1. Newsweek runs the cover you see to your right. The text reads "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Sarah? She's Bad News for the GOP — And For Everybody Else, Too." They illustrate this statement with a portrait from Palin's recent Runner's World photoshoot. In the picture, Sarah Palin is wearing running clothes, grinning, clutching two Blackberries and leaning casually on an American flag.
2. Sarah Palin, the person who posed for this picture in the first place, is angered. The photo was meant to be "all about health and fitness," she Facebooked, and Newsweek's "sexist and oh-so-expected" re-use of the image "shows why you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, gender, or color of skin." She cannot name any books that have genders or skin (but then, who can?). Nor does she explain what the Blackberries have to do with "health and fitness."
3. Various people around the internet agree with Palin that the cover is sexist. Other people disagree. Some of us remember the last time Newsweek caused a controversy with its cover image of Sarah Palin.
4. An Indecision blogger and her editor spend almost an hour instant messaging about the Sarah Palin Newsweek cover. At one point your blogger's editor asks her to 'role play' a hypothetical meeting in the Newsweek editorial department.
5. We all know that Sarah Palin leaps at any chance to play the victim (it's cardio), even when she's invited the scrutiny, prompted the inquiry or posed for the photo. Also, any time a major political figure agrees to be photographed in an unusual setting, wearing anything less than a power suit, and those pictures are made public, they will be seen and published and republished. In public.
6. Yet here we have a political-type lady wearing shorts, on the cover of a national news magazine. That seems sexist.
6a. Or not.
7. All this discussion, and still no definitive answer to the big question: Did this photograph of Sarah Palin violate flag protocol?
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John Ziegler — the right-wing documentarian guy who made 
