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When law firms institute family-friendly policies (flex hours, reasonable work loads), who benefits? That depends how you measure it. Mothers at these firms are neither more nor less productive than mothers at other firms, as measured by billable hours, according to a new study of 670 lawyers in Alberta, Canada, by sociologists Jean Wallace and Marisa Young. But fathers at family-friendly firms are less productive than fathers at old-style firms. At the same time, fathers with help at home, like stay-at-home wives and weekly cleaning services, increase their productivity at work, whereas women with stay-at-home husbands and cleaning aren't more productive.
What's going on here? Wallace and Young argue that fathers tend to consider breadwinning an all-important family contribution, so when they have more help at home, they respond by working harder. Also, men are far more likely to have a stay-at-home spouses than women are. Women, on the other hand, seem to sink more time into their kids, if they have it. The happy spin from the authors is that the family-friendly policies aren't hurting the firms vis-à-vis their women employees, which makes the policies seem less costly. The finding about the men working less, though, throws a wrench into the discussion, doesn't it? The authors ask, "How are men using their free timeas a result of working fewer hours?" and then cites other evidence that men may plow their time into more leisure activities. Is that perfectly understandable, or is it shirking? Who's modeling the good behavior here? It's hard to tell, but the gender split is there to be mulled over.
Over at Legal Blog Watch, Carolyn Elefant argues that billable hours are a bad measure of productivity. That makes sense to me as a reason that this study may not translate to other professions in which parents can argue they work more efficiently, squeezing more work into less time. But it doesn't seem like a salient criticism of these findings, since hours are firms' explicit measure of productivity.
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Anybody else read the NYT Magazine piece on Harvard's intentional virgins? It was in many ways right off-the-rack: Not all young people who are virgins on purpose are dum-dum religious nuts. Some of them—brace yourselves—have even infiltrated Harvard. And have complicated philosophical reasons for this lifestyle choice. Too complicated, in fact, even to take a stab at explaining. But don't sweat it, because underneath—who would have guessed?—they're religious nuts, too! With hilarious hang-ups, as you'll note when I torture Harvard's Head Virgin with completely disrespectful questions about just how far she'll go. So ciao for now and see you next time, when I pull the wings off butterflies. ...
OK, so it infuriated me, but it did sound one hopeful note. When the head virgin (who doesn't even order dessert after lunch, poor sensually starved child) debated a campus sex blogger (who voraciously gobbles every crumb of her ginger cake with cream-cheese frosting and raspberry compote, get it?) the two women showed mutual respect. They declined to supply the crowd with a catfight and refused to live up to their billing: Harvard's Jezebel Takes On Campus Virgin Mary. "The women themselves saw their encounter as a meeting of two feminist positions,'' the story says, and good for them. Afterwards, they probably headed out for a glass of water and a chocolate martini. Oh, and according to their chronicler, the men of Harvard indicated that after some serious reflection, they would indeed rather marry Mary Ann than Ginger—though I'm not sure either of them would say yes.
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Judith, I agree that the right messenger (at the right moment) could deliver most of your speech on gender. But maybe it would be easier for a woman to achieve liftoff. Anybody else remember Nicole Hollander's Sylvia cartoon on the wage gap? From her classic, Ma, Can I Be a Feminist and Still Like Men? (A: Sure, just like you can be a vegetarian and like fried chicken.) In it, four people respond to the question, How do you feel about equality for women? "I feel that women should get equal pay for equal work,'' says the white guy. "I think it's only simple justice that women get equal pay for equal work,'' says the Hispanic guy. "I think if a woman's doing the same job a man is doing, she should get the same pay,'' says the black guy. "Equality for women,'' says the Hillary stand-in, "means that our potential for physical, intellectual and emotional growth be supported and nurtured. It means being recognized as full and valuable members of this society. It means being given a chance to risk, to grow, to make a contribution to a better world, side by side with men.'' I think about this not infrequently. (Though perhaps not as often as I do my very favorite Sylvia, in which two hookers walk into a bar. One tells the other, "So he dresses himself up in this chicken suit, covers himself up with mostaccioli ... and then looks around real scared. He says: 'How do you feel ... about Title IX?' And I say, 'Senator, anything that turns you on, turns me on.'' And then I trigger the hidden camera.'')
