Apparently Rielle is unhappy with her GQ photo shoot. (I screamed for two hours, she told Barbara Walters. Video below.) I guess it was the wily photographer who got her to take her pants off and strike a come hither pose next to Barney and Kermit. No matter. However it happened, we are now stuck with two frightening images of Rielle on the bed: the Barney image, and this other one from the Daily Beast description of the sex tape: (Emily, you were too classy to include the graphic description, so I will.)

On the video, both participants are naked. Hunter is propped up against the hotel bed headboard, with John Edwards belly-down on the bed between her legs. As Hunter, the campaign's official videographer, holds the camera, a smiling Edwards performs oral sex. Because of the camera angle, Hunter's face is not visible, but her distinctive jewelry is. Not only does candidate Edwards know he's being filmed, one source says, he's also clowning around and graphically performing for the camera.

Barney. Johnny. Pregnant. Dora. Oral sex. “Clowning around.” God, the more I stare at that GQ photo, the more it looks like Barney and Kermit are the ones "graphically performing." Help! It’s all starting to blend together.

Tags: rielle hunter, Rielle Hunter and GQ, sex tape

I hate to bring this conversation about Rielle thudding back down to earth, Hanna, since surely I should be exalted by her conception of the divine. But Diane Dimond at the Daily Beast says she knows what's in the Rielle-Johnny sex tape:

The Daily Beast can now describe the video in detail, based on accounts from multiple people who have viewed it. One source who has a medical background and has worked with pregnant patients says Hunter appears four or five months pregnant based on the swollen state of her belly and nipples. This would would place the tape's filming somewhere around September or October of 2007, smack in the middle of Edwards campaign for the presidency.

That's right—John Edwards apparently made a porn video with a woman he picked up in a hotel bar in the middle of his bid to become the Democratic presidential nominee. If Rielle is New Age gauzy-crazy, he is stark, raving mad.

Tags: John Edwards, rielle hunter

KJ, Dahlia, I read Rielle’s interview and immediately thought of many yoga teachers I’ve met, the acolytes of Marianne Williamson and other devotees of what they call “Eastern” religion. The blossoming New Age/Buddhism lite that populates yoga classes talks about the toxic nature of the Western “ego” (you know, we work too hard, we value ourselves above others, etc.) But then it replaces this ego with something like a supreme inner deity residing in all of us whose dictates can never be ignored. Dahlia, you call it silly but to Rielle it’s so profound—divine, even.

I had never experienced anything like what was flowing between us. I sat on the other side of the room. I wouldn't go near him. And he kept saying [she mimics his southern drawl], "What are you doin' over there? Come over here. I can't even see you. Come closer. I won't bite you." I was just—there was sooo much attraction and sooo much… I want to say love, but it wasn't love at that point. You know, it was just this, this magnetic force field like I had never experienced. It terrified me. Absolutely terrified me.

A lesser mind might call this lust or even fatal attraction, but to Rielle it’s destiny, ordained by the gods.

Rielle does not really mention his other children or even Elizabeth except as an object of pity or someone going through a “process” of her own, because what are mere mortals in the face of such a supreme force? She will never accept that she did anything wrong—probably she’s never considered it—because she has convinced herself that she and Johnny exist on a higher plane.

Everyone talks about how Johnny has fallen from grace. In reality, he's fallen to grace. He is integrated. He is living a life of truth. He has grown in awareness and humility. He had all these things within him, but they weren't the guiding, leading principles of his life. Now they are.

Even her pregnancy, news of which came as Johnny was renewing his wedding vows with his wife and about to announce his candidacy, she attributes to “divine timing.”

And I just felt like Quinnie needed to come into the world and this wasn't our timing, this was divine timing and he needed to get on board. And figure that one out. And it's interesting, because it's not over yet. That's the other thing. Everyone has such judgments about "He's lost everything." But you know, life isn't over. He's gone through an amazing transformation. And who knows what's gonna happen.

And then there’s the matter of her “business” card. Apparently it did not say "truth -seeker" on it. It said "Rielle Hunter: Being is free." I’m really glad she cleared that up.

