G.M. Closing 4 Plants in Shift From Trucks Toward Cars

Responding to a consumer shift to more fuel-efficient vehicles, General Motors said Tuesday that it would stop making pickup trucks and big S.U.V.s at four North American assembly plants and would consider selling its Hummer brand.

dear GM: did you think the price of gas was going to go down in the near future? what were you waiting for?

and with a tear in my eye:
Officials: Clinton will concede delegate race to Obama

is this all over yet? wake me up in november.

in other clinton news, this slate piece is probably the dumbest thing i’ve read in a good while.

Hillary and the City: Is Sex and the City our culture’s consolation prize to Hillary Clinton’s supporters?

Does the movie version of Sex and the City owe its success to the failure of Hillary Clinton’s campaign?
…
By weird coincidence, during the same weekend when Sex and the City demonstrated women’s unprecedented consumer clout at the multiplex, Hillary Clinton’s campaign developed its death rattle.
…
By this past weekend, however, it was becoming clear to all but the most delusional Hillary supporters that the game was up. Sisterhood was powerful, but in this case it wouldn’t prevail. That realization left a lot of white women all dolled up with nowhere to go. And so … they went to the movies.

what?! tim noah admits the causation argument is “somewhat glib” (somewhat?!), but basically proves by the end that THIS ARTICLE HAS NO POINT. unless it is to find some contrived reason to make fun of both clinton and sex and the city, all in one fell swoop. white women like hillary! white women like sex and the city! must find a connection beyond coincidental timing.

and slate’s relevance stock continues to fall …

every day that passes, my disdain for slate grows and grows. too contrarian, too pretentious, etc. but two articles have redeemed its standing for me, at least temporarily.

1. “Bigger Than Elvis: Why the haters are wrong about Mariah Carey.”

there isn’t anything terribly quotable in this point-by-point defense of mariah, but to sum up: she’s got skillz, she’s inspired the american idol generation (maybe not a plus for the world, but proof of her influence), she’s versatile, and she predicts the future. really!
the point: E=MC2 is — against all odds — a very good album. maybe great. maybe her best. if you have ever liked a mariah carey song in the history of mariah carey (always be my baby? all i want for christmas is you?), i don’t think it’s crazy for me to say that you’ll like some part of this new album. really. REALLY.

2. “How Dumb Are We?: How long will women shoulder the blame for the pay gap?”

on a less celebratory note, dahlia lithwick — one of the few shining beacons on the slate payroll — rips to shreds the supreme court’s infuriating ledbetter vs. goodyear decision and also mccain’s opinion on the whole gender pay discrimination bill/travesty that got denied in congress last week.
do you want to hear my angry voice? then PLEASE ask me to explain this case to you. and if you wonder where your friend alison went and how they replaced her with a crazy feminist, just read this article. if you aren’t really pissed off by the end of it, i’m not sure why we would ever talk.

in “Postfeminism and Other Fairy Tales,” the new york times sort of agrees with me that this spitzer thing might be the aha! moment many women (and men) needed to wake up from their “sexism isn’t that big of a deal anymore” haze.

Weren’t we in what some people have long called a postfeminist era, when we thought the big battles were over, or at least that the combatants had reached some accommodation? And wasn’t the younger generation less hung up on the stereotypes and issues of the sort Mrs. Clinton taps into among older women?

Not so fast. No matter how historic the prospect of electing a woman or black man as president this year, if the rising volume of chatter in the news and entertainment media is any measure, women are doing a little re-tallying.
…
“Like lots of other twentysomething women, I’ve been an unswerving Obama girl from the get-go,” wrote Noreen Malone on The XX Factor, the Slate magazine blog written by women. “Oddly enough it’s taken Spitzergate — not Hillary’s tears, not her scolding — to make me less dismissive of the feminist ‘obligation’ to vote for a woman.”

speaking of the XX factor, does anyone else think it sort of sucks? i’m sure someone else has said this (in fact, it’s slate, so i’m sure they talked about it themselves in that narcissistic gen x meta thing they’re so good at), but the existence of a blog written by women seems condescending itself. is there something revealing about aggregating the mind vomit of slate’s female writers on political gender issues? is there something special about what they are saying because they are women? seems to pander to the dangerous “women and men are different, so we should treat them differently” argument that makes sexism so easy to accept.

but mostly, i dislike this blog b/c of asinine posts like “How Is Spitzer Different From Bill Clinton?” and “Spitzer: Pathos, Not Power.”

maybe if this blog actually contained smart commentary on gender issues (emphasis on “smart”), i’d complain a lot less. instead it’s a handful of great points mired in half-ass pseudo-intellectual dreck.