Matt,

Obama supports rehabilitation for young, NON-VIOLENT gang members, and he does not support tougher penalties for gang-related crimes as opposed to other crimes.

That’s all it is. i didn’t do the proper research. I just took a Chicagoan i met on the net at her word. It was very stupid of me.

Matt Erikson:

‘TalkLeft: the politics of crime’ has some useful info, credit to the blogger Jeralyn.

No he didn’t vote specifically for early parole for sex offenders as far as i can see. I’m starting to think it is a racial misinterpretation: he refused to vote to toughen penalties for gang-related violence, (which often includes gang-rape). He said something about causing a disparity in sentencing for gang members (who are likely to be African-American or Hispanic) and other violent offenders.
Perhaps this rumour has soemthing to do with his support for rehabilitation of young gang members in Chicago in lieu of jail time. Some of those kids would’ve been involved in gang-rape.

i have posted about this once elsewhere, i will retract and reword my concerns.

Thanks, Matt.

i understand it was in the Chicago legislature. Shouldn’t that be on the internet? I got it from a friend who should know. Perhaps she is mistaken.

And yes, sex crimes statistically have a high rate of recidivism. If you can’t find that on the net, i can’t help you. It is something i learnt in law school and criminology many years ago. i doubt the nature of the crime has changed. It reflects an attitude towards women that objectifies and dehumanizes the victim (or diminishes her enough in relation to himself) so the perpetrator can do whatever he wants. Serial killers do the same thing to their victims, as do porn films, and wife-bashers/killers. This attitude usually doesn’t change even with intensive counselling. So they do it again. Bear in mind the statistics are on the light side because a lot of women are ashamed to report a rape. You would be too, if you’ve ever seen a rape trial, or media treatments/public opinion on some rape victims who aren’t lily-white.

If i have been inadvertantly slandering Obama, i apologize. Please post here again if you can confirm or deny for the benefit of future readers.

Honky,

you don’t have to worry so much about Democratic women voting for McCain. It is the men who admire him as a POW that will vote for him, not the women who know they will be disenfranchised by him. Collectively, we waste so much time bashing women when the worst problems lie elsewhere.

If HRC becomes the useless VEEP, a lot of people will blame her for any mistakes Obama makes. That’s just the way we are, unfortunately.

‘If the threat of voting for McCain is an attempt to get Obama’s attention, it is probably unnecessary.’

Honkybonk, if it wasn’t necessary they wouldn’t be doing it. It’s not called terrorism, it’s called activism. At least it is when it doesn’t pertain to feminism. They aren’t threatening to blow Obama up.

My use of an ‘absolute term’ made perfect sense in context. Why don’t you read that paragraph again? Or are you being disingenuous? If so, please don’t comment on my posts, because you just waste my time.

Obama voted for early parole for sex offenders. Most of whom, statistically speaking, get out of jail and do it again and go back to jail then get out of jail and do it again. Hell, they are providing a public service, right?

Did O do this because he is uninformed/ignorant of the very real consequences (for women, mostly young women) of such a vote? He has two young daughters. What’s his excuse?

Honky! Spell it, my love! P-A-T-R-O-N-I-Z-A-T-I-O-N !!
See? the widdle girwal taught you somefink!

Dear Honkybonk, you characterising my righteous anger at your patronising mode of expression as a temper tantrum is prejudiced and arrogant.  It is the attitude under your post that is wrong.

You misunderstand my ‘temper tantrums’. I am perfectly calm, i am just free from social contraints in my choice of words.

Like a bird on a wire,
Like a drunk in a midnight choir,
I have tried in my way
to be free.

i am always in control. Emotion itself isn’t the problem. A lack of emotion is just as bad, sometimes worse, than a lack of control.

I have signed my real name, because i believe in what i am saying. How about you?

Ellen Goodman’s comments are liberal feminism, as defined by Allison Jagger, at its worst. Unfortunately, politics is a dirty business. The sour-grapes complaint expressed by Ms. Goodman isn’t so much that our society tolerated misogynistic attacks against Sen. Clinton but that it would not tolerate racist ones against Obama as well. Politics is a form of war, and, as they say, “All’s fair in love and war,” which is to say, of course, that nothing is fair in either love or war, or politics.

Speaking of war, Ms. Goodman says nothing of the fact that Sen. Clinton’s loss of the nomination has less to do with misogynists preventing women from breaking through that elusive political glass ceiling than the public’s repugnance of the failed domestic and foreign policies for which Sen. Clinton and her husband have been, and continue to be, responsible, above all her vote in favor of authorizing military force against Iraq. How many of the women who supported Sen. Clinton’s bid for the Democratic Party’s nomination ever considered what that vote enabled? How many of them grasped that she had access to classified documents that made the administration’s weak case, but she didn’t bother to read them? (That makes her fit to be commander-in-chief?!)

If it’s getting even that Ellen Goodman and other women supporters of Hillary Clinton think they need, I suggest they think of it instead as evening out their awareness of what the Clintons have done to the women and children of Iraq over the past two decades, and the reasons why so many Democrats, including feminists, rejected her. I wonder, for instance, how many of the women who supported Hillary Clinton noticed that Madeleine Albright was her foreign policy adviser, or remembered the part she played in inhumane policies against Iraq. Albright--as the first woman Secretary of State in US history, mind you--happily went along with the economic sanctions against Iraq which was responsible for over a million deaths from starvation, most of them children. Ms. Albright defended the policy, saying, “..the price, we think, is worth it.”

When Sen. Clinton voted in favor of an illegal invasion of Iraq, she continued the same dastardly policies against the women and children of Iraq that her husband and Albright had initiated. Whatever the price might be in civilian human lives, she and others who gave the administration the vote they wanted to invade Iraq apparently thought it would be “worth it.”

