Take Kornblut's tips for "How to shatter the 'highest, hardest' glass ceiling," which include: Beat breast cancer. No, really. Surely, it's a tongue-in-cheek strategy suggestion, but given the number of female politicians who have successfully leveraged their triumph over the disease to improve their image — Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire, Connecticut Gov. M. Jodi Rell — it might just be one of the best. By contrast, only Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin have provided evidence that advice like "Don't take women — especially young women — for granted" is sound.

Then there's the "Women Leadership Styles" piece (which notes that former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina is "is pointing to her recent survival of breast cancer as evidence she is tough" in her campaign to unseat California Sen. Barbara Boxer), which identifies five models, including one ("The Businesswoman") that is admittedly "untested." Beyond that, the "Iron Lady" has a good track record internationally, but only Clinton and Madeleine Albright fall into that category in the U.S. We apparently favor "The Prosecutor" — e.g., Napolitano, Gregoire, Claire McCaskill, Amy Klobuchar, and Jennifer Granholm — although "The Young Mom" can sometimes be a crowd-pleaser. Reps. Wasserman Schultz, Stephanie Herseth Sandlin and Linda Sánchez have done all right with that, but then, the only female governor of Massachusetts, Jane Swift, might have been forced out because she gave birth while in office, and the other noteworthy figure in this category is Sarah Palin. On the upside, if Jane Swift waits until she's a bit older to try again, her maternal image could make her a fabulous "Grandmother in Pearls" — a love of children is evidently an asset as long as you're done raising them — à la Nancy Pelosi. Who, although she "is, after all, the most successful woman in American political history" is also the only woman working that particular model, making it not so much a "women leadership style" as "one woman's persona." And that's the whole list. (As Bitch Ph.D.'s M. Leblanc tweeted, "Women leaders, get them in ALL THE FLAVORS!!!")

So the path is clear for little girls who want to be politicians when they grow up: Become a successful prosecutor with young children and grandchildren simultaneously, and never let work interfere with your home life, or vice versa. Failing that, cultivate an image of toughness — and enough actual toughness to endure all the jokes about your either having testicles yourself or being inclined to remove other people's — or become CEO of a huge corporation and cross your fingers that that will work someday. Bonus points if you survive breast cancer. Oh, also, in the immortal words of Ani DiFranco (whom you probably shouldn't listen to unless you want to grow up to be some kind of commie, but still), "God help you if you are an ugly girl/'course too pretty is also your doom." If, like Clinton, you dare to have undereye bags in your 60s, you'll be savaged. If, like Pelosi, you have obvious work done to counter the criticism that you look too much like an actual aging woman, you'll be savaged for that, too. And if, like Granholm, you're younger and conventionally beautiful — hey, guess what! Also a problem! "Voters can find a woman attractive, but they don't necessarily think that translates into gravitas," writes Kornblut. Neither, apparently, do a Harvard law degree and experience as a prosecutor, at least until you fug yourself up in television ads. Says one of Granholm's advisors, "When we took it down a notch, people said, 'OK, she can be governor.'" God bless America.

And of course, there's Palin — an inescapable part of the conversation whether we're discussing beauty queen governors, female presidential contenders, moms of young children, the 2008 election or a laundry list of other issues. Her very omnipresence in articles and now books about women in politics only serves as a reminder of how few serious success stories there have been from which we can draw lessons for the future. Kornblut lumps her in with all the others in these short pieces, as though Palin's just one more highly accomplished woman butting her head into that glass ceiling, sidestepping the fact that — although she's taken her share of purely sexist criticism — the former Alaska governor's reputation suffers most because she distorts facts, presents ignorance as a virtue, translates the Constitution as saying that freedom of speech means freedom from criticism, et frickin' cetera. That this is one of the most visible women on the political stage — a fluke and a national embarrassment — is all the evidence necessary to prove that we still don't know jack about what it takes for a woman to succeed on merit at the highest levels. And when the number of successful female politicians is so pathetically small that even an expert on the subject is reduced to offering insights like, Umm, it probably helps to be an average-looking breast cancer survivor, and having kids is good except when it isn't, all that tells me is that we need to elect a hell of a lot more women before seeking patterns in their examples will be worth the trouble.

"Democrats are protecting this rationing 'death panel' from future change with a procedural hurdle. You have to ask why they’re so concerned about protecting this particular provision. Could it be because bureaucratic rationing is one important way Democrats want to 'bend the cost curve' and keep health care spending down?" Palin's post reads.