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Rachael, Melinda,
1. I agree that Hillary would have a hard time getting away with the speech
I want her to make. As
Rachael says, abortion and workplace policies and matters of that ilk remain white-hot and divisive among women, not to mention in the general population. It is hard to wrap one's mind around a speech that bluntly addresses these issues and is uplifting and unifying to boot. Nonetheless, these are (I believe) the fundamental issues: control over one's body and workplace policies that level the playing field for women, despite women's child-bearing and mothering functions. They seem essential if we're to achieve a truly egalitarian society. (Yes, I still think we should seek an egalitarian society, even though I also think that it's unlikely, for biological and possibly linked social reasons, that women will ever be able or even willing to give up certain primary caregiving functions. The job of feminism today, as I see it, is to create a world in which we get to remain members of society in equal standing while raising our children in a serious, loving, attentive way. In this possibly idiosyncratic sense of the term, then, feminism isn't just for women anymore. It's for fathers as well as mothers. Maybe it isn't even feminism any more.)
As for the presidential race: It also seems evident that a woman seeking higher office faces obstacles that a man does not face, no matter what the color of her skin. Check out
Mike Kinsley's hilarious piece on the time-cost to a female candidate to meeting female standards of presentableness—roughly two-and-a-half weeks more spent primping during the average campaign cycle. Women operate under countless other double standards. You know which ones: They sound "overemotional" or they seem "calculating"; they're too sexy or not sexy enough; they made choices in the "Mommy Wars" that half of all American women disagree with, or else lack children and thus are't people American women can identify with. I don't see Obama taking any heat for having left the child-rearing to his wife. I wonder how a woman running for office would play to the public if she had left the child-rearing almost entirely to her husband.
In short, it seems as if we have arrived at something of a consensus, albeit a very rough one, about what racism is and why it's bad, whereas we still disagree about what sexism is and so don't agree on what's bad about it. That's why it's hard to imagine that speech.
2. Even though I see that it's hard to imagine, I don't think it is nearly as impossible to make as we think. The miracle of Obama's speech was that he made a number of thoughts that have long been unthinkable in America sound reasonable, even obvious--the notion that white America is suffused with casual racism; the idea that we need not demonize a man who says unacceptable things but does good in other ways. And so on. I put my list out there in a bald, unadorned way.
Emily suggested a way to wrap it up more elegantly. The speech would try to re-imagine family values. There might be other ways to give it. I'll admit that neither Kerry nor Clinton has found a way to do so. That doesn't mean that Obama couldn't, if he so chose; or that a female politician with similar levels of eloquence and courage wouldn't be able to put it across.
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If Dahlia can stand one more conversation about the conversation, I thought the grace note of Barack Obama's March 17 epic conversation starter were his few words about his grandmother’s quiet bigotry. He was, as pundit Jon Stewart said the next evening, speaking to the electorate as adults. At the same time the remark reminded everyone why his particular heritage is so appealing to lead the effort for change. If you missed it, Stewart and Larry Wilmore had a hilarious sample conversation of their own. All that was before, as Dahlia wrote, the "dialogue" devolved into “the sort of conversation that always goes badly in the end.” I missed the example of Obama being blacklashed on by the Fox & Friends hosts on March 21 when Obama’s reference to the elderly woman who raised him as a “typical white person” in a radio interview was apparently edited to sound offensive while the morning show hosts imagined insult. The New York Observer gives a flavor here:
Can you say ‘typical white person’ if you’re white?” asked Mr. Doocy. Of course not, noted Ms. Carlson. There’s no way that Senator Hillary Clinton could use the phrase “typical black person,” they noted. “So there is a certain double standard in society,” said Ms. Carlson. And also: “I sort of take offense at that line: ‘typical white.’”
Oddly, Chris Wallace, who anchors Fox News Sunday, thought they weren’t “providing the full context” and thought their spin was “excessive.” Chris who can be a bit snappish, called his Fox colleagues on their zeal. Fortunately, he did so using the live 2-way camera they had set up to promote Wallace’s Sunday lineup so we can all hear.