While Hillary Clinton’s supporters nurse their wounded liberal feminist pride, which is more based on the good they believe that comes from the image of a woman’s breaking a glass ceiling than on helping their less fortunate sisters to rise up from the dank basement, perhaps they’ll peruse the widely available information on the pain and suffering that US--not Iraqi--weapons of mass destruction used by our military since the Gulf War of 1990-91 have caused our soldiers and Iraqi civilians. Where is the outrage among US women for the lies the Department of Defense has been repeating to this day about the negligible harm of Depleted Uranium weapons?

I for one do not mourn that Hillary Clinton was defeated. Women like Madeleine Albright, Sen. Hillary Clinton, Sen. Mary Landrieu, and Condoleezza Rice go to show that war crimes are an equal opportunity industry, and women can be just as skilled at it as men. So, cheer up, women. Defeating Ms. Clinton is a step forward for women’s and children’s human rights throughout the world.

Rather than a prolonged mourning over the Clintons’ loss, we should all count our blessings. Liberal feminists like Ms. Goodman were responsible for electing Louisiana’s first female governor. You might have heard what a disaster that turned out to be. There are competent women who also have impeccable integrity. I don’t mind waiting for her to come along, even if it’s in my daughter’s lifetime and not my own.

“Get Even as Voters. Until now, Democrats have taken our votes for granted. Where else would progressive women go? Democratic leaders have often seen these women as a one-issue, pro-choice group. It’s not enough.”

Your article is half nonsense.  Obama just broke through a much tougher ceiling than Hilary Clinton faced.  Since 2000 Clinton has been considered a strong candidate for the presidency.  No one took Obama seriously until he started winning.

As for you statement that Democrats take women’s votes for granted, that’s nonsense too.  Yes, women vote slightly more for Democrats than the do for Republicans.  But it’s a close call and their votes can hardly be taken for granted.  It is blacks who overwhelmkng vote Democratic who have a better claim that they are taken for granted.

Of course, being taken for granted has it advantages.  That is, it’s better than being written off, which is pretty much what the Democratic Party has done for white men in the last 30 years.  The funny thing about this year is, with a white woman and a black man as the two front-runners, for the first time in years the Democrats actually have made some attempts to reach out to white men.  If blacks and women didn’t they live to see the day where they would be contenders, I didn’t think I’d live to see the day where the Democrats would reach out to me.  An interestng year.

White Guy

‘An attitude of “I’ll blow the whole thing up if I don’t get my way!” will show an immaturity that will not convince doubters that women are ready to lead.’

Oh, you mean it hasn’t always convinced people that MEN are ready to lead? That is in-cor-rrrrrect.

Why do those doubters need to be convinced in the first place, ronky? Do you actually think there AREN’T millions of women the world over who have already proven their leadership chops? They have since the beginning of time. But are we all undeveloped child-adults to people like you?

Why don’t you wake up to reality? Do you even know where your own arse is?

FYI, i sincerely doubt any female democrat is going to vote for McCain out of spite, it is just an expression of anger, demanding Obama hear them, when they have felt so ignored and dismissed for too long. (that was the whole attraction of voting for a chick, you know?) But the media’s prolonged exaggerated treatment of that expression is, i’m afraid, sexist.

Like you, i suspect.

i wanted to return to a point Ellen brought up briefly above: the pro-choice issue. If one candidate is pro-choice and the other is anti-choice, that effectively neutralizes the most powerful voting block in the country, as there is no other factor that would be more crippling to the rights and progress of women than if they should lose abortion rights. Most rational women cannot vote for an anti-choice candidate without knowing that they are destroying their own status as human beings in society, so if there is only one pro-choice candidate, women can be safely ignored on wider issues. If both candidates were pro-choice, women’s issues would come into play.
This, of course, is probably why the issue has been stoked back into prominence in recent years. Doesn’t that just make your gorge rise?

that Obama, the alpha male, will lose to McCain, the even more alpha male. Whereas HRC, if her people had gotten behind her, would’ve creamed him. Even if, as Carter says, the Clinton-haters came out in force. Women who’ve never voted before may have come out in equal or greater numbers. (It’s like playing chess, right? You have to plot ahead.)
‘What are we going to do about the bitch?’ Well, Repubs, congrats.
With everyone’s favourite female dartboard out of the picture, Obama may soon fall under the wheels of the conservative media hate machine. But, despite what i have said in other posts, i wish Barack and Michelle luck. They are not so much hope and change as they are the last line of defence.
McCain is just going to grow in popularity, methinks. Because that is what a war-loving patriarchy does: it worhips the warrior (and butchers him) with pomp and ceremony.
The other day i was dismayed to hear an intelligent, vastly-educated theologian say that if the concept of equality was not based on equality in the eyes of God, HE DIDN’T KNOW WHAT IT WAS BASED ON!!! Is there a more succinct illustration of the normalisation of abuse of power in our society? That this brilliant man could not see that any seemingly natural hierarchy is based on the abuse of power? That the people who have power over others use it to claim more than their fair share, is seen as normal instead of a kind of social sickness?
Does such a society deserve peace? Do any of us, as individuals with such unconscious unjust attitudes towards each other, deserve peace?
Peace isn’t earned by blood-letting, it is earned only by conspicuous fairness. Love, in other words.

Thank you Ellen well said.  I am taking a very hard look at Mr. Obama’s scant record and words, and I am afraid to say he falls very short. 

The latest the comments made at AIPAC and the promises he has made.  This man has gone farther than Bush when it comes to Jerusalem.

It appears to be business as usual.  This I will not forget come November.