Ever since Seth MacFarlane sang that silly song about seeing actresses’ boobs and everyone got mad, I’ve been of two minds about whether it’s worth our time, as women, to keep fighting this particular battle.
One the one hand, we seem to have time-traveled back to the Mad Men era. Across the land, from Hollywood to Fargo, nostalgia for twinsets, garish lipstick and back-alley abortions is in vogue.

On the other hand, I too want to laugh at boob jokes, and of course, I want to be able to welcome a compliment from a president of the United States.
But O got himself a Saturday Night Live skit and a million blog posts last week when, besides praising her brilliance, dedication and toughness, he added of California Attorney General Kamala Harris: “She also happens to be by far the best-looking attorney general in the country ... it’s true ... come on.”
Whoops. As the play-by-play announcers on Obama’s favorite network, ESPN, would put it: out of bounds!

He knew it, too, and shortly afterward he apologized. That pissed other people off. Because why should he apologize for saying something so nice?

It’s not like he said, “She has a really nice ass!” But the way some feminists are reacting, he might as well have.

Before we jump on O, which I am sorry to say that I am about to do, let’s remember that he gave us two really great female Supreme Court appointees who are not by any standard definition “hot.” And by saying that, I’ve just implicated myself. I can’t help it. I am hardwired to. More on that below.

I wish we were at the point where we could welcome a flattering comment from a male public figure about how a female public figure looks.

After all, what’s the first thing a woman says when she meets another woman? That’s right: “You look great.” “Love those shoes.” “Where’d you get that sweater?”

There’s a whole industry devoted to how women look, and it keeps a large swath of our city employed. Women in the U.S. spend $250 billion a year on looking good.

Of course, O was being genuine in his flattery. He clearly values good looks, and he likes looking good himself. He works out, gets photographed shirtless, praises his wife Michelle all the time (that’s okay!) and doesn’t have his own body insecurities. When asked in 2008 whether he wears boxers or briefs, he replied, “I don’t answer those humiliating questions. But whichever it is, I look good in them!”

So how is telling a woman she looks good offensive? Because in a country where trafficked women’s bodies are for sale, where gang-rapes of teen girls and victim-blaming are on the rise, and where statehouses across the land are trying to return women to forced child-bearing, reminding women that how they look still matters is sexist.

It is offensive as long as women—historically valued chiefly for how we look—still have vastly less power than men and are egregiously underrepresented in all corporate boardrooms, in Congress, in academia, in the elite media and, yes, in the White House.

The other problem with the president drawing attention to a female officeholder’s looks is that women believe—and objective evidence backs them up—that being pretty actually helps women succeed.
The opposite is, quite unfairly, totally not true.

I realize cute males in politics like Gavin Newsom and centerfold ex-Senator Scott Brown get their fair share of attention. But the vast majority of powerful men are not hot. They never have to be. Whenever I run into Harvey Weinstein, for example, or look at pictures of Mitch McConnell, I try to imagine a woman looking that way and getting to where they are.
Impossible.

Sexism is subtly and pervasively sewn into the fabric of society. Because women participate in it all the time, it’s easy for men to complain that they don’t get why our president ought not to be commenting on how prominent public officials look.

There’s a name for what O did. Social psychologists call it “benevolent sexism.” Melanie Tannenbaum, writing in Scientific American last week, pointed out how benevolent sexism explained The New York Times’s obit of rocket scientist Yvonne Brill, which started off with a description of her cooking skills.
Benevolent sexism looks a lot nicer than hostile, open sexism, Ms. Tannenbaum writes. It justifies the power imbalance between men and women, as much as—or perhaps even more than—open misogyny.

Calling a woman a bitch, a ho, a stupid girl is actually not as insidious, because it’s out in the open. Benevolent sexism perpetuates ideas that diminish women’s already limited power without giving outright offense. And if you don’t like it, you are missing a good-humor chip.