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Ouch. I think I just got my hair pulled. Guess it wasn't so memorable, but here is Kerry on the wage gap, which he spoke about on many occasions. Here he is on his plan to subsidize day care, which he tried to make a big deal of, though the press mostly ignored it. Both Kerry and his wife spoke about early childhood education every time I ever traveled with them—though much of the resulting attention, as here, seemed to focus on how we just couldn't afford such programs. Here he is being congratulated for reaching out to women "not only about abortion but in the questions of gender discrimination in the workplace over pay and family-related flexibility, and also the minimum wage, which affects the pay of more than 9 million women.'' And here he is on choice, which he talked about plenty. If Hillary has been more subdued on the subject of abortion rights, maybe it's because she agreed with what Kerry said after the '04 election—about how his party's determination to make pro-lifers feel like pariahs may have hurt him at the polls. According to USA Today, "In a meeting with liberal organizers after losing the presidential election in 2004, John Kerry infuriated some party stalwarts when he said the approach to abortion needed to change. He said Democrats should do more to welcome candidates and voters who say they're pro-life and to make it clear that being 'pro-choice' didn't mean being 'pro-abortion.' A survey in February by Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg concluded that the abortion issue was a significant factor in Kerry's loss of white Catholic voters, a key group that sometimes votes for Republicans, sometimes for Democrats. President Clinton carried white Catholics by 7 percentage points in 1996; Kerry lost them by 13 points.''
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One of Hillary Clinton's rationales for staying in the race when she was getting battered in a string of defeats was that she was so much more experienced than Barack Obama, that over time his inexperience would cause him to stumble. That would leave Clinton, having been so gruelingly tested over so many years, ultimately victorious. But isn't it ironic that now a central Clinton claim on the presidency—her experience—is making her look foolish. There have been her embarrassing, exaggerated claims that as first lady she helped bring peace to Northern Ireland and risked her life in Bosnia. And now the Boston Globe has effectively taken apart one of her oft-repeated accomplishments: that she created the State Children's Health Insurance Program. Turns out, according to the legislators who did create it, that she had virtually nothing to do with it, and that the (Bill) Clinton administration initially opposed it.
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Christie's New York will be auctioning a naked portrait of the French first lady, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, on April 10. I'm no prude, I'm certainly not a Victorian, and I commend the French for turning a blind eye to their politicians' private lives, but I'm starting to come around to the idea that we're better off with straight-laced statesmen.
Case in point: A CNN article on the French couple's first official visit to the U.K., which tries to, ahem, cover Carla's bod and Sarkozy's foreign policy all at once. The result is absolutely ridiculous: a nude pix lede, followed by the portentous quote, "We cannot afford to lose Afghanistan," back to the nude pix, then mention of a rumor that Sarkozy might boycott the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics.
I think the world needs dull, egghead politicians. Or maybe sexless ones, at least until the press grows up (and God knows we never will). I'm pretty sure the Qing Dynasty had eunuch bureaucrats, so there's precedent.
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Hey Melinda, when you get off your fainting couch, John Kerry did NOT give that speech—not in the memorable, reimagining-family-values way that Judith is imagining. And yes you're right, Rachael, these issues are divisive, and I guess I have to reluctantly agree that it wouldn't be in the Democrats' interest if Hillary or Obama decided to have a Big Gender Moment. Which is why, as Dahlia and Melinda started out by acknowledging, we're not having it. But I applaud Judith's list, especially in its attention to economics and employment, which never quite seem to get their due and catch on fire, and so leave two-working parent families scrambling to keep it all together. I'd like to think that someday the country will be ready for and will find the candidate who will make universal preschool seem as important as saving Bear Stearns.
On a lighter note, earlier this week I watched Fifty Nude Women by Margot Roth of New Yorker Talk of the Town fame and marveled at its winsome playfulness. The women in this 12-minute film seem entirely at ease in their bodies, of all varieties. I'm with Jezebel in that the video made me think about weight but in a much less tedious way that usual. The curves and rolls and wrinkles and scars and stretch marks signaled vulnerability and also a record of lives fully lived.
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Sorry for the delay; I was on the fainting couch, indisposed and hoping I'd remember to tell Chantal that while I appreciate her efforts, overlacing cuts off oxygen to the brain. Judith, John Kerry did give that speech, point for point—until he was hoarse, bless his heart. Yet when the votes were counted—or some of them, anyway, because I, too, have my conspiracy theories—all he had to show for it was a three-point narrowing of the gender gap. And if Hillary sent up that flare right now, the most likely effect would be a narrowing of her lead in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. She won't.
