The Nation: “Women, by and large, are leery of the new right-wing female politicians, but men are far more receptive. Palin has a much larger gender gap than her ideological persuasion would predict: men are split 44 to 45 between those who hold favorable and unfavorable views of her; for women, the split is 35 to 58, according to a National Journal poll. Says Christie Whitman, ‘Palin appeals to more men than women. It was the white men in the party who put her on the ticket [in 2008], thinking that women who would have voted for Hillary would vote for her. That was dumb. They weren’t going to buy into that.’ In a recent survey presenting respondents with a hypothetical matchup between Palin and Obama, Obama beat Palin by 13 points among women, but men preferred Palin by 2 points. In other words, if it were up to men, Palin might very well become president in 2012 (if it were up to white men, she’d be a shoo-in).”
Asians Out of Work Longest Among US Minorities
NPR: “The community is reinforcing in good times, but during a downturn — more so than other minorities — Asian-Americans lack the networks or language skills to find jobs outside their community or industry. And whereas Latinos of different nationalities are bound by a common language, there are about a dozen languages spoken in the Asian-American community.”
Feministing: “So I could date women and maybe have a better chance of finding an emotional equal (I know lots of them aren’t particularly facile with their emotions, too). Turns out, I’m mostly attracted to dudes, so I’m trying to learn how to have boundaries in my relationships so I don’t end up exhausted or bitter at helping guys I love figure out their emotions all the time. I’m also hoping to someday raise a boy who is adept at naming and managing his own emotions. This is some of the major undone work of the feminist movement.”
Sarah Palin: Still Claiming (Falsely) That Health Reform Expands Abortion Access
Dana Goldstein: “None of the mainstream news organizations reporting this event fact-checked Palin’s claim that the health bill expands access to abortion. It does not. Just to review recent history, President Obama and the pro-choice majority of the Democratic Party largely capitulated to the party’s anti-abortion rights, Blue Dog faction in order to pass the bill. The result is that under health reform, newly-insured women will find it very difficult to access insurance coverage of abortion”
Mass Rapes In Congo Reveal U.N. Weakness
New York Times: “But many critics contend that nowhere else in the world has the United Nations invested so much and accomplished so little. What happened in Luvungi, with nearby peacekeepers failing to respond to a village under siege, is similar to a massacre in Kiwanja in 2008, when rebels killed 150 people within earshot of a United Nations base.”
Elections are likely to trim number of women in Congress:
USA Today: “Bottom line: Independent analysts predict that the number of women in Congress — currently 56 Democrats and 17 Republicans in the House, and 13 Democrats and four Republicans in the Senate — will decline for the first time in three decades. The drop would come two years after a string of breakthroughs, when Hillary Rodham Clinton was the first woman to vie seriously for the Democratic presidential nod, Sarah Palin the first woman nominated for national office by the GOP and Democrat Nancy Pelosi the first woman elected speaker of the House.”
Re/Visionist 