It's Cindi Leive, the editor of Glamour magazine, here. A few weeks ago, we arm twisted Kenneth into guest-blogging on glamour.com's political blog, Glamocracy, and I told him I'd return the favor here.

I figure plenty of you reading this blog are women --- so, really, is there anything to write about right now except Hillary Clinton? Now that the dust is cleared and the Democrats finally have a nominee, I've been shocked at how NEGATIVE all the coverage of Hillary's presidential run has been, and I'm worried about the downbeat message that negativity sends to other women considering a political career. While Hillary's supporters say they're still progressing through "the stages of grief," media watchers are bemoaning the "feral" quality of the sexism she faced during the campaign---a theme that's come up repeatedly over the last six months. "If Hillary can't even get the nomination," said one political expert at a March 30 panel in Boston, "I don't think we'll see another woman run and win until my daughter is a grandparent."

Seriously? Women are supposed to feel discouraged about what happened to Hillary? Now, I'm a girl-power girl all the way, with a five-year-old daughter who's always saying, "Mommy, when you get done being an editor, can you be president?" (For the record, sweetie, no. Mommy had a little too much fun in college.) I spend my professional life cheering young women on to pursue their dreams and break through barriers. But to me, Hillary's riveting, neck-and-neck race looked like a victory --- not because of how short she came up, but because of how far she got to begin with.

Seen against that depressing backdrop, you have to wonder what anyone who questions the door-opening quality of Hillary's campaign is smoking. So what if one crackpot yelled "Iron my shirts!" on the campaign trail, and pundit Chris Matthews called her "witchy"?

In the presidential marathon, Hillary made it roughly 225 million dollars and 18 million votes farther than any woman ever had before and it seems clear that had she not been running against, oh, the most gifted candidate in decades, she could have snagged the nomination, and maybe the presidency too. The distance she came should lay to rest once and for all the question of whether a woman can run for president. She already has.

For young women, seeing that, knowing that, is transforming. After all, as a Brookings Institution study found last month, women who do run for office tend to win as often as men do -- the real problem is that they just don't run. Hillary's example should change that, for women of both parties. Is it far-fetched to think that my own kindergartener is just a little more likely to consider politics as a career having grown up exposed to Hillary's constant front-page presence? I don't think so. As the cliché goes, before you can be it, you need to see it.

Years ago I interviewed the great judge Martha Craig Daughtrey---the first female U.S. attorney in Tennessee and at the time the sole woman on her state's Supreme Court. I was breathless over her historic resume: How did it feel to do all that pioneering? "Oh," Judge Daughtrey shrugged, vaguely annoyed by the preciousness of the question, "someone was bound to come along and get those firsts one day or another."

So we've gotten the First Woman thing out of the way; now let's get on with it. Don't let the media naysayers convince you otherwise: The door's open, waiting for you to walk through it.

[image: Hillary Clinton via Wikimedia]

Warning : This Amnesty International advertisement about torturing by waterboarding may be too upsetting for some of our readers.

Christopher Hitchens is the curmudgeonly self-described polemicist and intellectual that most recently has been stationed at Slate.com. From his cyber column, he's been known to throw atheist molotovs to the theocrats of the American right wing and verbal judo blows to two of his most detested foes, the Clintons.

Yet even though he's no friend of the extreme right, he's been a defender of George Bush's foreign policy and a rabid apologist for the invasion of Iraq. Not of Abu Ghraib or torture techniques, but certainly for the war.

Which is why I find it fascinating (although not shocking given his propensity for pulling self-promoting stunts) that when asked by Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter if he'd like to be tortured with waterboarding by former military Special Forces, he gladly accepted :

You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it "simulates" the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning--or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure. The "board" is the instrument, not the method. You are not being boarded. You are being watered. This was very rapidly brought home to me when, on top of the hood, which still admitted a few flashes of random and worrying strobe light to my vision, three layers of enveloping towel were added. In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited for a while until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose. Determined to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea, I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and--as you might expect--inhale in turn. The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don't want to tell you how little time I lasted.

The men and women who show them their techniques for resisting waterboarding were training in the art of SERE, Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. Their lessons they learned in waterboarding were for survival. The didn't learn waterboarding so they could torture enemy combatants. They were taught waterboarding so they could survive it in the event they became prisoners of war.

Hitchens may be fool to support the Iraq War but he is not an unethical fool. His article is an argument for respecting the Geneva Convention and for the most basic respect for human rights even in the middle of a terrible war.

I have a lot of problems with a lot of what Hitchens writes but it's when he writes articles like this one that he earns my respect.

We're in a classic catch 22, not unique in our history. The dilemma is that until we believe the economy has already gotten better, it can't get better.

Until enough of people are comfortable that all is stable and the worst is behind us, they won't feel comfortable relinquishing (spending or investing) their precious remaining dollars. However, until they do, the economy can't get better.

The inverse of this is also true. The economy will continue to get worse if people simply believe it isn't getting better.

There is only one other circumstance I can think of where perception similarly must precede reality, and while it potentially trivializes this message, it's fashion. Unless people who are cool decide to wear something they believe is cool, is it?

In regard to the realities of America's Great Depression (which was about the state of our economy, not our wardrobes) President Franklin Roosevelt addressed the perception issue when he said that "the only we have to fear is fear itself."

So, ironically, in looking to choose our new leaders, it does matter, because he who can most likely inspire us best to feel best about our realities (real realities or perceived ones) as well as about our potential, is the one who can most likely get the economy onto its feet.

We need to remember that the stakes are high, and that it's important to be conscious of for what we stand, as well as in what we stand.

[Image Credit: USA-satellite.jpg by U.S. Government from Wikipedia]

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it (for now).

Intrigued? Or maybe just dumbfounded...

When we're in the midst of a food crisis -- rice costs are at an all-time high, simple foods like tomatoes are posing serious health risks, and the politics surrounding US beef has South Korea in a state of panic -- how on earth can anyone justify spending five years and untold millions researching a "food" that delights more than it sustains?

Simple: understanding the genome of cocoa will help produce better beans, more resilient to disease, and thereby benefit the estimated 6.5 million farmers who provide us with the raw material to make those delectable treats.

Of those farmers, around 70 percent are in Africa, a poverty- and disease-stricken continent that can use all the help it can get. If the project benefits those African cocoa farmers, their economies can only become stronger in return. That is, provided Mars and IBM share the wealth.

The prognosis on that is positive, too: the Mars company says it will make its research freely available via the Public Intellectual Property Resource for Agriculture, which supports agricultural innovation for humanitarian and small-scale commercial projects.

[Image Credit: Andre Karwath on Wikimedia Commons]

On Sunday, a 22-year-old Muslim man was killed, which only fueled protests' fire against the state. Now in its eighth day, the protests show no signs of subsiding. This clip provides a glimpse of the rage many Muslims feel over this issue:

Clearly, it's difficult to say which religious group deserves the land more. So is a peaceful resolution even possible, that is, one that doesn't require one side to entirely compromise its position?