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Judith,
I think you make a great point that we can get a little too caught up talking about politicians' sexual peccadilloes when there are larger issues at stake. But I can't see even an imaginary speech by Hillary tackling some of the topics you address. And I think that illustrates some of the differences between race and gender that we've been talking about—I'm particularly reminded of Melinda's post, about the black woman who said she didn't have much in common with white women. There's a lack of shared experience. Most if not all blacks, regardless of their education or socioeconomic class, have felt the sting of racism at some point. And most if not all whites, for better or worse, right or wrong, have felt threatened by blacks, be it from ignorance, or angry rhetoric like that of Jeremiah Wright, or affirmative action.
In his speech, Barack Obama was trying to help each side understand where the other was coming from and get us past it. He called out the Rev. Wright and his own white grandmother. But some of the topics you suggest in a hypothetical speech on gender are still white-hot among women, and whatever Clinton could say would only be divisive. Abortion? Her long-established philosophy of "safe, legal, and rare" is something that I can accept, even as I disagree with her. She should leave it at that. Roughly half of all American women are anti-abortion, and we're not changing our minds. Subsidized day care? That's sure to stir up another battle in the Mommy Wars: Women who choose to stay at home aren't going to be pleased to see their husband's paycheck shrink (in the form of higher taxes) so that two-income families don't have to pay for child care. A shorter workweek? Well, OK, I could live with that. Let's at least make hiring a housekeeper tax-deductible.
That doesn't mean that the conversation about women's issues isn't vital or that we shouldn't be seeking out common ground among ourselves. I just can't picture a speech on these issues that would be sweeping, uplifting, and/or unifying.
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When did infidelity on the part of politicians become such an urgent feminist issue? From the outrage on the XX Factor over Eliot’s misdeeds, Bill’s affairs and Hillary’s toleration thereof, and, most of all, from the speech on gender that Melinda and Dahlia think Hillary should give, you’d think political philandering was the paramount issue facing women in our time. Public figures cheating on their wives, having sex with prostitutes, and—oh yes!—sexually harassing employees: These are the grievances we and Hillary are supposed to deem worthy of addressing the nation about. Sure, my fellow bloggers recognize that there are other important policy matters, but to gauge from word count over the past few weeks, this is what gets their juices going—the negative “gender signals called out by the media” (to quote Melinda and Dahlia) in their coverage of the various scandals. Poor, weak women being victimized by powerful married men. The bad examples Eliot and Bill and their consorts set for the young men and women of America.
Since when has it served the cause of women to demand that our public figures act like Victorian gentlemen? Since the era of Victorian feminism, of course, when women’s clubs joined with “social purity” clubs to police the morals of the time. (Anyone remember the Society for the Suppression of Vice?) Ladies, move on. Trust the several generations of 20th-century feminists who fought for such freedoms as no-fault divorce: Making marriage this sacred is not a good idea. For one thing, women philander too. Even sexual harassment is an issue feminists ought to handle gingerly, given the long history of institutions and politicians abusing sexual harassment codes to take down their enemies or violate civil rights. (See Margaret Talbot’s still-remarkable piece about the University of Wisconsin’s prosecution of feminist professor Jane Gallop, for an example.)
What didn’t Melinda and Dahlia put in “Hillary’s speech” that I think they should have? Here are a few things I’d have liked a speech on gender to address:
—Abortion and contraception. Our right and access to them have diminished steadily in the past eight years, and they lack a firm supporter in the Republican presidential candidate. Have women in America forgotten how grisly life gets without those things? If so, they should request 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days from Netflix immediately. The movie is set in Romania in the 1980s, when the crazy Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu had made both abortion and contraception illegal, but it could just as easily be us in a land ruled by the anti-choice crowd.
—Fairness in the workplace. By that, I don’t just mean equal pay and equal treatment, but the need for business and the professions to alter the criteria for promotion so that working women aren’t damned by their biology. In other words, rethinking how people come by tenure and partnerships and editorships and other leadership positions so that women aren’t penalized for, or forced out by, the decision to have children in their 30s.
—Day care—expanding it, funding it, regulating it.
—Public preschool education—making it universal.
—The length of the work day/week—given women’s “double shift,” a feminist issue if I ever saw one.
Anyone care to contribute to the list?
