eh_notsomuch

On the pitcher's mound, a 12-year-old girl from New Jersey is perfect.

Mackenzie Brown is the first girl in Bayonne Little League history to throw a perfect game. She retired all 18 boys on Tuesday.

There are no official records of how many perfect games are thrown per season. Little League Baseball in Williamsport, Pa., estimates only 50 to 60 occur each year. No one knows how many are thrown by girls.

Brown says she knew she had something special going in the fourth inning. She says she just kept doing what she was doing and tried not to mess it up.

She'll get to throw the first pitch at the Mets game on Saturday.

WASHINGTON -- When Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz steps to the lectern at the Capitol on Monday to push for greater awareness of breast cancer risks in younger women, she'll be speaking from experience.

The Broward County Democrat and mother of three told The Miami Herald on Saturday that she successfully battled breast cancer for the past year and is going public with her story in the hope of alerting young women to its prevalence. She'll introduce legislation Monday that calls for a national education campaign targeting women between 15 and 39.

'I wanted to be able to not just stand up and say, `I'm a breast cancer survivor.' . . . I wanted to find a gap and try to fill it,'' said Wasserman Schultz, 42.

In the past year, she underwent seven major surgeries, including a double mastectomy and reconstructive surgery, while balancing motherhood, Congress and her roles as a chief fundraiser for House Democrats and a political surrogate, first for Hillary Clinton and then for Barack Obama.

''I had a lot going on last year,'' she said with a laugh, sitting in the living room of the Capitol Hill town house she shares with two other members of Congress when she's in Washington. ``I'm a very focused, methodical person, and I wasn't going to let this beat me. I wasn't going to let it interfere with my life.''

I am no great defender of Rachael Ray, 30-minute peddler of EVOO and perpetual pep, but I was pretty aghast this weekend, when I finally sat down to watch a (week-old) clip of last Monday's "Nightline," in which ABC journalist Cynthia McFadden sat down with the talk-show host and convenient cook to talk about her life and empire...

...It was the interview's turn toward the domestic, in which McFadden shows the television star playing with her pit bull, described as "the light of her life," and planning dinner with her husband. "You have said famously that you're too busy for children," said McFadden.

"I'm not too busy for children in general," replied Ray. "I love working with them, I love hanging out with them, I love cooking with them. I think that I'm 40 years old, and I have an enormous amount of hours that have to be dedicated to work. For me personally, I would need more time to feel like I'd be a good mom to my own child. I feel like a borderline good mom to my dog. So I can't imagine if it was a human baby. Plus I also literally don't think ... I can't imagine anybody giving me three or six months off to go physically have a child and take even a baby break. There is too much momentum and I feel like it would be unfair, not only to the child but to the people I work with."

This sounded to me like an extremely full answer to McFadden's question -- one that probably wouldn't be asked of a man, but which is certainly fair to ask of a television host who specializes in the domestic arts. But McFadden's follow up was kind of beyond the pale: "Do you think you're missing something?"

What? Didn't you hear the lady say she has so much work and so many commitments that she doesn't have time or inclination to add motherhood to her list of responsibilities? Didn't you catch the part where she said that she likes kids but doesn't want them enough to clear space for them? What about her priorities to her colleagues, and her open and unapologetic evaluation of the limited energy she could spend on motherhood? If she felt like something was missing that she needed to add, does Rachael Ray strike you as the kind of retiring violet who would sit silently and suffer in her muted desire for babies? And also, what of this "Are you missing something?" question. Why is that only asked about children, or sometimes to single people about whether or not they long for romantic partners? Why doesn't anyone ever ask the married mothers who don't run media empires if they feel like they're missing something? Isn't everyone always "missing" "something" -- a friend or a partner or a parent or a child or a job or a hobby or a savings account or a sense of security or an extra hour in the day or a soul?

In any case, Ray dismissed the question with a quick sentence, telling McFadden, "I don't feel like I am. I really don't."

WASHINGTON - MARCH 05: U.S. first lady Michelle Obama serves lunch at Miriam's Kitchen which provides meals, case management services and housing support to nearly 250 homeless men and women March 5, 2009 in Washington, D.C. The visit was a part of the first lady's effort to connect with the Washington, D.C. community and also highlight the city's best practices. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

...Rachel Maddow - in her own words a mannish lesbian policy wonk who doesn't own a television set - is not your average anchorwoman in America, or indeed on this side of the Atlantic. Later today when she goes live on air she must swap her Red Sox T-shirt and baggy Levi's jeans for what she calls "lady clothes" - a bland slate-grey trouser suit. (She won't say who it's by for fear of insulting the designer.) Her chunky Eric Morecambe glasses will be exchanged for contact lenses (which she's still getting used to). Reluctantly, there will be the merest smear of lipstick and blusher. She will, however, cling on to her trainers, safely out of sight under the desk. (The stylists at American Vogue recently offered her an array of extravagantly high-heeled Louboutin shoes for a photo shoot. She insisted on a pair of Converse boots.)