"Though Nancy Pelosi and friends have tried to call 'death panels' the 'lie of the year,' this type of rationing – what the CBO calls 'reduc[ed] access to care' and 'diminish[ed] quality of care' – is precisely what I meant when I used that metaphor."

Even for Palin, this is pretty brazen. It wasn't "Nancy Pelosi and friends" who gave that title to the "death panels" myth; it was an independent, non-partisan organization devoted to fact-checking. And her claim that she was referring to rationing when she first used that term is easily proven false, just with a cursory examination of the record.

In the post in which she coined the term, Palin wrote:

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

That's a whole lot different than a panel making broader judgments about care in the country at large -- even if it were engaged in "rationing," as Palin claims, it would still be different. Moreover, after that original post Palin and her people made it clear that she was referring to a provision (since stricken from the legislation) that would have ensured coverage for seniors who wanted advice on end-of-life planning.

In fact, Palin's statement on Facebook isn't even consistent with what she said on Twitter Tuesday, "[M]erged bill may b unrecognizable from what assumed was a done deal:R death panels back in?" The board referred to in her Facebook post couldn't be put "back in" the bill, because -- as she herself noted Wednesday -- it's in there now.

Coincidentally, on Tuesday Palin took to Twitter to comment on the Senate healthcare deal. And when she did so, she went back to a familiar topic.

"NOW w/the Prez "threatening" &Congress "rushing" is when we MUST pay more attention than ever 2what this HealthCare Takeover is all about," Palin wrote in one tweet. "[M]erged bill may b unrecognizable from what assumed was a done deal:R death panels back in?"

You almost have to admire the chutzpah it takes to write something like that for tens of thousands of people to see. The "death panels" were never even in the bill in the first place, so they were never taken out -- and it's not like Palin would have seen news reports that they had been removed from the legislation. But they are gone now (because of the former governor's intervention, no doubt), apparently; however, we have to watch out, because Democrats are just dying to sneak in a provision that would allow them to kill your loved ones. It's vintage Palin.

Palin took to Facebook in August to warn of a system "in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care." And she warned of "the Orwellian thinking of the president’s health care advisor, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel." Not two months earlier, a leading LaRouchite described Emanuel -- who's actually a leading medical ethicist and staunch advocate for those approaching the end of their life -- as "President Obama's leading representative on a Federal 'death council' drawing up a list of medical procedures to be used to deny care to elderly, chronically ill, and poor people, whose lives are considered of less value."

Ultimately, the genesis of the whole "death panel" idea didn't matter, at least not nearly as much as the notion itself. It had been bubbling up on the right before Palin got to it, coming from every conservative's favorite source for completely distorted information about healthcare reform, Betsy McCaughey, not to mention from Republicans who warned of "euthanasia" – much of the hysteria based on an innocuous provision that would have ensured coverage for completely voluntary counseling about end-of-life decisions, which middle class and wealthy families routinely obtain.

Luckily for the right, the press was there to help them spread this message. Some media outlets were better on this story than others, pointing out that what Palin and others had said was flat-out wrong, but the story was irresistible fodder for many, especially on television. The amount of coverage granted to the claims only added to the insanity, whether there was a debunking included or not. Television news was, of course, the worst offender -- CNN, for example, did fact-check the allegations at times, but because it was covering the story so often, there were also all too many times when what Palin had said was just reported as news; the actual facts weren't included. On the night that the former governor debuted the "death panel" term, CNN anchor Campbell Brown said only: "The debate over healthcare reform getting ugly. Tonight, Sarah Palin posted a long statement on her Facebook page calling the Obama plan, quote, 'downright evil.' She says it would force her disabled son to stand in front of an Obama death panel in her words."

Meanwhile, prominent conservatives were doing their level best to promote the idea of death panels as real. On his radio show, Glenn Beck said, "I believe it to be true." Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich went on ABC's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos" and backed Palin, saying, " You are asking us to trust turning power over to the government, when there are clearly people in American who believe in establishing euthanasia, including selective standards." And Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley stole the spotlight for himself when he said, "We should not have a government program that determines if you're going to pull the plug on grandma."

The influence this kind of coverage had was unmistakable. One poll conducted less than two weeks after Palin popularized the term found that 86 percent of Americans had heard about "death panels," and 30 percent -- including 47 percent of Republicans and 28 percent of independents -- believed the claims about them.

Those numbers were disturbing by themselves. But the saddest part is that all this hubbub obscured one simple truth: There aren't any death panels in the Democrats' legislation -- but private insurance companies ration care all the time, and sometimes the results are fatal.