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Here's one thing George W. and Hillary have in common: She never was a big consumer of news. In fact, according to Carl Bernstein's book, during her Little Rock years "Hillary didn't read newspapers or watch television news. Instead, she listened to National Public Radio or classical music in the morning. If there was anything else she really needed to know, she figured, she'd be told about it early in the day, either by Bill on the phone or Vince in the office. But even in her earliest days as first lady of Arkansas, "she didn't want to read about things that would bother her and about which she could do nothing,'' said Betsey Wright. "She saw it as an irritant.'' So perhaps no one's made her aware of the David Brooks column you mentioned, Meghan. Not that she needs him to tell her it's over—and has been for some time, if you're going to be a total math drone about it. Honestly, if you didn't know better, you might even have begun to suspect she was hanging in there at least in part to do the maximum damage to her party's nominee, weakening his chances in the fall and building the I-told-you-so case for Hillary in 2012. But that couldn't be right. Right?
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This link is to the utterly bizarre video tribute by Hillary Clinton to Heather Mills—the mentally unbalanced newly ex-wife of Beatle Paul McCartney. Hillary, in a kind of zombie mode, gives a unified field theory tribute to Heather. In this four-minute accolade, Hillary credits Heather, in part, for New York's recovery from Sept. 11, Hillary's decision to introduce an anti-landmine bill, and Hillary's knowledge about life that we must "just enjoy every single minute of this beautiful gift that we've been given." She ends by saying, "God bless you, Heather." (The judge in Heather's divorce case has a somewhat different take on Heather's qualities, saying she is a self-aggrandizer with a tenuous relationship to the truth and an "explosive and volatile character".) The only explanation for this artifact I can come up with is that in a little-known episode Hillary was forced to make this tape while being held hostage by Heather, which must have been a far more perilous situation that Hillary's trip to Bosnia.
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Dahlia, I definitely agree that these "conversations'' on race and gender are no fun. Still, maybe the only thing worse than having them is not having them; we've been trying it that way more or less forever and where did it ever get us? Yesterday I was part of an online discussion on race and gender in the Democratic primary on Washingtonpost.com, and though the questions were great, I found it frustrating trying to snag at least a few of the balls whizzing by me when each one of them deserved a seminar-length give-and-take. One question I never even got to—because it was more than I could begin to address on the fly—I am still thinking about today. As I no longer have the questions, I'm paraphrasing here, but it was from an African-American woman who was writing in to say that she just doesn't feel she has that much in common with white women. Occasionally, there's a spark of connection over childbearing or -rearing, but in the main, she relates more to black men than to women of other races.
Now, that does make me feel sort of rejected—I feel like her sister and she doesn't feel like mine -- but it's interesting, too: Why is it that I'm imagining I'd feel kinship with women from Jupiter, and she doesn't see the female experience as all that formative? Donna Brazile told me the answer once, I think. This was when I was just starting to work on my book on how women make electoral decisions. (Short answer: Other-than-rationally, just like men do. Not unlike decisions in dating, really. Which is why our dutiful, "Oh, my top issue is health care,' answers to pollsters don't always mean that much.) Anyway, what Donna said was, you know, women don't vote as a block because we never had to go through something like the slave experience together. So the biological and cultural deal that I consider such a sealing bond just doesn't compare. (Does it?) My son who is mad for movies had us watch Sixth Sense for I think it was the 234th time this last weekend, and you know how the ghosts go away after the little boy finally listens to them? Cheesy, OK. But on race and gender, I do think there's a lot more we have to hear from one another.
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Interesting post by Andrew Sullivan in response to Hitchens' current piece in Slate about Obama and cynicism. I have to say I'm with Sullivan on this one. I think if the mask were going to come off Obama and reveal some foul, calculating monster within, it already would have. Sure, all politicians are to some degree calculating; they have to be, to survive at all. But Obama has really made such calculations as transparent as he can. And he has for the most part resisted stooping to the petty mudslinging that passes for political discourse today. Sure, we can catch him out on exceptions now and then. And I think there are some real questions about how untested he is, and whether he'll be able to make good on his many promises to the American people. But I don't find him to be a powerful hypocrite. Meanwhile, Hitchens' piece and Sullivan's response only underscore the very solid point of David Brooks column in the New York Times today: That whatever you make of Obama, it is time for Hillary Clinton to bow out of the race gracefully. Read it; it's more cogent than I can be. The power of language is real. And the longer Clinton stays in the race and hashes it all out with vicious political rhetoric, the more that power will be driven home to all of us. As Brooks says, Obama's ratings have already dropped in the polls.