Photograph of woman by Photodisc/Getty Images.

Tags: rielle hunter, Rielle Hunter and GQ, Rielle Hunter poses for GQ

I’ve gotten to the point where I can’t decide if Nancy Pelosi is merely out of touch with a great deal of the American electorate or if there is a mysterious reason she’s working against the health care bill. Aside from her disregard for the concerns of pro-lifers who are unhappy with the Senate bill and her comments that “we have to pass the bill so you can find out what’s in it” (is THAT what Obama meant by all that transparency talk?), she uncorked another gem late last week. She said that if we pass health care reform legislation, “people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance.”

She’s spent the last several years railing about how President Bush found time to destroy the economy when he wasn’t busy shredding the Constitution, so you think she’d have a touch more respect for the average American worker. Right now she’s trying to pass a bill supposed to cost close to $1 trillion, but which will probably cost much more, as David Brooks points out. It’s a bill that 53 percent of Americans oppose. And she’s touting how wonderful it will be for ... the creative class? (She briefly mentions entrepreneurs and bemoans that our businesses can’t compete internationally because of having to provide health care benefits. Um, you know what else hurts American businesses? The fact that we have some of the highest corporate tax rates in the world. But I digress.)

I realize that art, writing, and photography are not easy jobs. I would never have the guts to try to make it as a freelancer, at least not with a mortgage hanging over my head and college tuition for three looming. But we’re still shaking off a recession that saw many laborers lose their jobs and many people who kept their jobs working to do their job and the jobs of those who were laid off, all without extra compensation. How are nurses and factory workers and retail clerks and salesmen supposed to feel when they hear that health care reform will be good for the willfully underemployed?

As this post by Mary Katharine Ham in the Weekly Standard points out, there used to be 41 American workers for every retiree. Today, there are 3.3. Now Nancy is telling people they can go be slackers who live in their parents’ basements while writing the next Great American Novel while the rest of us, who are already working to pay for Social Security and Medicare, also work to pay for everyone else’s health insurance. Thanks, Nancy! Now I’m really excited for health care reform.

Tags: health care reform, Nancy Pelosi

KJ, I keep trying to connect the bad judgment Rielle Hunter exhibited in this interview with the bad judgment she exhibited in posing, with her child, for a series of photos that look like a creepy, male sex-fantasy from 1984. Pearls? Stuffed animals? Men’s shirt? Belly button? It all sort of puts the “ill” back into MILF doesn’t it?

The interview is almost unbearable in its silliness: “One thing I've learned about relationships and men is that you can never walk across the room for a man.” And: “It's beyond difficult. To allow a man to be a man.” And: “I could have helped save the world, but I had to sleep with him.” Every time Hunter makes a consequential choice—to sleep with Edwards on the day they met,  to become involved with a married man—she blames “the force field” of their love. There’s not a lick of remorse, growth, or responsibility in here. She’s just sort of bobbing along in a New Age current of words from one bad decision to the next. It’s funny that Hunter’s singular obsession with Edwards is that, as she explains, “His public persona just did not match who he is.” She has no such problem. Given 10 pages to finally tell us who she really is, Hunter reveals herself as exactly the same amoral sex-kitten/child captured in these photographs.

Photograph of John Edwards by Michael Williams/Getty Images.

Tags: Elizabeth Edwards, John Edwards, rielle hunter

—The most nutrition-deprived people in America may not be skinny; in fact, they may be obese. In the South Bronx, hunger and obesity are the two parts of malnutrition. [New York Times]

—The GOP may lose midterm elections if it continues to ignore abortion. [Washington Post]

—The Vatican is denying a celibacy rule for priests led to the developing sex scandal in Europe. [Washington Post]

—Online dating sites have been taken to a new level. Now the broken-hearted can go online to commiserate over bad dates and get dating advice. [Washington Post]

If you've ever lived in a rural area (as I did growing up) and spent time around actual pecking, squawking chickens, you probably think of them as mean, stupid, filthy animals that get into more scrapes than an unattended Roomba left to handle a fringed rug. Which is why my first reaction to this article by Peggy Orenstein in the New York Times Magazine about rich housewives raising organic chickens was to laugh for a solid 30 seconds at the ridiculous accompanying photo. In it, a slim woman in a shawl standing under an arbor of roses clutches a chicken fondly. Said chicken looks for a means to escape, while probably thinking about going to find some hole to get stuck in. Only after laughing until I let out an unladylike snort did I actually read the article, which was yet another one of those expensive NY Times pieces about how some rich ladies found an out from the supposed demands of feminism, a space where they can stay at home without being so bored they have to subsist on Valium.