“Although it is tempting to brush this experience off as an overreaction to compliments or a misunderstanding of benign intent, benevolent sexism is both real and insidiously dangerous,” Ms. Tannenbaum writes.

The costs of benevolent sexism can be seen in every boardroom and political body in America, where women are underrepresented because they are not considered powerful or serious enough to do the job.
The day might come—for our granddaughters, I wish, but probably beyond—when gender parity arrives. Then, how America’s female political leaders look and dress will matter as little as it does for our male leaders. And then, our president will be able to say whatever she wants.

editorial@observer.com

For three consecutive days last week, I woke up before 9 a.m. without the use of an alarm. This has never happened before. It’s not because I’m bright-eyed and looking to seize a brand-new day’s worth of opportunities, but because I'm an addict. A filthy, filthy blood-eyed, rot-tooth addict, and the new shipment just came in. CSPAN’s coverage of Congress comically attempting to do something important begins at the crack of dawn, and I hate to miss even a second of it. 
That’s right, our completely broken federal government has begun its latest round of fiscal negotiations in search of a big deal, before some apocalyptic fate entirely of the politicians' own creation kicks in.

There's nothing I can do to turn away, reveling in all of the fake twists and posturing and lying and shifts in leverage. It gets more embarrassing for the country each time, and so I get more immersed in it. Grimy, cynical, awful budget negotiation crack—it is military-grade nerd meth, watching this horror show play out.

The "fiscal cliff" negotiations represent the fourth such circus in the past two years. The two parties take it upon themselves to resolve a bundle of major budgetary issues against the backdrop of a ticking clock that, were it to hit zero, would release an army of 10 million demons into the night. Only under such a threat, the theory goes, can these two parties with completely different ideologies but a shared strategic philosophy of "fuck over the other's base" come together to pass whatever biggies are coming up on the calendar.

It started with the tax negotiations in the 2010 lame-duck session, under threat of full expiration of the Bush tax cuts. The parties finally agreed, in the last days of the session, to delay all major tax decisions another two years. In April 2011, after Republicans took control of the House, it was about funding the government for six months and maybe cutting some spending in the process, or endure a government shutdown. Ten minutes before their deadline, they decided to keep spending pretty much the same for the next six months.

The next month's debate was about raising the debt ceiling. You remember that one, right? It was that funny one where the House Republicans threatened to arbitrarily destroy the global economy forever if they didn't get a constitutional amendment to ban the Democratic party's policies, basically. That stupid plot by stupid people who hadn't yet read their federal policymaker Cliffs Notes led to more last-minute flailing can-kicking. And now here we are, trying to resolve all of this accumulated, punted crap at once before a bunch of recessions and Mayan apocalypses ruin whatever's left of the Greatest Country in the History of the World.

I've followed each of these sagas closely. My addiction is now long past the point where it should've exploded my brain, but here I am, tweaking out on all the latest minutiae again.

Here's how fiscal negotiations addiction works its dark magic: I understand at this point that the day-in, day-out drama of it all is entirely a theater production where the lead actors pander to their bases until the very last second, when they decide to maintain the status quo as planned all along. But the clearer this becomes—and it really can't get much clearer—the more engrossed I am with the day-in, day-out drama that I know to be fictional.

This is the best month ever.

I live-tweeted C-SPAN from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Monday, for free, when no one asked me to.

Everyone was writing off Grover Norquist for dead, along with his famous anti-tax pledge, after a few congressional Republicans said they'd consider increasing revenue by eliminating certain tax deductions—a direct violation Norquist’s pledge! President Obam  already seemed to have the leverage at this point, with his ability to wait until after the fiscal cliff to draw up his own tax plan if he didn't get one he liked. Now he saw his leverage get even more leverage-y. I read every article on the Internet about this. I kept another tab for TPM reporter Brian Beutler's site, refreshing it all day. He is so smart about leverage, Brian—my go-to leverage guy.