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Gerry Ferraro thinks Obama's "base is African-Americans"? Noted campaign expert Obama Girl begs to differ. (Me, too, but I have nothing whatsoever to add to the tortured discussion of race vs. sex, so let's stick with Obama Girl for now.)
Anyway: Obama Girl has a new music video out—following on June's viral hit "I Got a Crush on Obama"—and her latest is addressed directly to Hillary Clinton.
Though Obama's gonna win it, you're sorta kinda staying in it
Sometimes in this campaign, you've got a crush on John McCain
Can't you see it's hopeless?
It's become an Obama-nation.
After calling on Hillary to drop out of the race—or at least stop attacking Obama—Obama Girl speculates that it's all just spurned love on Hillary's part:
"I know deep down, you're an Obama Girl ...
We all have a crush on Obama."
Take that, Gerry.
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I thought I was onboard with Emily about all the benefits of openly airing this buried anger and rage about race and gender. I’d been arguing for months that it was past time to lance this boil and just have it out in the streets about how mad everyone in the Democratic Party feels.
Perhaps I’ve read one too many livid blogs today or listened in on a few too many enraged racially charged debates this weekend, but I am starting to go a little wobbly at the ankles. Can someone remind me what’s truly served by a “conversation” about race and gender for its own sake? Are we progressing toward something better here? Is all this dialoguing fostering some new paradigm for talking about personal identity and politics? Or is this just the sort of conversation that always goes badly in the end? The kind that starts when some guy in a bar says, “Wanna hear what your real problem is?”
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Here is Geraldine Ferraro defending herself against Barack Obama's accusations. His base is African-Americans? What is it with this generation of American feminists? All she left out was "articulate."
Overall, Ferraro said, she thought the speech was "excellent," but she lamented that Obama did not go further in condemning Jeremiah Wright. She surmised that Obama was limited in that regard because he did not want to offend black voters, whom she called the base of Obama's support.
"I think they got as far as they could go politically," she said. "They're looking at their base. Their base is African-Americans. They're looking at that and they're trying to walk a very thin line. They don't want to offend the African-Americans, and this is the way he did it."
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I am curious about what all those people who think immigrants have such a fabulous free ride in this country think about this New York Times story about a 22-year-old Colombian woman, married to an American citizen, who was informed by a U.S. immigration agent that her application for a green card would sail right through—after a couple of blow jobs, that is.
According to the story, this was not even an isolated incident: "Money, not sex, is the more common currency of corruption in immigration, but according to Congressional testimony in 2006 by Michael Maxwell, former director of the agency's internal investigations, more than 3,000 backlogged complaints of employee misconduct had gone uninvestigated for lack of staff, including 528 involving criminal allegations."
In a conversation the Colombian woman taped on her cell phone, she pleaded with the agent not to force her to have sex with him: "If I do it, it's like very hard for me, because I have my husband, and I really fall in love with him.'' But when she tried to get out of the car where this conversation was taking place, he stopped her and made her perform oral sex. Too frightened to take the tape to the police, she eventually went to the newspaper, and, because there is a God, found reporter Nina Bernstein. Now the immigration agent has been arrested, but the woman's new husband—no Silda Spitzer he—has left her.
Is it fair to immigrants like this poor woman to leave them effectively unprotected by the law? And to all of you who've canceled your NYT subscription because it was mean to your favorite candidate or added a conservative voice to the opinion page, have you really thought about what we'd do without newspapers? Or without reporters like Nina who have the time and the inclination to actually listen to this woman's story and say, That happened to you? We'll see about that. If that day ever comes, I don't want to hear a word out of you.
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From the beginning, Spitzer's downfall has aroused the conspiracy theorist in me. A friend who had been skeptical of my take alerted me to this story in the Miami Herald, picked up today in the New York Post, and writes: "Not sure that it changes my view of how it had to end, but if the Post story is true, you are certainly correct about how it began and what it was for."
One mystery cleared up, and another raised: Can it really be that rare to have sex with your socks on?
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I was glad to see the
New York Times raise questions about the aggressiveness and anomalous nature of the Spitzer investigation and prosecution, but I was very taken aback by the answers, especially those given by the federal prosecutors. They sounded like they were trying to wriggle out of being held responsible. There are two aspects of the case that worry me, and that I think should worry anyone who would like to prevent the collapse of our civil liberties: first, whether Spitzer should have been investigated at all, and second, whether his situation warranted him being followed and staked out by large teams of FBI agents. The pat answer to all this is that, hey, he would have done it, but a version of the old childhood saying comes to mind here: His being wrong wouldn't have made it right.