It's a disappointment to see a usually strong feminist writer like Orenstein get sucked into the Times vortex of finding any and every way to suggest that women in the workplace was just some weird '70s lark that can totally be rectified, that there are ways to keep the little ladies occupied without tempting them to emasculate their husbands or male colleagues by drawing paychecks. And I say this as someone who actually loves organic gardening and idly considered chickening up when I had an organic garden back in Texas.

The operative word here is "garden." Orenstein tries to fend off boring feminists like me who point out that most women aren't married to wildly wealthy men who have to pay you alimony if you leave—and therefore most women need to have money of their own, which is why employment is such a good idea—by trying to recast the craftiness and organic gardening that many housewives get into as a hobby to fill their hours as a legitimate form of economic empowerment. She describes a subculture of people out there where housewives make clothes, grow and can food, and otherwise supplement the family income with their projects. And yeah, I've known lots of people who live like that in my time. They all lived in rural areas and owned enough land to make the difference between gardening and farming hazy indeed. But for most organic gardeners, even those with chickens, the income you get from your hobby won't even bring in as much as light part-time employment.

I had the uncomfortable image of Marie Antoinette playing peasant creep into my mind as I thought of wealthy, idle housewives starting a beehive and buying a couple chickens and thinking they were Farmer John, gaining real employment and fulfillment working the land while the actual income that comes into the house comes from the very modern world in which their husbands live. Orenstein also suggests that the image of a man engaging in intellectual labor while a woman stays at home doing manual labor might not be the panacea for the misery caused by sexism that you might think. Her feminist housewife guru admits that women who don't feel their husband's partnership in the tasks at hand get bored and drop it after awhile.

But demanding that the man who actually pays for the whole enterprise joins in as an equal partner strikes me as wanting it both ways. Either the work of tending a garden with chickens is so time-consuming and fulfilling that it can occupy a housewife's day and give her meaning, or a man can be an equal partner in the task in the hours he has on the weekend and after work. But if a man can do 50 percent of the work in his leisure hours, it's just not that much work. In my experience, plenty of couples and even single people I know do just fine with elaborate organic gardens in conjunction with their full-time jobs. As with me and my cooking, their gardens gives them respite from a day of earning money and having an impact on the world, a place where they can drink a glass of wine at sunset while laughing at their stupid chickens do comical things.

My final question is this: What do they do with the chickens? We never do find out if they just use them to poop in the garden and provide eggs, or if the lovely, romantic housewives have gone the next step and learned the art of wringing a chicken's neck and then cleaning and dressing it for dinner.

Photograph of woman and chicken by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.

Tags: Betty Friedan, chickens, organic gardening

Having an affair with a married politician, having a baby with him, accepting money from the politician's supporters—those are just the kind of things that could happen to anybody, really. We all make mistakes. But Rielle Hunter, sexily posed on her toddler's bed, reveals more than just her underwear. It's hard to argue that the photoshoot is anything but poor judgment on every possible level. It's a poor parental call: Your daughter will have to burn those toys and the bedspread, but the memories—not to mention the picture—will digitally stalk her forever. It's a poor PR call: The few die-hard romantics who believed in the "magnetic force field" that Ms. Hunter says drew her to John Edwards may be tempted to reconsider, given this fresh evidence of general foolhardiness. And it's just a poor call overall: Kermit, maybe. Barney—well, it's a huge stretch. But no one will ever make Dora the Explorer sexy.

Tags: John Edwards, Rielle Hunter; elizabeth edwards; marriage and commitment