Ian’s annoyed that the women on the Supreme Court have been tossed off the Forbes influence list in favor of the likes of Sarah Palin, Gisele Bündchen, Greta Van Susteren, and Lady GaGa. I think there’s some justification to his annoyance: Bündchen and Van Susteren do have influence, but it’s not necessarily substantive or lasting and it’s limited to a couple of realms. Palin has influence in that she’s able to drive news cycles, but there’s no evidence that she will get votes, can influence the passage or failure of legislation, or that she is herself terribly convincing (all the television shows and media projects she’s been involved with have dramatically underperformed). Compared to these three women, the influence of the women on the Supreme Court is less immediately visible — we don’t, after all, see the conversations the justices have in chambers—but it’s certainly more important.

But I’m prepared to defend the idea that Lady Gaga may be more influential than a Supreme Court justice. She’s a major commercial and artistic force who has also managed to turn her fans into a political base when she wants to, and her influence is international as well as domestic. I tend to think the influence of celebrities is generally overstated, but in this case, I think Gaga isn’t a ridiculous choice.

The bridge is yours.

-Are cloud music lockers in legal trouble?

-Unless there are huge hidden costs or they have major cash flow issues, it is odd that the networks that created Hulu are selling it.

-Surely there are more ways to illustrate that humanity has warring impulses.

-Simulating Iraq.

-Might be sacrilege to the memory of Clarence Clemons, but I would LOVE to see Lisa sit in for him on “Edge of Glory” when Lady Gaga visits Springfield.

The video for “You and I” is far from Lady Gaga’s most original, and it’s interesting that she made the video with the so-called “Country Road” version of the song. This being Gaga, she’s in drag as her male alter-ego Jo Calderone (which I’d actually like to see more of), people are keeping mermaids out in the barn, and androids are meandering down the backroads:

I actually kind of dig that last bit of it. In a weird—but good—way, it reminds me of the car chase scene that introduced us to what a punk James T. Kirk was as a kid in J.J. Abrams 2009 Star Trek movie:

I think we often assume that the future’s going to look totally different than it is today, when actually a lot of it might look the same, but with tweaks. We’ll still have corn fields, it’ll just be robot cops who police them—and android hitchhikers who meander down them.

Or it could just be a riff on Lady Gaga’s collaboration with Farmville:

Either way, she seems pretty determined to conquer the heartland.

This post contains spoilers through the Aug. 4 episode of Louie.

I think Marc Hirsch is overstating the case slightly in this otherwise excellent piece on Louie to say that the character “exists outside of continuity,” because I do think events in the series resonate from one episode to the next even if they’re not followed up on directly. But I think he is absolutely correct that “C. K. is, in many ways, the preeminent short-story writer currently working in the television medium.” So there’s something fitting about the fact that this week’s episode is commentary on Louie’s diversion from the traditional sitcom format, and a short story that O. Henry might have written if he had kids and they wanted Lady Gaga tickets.

It was also a nicely feminist episode. Louis C.K. often goes to places that I’m uncomfortable with when women are on screen, but I’m generally uncomfortable, as I was in the episode where he ends up spanking a crying PTA parent, because of the things that are happening are true, not because they’re sexist. So there was something wonderful about seeing C.K. on a sitcom set, complete with a laugh track, treating the actress playing his wife badly, and unable to go through with a scene where he lies to her, admits it, and gets told “I love you.” “Why would you say that? I just did a really dick thing. Why would you say ‘I love you’?” he asks her, genuinely bewildered. And he just can’t get back into the groove and pull the sitcom, and by extension, a more stable life for his own real family, together. “This woman is trying to raise two kids and her husband keeps shitting all over her, chipping away at her furniture with his bad attitude. Are you folks seriously buying this shit?” he tells the director. “We’re making all the same mistakes, the wife that’s too hot for the dude, and the friend who I would never hang out with.”

This is the kind of thing that makes Louis C.K. such a favorite for those of us who think about comedy a lot, and have to watch the same thing over and over, and why he can get Dane Cook on camera and directly address the vote-stealing controversy between them—his work both implicitly and explicitly acts as a critique and as a remedy to our current state of comedy.

The reason that Louis and Cook end up in the same room is that, having disappointed her years ago by failing to pull off the sitcom, apologizing to infant her that “Sorry, baby, your dad is a comedian. It’s your tough luck. Okay. Let’s put you to sleep,” he’s now trying to make it up to her. Confident he’s nailed the perfect birthday present for her, Louis jokes around with her at a diner, telling her an envelope is “for the little old lady who lives in your nose” when she asks if the present is for her. But it turns out the joke is on him — his daughter’s moved on to Lady Gaga, a move that has Louis decidedly dismayed. “I want you to grow up to like yourself and have a job and be strong and think about who you are,” he tells her. “I don’t want you to think it’s all about your looks, and glamor, and stuff.” But she’s a good little fourth wave feminist, and asks him “Can’t I grow up like that and still like Lady Gaga?” Being a comedian may not make you an ideal parent, but as Louis proves time and time again on his show, it’s possible to make up for that.

There was something sort of sweet about Republican contender Tim Pawlenty’s admission last week that he’s fond of Lady Gaga, particularly the acoustic rendition of “Born This Way” from her HBO concert movie:

But however charming I find the Minnesota candidate’s confessed affinity for the pop phenomenon who’s also been one of the more politically active and effective celebrities of recent years, it’s entirely predictable that Republican commentators are jumping all over Pawlenty for it. Specifically, Laura Ingraham took to the airwaves this morning to declare that it was “idiotic” for Pawlenty to say he likes Gaga because both she and Rihanna are contributing to “cultural decay” in America.

If by “cultural decay” Ingraham meant a death of creativity, she has a point. “Born This Way” has clear and much-remarked upon similarities to Madonna songs. And David LaChapelle and Philip Paulus are suing Rihanna for ripping off their fashion photography for the video for “S&M,” the song that has Ingraham in a snit:

But freighting two 20-something pop queens with the downfall of American society? Not hardly. Gaga’s music is full of a deep skepticism about sex. In her personal life, she’s said that she didn’t enjoy sex until she was in a stable, monogamous relationship, a more realistic compromise on the evangelical promise that sex will be better if you wait for marriage. As for Rihanna, I don’t think Ingraham has to worry has to worry that teenagers are going to rush out and buy designer ball gags and harnesses. That stuff is expensive.