First: Never having researched this issue, I don't understand the charge of "structuring," or the exact nature of the financial transactions that triggered the Suspicious Activity Report, but it is clear that they involved what the Times once called "apparent sleight of hand" with sums of money that otherwise fall below the threshold of concern, and that would probably not have attracted notice before the new financial regulations put in place after 9/11. Those rules were adopted to catch terrorists, but I wonder how many terrorists they have helped to catch, and whether, rather than protect our security, they have instead exposed citizens—us—to unduly intrusive oversight of our personal finances. Maybe one of the many of you with law degrees, or someone who covers the legal beat, has a more informed opinion on this. To me, it seems that we should be absolutely certain we know what we're agreeing to before we let the government investigate behavior that is not actually illegal, such as moving small sums of money around.
Second: According to the Times, the prosecutors argued that they had to go to the lengths they did to investigate Spitzer, even after it became clear that he wasn't bribing anybody but just paying prostitutes, because if they hadn't, they might have been accused of a cover-up. His prominence and importance did him in. What could they do? This answer, it seems to me, is mischievous. It is a prosecutor's job to exercise discretion about whether or not to investigate and prosecute, and most prosecutors, I would hope, spend most of their working hours saying no. Are the federal prosecutors now saying that, in the case of a highly visible elected official, all they can do is throw up their hands? That they no longer have the right to exercise discretion—even though they did with every other client in that sting? That's a pretty alarming thing to say, especially when they didn't just fail to exercise reasonable discretion, they threw the entire weight of the U.S. Justice Department into spying on Spitzer. If visibility or prominence is the standard for investigation/prosecution, and not the gravity of the conduct involved, then that's an open invitation to harass our public figures for just about anything. It strikes me that an attitude like that toward elected officials could subvert—has subverted—our democracy in a very dangerous way.
Prominence, moreover, is a very subjective standard; in the era of electronic surveillance and YouTube fame, who isn't prominent? It seems to me that public figures are liketerrorists in this way: They are canaries in the civil-liberties coal mine. As go the rights of public figures and terrorism suspects, so go ours.
One other thing: To respond to Emily's question about whether in
my last post I was claiming that sexism is worse than racism: I was saying that I thought Hillary Clinton had had a more horrifyingly personal encounter with sexism in her days as a public figure than Barack Obama has with racism. I was not making a blanket statement about racism vs. sexism, both of which strike me as equally brutal, insidious, and alive in our day. The context of my comment was the Woolf quote, which was about mockery and superciliousness and a very intimate sort of psychological harassment. I haven't read the Obama autobiography, but I find it hard to believe that he has been subjected to as much ridicule and deep, mean-spirited, unwarranted humiliation, as she has. (I have no doubt that he has encountered a great deal of racism—but doubt it has been as intimate as her brushes with sexism.)
And please don't say that her humiliation is Bill's fault. First of all, it started long before the Lewinsky affair, and second, what happened between Bill and her should have stayed between Bill and her. It should never have become public knowledge, and thus fodder for sadistic, voyeuristic, and yes, sexist awfulness. That it did, and the manner in which it did, is another good example of why the privacy of public officials needs to be protected from prosecutorial overreach.
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The Republican race for the White House turned out to be something of a snoozefest compared with the drama of the Barack Obama-Hillary Clinton contest. I've waffled among envy, relief, and worry that the lack of excitement actually means a lack of enthusiasm for John McCain. And, as Politico points out this morning, the fact that Democrats are raising so much more money than McCain is a sign that conservatives "have yet to coalesce behind their standard bearer."
But maybe John McCain doesn't need all the conservatives. A new poll from Pennsylvania (hat tip: Drudge) suggests that the divisiveness of the Democratic campaign might indeed hurt the party. The candidates have each inspired such passionate followings that 20 percent of Obama supporters and 19 percent of Clinton supporters polled have vowed to vote for McCain if their candidate doesn't win the nomination. It's hard to say if that will play out, but given that our past few elections have been so close that even a small percentage of defectors can make a big difference, I think for now Republicans of all stripes can be glad we didn't nominate Mike Huckabee or Mitt Romney, who have far less appeal to our Democratic friends.