With their ironed hair and shrink-wrapped foreheads, women on American television news programmes all too often come across as shrill harpies or eye candy. Maddow seems to have both types on the run. She goes on air as if she's got nothing to prove, this despite the fact that she'll have done hours of preparation: a cheerful and clever geek, fluent in irony, alternately idealistic and sceptical, who doesn't believe in talking down to the viewers. Her aim? To raise the level of debate in America so that the right kind of decisions are made in the future....

56 Year Old Jennifer Figge Becomes The First Woman To Swim The Atlantic

Many years ago, Jennifer Figge found herself on an airplane over the Atlantic in the midst of a rough storm, and began to imagine that she could swim across the ocean in a life vest.

The experience set off a lifelong dream of swimming the seas, which Figge, 56, completed on Thursday, becoming the first woman to complete a swim across the Atlantic Ocean. She set out from the Cape Verde Islands on January 12, and touched land in Trinidad, having spent roughly a month at sea keeping in touch with her friend, David Higdon, by satellite phone. Figge was accompanied by a crew who provided her with pasta, peanut butter, and fresh water; she spent anywhere between 8 hours and 21 minutes in the water at any given time. As for sharks, Figge claims she never saw any: "I was never scared. Looking back, I wouldn't have it any other way. I can always swim in a pool."

WASHINGTON - Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has undergone surgery for pancreatic cancer, which was apparently at an early stage.

Court officials said the 75-year-old Ginsburg had surgery Thursday at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. She will remain in the hospital for seven to 10 days, said her surgeon. Dr. Murray Brennan. This was according to a release issued by the court.

Ginsburg, a justice since 1993, had colon cancer earlier in her tenure.

The cancer was discovered during a routine, annual exam late last month at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md.

The court said a CAT scan revealed a tumor measuring about 1 centimeter across the center of the pancreas.

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama signed an equal pay bill into law Thursday, declaring that it's a family issue, not just a women's issue.

The president picked the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act for the first piece of legislation to sign as president.

He appeared before a packed East Room audience for a ceremony, and Ledbetter stood at his side.

His entrance in the room was met with hearty cheers from the many labor and women's groups represented there. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the first woman speaker in the history of Congress, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, were present. Clinton went further than any woman previously in her campaign for the presidency, although she ultimately lost the Democratic Party competition to Obama.

The measure is designed to make it easier for workers to sue for decades-old discrimination. He said "this is a wonderful day."

The law effectively nullifies a 2007 Supreme Court decision that said workers had only 180 days to file a pay-discrimination lawsuit.

Ledbetter said she didn't become aware of a pay discrepancy until she neared the end of her 19-year career at a Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. plant in Gadsden, Ala. She sued, but the Supreme Court in 2007 said she missed her chance.

The court said in its 5-4 ruling that a person must file a claim of discrimination within 180 days of a company's initial decision to pay a worker less than it pays another worker doing the same job. Under the new bill, given final passage in Congress this week, every new discriminatory paycheck would extend the statute of limitations for another 180 days.

Congress attempted to update the law to extend the time, but the Bush White House and Senate Republicans blocked the legislation in the last session of Congress.

After being wooed by many Washington area community colleges, Jill Biden began teaching today at Northern Virginia Community College.

Vice President Biden's wife, a 28-year veteran educator, has been hired as an adjunct professor and is teaching two classes this semester at the Alexandria campus: an English as a second language course and a developmental English course. Each class has roughly two dozen students and will meet twice a week, for a total of about 10 teaching hours a week, Biden spokeswoman Courtney O'Donnell said.

"I am thrilled to return to the classroom to continue working with community college students, whom I greatly admire and enjoy teaching," Biden said in a statement. "I have always believed in the power of community colleges to endow students with critical life skills, and I am pleased that I can make a difference by doing what I love to do, teaching people who are excited to learn."

Biden spent the past 15 years teaching English composition courses at Delaware Technical & Community College, and prior to that worked as a reading specialist and English teacher at public schools in Delaware. She has two master's degrees and earned a doctorate in education from the University of Delaware in 2007. Her dissertation focused on retaining students in community colleges.

