WND sides for Obama! Schilling places scare quotes around the word "homosexual" in her headline, as in "'Homosexual' Time reporter: Obama is a 'bigot,'" then pepper her report on Cloud's smack-down with this description of Cloud's work for CP:

In his earlier days as a reporter for the Washington City Paper, Cloud described his first-hand experience and arousal at a Washington, D.C., group-sex party for homosexuals in 1997. His report was sexually graphic and filled with expletives.

Bravo, Schilling, but you left out the link! Read up on Cloud's arousal here.

* Gender Goggles rants on the use of the term "failure of feminism" to describe shit that happens that's not great for women. Don't call it a failure of feminism when you mean "a failure of mainstream society to embrace feminism fully."

* Great conversations going on at Slate's XX Factor: Eve Fairbanks on claims that the media turned sexist in 2008; Melinda Henneberger asks, "are traditional Christians necessarily haters?" (Short answer: Mmmm, no).

* Some dude has started a blog of photographs his three-year-old child took with his digital camera that provide "a window into the perspective of a child." Are we're supposed to glean from this that a child has the perspective of a lazy, indiscriminate photographer?

* McCain Blogette is back! Meghan McCain jumps back into the blogosphere to wish us a happy new year and update on her post-election "emotional rollercoaster." This is just a hunch, but I have a feeling there's a third-wave feminist blogger in Meghan just waiting to rise from the ashes of her aging parents' cold, political marital agreement (just look at those sassy red shoes!). Come, young Padawan. I will guide you to shed your earnestness and adopt left-leaning positions on women's health!

Photo via trialsanderrors.

Among gay activists, the Cabinet is revered as a kind of secret gay Super Friends, a homosexual justice league that can quietly swoop in wherever anti-gay candidates are threatening and finance victories for the good guys. Rumors abound in gay political circles about the group's recondite influence; some of the rumors are even true. . . . The Cabinet spends at least as much each election cycle as does the PAC run by the Human Rights Campaign, the world's largest gay political group. And yet the Cabinet has operated in stealth, without accountability from watchdogs. (The Cabinet does not subject itself to MAP analysis.)

Naughty:"Why Some Women Hate Sarah Palin" by Belinda Luscombe, a piece about girl-on-girl hate in the case of Sarah Palin. Yes, B, you are pretty clever when you detail the schoolyard-level hate a woman can exact on another woman: "No matter how seemingly benign, every attribute becomes an affront: the hair, the voice, the husband, the moose-shooting, the glasses, the big family, the making rape victims pay for their own rape test kits."

Good line, Ms. Luscombe. However, the three-point argument that follows—that women hate Palin because (1) "she's too pretty," (2) "she's too confident," and (3) "she could embarrass us"—is less cute. Sure, one out of three ain't bad, but couldn't you have replaced the first two with "she doesn't support women's rights" and "seriously, she really does not support women's rights, like, at all"?

Note to Luscombe: Sarah Palin's uncanny resemblance to Tina Fey does not reduce all the women who won't vote for her to Mean Girls. So while I appreciate your tongue-in-cheek approach, Senior Editor of Time, I wish you were joking in a different way when you write, "we could just do what we always do and just vote in some guy. It's worked so well for us in the past." All sarcasm aside, I'd much rather vote for "some guy" whose policies support women than "some woman" whose support can be boiled down to a hastily paraphrased Starbucks coffee cup.

Nice: "If Women Were More Like Men: Why Females Earn Less," by John Cloud, who covers a new way to tackle the wage gap. Writes Cloud:

In previous studies, academics have looked at variables like years of education and the effects of outside forces such as nondiscrimination policies. But gender was always the constant. What if it didn't have to be? What if you could construct an experiment in which a random sample of adults unexpectedly changes sexes before work one day? Kristen Schilt, a sociologist at the University of Chicago and Matthew Wiswall, an economist at New York University, couldn't quite pull off that study. But they have come up with the first systematic analysis of the experiences of transgender people in the labor force.

The study, published in the Berkeley Electronic Press' Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, found that when transgender individuals transitioned while already in the workforce, "newly minted women were punished, and newly minted men got a little bump-up in pay." Men who became women earned 32% less; women who became men earned 1.5% more. Cloud's piece lends some much-needed insight into an old story (the wage gap between men and women); establishes new ground on an as-yet-unreported one (the wage gap between transgender men and women); and avoids tired gender stereotypes in the process. Just so Luscombe doesn't accuse me of being jealous of her confidence: While Luscombe does score high on style points, her all-girls'-schoolyard analysis could take some pointers from other parts of the magazine.