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Rosa, I'm glad to know that Rev. Wright made it to the Clinton White House, but no, I don't think it's time to stop talking about him. Obama and the country are better off for his amazing and moving race speech, which Wright popping up on YouTube forced him into giving. All of this needs to be aired, and now, during the primaries. If Obama becomes the Democratic nominee, the Republicans are going to come back at him with another round or three of Wright. And if the party isn't ready to nominate Obama because he's got roots in the angry black community, alongside his message of hope, well, I think that's the wrong rationale, but let's get it all out there. No surprises. Or at least as few as possible.
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Noooo... it wasn't Monica.
It was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, of course, joining Bill and Hillary for a breakfast with "religious leaders" on Sept. 11, 1998. There is a lovely photo, too.
Q. Does this mean Bill & Hillary are closet Wright parishioners who share Wright's every opinion?!
A. Nope. But I think now we can all stop talking about Jeremiah Wright. If Wright was good enough to be considered a major national religious leader by the Clinton White House, then maybe Barack Obama wasn't uniquely obtuse in his decision to stay on at the church where Wright presided. And maybe Hillary Clinton's campaign should stop trying to use Wright to discredit Obama.
Just a thought.
And in case you were wondering what Bill, Hillary, the Rev. Wright, and the other religious leaders chatted about over their coffee and muffins: Bill took the occasion to repent. Even the absent Monica got an apology from Bill, at least in passing: "It is important to me that everybody who has been hurt know that the sorrow I feel is genuine. First and most important, my family, my friends, my staff, my Cabinet, Monica Lewinsky and her family, and the American people."
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Rachael, I don't think your sympathy for Hillary is misplaced. But I think perhaps you are not cynical enough. I've always assumed that the Clintons had a purely political marriage. So when you ask, "Wouldn't it be easy for Hillary to pop down to the Oval Office and see how Bill's doing or ask him if he wanted to serve the red wine or the white at their dinner that night, on a quiet Sunday afternoon?" I wonder, what if she had? Would she care if she found "that woman, Ms. Lewinsky," under Bill's desk? I always assumed she would not in the same way that you or I would care if we walked in on our husbands with another woman, except that it would be a pain in the butt for Hillary in political terms. (How to keep it quiet? How to explain it? etc.)
Do the Clintons love each other in the way that married people love each other? I just assumed they were still together for political reasons only.
Why does a man, or woman, have to be married to be successful in politics? Why couldn't Hillary have ditched Bill then and gone on to have her political career? Sadly, I don't think she stuck around for love.
Also, I do find it mean-spirited for the AP to cross-reference Hillary's public schedule with the Starr Report. After all, she did nothing wrong.
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Hillary Clinton released her "public schedules" from her days as first lady, and Ann Althouse has a good riff on how Hillary was a very "First Lady-y First Lady." But—and I suppose it was bound to happen—the AP went through Mrs. Clinton's schedules and apparently cross-referenced the Starr Report, and the result is a half-dozen or so incidences of Bill Clinton trysting with Monica Lewinsky while Hillary was at the White House.
I had two immediate reactions. First, I felt sorry for poor ol' Hillary. Bill is such an unrepentant philanderer that he had no qualms mocking his marital vows right under his wife's nose. Plus, Hillary's lived with this elephant in the room for the whole campaign. And now, boom, here it is out in the open. But then, a more cynical reaction: Could it be that Bill didn't worry about getting caught because Hillary was aware and lived with it because a scandal could have tainted her political future? Even when I'm feeling cynical, though, I still feel for her.
For some reason, this particular encounter really stands out for me: "Jan. 7, 1996: On a Sunday afternoon, Lewinsky and the president spent most of the afternoon in the Oval Office. The first lady and the president had a small dinner with 20 people at ‘the Old Family Dining Room' at the White House." Was that particularly daring of Bill? Wouldn't it be easy for Hillary to pop down to the Oval Office and see how Bill's doing or ask him if he wanted to serve the red wine or the white at their dinner that night, on a quiet Sunday afternoon?
So, colleagues, is my sympathy for Hillary misplaced? Or is my cynicism?
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I love that Woolf quote, Judith, and it's sadly apt, lo this century later. And I think you're right that's both Hillary's own doing and a product of how s