We'll stipulate that "she knew what she was doing" is an incredible callous thing to say, and it's bizarre that the AP would quote it as though it were a credible observation.

But it's there. What does it tell us about the case? To what extent did those 20 (!) men ranging in age from 13 to 40 (!) feel justified in their horrible actions because they thought "she knew what she was doing?" If they did feel this way, then why?

As a woman, and a mother of daughters, I sometimes feel drained by the amount of effort and worry that goes into keeping ourselves safe from assault. Stories like this are extremely depressing. It's tempting to shudder and turn away. However, I think efforts to reduce sexual assault will stall unless we are willing to examine why they happen when they happen, and how perpetrators justify their crimes.

I would like to know what made someone have this judgment about an 11-year-old girl. Was it just the fact that she was over there with a bunch of men, and so assumed the risk of what happened to her? Maybe the girl had no one looking out for her (a chaotic home life, absentee parents?), and her attackers somehow perceived that she was unprotected and thus could be targeted. Maybe she had some sort of developmental disability that made her particularly vulnerable to being lured into a bad situation, and that also made people feel free to think of her as some sort of "other" undeserving of protection. I'm trying to word this delicately; I remember a mentally retarded girl at my high school who was the target of a lot of sexual rumors. Everyone said that she was permanently available to anyone who wanted her. I think this is probably rather common.

Most depressingly of all, maybe this has nothing to do with the girl but is purely about the speaker of the quotation, who feels the need to demonize a victim rather than admit that 20 men in her neighborhood are child rapists. Is this representative of community sentiment? If so, how do we change people's mindsets?

What lessons can we draw from this? I really wish the AP quotation could have given more context to this unbelievable statement, to help us understand better how exactly anyone could think that a woman of any age, let alone an 11-year-old, could have brought upon herself this nightmarish assault.

The NYT reports today that the mistress and the purported father of her baby, Edwards' staffer Andrew Young, both moved out of North Carolina after receiving payments from an Edwards backer named Fred Baron. Baron claims he felt bad for how they were being harassed by tabloid journalists, so he helped them move out of state. Ridiculous, of course, because the National Enquirer would hardly drop a hot story simply because the persons of interest have moved to another state.

Rielle Hunter and Andrew Young both moved to Santa Barbara. Hunter's house is worth $3 million and Young's is worth $5.4 million (and according to the Times, he has "no visible means of support").

Exactly how much was paid to these two, and why? And by whom? And when? Are we talking $10 million or more? Why would this Baron guy spend so much of his money to set them up in high style in Santa Barbara?

I think we're looking at straight up blackmail and bribery. I think it vastly strains plausibility that Edwards didn't know about this - or that his wife didn't. I wonder what else will emerge as the weeks pass - or whether Edwards' carefully timed, highly qualified "admission" will have its intended effect and bury all future stories.

When McCain goes down in the polls, it’s not because people are leaving him and flocking to Obama. It’s because conservatives and libertarians, the Republican base, have lost confidence in him as a candidate who shares their values. McCain needs to reactivate his base. Whenever he does that (as he did by selecting Palin, and with his moving acceptance speech at the convention), he shoots up in the polls. What matters is not how he does among Salon’s liberal readership, or even among independents, whoever they are, it’s how he does with Republicans. It remains to be seen how he does with them, but I for one was impressed.

As an added bonus for McCain, everything Obama said was tailor-made to drive libertarians crazy. It was all spend, spend, spend, and correct me if I'm wrong but his foreign policy seems to involve being aggressive everywhere except Iraq. His antiwar stance is his one advantage over McCain - why is he squandering that by suggesting escalation in Afghanistan and extralegal incursions into Pakistan?

"This is such a perfect example of why vocal feminists get cranky about seemingly trivial things like jokes and/or hosiery . . . "

And this Broadsheet posting is such a perfect example of why I could never call myself a feminist, vocal or otherwise.