Barack Obama is a macho man. Before Michelle Obama accepted a job in the Chicago mayor’s office, Barack insisted on meeting her new boss. ”My fiance wants to know who is going to be looking out for me and making sure that I thrive,” Michelle said. On the campaign trail he called a reporter “sweetie” in the course of blowing her off.

(Where did Obama even pick up the term “sweetie”? He’s not 90 years old or a cab driver.)

This weekend the NY Times reported that Obama unwinds by playing sports with his advisors and members of congress—but never with female ones. He’s played 23 rounds of golf with men since taking office and he’s never played with a woman. His White House is “rife with fist-bumping young men who call each other ‘dude[.]’” When asked about the issue, Obama called the whole thing “bunk.”

Putting all that together, might one worry about Obama overlooking ideas that come from women? Only if one is a Feminazi. All over the internet this week, women have reacted to Obama’s biases against them by boasting nonchalance. Here is a representative argument in the Washington Post:

Basketball is a contact sport. Wouldn’t we find a presidential body brush with a congresswoman at least equally problematic? How about the likelihood that few women in the White House or Congress could play well enough to make it fun for the president? Or should we have Obama play down for the girls?

If Obama enjoys competing only against the best basketball players in the world, he should fly in the Carolina tar heels. If his favorite part of the game is mutual unrestrained shoving, he should fly in the Patriots’ defensive line. If men and women elbowing each other is sexual, then I should keep my love of subways to myself. How embarrassing!

Does anyone, male or female, actually do their best to clobber the president of the United States? …Maybe they shouldn’t?

Obama plays basketball against male colleagues because he likes to hang out with male colleagues. Argue about whether that’s weird, but don’t argue that playing sports with women sucks. That’s like saying arguments are only interesting if you have them with lawyers.

The pro-macho argument devolves:

Honest women will have to admit that they helped Obama become president not only because of the policies he promised but also because they rather fancied him. That famed jocularity he shares with men more than women may be cause for criticism in the Halls of Harrumph, but it’s called nectar in the jungle.

… Opinion websites need to hire more lesbians.

Some people decorate their houses creatively; some people make money creatively; some people aren’t creative at all. NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman thinks that in our exciting new economy, only those in the second camp will be able to eat—and he seems to be cool with this. Sure, not all of us are superstar hustlers, but that’s just because we have bad educations. If public schools start teaching “entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity” then wealth disparity will melt.

What inspired Friedman to blame poverty on uncreativeness?

“A Washington lawyer friend recently told me about layoffs at his firm. I asked him who was getting axed. He said it was interesting: lawyers who were used to just showing up and having work handed to them were the first to go because with the bursting of the credit bubble, that flow of work just isn’t there. But those who have the ability to imagine new services, new opportunities and new ways to recruit work were being retained.”

Another interesting factoid about laid off lawyers: lots of them are recent graduates who would’ve been laid off plus punched in the face if they’d told a partner that they wanted to change how he practiced law.

I guess the Friedmanian solution is to start our own firm. Clients will love us because we’re cheap, we tweet, and our memory of Introduction to American Legal History is way sharper than those old experienced guys’.

Or here’s a less dangerous idea: since America is wealthy but there’s not a lot of work to go around, we should distribute the wealth according to some other metric besides work. Niceness, maybe, or funniness. And we should give everyone a few sandwiches per day just for being themselves.

UPDATE: here’s an anti-Friedman rant from a lawyer who survived layoffs at her firm. She refuses “to fall into the trap of blaming all the people who had to lose their jobs to justify my own privileged position[.]”

The New York Times Magazine is supposed to be a sanctuary of abstraction. But Michael Pollan keeps invading it, trying to make me anxious about the most basic part of my day besides blogs: food. Last time he accused feminists of “trampling” over cooking. This time he’s laying down rules for eating. Rules?! Don’t worry, they’re packaged cutely.

“Every trip to the supermarket these days requires us to navigate what has become a truly treacherous food landscape,” he begins. Later he uses the phrase: “minefields of the modern-food marketplace.”

That’s dark. It makes you reconsider Pollan’s adorable slogan, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Guess the subtext is, “Be afraid. Be very afraid. You’re fat.”

So don’t read him! Follow my “modern-food marketplace” rules instead:

1. If you live near a Trader Joe’s then buy trail mix, string cheese, garlic bread, and the TJ version of oreos.
2. If you live only near bodegas then buy rolls, brie, and mint milanos.

A Times op-ed bears the subheading: “When unemployed, time should not be idly spent.” The author describes the joy and resume-building utility of performing slave labor and concludes, “my time is valuable, really valuable, even if it’s not measured in paychecks.”

The author is not only a doosh but a liar. You can tell because she seems to have graduated less than a decade ago yet she says “I worked my way through college […].” Ha! Nobody in my generation “worked her way through college.” On top of cost of living, tuition’s way too high. Charity and loans paid our way through college. Jobs were for building up a savings account to finance the first few months of post-graduate unemployment. Also for nourishing an American Apparel addiction.

This woman admits her biggest accomplishments are an MFA and peace corps experience but then she claims: “I am not unemployable.” First of all, apparently she is. Second, some of us fluff-inclined unemployeds actually try not to seem like assholes. We trudged through real degree programs and worked uncool jobs we hated, and we still fake a sense of humor about our unemployability. As educated as the author is, she has a lot to learn about endearing herself.

I want to start an Unemployed People Union which forbids its members from embarrassing us in the New York Times. Not sure how I’ll entice them to join, though. Grant everyone the title of Vice President so they can put it on their resumes?

NYC’s unemployment rate just broke 10%. But if there’s one thing non-socialist media has taught me, it’s that gloomy unemployment numbers always mask happy truths. For example, last time they spiked I learned it was because tens of thousands of people had resumed looking for work due to a spontaneous and therefore correct hunch that the economy had improved.

In that spirit, here are some theories as to why NYC’s jobless stats are inflated:

• New Yorkers are arrogant, so only the most pathetic among them humor telephone surveys.
• Educated housewives are ashamed of their unfeminist roles and so identify as “unemployed” instead.
• Brooklyn Hipsters take the summer off by choice, in order to attend rock concerts.
• Single Manhattanites erroneously count their cats as “household members.”
• The Labor Department erroneously counts lawyers and bankers as people.