Thomas Jefferson Street

It was a scene right out of Bonfire of the Vanities, but with an interesting twist. In the book and in the movie, each of the characters performed according to stereotype, while cynical audiences and readers roared. In this farce, an African-American woman, serving at the pleasure of the president, was captured on YouTube confessing to having dispensed less aid to a white farmer than she might have on the basis of his race. The NAACP, singed by criticism for calling the Tea Party leadership to account for racist epithets uttered by unidentified attendees at its rallies, anxious to demonstrate its own sense of fairness, criticizes the political appointee. The Obama administration, under criticism for the attorney general’s decision not to prosecute the New Black Panther Party for voter intimidation, and jittery over the diminished standing the president enjoys among white voters, presses the official to resign.

Then, as the late Paul Harvey would have said, came the “rest of the story.” According to this narrative, the official’s YouTube remarks had been selectively edited. She appears on CNN and says not only that the now famous incident happened 24 years ago, but that she had assisted the farmer after all. She then relates how she had overcome her own prejudice against whites and cited her actions as an example of long-overdue racial reconciliation and healing. The farmer and his wife go on camera and credit her for having helped them save their farm.

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Forget about Secretary Clinton’s participation in the Afghan conference, or British Prime Minister David Cameron’s meeting with the president today. Ladies, it’s time for some very important Internet research. Click to watch the #1 most-viewed videos on YouTube this week, which are the Old Spice ads which feature former football player and current hottie Isaiah Mustafa. I was out with some women last night and it’s all they could talk about. One told me that even her teenage daughter had starting wearing Old Spice.

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My colleague David W. Conover at the Washington-based Bipartisan Policy Center was the Republican staff director at the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee, or EPW, from 1999 to 2003. His experience on the committee is a revealing window into the shifting environmental politics of the U.S. Congress and the country.

Cap-and-Trade, as the leading environmental legislation of 2010 is known, has been stymied in the Senate, and the environment committee has now become a hothouse of partisan acrimony. The ranking Republican, James Inhofe of Oklahoma, is actively supporting committee Chair Barbara Boxer's opponent--Carly Fiorina--in California’s Senate campaign.

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It's great that international medical groups are making progress stemming the spread of AIDS in Africa. But our medical community here at home needs to get a clue as well and get on the vaginal microbicide bandwagon. HIV-AIDS is a worldwide epidemic, but in trials in Africa, where women have much less control over their own bodies than here in the United States, doctors are making headway against the spread of the virus. Today's New York Times reports on a new study on the efficacy of the antiretroviral medication. But there's nothing especially new about vaginal microbicides, a gel women can use on themselves well before having sex, which has been around for several years:

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