HILLARY CLINTON

NEW YORK — Put Angelina Jolie’s face on a magazine cover and sales will surely rise. Get her to write a memoir and it would be worth millions. But write a book about her, without her cooperation, and you’re taking a chance. Coming a week after the release of her latest film, “Salt,” a biography has been published. “Angelina,” by Andrew Morton, is out with an announced first printing of 150,000 copies and the promise of a “spellbinding” adventure.

Hyper-partisan, painfully ignorant, pathologically dishonest, chronically unethical, intellectually unconscious, and jaw-droppingly stupid. And those are her better qualities. Sarah Palin is so soulless that she traded away her credibility on the one issue on which she had any authority: her personal story about raising a child with special needs. That was it, the full sum of her sliver of sincerity. And she gave it up to offer political cover to an equally soulless ally. In other words, she is the perfect embodiment of what her party has become.

Robert Gibbs pokes fun at Sarah Palin from his presidential podium. Giving a high profile dig to someone not in office, running for any office, or having any official role anywhere in the country. That’s a lot of attention for someone who supposedly doesn’t matter. The White House getting a little sloppy with their arrogance. It’s not like Sarah’s viability has spiked. A new ABC/Washington Post poll finds her unfavorable numbers at 55%, with her support among Republicans down.

Quick, pop quiz: Where does the United States rank on female participation in government? In the top ten? In the top 20? In the top 50? Answer: America ranks somewhere around #71 worldwide, below Pakistan and Cuba, when it comes to the share of women in political office (in the US Congress, it’s less than 17 percent). That statistic tells just part of the story. At one time, Margaret Thatcher seemed to be the rare example of a female head of state, the isolated exception to the worldwide rule of male-dominated law.

Political pundits are like astrologers and psychics: They get away with making outlandish predictions and are remembered when lightning strikes and they guess right, but rarely are they called to account for a litany of missed calls that would put weather forecasters and stock market analysts to shame. We were told to be nervous about Barack Obama, but after one year in office, it should be clear to all but President Obama’s most partisan critics that he has been good for Israel.

“Notes From the Cracked Ceiling: Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, and What It Will Take for a Woman to Win” (Crown, 288 pages, $25), by Anne E. Kornblut: If you thought the 2008 election was a triumph in the cause of getting a woman closer to the White House, political reporter Anne E. Kornblut begs to differ.

The year began on an uplifting note with Barack Obama sworn in as the 44th U.S. President and the first African-American elected to the nation’s highest office. It was all down hill from there, however. 2009 quickly became known as the year of the Great Recession; with jobs shed at an alarming rate (unemployment the highest its been in 26 years), fears of banks on the brink of insolvency, foreclosures at an all-time high, reduced credit availability for consumers, shrinking investor confidence, and a marked decline in business and consumer spending.

President Obama’s most enduring political weakness has been his relative difficulty connecting with working class white Americans. He won the Democratic nomination in 2008 by building a coalition based around African Americans and white liberals. The economic collapse and the widespread anger at President Bush, pushed a lot of working class white voters towards Obama in November of 2008, but this was a brief alliance, rather than a strong gesture of support.

It did not take long, upon the shocking revelation that DeDe Scozzafava had walked the plank, for a number of political dominoes to begin to fall: The likely beneficiary of her decision, right-wing Independent candidate Doug Hoffman , commented on the suspension of the Scozzafava campaign, and it was hardly a magnanimous message– This morning’s events prove what we have said for the last week; this campaign is a horserace between me and Nancy Pelosi’s handpicked candidate, Bill Owens.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.