1. The Female Thing
2. Mind the Gender Gap
3. Race Matters—and Class, Too
4. Winning Women Isn’t the Same as Winning
5. Besides, Women Keep an Open Mind
6. What About the Middle Ground?
7. The Gap That Matters
8. What Makes Women Tune Out
9. Pride and Prejudice
10. XX Marks the Spot
11. When Sisterhood Is Power
12. More Sense Than Sensibility
13. It Does Take a Village
14. Or a Cybervillage
15. The Political Is Personal
16. By the Numbers

SINCE 1964, more women have voted than men have, and since 1980, they have voted at higher percentages: 54 percent of voters in the 2004 presidential election were female. If women care less about politics than men do, why do they bother? In one recent study, women said that they vote to protect their interest. Whereas men said they vote because they enjoy politics. To a campaign strategist, the female vote — if you can get it — must look like the Chinese market does to an entrepreneur. Only a modest percentage has to want your product, and you’ll succeed beyond your wildest dreams.

See also: Where Did All Those Gorgeous Russians Come From?

16 Ways of Looking at a Female Voter

Frank Rich:

However much the Democrats might finesse differences on Iraq or any other issue in 2008, their best hopes for electoral victory still have less to do with their own ideas than with the sorry state of their opponents. Compared to the increasingly fractious and disheartened conservative coalition, the Democrats could pass for a model of coherence and unity. Compared to the Bush presidency, almost any conceivable Democratic ticket would seem a step up to the vast majority of voters eager to turn the page. The Democrats could yet lose the White House in 2008, especially if the general election becomes a referendum on the Clintons or race, but it would take the party's full powers of self-immolation to do so.

On the Democrats

Nose, face, spite.

Changes reportedly made last night in the stimulus package would reduce its effectiveness as stimulus. Although the package includes a reasonably designed tax rebate, the two most targeted and economically effective measures under consideration — a temporary extension of unemployment benefits and a temporary boost in food stamp benefits — were zeroed out, apparently at the insistence of House Republican leaders.

The two respected institutions that have rated stimulus options in recent days — the Congressional Budget Office and Moody’s Economy.com — both give their two highest ratings for effectiveness as stimulus to the two measures that were dropped.

Reported Stimulus Package Would Provide Little Immediate Boost Due to Removal of Most Effective Provisions

General David Petraeus has a sterling reputation, the love of the press, and the adoration of the GOP.

Don't be surprised if a Democratic presidential win in '08 starts an effort to recruit Petraeus as the Republican candidate in '12.

I wouldn't be surprised but I think it has zero chance of going anywhere.

Petraeus '12

George Packer:

The Clinton-Obama battle reveals two very different ideas of the Presidency.

From the recent archive, here's Manohla Dargis:

Americans consume a lot of garbage, but that may be because they don’t have real choices: 16 of the top box-office earners last weekend — some good, almost all from big studios — monopolized 33,353 of the country’s 38,415 screens. The remaining 78 releases duked it out on the leftover screens.

I doubt that most moviegoers would prefer the relentlessly honest “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” which involves a young woman seeking an illegal abortion, over “Juno,” an ingratiating comedy about a teenager who carries her pregnancy to term. But I wish they had the choice.

Here is Anthony Lane, this week:

He is a terminator, expert in the ending of advanced pregnancies, and you should be warned that “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” flinches neither from the procedures nor the outcome of his trade. There is plenty here to fuel both sides of the abortion debate: the grim and possibly fatal results of driving the practice underground will strengthen the hand of the pro-choice lobby, but, equally, when Otilia kneels on the bathroom floor, surveying the remnant of lost humanity, half wrapped in a towel, the look of dark and wondering pity in her eyes is enough to convince us that here is a deed of unutterable gravity.

Yet this is not an issue movie. We are not being forced to vote, and the characters are defined less by any stated beliefs than by the moral texture of their actions. Look carefully at Bebe as he unpacks his briefcase of crude tools: he is made faceless, filmed from chest to thigh, and that suits his status as a predatory machine. And, once he has departed, having exacted a terrible payment for his services, look at Otilia: She leaves Gabita to rest and goes, as promised, to her boyfriend’s parents’ house for a birthday dinner. There she sits at a table, surrounded by gleaming food and idle chatter, her thoughts miles away and fathoms deep. Again, hands reach in from the side, this time for pickles and wine, but the camera holds steady, minute upon minute, and we gaze at her, face to face. How can people feast when she has just come from the pits of degradation, and must shortly return to dispose of an unwanted fetus? Disposal, incidentally, is recommended via the garbage chute of a high-rise apartment building; try going from this film to “Sweeney Todd,” with its corpses dumped for comic effect, and see how long you last.

