Once a contender for vice president and seemingly a sure thing for a Cabinet post, Gov. Kathleen Sebelius now has removed herself from consideration for a Cabinet job in the Obama administration. The reason cited makes sense: the state’s severe budget problem. But that won’t stop speculation about what else might have influenced her big decision (a 2010 Senate run?).
Reports of Barack Obama’s election are premature until the Electoral College votes Dec. 15. Chris Arterton, dean of George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management, told the Roll Call newspaper that until then, the title “Mr.” is more accurate than president-elect. The technicality has fueled a Web-driven push to convince electors that Obama’s election is unconstitutional, based on the bogus allegation that he was born in Kenya.
“Alongside the brutal public terrorism that fills the television screens, there is an equally cruel form of terrorism that gets almost no attention and thrives as a result: flinging acid on a woman’s face to leave her hideously deformed,” Nicholas Kristof wrote. Since 1994, a woman activist in Pakistan “has documented 7,800 cases of women who were deliberately burned, scalded or subjected to acid attacks, just in the Islamabad area,” Kristof wrote. “In only 2 percent of those cases was anyone convicted.” One thing that can be done about this is to pass the International Violence Against Women Act, which Kristof said would adopt a range of measures to spotlight such brutality and nudge foreign governments to pay heed to it. “That might help end the silence and culture of impunity surrounding this kind of terrorism,” he wrote. If you have the stomach, watch Kristof’s video about this terrorism.