As second lady, Biden plans to assume a role as a public advocate for community colleges and may advise the Obama administration on related education policies.

"She feels passionately about community colleges," O'Donnell said. "For her, being in the classroom is extremely natural. She is a born teacher."

The Senate passed by a strong majority the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 (S. 181) last night after defeating a series of Republican hostile amendments. The Senate floor debate for the Act was led by Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), Dean of the women Senators, for Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee Chair Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) after Majority Leader Senator Reid (D-NV) navigated the bill to the floor.

"President Obama and the Democratic Congress are keeping their pledge to women and all workers to reverse the Supreme Court decision that gutted the right of employees to fight wage discrimination," said Eleanor Smeal, President of the Feminist Majority. "We're on a roll to rebuilding women’s rights and civil rights taken away during the Bush era."

The Senate Act, which has already passed the House in a version coupled with the Paycheck Fairness Act, will go back to the House as a single bill. The House is expected to pass the Senate bill on Tuesday. President Obama is expected to sign it into law shortly thereafter. In almost straight party line votes the Senate kept the pledge of President Obama to sign the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act almost immediately after being sworn in.

Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson's killer amendment was defeated 55-40 in a nearly straight party vote with Democrats voting against it – only Republican Olympia (ME) voted with Democrats. Several other debilitating Republican amendments also went down to defeat.

The Ledbetter Act corrects the Roberts Supreme Court decision that gutted the ability of women workers to sue for wage discrimination. The Act passed helps not only women, but all workers who are victims of wage discrimination on the basis of sex, race, color, religion, national origin, age, or disability.

MIGDAL HA-EMEK, Israel - Sandra Samuel had one thought as she huddled for safety between two refrigerators in the besieged Jewish center in Mumbai: the safety of the 2-year-old boy in her charge. The moment he cried out for her, she ignored the crackle of the gunfire and the explosion of the grenades that rocked the building, charged up the stairs and whisked the boy away from the motionless body of his mother to safety.

Today, the Orthodox Jewish toddler's only tie to his life in Mumbai is the Christian woman who rescued him. His Israeli parents died in the assault. Samuel, a recent widow, has given up her life in India and left her two sons, aged 18 and 25, to move to Israel, where she says she will stay "as long as my baby needs me...."

...Moshe's great-uncle, chief rabbi Yitzhak David Grossman of the small northern Israeli town of Migdal Ha-emek, used his influence to immediately get Samuel a one-year passport and a three-month tourist visa to Israel so the boy would have a familiar face to see in the midst of the trauma.

Sabine Haddad, a spokeswoman for Israel's Interior Ministry, said Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit wants to grant Samuel the status of "Righteous among the Nations," an honor bestowed upon non-Jews who save the lives of Jews, which would allow her to stay in Israel as long as she wished....

Ever heard of something called Dada?”

Rachel Maddow is trying to make an analogy. It’s mid-October, two weeks before the election, and the MSNBC host is comparing the McCain campaign’s recent fixation on “Joe the Plumber” to the anti-bourgeois cultural movement of the early-twentieth century. But this is prime time, and Maddow first has to define Dadaism in as colloquial a way as possible. This is something of a challenge considering she only has about twelve seconds.

“Deliberately being irrational, rejecting standard assumptions about beauty or organization or logic,” she begins. “It’s an anti-aesthetic statement about the lameness of the status quo … kind of?” She twists her face into a cartoon grimace that morphs into a wide smile. “Why am I trying to explain Dadaism on a cable news show thirteen days from this big, giant, historic, crazy, important election that we’re about to have?” she asks with a self-deprecating laugh, as she recognizes the Dadaishness of her own quest. “Because that’s what I found myself Googling today, in search of a way to make sense of the latest McCain-Palin campaign ad!”

"I think I have a fear in general about whether being a pundit is a worthwhile thing to be," Rachel Maddow tells me over dinner at a Latin restaurant in lower Manhattan. It's more than the ordinary self-deprecation of someone who just got her own cable commentary show. It's an insecurity essential to the on-air style that's powered the 35-year-old's rapid rise from a wacky morning radio show in western Massachusetts to the liberal radio network Air America and now to her own prime-time show on MSNBC.

