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Meet Sara Blakely of Spanx Image: Ben Baker/ReduxSpanx Cool Billion

Sara Blakely has been getting half-naked in public for the last decade, writes Forbes. Today her Spanx empire is valued at $1 billion by four Wall Street investment banks, making her the youngest woman at 41 to create a billion dollar business with no inheritance or help from a husband.

Blakely owns 100% of her company and she has no debt. Spanx is to slimming undergarments, writes Forbes, as Kleenex is to tissues. Spanx nets annually an estimated 20% of revenue on sales of $250 million and has never spent a dollar on advertising.

The entrepreneur has three serious phobias — fear of heights, fear of flying and stage fright — and now has the upper hand in all of them. Listening to Sara Blakely talk in her Forbes interview, she also shares the reality that she flunked her law boards twice.

The result was a new career and outstanding success for America’s specialist in smooth butts.

Sara Blakely Forbes Interview

Yoga Lovers Tiff

Sonia Jones with Pattabhi Jois by Michael Halsband/Landov.Sonia Jones, the lithe blonde married to hedge-fund billionaire Paul Tudor Jones, has a new business relationship with the family of the late Ashtanga-yoga master Krishna Pattabhi Jois. A chain of yoga studios and boutiques are on the horizon, writes Vanity Fair. ” That’s got many of Jois’s devotees in a distinctly un-yogic twist.”

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War on Women

Mike Huckabee, Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesOn April 2, Rush Limbaugh gets some serious competition in the new Mike Huckabee show, launching in Rush’s noon-3 time slot. Huckabee would be a concern under any circumstances, writes David Frum for The Daily Beast, but the recent furor over Limbaugh’s attacks against Sandra Fluke make Huckabee — who promises to run a much more civilized program — even more attractive to many.

At a time when the talk radio audience is dropping, Rush Limbaugh’s business model may be crashing around him.

He (Limbaugh) actually charges radio stations for his content: up to $1 million a year in a major market. Plus, he charges the highest ad rates in the business. Those two revenue streams—multiplied by more radio outlets than anybody else in the industry has—have made Limbaugh a very rich man. But those revenue streams always depended on Limbaugh upholding his end of the bargain: delivering the audiences. And on that count, Limbaugh has been notably failing.

Industry estimates are that Rush Limbaugh’s audience has dropped in half over three years. The listeners still engaged are the most ideological and right-wing. Rush says his advertisers — now on a two-week national time out from the show — have nowhere to go.

Enter Mike Huckabee with a slogan of “more conversation; less confrontation.” Rush Limbaugh’s audience was 72 percent male in 2009, more male than almost any other program or radio or TV.

Girl’s Club Says ‘Ban Rush’

We agree with Jane Fonda, Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan, co-founders of the Women’s Media Center, comparing Rush Limbaugh to Josef Goebbels, the man who promoted Hitler’s racist, genocidal policies in Nazi Germany.

We can’t support their call to ban Limbaugh from the people’s airways, because it makes him a martyr. There is every reason to believe that Limbaugh’s influence will be waning soon, with Mike Huckabee going head-to-head in the same time slot.

We do support the statement by female vets, including Katherine Scheirman, former chief of medical operations in the US Air Forces, demanding that Limbaugh’s bile be dropped from the American Forces Network.

Women serving in the military shouldn’t be working with men who spend their time off listening to Rush Limbaugh calling them feminazis. Increased rapes and assaults are up in the military.

Esquire weighs in with an in-depth, supportive piece on behalf of women: It Is a War on Women, and It is Not Stopping. The problem goes far beyond Rush Limbaugh’s big mouth, writes Charles Piece. Women’s rights and bodies are being brutalized.