And then, a few more hours on Twitter, reading about tax deductions and cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security beneficiaries and tweeting one-liners about them.

A Republican congressman then pointed out that his party would have more leverage if it passed Obama's middle-class-only tax cuts before the end of the year and dealt with the spending cut side in January, after Obama had already given up his leverage. Could it work? I spent an hour on Twitter bombarding poor Brian with leverage questions.

I read about taxes and leverage and tweeted out links for 30 hours over the course of Tuesday and Wednesday. Don't worry, I took some breaks… to read more of the fancy, think-tank tax and leverage stuff on the Internet, that is. Mark Schmitt of the Roosevelt Institute, for one, is a delicacy. "It's a very complicated argument, but what it comes down to is this," he writes in an article about budget baselines and interest groups' scoring methods or something. "Letting the tax cuts expire by law would actually achieve many of the goals of tax reform… But if the tax reform is already half-completed, there's less room for classic tax reform in a grand bargain."

Yes! How can you say you’re doing tax reform if your top condition is to keep most of the Bush tax cuts in place? The idea of the parties ever wanting to radically upend the status quo in a mutually sacrifical “Grand Bargain” is a dirty lie! It was all starting to make sense, and I just needed to read a few more articles and tweets in the morning to discover the full truth...

…But then I woke up at 2 p.m. on Thursday, missing everything.

And it really didn't fucking matter.

There are hundreds or thousands of other fellow fiscal negotiations junkies along with me. I see you there, on Twitter—don't think I can't tell.

This is bad. We've got to put an end to this sort of behavior before it wastes us.

I'm talking about you, Congress. Please stop attempting to craft these big budget deals that you’ll never execute. The negotiation process makes for some excellent, guilty-pleasure reality TV, but booming C-SPAN ratings aren’t the best indicator of a job well done.

That is quite a concession from the GOP’s leaders on Capitol Hill. Not long ago, they would have stood firm against any plan to raise an additional dime in revenue. But they understand reality, and they know that last month’s elections didn’t go particularly well for their party.

Unfortunately, the White House seems incapable of putting ideology and dogma aside in the best interests of the nation. President Obama’s deficit reductions include not a dollar’s worth of cuts in Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid spending.

But, of course, the biggest item in the president’s plan is a tax hike on well-off Americans-—nearly a trillion dollars worth of tax hikes, in fact.

It’s tempting to dismiss the president’s proposal as simply not serious. And, of course, it is just the beginning of the high-stakes poker game that will occupy Washington for the next two weeks.

But still, anyone who followed this year’s presidential campaign knows that the president is quite serious in his demagogic insistence that the well-off are simply not doing their fair share. What’s more, the president has refused to confront his party’s hard-liners, who really do believe (or say they do) that Washington can balance its books without reforming federal entitlement programs.

Social Security cost Washington $762 billion in the most recent fiscal year. Medicare cost another $470 billion. These are big numbers, even by Washington’s standards. Social Security costs more than national defense. And yet some Democratic hard-liners would have you believe that the program doesn’t need to be reformed.

Republicans know (and some no doubt fear) that by conceding the point on revenues, they have created a space for possible tax hikes. If nothing else, Speaker John Boehner and his colleagues have shown an admirable degree of flexibility. You can be certain that the tea party crowd is up in arms over any plan to raise more revenue for the federal government.

The question is whether the White House can reply in kind, and whether the president has the will and the determination to defy his party’s dogmatic defenders of entitlement programs. Mr. Obama needs to remind them that in fewer than 20 years—the blink of an eye in the life of this republic—there will be 72 million Americans over the age of 65. That’s compared with about 40 million today. How in the world can Washington afford current levels of benefits for so many senior citizens?

Politicians and policymakers alike have been fretting about this other fiscal cliff for decades. Little has been done. Now is the time to get entitlement reform done. The president has to tell members of his party’s left wing that the status quo is unacceptable and unaffordable.