The Choice

Pew:

With the economy slowing and the stock market reeling, there is greater agreement among Republicans and Democrats that strengthening the nation's economy should be a top priority for the president and Congress in the coming year. By contrast, partisan differences over the importance of other domestic issues – such as dealing with global warming, helping the poor and providing health insurance to the uninsured – have all increased substantially over the past year.

An Even More Partisan Agenda for 2008

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that after three years of declining budget deficits, a slowing economy this year will contribute to an increase in the deficit. Under an assumption that current laws and policies do not change, CBO projects that the budget deficit will rise to 1.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2008 from 1.2 percent in 2007. Enactment of legislation to provide economic stimulus or additional funding for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan could further increase the deficit for this year.

The state of the economy is particularly uncertain at the moment. The pace of economic growth slowed in 2007, and there are strong indications that it will slacken further in 2008. In CBO’s view, the ongoing problems in the housing and financial markets and the high price of oil will curb spending by households and businesses this year and trim the growth of GDP. Although recent data suggest that the probability of a recession in 2008 has increased, CBO does not expect the slowdown in economic growth to be large enough to register as a recession. Economic performance worse than that suggested in CBO’s forecast could significantly decrease projected revenues and increase projected spending. Furthermore, policy changes intended to mitigate the economic slowdown would, by design, tend to increase the budget deficit in the short term.

The Budget and Economic Outlook: Fiscal Years 2008 to 2018

It's like SMS.

Bottled water has a huge environmental footprint, the critics now say. It takes immense amounts of raw material and energy to make all those plastic bottles. At the other, postconsumer end of the product life cycle, hundreds of millions of empty plastic bottles end up in landfills, in an era when it is increasingly difficult to find new waste-disposal sites.

And for what? There is no real benefit, the naysayers argue. Bottled water is less stringently regulated than tap water. Tests over the past several decades have shown that bottled water is about as good as tap water; some samples test worse, with contaminants that exceed Safe Drinking Water Act standards. Better taste? When blindfolded, taste testers can't typically tell which sample is from a bottle and which is from the tap.

Customers pay maybe a thousand times as much as they would pay for the same amount of water from the tap. They get little or no benefit for the extra expense, while society as a whole incurs the environmental costs. No wonder we are seeing something of a backlash.

...

We need to encourage technological innovations that provide us with adequate amounts of material goods while dumping lower levels of hazardous materials into our environment. For that, we will need a new, more vibrant, more adamant kind of environmental activism. That will happen, in turn, only if Americans reject the mirage of inverted quarantine, reject the seductive but false idea that there are purely individual solutions to our collective problems.

The Dangerous Delusions of 'Inverted Quarantine'

The vault opens; treasures await within.

Each year for hundreds of thousands of American women there is a wide gulf between what the law forbids and what they feel they must do. The author of this article, whose credentials are trusted by the Atlantic, is a college graduate in her forty-sixth year, the mother of three children, living with her husband and family in one of the many commuter communities in the East.

The Atlantic Online | August 1965 | One Woman's Abortion | Mrs. X

The Bush administration is beginning its last year in office by quietly scaling back its foreign policy ambitions as it struggles with new obstacles and rapidly dwindling influence.

The upshot is that the Bush administration is going to be spending the next year managing crises and tidying up messes until the next president takes over, rather than reaching legacy milestones, as officials recently had hoped.

Contrast this with George Friedman's expectations about the last year under Bush:

George W. Bush is not up for re-election, and there is no would-be successor from the administration in the race; this frees up all of the administration’s bandwidth for whatever activities it wishes. Additionally, Bush’s unpopularity means that each of the White House’s domestic initiatives essentially will be dead on arrival in Congress. All of the Bush administration’s energy will instead be focused on foreign affairs, since such activities do not require public or congressional approval. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, 2008 will see the United States acting with the most energy and purpose it has had since the months directly after the 9/11 attack.

I guess the LA Times is that conventional wisdom he's talking about.

Bush officials narrow foreign horizons