevelt.

Peggy Olson or Joan Halloway?
Peggy.

3. What’s the biggest story the media has missed this year (or last week)?

I’m part of the media. If I thought there was a big thing we missed, I should write a column about it, not complain about it.

4. Obligatory Twitter question: Describe yourself in 140 characters or less (hash tag optional).

Columnist and writer of women’s history books currently in mental meltdown over twitter assignment.

5. Are you nervous or excited about the future of Journalism? Why?

Excited. The next generation is going to get to make a whole new thing. I’ve got total confidence reporting will continue to go on, and actually get better on the state and local level. And there will be entirely new ways of writing that will be appropriate to the internet. It’s going to be amazing for young journalists. But in the near term, try to find a spouse who has good health insurance.

Feminist activist Gloria Steinem suggested that women get together regularly to discuss their communal and individual roles. This gathering, it seemed, served that purpose for many in attendance. It provided a place for them to express their anger, frustration, doubt and confusion over modern-day feminism.

The audience was comprised of mostly women. They shared in the discussion, actively engaging through the night, nodding along with panelists’ points, clapping, and voicing audible agreement to express their approval. In certain ways, Steinem and the other panelists were tasked with setting the agenda and the discussion for the hundreds of assembled women to consider, reflect on and debate.

Farai Chideya represented a younger generation of feminism than Steinem and Gail Collins. Chideya said that the expectations thrust on her and her peers have led to disappointment and disillusionment among women. Steinem suspected that current female unhappiness could be tied into this reality. Steinem’s movement bred pride, pleasure and strength that today’s women don’t experience as prominently.

There’s new ground to be broken, they agreed. While Steinem didn’t think Hillary Clinton stood a chance of winning last year, she said it did allow Americans to imagine the possibility of a female President. She suspected, though, that that candidate will come on the conservative side where she’d be able to “sell out” instead of “represent.”

As they looked to the future, they considered both the benefits and drawbacks of technology. Steinem pointed to the power of mommy bloggers to get their voice out. Chideya worried about how social media will inhibit teenage girls from forming their identities since every picture and comment is stored.

And then they turned the microphones over to the audience who solicited advice and shared their thoughts and impressions. The Q&A was only the start, as conversation continued afterwards when people headed out the doors. We suspect the discussion is continuing on today as last night’s crowd assembles friends and colleagues for their own audiences.

What They Said
“I think that as women we spend so much time trying to change ourselves, and that’s exhausting.”
– Farai Chideya urges women to develop the confidence to compete and succeed

“The times I’m happiest don’t have to do with accomplishment but they have to do with feeling connected.”
– Gloria Steinem says that first and foremost you have to be secure with yourself within a community

“I think if you go to the Rayburn Building (link to http://www.aoc.gov/cc/cobs/rhob.cfm) you encounter more sexism than at strip clubs.”
– Farai Chideya believes that the government hasn’t done enough to promote equal rights and fair treatment for women

“I used to work at New York Magazine where they said ‘You write like a man’ and I was like ‘Thank you.’”
– Gloria Steinem reflects on how much she’s learned and changed since her twenties

“Good sex is feminist. Bad sex is just bad sex.”
– Farai Chideya recruited a lot of new feminists

What We Thought

• Collins added some relevant stories from her years of interviewing women of all ages and backgrounds. She didn’t just lead the talk with questions, she contributed to it with cogent points based on real examples.
• Steinem put a cheerful twist on the storm over today’s teens’ revealing clothing. She said that only in equal societies can women uncover like that and still feel safe.
• We enjoyed the panel’s discussion about how women rely heavily on persuasion to dictate their effectiveness in the workplace. Steinem says that she regrets being so nice and cordial. It’s what led women to rely on what they knew already instead of going after something different.

PANEL RULES!
Some audience behavior seems to repeat itself panel after panel. We’ll be updating a running list of “PANEL RULES!” that will help ensure that you are not the dweeb of the Panel Nerds.

Panel Nerds don’t like…Maling It In
Gloria Steinem is famous for her efforts in the 1960s and 1970s in making progress for equal rights. At that same time, Abbie Hoffman was leading the Yippies. Just because the two may have crossed paths at the 1968 Chicago democratic convention doesn’t mean that Steinem has feelings about Hoffman or his movement today. There’s no need to ask about him, especially at an event focused on women’s issues. You were the lone man to ask a question at the panel and your question was way off-base. What’s that say about men and feminism today?

Women’s roles had become a hot topic again thanks mostly to Hillary Clinton’s presidential run, and later Sarah Palin’s vice presidential one. Collin’s enormously entertaining survey of women’s lives over the past 400 years of American life seemed to strangely fit into to what was going on on the national political and cultural stage last year; a sort of primer to how we got from there to here. Here’s what I wrote at the time:

With her usual, often revealing wit, Collins has created a hard-to-put-down read that will leave you with not only a deep, and sometimes jarring, appreciation of the often terrible struggles women faced for most of this country’s history but also enormously grateful you were born late enough to miss most of it. Needless to say, just like her NYT op-ed columns, it’s also great fun.

Cut to a year later and Gail Collins has followed up with the soon-to-be published When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey Of American Women From 1960 To The Present, an advanced copy of which landed on my desk last week.

This volume begins in 1960, where the last left off and also the year Collins taps as the moment when everything changed. Or began to anyway, since it’s painfully clear from the outset that not much had changed. Says Collins:

In 1960, where our story begins, although computers were still pretty much the stuff of science fiction, almost all other things that make modern life modern — jet travel, television, nuclear terror — had arrived. But when it came to women, the age-old convictions were still intact. Everything from America’s legal system to its television programs reinforced the perception that women were, in almost every way, the weaker sex.

It is this point exactly that Collins spends the first hundred pages or so (which is as far in as I have gotten) illustrating. The scenarios she describes will be slightly less shocking to regular viewers of the television show Mad Men. In fact, the opening chapters of the book often feels like a companion reading piece to the show. In particular the lives of Betty Draper and Peggy Olson.

One of the genius aspects to both this book, as well as 400 Years, is that they are very quotable! It’s like a 400 page book of really well-written 500 word blog posts that you will want to copy and paste and send to people. Which is exactly what I intend to turn this reading experience in to over the next week or so…a series of quotable blog posts. Here’s a taste of what you can expect.

By 1960 television was big business, and if women were around at all, they were in the kitchen, where they decorously stirred a single pot on the stove while their husbands and children dominated the action. (In 1960 the nominees for the Emmy for best comedy series were The Bob Cummings Show, The Danny Thomas Show, The Jack Benny Show, The Red Skelton Show, The Phil Silvers Show, and Father Knows Best.)