A deal requires pragmatism and flexibility. It’s time the White House showed more than a little of both.

None shall pass.

As is his want, Gridlock Sam Schwartz is out trying to warn people about troubling traffic conditions. As Mr. Schwartz explained in a profile earlier this year in The Observer, you tell people about how terrible the roads will be, and they have a remarkable habit to stay out of their cars. After all, everybody hates traffic.

So when Mr. Schwartz says this will be the worst traffic week of the year, we are want to give the former traffic commission his due. Here's what we have to look forward to in the coming "Carmageddon" (his term, not ours, and we think it's a technical one at that).

Monday: The President and the First Lady tape “The View” approximately 1:30 p.m. on 65^th St. and West End Ave.

Tuesday: President Obama addresses the UN in the morning after 9 a.m. At noon, the President speaks at Bill Clinton’s Clinton Global Initiative at the Sheraton New York Hotel and Towers on Seventh Ave. between 53^rd and 52^nd Sts.  Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney speaks at the Clinton Global Initiative 9 a.m. Iranian President Ahmadinejad arrives at Warwick Hotel on W. 54^th St. between Sixth and Fifth Aves.

Wednesday: Iranian President Ahmadinejad addresses UN General Assembly on Yom Kippur.

Thursday: Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu addresses the UN in the late afternoon; he will stay in the vicinity of Park Ave. and 67^th St. until Sunday.

Friday: Bike demonstration at Sixth Ave. and Houston 6:30 p.m. Barclays Center debuts with an 8 p.m. performance by Jay-Z!

Avoid First Avenue in the vicinity of the UN all week long!

President Obama or Jay-Z: Who is the bigger draw?

Ms. Obama and the girls. Photo Courtesy of AP/WWD.

Word has gotten out from publicists and fashion news authority Women’s Wear Daily that first lady Michelle Obama has endorsed yet another one of Barbara Tfank’s ladylike designs for a heavily monitored public appearance. It is said to be the fifth time that the first lady has donned a Barbara Tfank frock. She wore the ravishing outfit at a meet-and-greet in Gainesville, Fla., for a young girls’ after-school program called Girls' Place on September 17.

"A friend, who Tfank had shown the unusual fabric to, spotted the dress on C-SPAN and called the designer to tell her the news,” reported WWD.

According to our perhaps inaccurate tally, this means that Ms. Obama has worn Tfank to more public appearances than any other high-end American fashion designer, which leads us to ask: Is Barbara Tfank Ms. Obama’s new designer of choice? Has Ms. Tfank overtaken the feminine and playful aesthetic of Jason Wu?

With the election fast approaching, this would come as no surprise. Back in February, during New York fashion week, Ms. Tfank told The Observer, “It really interests me that the people who gravitate towards my clothes ... they’re women that are communicators—they have very strong opinions. I think that my clothes allow for women to show themselves, their power.”

Barbara Tfank at her New York Fashion Week presentation on September 10.

While Ms. Tfank would not comment specifically on her working relationship with the first lady, respecting her privacy, she did tell The Observer in an email today that “she represents all that is good about America.  Her inherent luminosity and warm personality can only enhance the quality of any designer’s work.”

The cerulean, marine and sky-blue mosaic print dress was reported to have been made of vintage fabric from Bianchini-Férier and is silk twill, according to WWD. The newspaper stated that the print fabric was created by artist Raoul Dufy and that Ms. Tfank had purchased the material at auction.

“I am honored that she chooses to wear my designs,” Ms. Tfank concluded in her email.

We’ll have to wait and see what else comes from this dynamic design duo. Best keep your eyes on the red-white-and-blue podiums.

Who built that? (Pool photo/NBC NY)

Obviously all we think about, all we care about, here at the real estate desk is, well, real estate. Which is why one line in particular jumped out during the president's speech at the Democratic National Convention last night.

