Walsh has misrepresented Warren pretty egregiously here, and in all fairness ought to issue a correction. Obama has met with Warren at Saddleback before, on World AIDS Day in 2006, and Warren has stated that he's willing to work with Obama on issues like AIDS and the environment. In short, Warren is no mere conservative ideologue.

But when Warren states that for many evangelicals, abortion is a moral evil equal in scope to the Holocaust, and that being pro-choice is a "deal-breaker" for them, he is making a simple statement of fact about the congregation he serves. Many evangelical voters view abortion in precisely this manner, which is why Obama's previous appearance at Saddleback stirred up a good deal of controversy among the Christian right.

McCain lost the evangelical vote in the 2000 GOP primaries largely because the Bush campaign depicted him as a pro-choice candidate. (Since we're talking about the Bush campaign, it should go without saying the allegation wasn't true; if anything, McCain's record was even more solidly anti-abortion than Bush's own.) So now, the big question for McCain is: If he picks a pro-choice running mate, as he has indicated he might, how will his evangelical base react?

In the interior of Alaska, summer temperatures can reach as high as ninety degrees. So depending on where in Alaska your grandmother lives, she might need that air conditioner after all.

You know, that's just what the menfolk were saying about Hillary Clinton during her presidential campaign. Too aggressive, too matronly or too masculine, didn't do as she was told -- no wonder the Party's superdelegates cast her off like an old shoe. Only when Hillary submitted to the male did she finally win applause.

Who knows? Maybe President Obama will let Hillary bake cookies in the White House.

The title pretty much says it all.

Considering that many Islamic fundamentalists hardly allow women to venture forth in public, let alone be seen unscarved as a major participant at a national political convention, one suspects that the ability to wear lipstick may be a far less trivial distinction than Cole's headline implies. Of course, not all theocrats are alike. There is a major difference between a theocrat who is willing to accept the rule of law and the legitimacy of democratic process, and one who, accepting neither, attempts to subvert both through acts of terrorist violence. This is what distinguishes a Pat Robertson from an Eric Rudolph.

Whether Palin is a theocrat is a different matter, but the admittedly scant evidence we have from her tenure as Alaska's governor indicates she is not. Palin vetoed a bill that would have denied same-sex partner benefits to public employees, not because she believed it was God's will that same-sex couples in Alaska be granted such benefits (she opposes them), but because her attorney general informed her that the bill was probably unconstitutional.

If Sarah Palin were a true theocrat, she would have signed this bill anyway, for in a truly theocratic world view, divine authority cannot be checked by temporal concerns like constitutional law. That Palin placed questions of constitutionality above her religious belief -- effectively leaving religion at the church door -- makes her, in fact, the very opposite of a theocrat.

Wilkerson's comment could also refer to the likelihood that, should McCain be elected in 2008, Palin herself will run for the presidency in 2012. (McCain is unlikely to serve two terms in office.) Given her warm reception among the GOP base, and her proven appeal to working-class voters, Palin may run in 2012 whether McCain wins or not.

By the way, I know plenty of women who care very deeply about women's issues, yet who are not Democrats. They don't have the same views regarding those issues as old-guard feminists, in part because they define these issues very differently. But they care about these issues nonetheless.

Sarah Palin is currently the breadwinner of the Palin household. Her husband stays by her side, minds the kids while she campaigns, and generally performs the duties of a political wife. She's not deferring to his ambitions; he's deferring to hers.

So the "Stepford" label obviously doesn't fit Sarah Palin; Palin is the very opposite of a Stepford wife. True, Palin doesn't share the political ideology of the feminist old guard (at least as it pertains to abortion, the only issue that seems to interest it these days). But her life story is a feminist's dream come true. The revolutionary restructuring of the family unit, for which feminists clamored in vain throughout the 1960s and '70s, has come to surprising fruition among, of all people, American evangelical conservatives.

Meanwhile the American left clings to reassuringly reactionary images of traditional family life. Michelle Obama's DNC speech offered a particularly interesting example: Ms. Obama carefully sidestepped the question of her own lucrative career, casting herself as wife and mother in near-total deference to her husband. The effect was almost, well, Stepford-like. If you didn't know better (and most Americans didn't), you'd have sworn that throughout their marriage, she "turned the flapjacks" a la Mamie Eisenhower, instead of pulling down a six-figure salary.

If "the personal is political," as a central tenet of feminism dictates, then it's high time leftists began to evaluate Sarah Palin not in terms of a few litmus tests, but in terms of the ways in which feminism has made her life and political career possible.

Avoid. MOVING MIDWAY plays like an overlong episode of the History Channel's MEGA MOVERS. The best segment in the film is a brief essay on representations of slavery and plantation life in American cinema, but Cheshire breaks off this line of inquiry before anything interesting can come of it. Considering the potentially explosive subject matter, this slack little video documentary represents a missed opportunity. It's a pretty crushing disappointment.