Kallitechnis, your Wikipedia excerpt supports what I said, it's just phrased favorably towards Hillary. Lowey would have been the Democratic nominee, but she had to "wait in the wings" to see if Hillary (who had better name recognition because of her husband) wanted it. Hillary, who'd never held elected to any office and didn't even live in New York. "Cheating" is also defined as violating accepted standards, which Hillary did by carpetbagging her way into a state and cutting in line for a plum job she hadn't earned. She tried to leapfrog over the seniority rules of the Senate as well, but was rightly told to wait her turn.

There are many women currently in politics who are worthy of being role models. Hillary is not one of them. I don't want my future daughters to grow up thinking the path to the presidency for women is to marry well and then play dutiful wifey for thirty years to an adulterer. Women can get to the presidency through hard work and seniority, the same as men.

Salon, let's hear more about: McCaskill, Pelosi, Napolitano, Sebelius, Klobuchar, Granholm, Gregoire, Mikulski, Stabenow, Cantwell, etc. And some new faces too; do an article on the future women leaders of the Democratic party, women under forty or forty-five in important state offices, such as Lisa Madigan, Tammy Duckworth, Lori Swanson, Kathy Castor, Debbie Schultz, Yvette Clarke, etc. There are women working their way up in every state who deserve attention. One of them will earn the presidency in the same way Obama did, and she'll be someone we can all be proud of.

I kind of like the wife. She's secure enough not to need a ring, independent enough to keep separate bank accounts, and self-confident enough to keep her own name. She was also smart enough to ask for a divorce when her husband started screwing around with the LW. The stuff about her cheating on him, not wanting kids, not "inviting" him along when she went to grad. school is all typical cheater lies. Especially the not wanting kids thing, that's a classic.

I wonder what will happen next. I'm guessing the wife's biopsy is negative, they have sex to celebrate, and wifey gets pregnant! Woops, can't get a divorce now, she needs the insurance to pay for childbirth. The excuses will continue for as long as you're dumb enough to hang around.

Lesson: don't date married men. Duh.

Bristol gave the baby the surname of his father, 18-year-old Levi Johnston, although the pair is not yet married.

Marriage and the surname of the children have not really been connected for years. A large percentage of American babies are born out-of-wedlock, but almost all of them are given the father's surname. Conversely, some married couples choose to give some or all of their children the mother's last name.

Salon had some very good articles on baby surnames in 2000. They were the sort of articles that cause me to maintain my subscription, even though Salon has gone horribly downhill in the past eight years. It's depressing to see you go backwards.

Do you realize you insulted all the other women who spoke, by trivializing their words as just "vamp[ing] for time" until Hillary got there? Hillary did not make history; she's not the first woman to run for president nor the first woman secretary of state. She'll eventually be lost in the shuffle of history. One of the other woman at the Emily's List luncheon may well be president some day, but we all know it won't be Hillary. It will be a woman who respects herself, who fights her own battles, and who can get there on her own rather than by her husband's bootstraps.

It's interesting that you point out that Hillary didn't take her husband's name at first. She folded on that fairly quickly. I regard the day she changed her name as the first of many times she sold herself out. I think the best thing about last year's election was that the two people who'd betrayed themselves in their quest for power, Romney and the self-described "Mrs. Bill Clinton", both lost. It was a triumph for honesty and integrity! Barack Hussein Obama could have changed his name, but he had the guts to remain himself, no matter what anyone said. That's a leader! I'd have been proud of a President Hillary Rodham, but a "President Mrs. Bill Clinton" would have been an abomination.

As for Salon itself: today is Martin Luther King Day. Tomorrow, our first black president will be sworn in. You have Hillary as your front page. Again. Yes, there's a small article on MLK and Obama, tucked away in a corner, but even that mentions Hillary several times. Salon has to get over its obsessive over-identification with her. She's a loser. She took his name, she submitted the cookie recipes, she stayed home to play meek White House hostess (after royally screwing up a golden opportunity to reform health care). We have better role models, I just wish Salon would pay some attention to them.

As someone tried to point out upthread, it's not assault, it's battery. A battery is an offensive physical contact (doesn't have to cause injury), and assault is to put someone in reasonable fear of a battery. Medical situations such as this are one of the few situations in which one can have a battery without an assault. The victim doesn't even have to be conscious for a battery to occur, but would have to be conscious and actually feel apprehension for an assault to occur.

This reminds me, whatever happened to that doctor who branded the initials of his school into a patient's uterus while she was under full anesthesia?