"I promised to refocus on the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9/11," President Barack Obama declared. "And we have. We’ve blunted the Taliban’s momentum in Afghanistan, and in 2014, our longest war will be over. A new tower rises above the New York skyline, Al Qaeda is on the path to defeat, and Osama bin Laden is dead."

A new tower rises above the New York skyline.

Well, technically two are rising, and really, they've basically stopped rising. Unless the president was referring to the other two, which are trying desperately to rise. But we digress.

Not to take a political cheap shot, but didn't it seem like President Obama was taking some credit for helping 1 World Trade Center get to where it is? Granted the thing was practically invisible until shortly before he took office, so maybe such a claim is not outrageous. Just as we got Osama bin Laden on his watch, we have watched the World Trade Center retake its place on the skyline for the duration of his administration.

It is not as though President George W. Bush really did much for the rebuilding of Ground Zero, either. Almost entirely it was political brinkmanship (and infighting) in New York, Albany and Trenton that (slowed down and) helped launch the rebuilding of the World Trade Center. If anyone deserves credit in Washington, it is Senator Chuck Schumer and Congressman Jerry Nadler (not to mention former and current Senators Clinton and Gillibrand) who lobbied tirelessly for billions of dollars in federal funds to help Lower Manhattan rebuild.

Did the president take credit for rebuilding the World Trade Center last night? Of course not. This is a practice in exactly the kind of out-of-context-taking the media loves, the kind that ensnared the president when he uttered those four fateful words, when Mitt Romney declared "I like being able to fire people."

Still, the phrase jumped out at us. It was striking. Maybe more than anything else, it was all we could think about (again, we love real estate). After all, the sentiment does fit into the Obama narrative, the idea, the very thing the president meant when he said "You didn't build that," which is that you didn't build that on your own.

The same goes for the World Trade Center. Perhaps no single project since the Tower of Babel has been such a work in design by committee. We are better off for it, and worse off as well. As with all things in government, all things in society, all things in humanity. The same thing goes for the Empire State Building, the Washington Monument, the space program, Medicare, public housing, public schools, food stamps, social security, the Interstate Highway system.

You didn't build that. We all did. And sometimes, when the strife bubbles up to the surface at Ground Zero, it is good to be reminded of this fact.

Mr. Obama’s decision will directly affect the lives of about 800,000 young people nationwide. The President did not offer them amnesty or a chance to regularize their status. But with the threat of deportation lifted, they will be able to work on the books, apply for driver’s licenses and other government documents, and otherwise enjoy a much-better quality of life.

The President described these immigrants as “Americans in their heart, in their minds, in every single way but one: on paper.” Substitute “New Yorkers” for “Americans” and you have a fine description of thousands of people who live, work, play, and love in the five boroughs. They may have been born in Mexico, Brazil, Poland, or Thailand, but their formative years have been spent in New York. They may have a childhood memory of their native land, but for them, “home” means an apartment in Jackson Heights, a playground in Sunset Park, a school on the Lower East Side.

They are New Yorkers.

Mr. Barron currently is a member of the City Council, where his despicable rhetoric, we are happy to note, has had no visible impact on public policy and civic life. Yes, he embarrassed the city a decade ago when he escorted Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe, a serial violator of human rights, into the Council chambers and proclaimed him to be a “bold African man willing to stand up to the world for his people.” But that episode did no permanent damage to the city’s reputation—indeed, it gave New Yorkers a wonderful opportunity to show their contempt for Mr. Mugabe. Mr. Barron, on the other hand, was exposed as a vicious hatemonger.

Mr. Barron’s time in the Council is drawing to a close, thanks to term limits. But he may not be done. Mr. Barron is running for Congress in the Brooklyn district currently represented by Edolphus Towns, who is retiring. With less than a week before the Democratic primary, Mr. Barron is thought to be in a close battle with Hakeem S. Jeffries, who is seeking promotion from the state Assembly.