Maddow is not a Tim Russert or a Chris Matthews--an ostensibly nonpartisan interviewer who badgers politicians and policy-makers about contradictions in their records. Nor is she a Rush Limbaugh or a Glenn Beck--an attack dog who deals in calculated anger, bluster, and outrage. She's no mild-mannered liberal like Alan Colmes or a veteran observer like Wolf Blitzer or David Gregory. Maddow has broken the broadcasting mold. She has succeeded as an avowed liberal on television precisely because she is not a liberal version of conservatives like Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. Unlike so many progressive media figures who sought to replicate the on-air habits of the aggressive shock jocks of the right, she stumbled upon a workable style for the left. She is liberal without apology or embarrassment, bases her authority on a deep comprehension of policy rather than the culture warrior's claim to authenticity, and does it all with a light, even slightly mocking, touch. She proves that liberals can attract viewers on television when they actually act like, well, liberals.

Tim Graham is the portly Director of Media Analysis at the Media Research Center, which sounds very Marshall McLuhan but in actuality is a conservative watchdog group. So already you know what station he likes to make guest appearances on (hint: rhymes with "box"). This man is obsessed with MSNBC's recent woes, and bringing down Keith Olbermann.

Tim Graham, like any other red-blooded American male, is also fascinated by lesbians, most notably MSNBC's Rachel Maddow...

...Speaking on MSNBC's recent shake-up, Graham says, "Not only is the damage already done, the damage continues. Not only are they keeping these people (Matthews and Olbermann) on during the night, they are adding this lesbian Air America Radio host."

While Maddow's sexuality captures the American public like Anderson Cooper's did before everyone realized he would stay in that closet forever, the ire behind Graham's words cannot go undetected. But they do at Fox, and apparently, at Newsbusters, where Graham recently wrote a piece that's been making the blog rounds where he reiterates his lesbian=liberal=bad position. "The Globe sinks to an even more ridiculous level when they allow MSNBC to say this radical-left lesbian hostess isn’t so much laying out an opinion as the facts."

Ok, we get it. Rachel Maddow is gay. But so is Portia De Rossi, and she was on Fox. Granted, it was for Arrested Development and Ally McBeal, but still. Graham thinks he is acting like the little boy telling the emperor wears no clothes; will he be the only one brave enough to stand up and relate Maddow's sexuality with MSNBC's liberal agenda?

Everyone knows Maddow likes other ladies. But assuming that "gay" equals "liberal" — even when it totally does — and using the word "lesbian" as a derogatory adjective to prove someone's political bias…well, we see what you're getting at here Graham, but seriously. Kill yourself.

• TV Squad's Allison Waldman, who describes the show as a Countdown "spin-off," had high praise for Maddow. "Rachel Maddow is very smart — a Rhodes scholar — and you can hear that in her interviewing style. She packs a question with information," she wrote. She also discussed the opening segment of the show, "Talk Me Down." "It's Rachel's commentary/blog/editorial about a specific topic of note to her," she writes. "It's her show, so she gets to choose. She does her spiel, then invites a guest to 'talk her down.'"

• Roger Catlin writes for the Hartford Courant that the "best part," of the show featured Buchanan. "Together the two tangled enough on issues so that it allowed her to articulate her positions most cogently," he writes. "When it was over, Maddow wasn't mad or even riled up. She thanked Buchanan, whom she kept calling 'my fake uncle.'" He also notes Maddow is, "not nearly as grating as Olbermann." [Editor's note: It's TVNewser, so of course they can't go more than a couple paragraphs without a body hit to KO.]

• Megan Carpentier live-blogged the premiere for Jezebel, and had some critique for the end of the show. "Kent is a little annoying," she writes of Kent Jones, who was the last guest, on to discuss pop culture. But she also noted a favorite line of the night from Maddow: "Unlike chocolate and peanut butter, church and state are not two great tastes that go great together."

The premiere of Maddow's show finished in 2nd place in cable news at 9pmET, beating CNN's Larry King Live in both Total Viewers and the A25-54 demo (behind FNC's Hannity & Colmes).

Rachel Maddow's MSNBC hour premiered last night to spectacular ratings. Nothing should ever be assumed (we could each get 47 viewers tonight), but this is, as they say, auspicious.

The full ratings are posted in several locales, but here are the headlines:

Rachel drew 1,543,000 viewers in total at 9 PM last night. Not only was that better (by 160,000) than Larry King, but it was the second highest number of total viewers in Primetime, not counting Fixed News.

Modesty precludes me from saying who was ahead of her on that list.

The "advertisers' number" - the number of viewers aged 25 to 54, were also outstanding. 483,000 of the so-called buyers' demo tuned in, again, beating Larry (by 100,000) and second for any primetime show not on Fox (and she even outdrew Shepard Smith's 7 PM audience over there at The Zombie Channel).

Rachel is grateful, but too busy trying to improve over last night's debut to dwell on last night, which I assume doesn't surprise any of you.