Poor Mojo's Newswire

"Can you believe that sellout, Barack Obama?" says Rachel Maddow, looking around the room. "Let's hit him from the left!" It's 1:30 p.m. on Nov. 5, and the six-foot-tall Maddow, wearing her trademark baggy 501 jeans and thick-soled sneakers, has just burst into her staff meeting in a small office at 50 Rockefeller Plaza, home of MSNBC. Her team of political junkies, mostly in their 20s and 30s, perk up, laugh and start talking about how Obama is looking at hiring former Clinton staffers. "Yes!" Maddow responds, beaming. "He's already triangulating, the bastard."... But Maddow's Obama joke prompts an interesting question: how does a liberal, left-leaning "Rachel Maddow Show" behave when a left-leaning president is elected? Her extraordinarily quick success has been due at least in part to the fervor and passion this presidential campaign inspired.... All the ensuing hype and excitement about Maddow's rapid rise, and her quirks—the smart, self-described "butch dyke" who somehow broke into the cable-news boys' club—has masked the true reason for her success. It's not despite her differences from other talking heads, but because of them. A funny, cerebral and likable young woman who reads graphic novels and hungers for political change is more representative of the times than the older, angrier male pundits who've dominated the debate for so long. Maddow is not angry—her fans find her adorable, often confessing to crushes on her—but she is anxious, driven and determined. She did not stumble into a boys' club. She elbowed her way in, smiling.

AWESOMELY AWESOME! Obama gets elected, and now this. The 70'sw are BACK, baby! I still listen to Carol Channing's "Housework" when I clean. "Boy meets girl" is of course, a classic. And "Sisters and Brothers" is the single greatest, best, rockingest (kids or otherwise) afro-hair song EVAR. (If anyone wants a copy of the soundtrack... just sayin). Hell with the book, I'm gonna listen to the music again right now.

Free To Be... You and Me was one of my favorite movie/record/books when I was growing up. Marlo Thomas's 1972 project brought together an all-star cast to perform songs, poems and sketches that challenged gender stereotypes and delivered a fundamentally humane, loving message about being who you are and not being constrained by society's expectations.

But now the villagers of this tiny, close-knit community have angrily accused the comedian of exploiting them, after discovering his new blockbuster film portrays them as a backward group of rapists, abortionists and prostitutes, who happily engage in casual incest.

They claim film-makers lied to them about the true nature of the project, which they believed would be a documentary about their hardship, rather than a comedy mocking their poverty and isolation.

Villagers say they were paid just L3 each for this humiliation, for a film that took around L27million at the worldwide box office in its first week of release.