To their ever-lasting disgrace, Mr. Towns and the city’s largest public-employee union, District Council 37, have endorsed Mr. Barron. That’s why many observers fear that Mr. Barron might well capture the nomination, which is tantamount to victory in heavily Democratic Brooklyn, next Tuesday.

One person could stand in the way of Mr. Barron’s ambitions. President Obama can and should intervene on behalf of Mr. Jeffries. The president doesn’t have to say a word about Mr. Barron, a fellow Democrat, although it would be nice if he called out the councilman for his horrendous rhetoric. A presidential endorsement of Mr. Jeffries certainly would be a blow for the haters, racial arsonists, and refugees from the 1960s who support Mr. Barron’s candidacy.

The district’s registered Democrats will, of course, have the final say. But the party’s leaders at the local and the federal level ought to make it clear that Mr. Barron will be a pariah if he is dispatched to Washington—if a portion of the district’s voters are looking to send some kind of message to the establishment, well, they’ve rallied behind a flawed messenger.

If Mr. Barron wins, he will have a national forum for his hate-filled rants. To be sure, he will be incapable of turning his views into legislation, but still—he will have greater access to the media and a bigger audience for his insulting rhetoric. And here’s the worst part: He’ll be identified as a Democrat from New York.

Is that what Democrats want? Is that what New York deserves?

Those are questions Mr. Obama should ponder in the next few days.

The recall effort against Mr. Walker was framed as a working-class rebellion, a broad pushback against those who seek to shrink the middle class so that the rich could enjoy even greater affluence. Mr. Walker was portrayed as a tool of scheming capitalists intent on destroying the benefits of public employees because the wealthy deserve lower taxes.

Of course, nearly everything Mr. Walker’s opponents said was wrong. And voters clearly agreed. Mr. Walker won more than 53 percent of the vote despite his opposition’s slanders and the efforts of public employee unions from around the nation, who apparently felt they had a duty to interfere in Wisconsin politics.

Mr. Walker’s victory is a victory for all public officials, Democrat, Republican or independent, who understand that public employee benefits are strangling state and local economies around the nation. Mr. Walker inspired the hatred of unions and their sympathizers simply because he demanded fiscal sanity at a time when his state was staring at a deficit of nearly $4 billion, with no relief in sight.

Public employees in Wisconsin—a state that prides itself on its progressive traditions—paid nothing into their pension system when Mr. Walker took office, and paid only about 6 percent of their health-care costs. Mr. Walker supported reforms that required public employees to pay about 6 percent of their pension costs and about 12 percent of their health insurance. That saved Wisconsin taxpayers more than $700 million.

These are precisely the kinds of reforms that have been put in place in many states, including New York and New Jersey, over the last few years. More reforms must come, but at this point, any reform is a relief.

Public employee unions have manipulated the political process to win sweetheart deals from legislators and governors. Their benefits have little to do with equity and lots to do with pure politics. But the game is up: Even private-sector unions are getting behind groups demanding reforms. The private-sector unions recognize that their brothers and sisters are bankrupting local governments, with terrible consequences.

Mr. Walker personifies a new kind of political courage: The courage to say, “enough.” Voters rewarded that courage in his recall election. And voters elsewhere are making it clear that they, too, have had it with public employee unions. Last week voters in San Diego and San Jose approved ballot measures that cut pension benefits for municipal workers—not just future workers, but for current workers, as well. Here in New York, concessions on benefits generally apply only to future workers. But that too must change.

Police officers and firefighters in San Jose were eligible to retire after 30 years of service with pensions equivalent to 90 percent of their working salaries. Luckily New York has never negotiated such a terrible deal with its public employee unions. Nevertheless, New York City has seen its annual spending on pensions grow from $1.5 billion to $8 billion in the last decade. That has to stop.

Scott Walker is not just a local hero. He is a national leader on an issue that is about to explode in every state and in every city across the nation.