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NEWS / FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2010 / THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN / KANSAN.COM
Sexism still a problem in politics
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Republican senator-elect Kelly Ayotte and some supporters hold signs in Manchester, N.H. to thank voters.
NEW YORK — Even with many high-profile female candidates, the just-ended campaign was rife with sexism ranging from snarky fashion critiques to sexual inuendo. And when all the ballots are counted, women may hold fewer seats in the new Congress than the outgoing one.
"It looks as if we're going backward rather than forward," Siobhan Bennett, president of the Women's Campaign Forum Foundation, said at a teleconference Thursday discussing the prevalence of political sexism.
sexism.
Two years after Hillary Rodham Clinton nearly captured the Democratic presidential nomination and Sarah Palin was the Republican vice president nominee, female candidates dealt with comments about their hair and seamy, anonymous Web postings. Speaker Nancy Pelosi — second in the presidential line of succession — was widely vilified by Republican candidates in ways that often seemed gender-specific.
Bennett said the prospect of sexist attacks deterred many women from running for office and was a reason why scores of other countries have a higher proportion of women in their national legislatures than the U.S., which remains at 17 percent.
percent. Depending on the outcome of a few undecided races, women will at best hold even in the Senate with 17
seats, and could lose one or two of their 73 seats in the House. That would be the first such decline since 1978.
"Going backward is unacceptable," said Erin Vilardi of the White House Project, a nonpar-
for inadequate efforts to identify and support them.
Earlier in the campaign, there was widespread buzz that this would be "The Year of the Woman" — notably on the Republican side with the Senate candidacies of Carly Fiorina in California, Linda McMahon in Connecticut, Christine O'Donnell in Delaware and Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire.
Of the four, only Ayotte won. She will become the lone woman in the Senate opposed to broad-
tisan group dedicated to recruiting women to run for office.
"There's no question in my mind that calling this out was the right thing to do."
based abortion rights.
She said there was a growing pipeline of potential female candidates eager to run at the local level, and she faulted both major parties
KRYSTAL BALL
U.S. House Democratic candidate
on the House side, the GOP fared better. adding at least eight new female members. But those gains were offset by defeats of at least
incumbent Democratic women.
number of female governors will remain at six, including three new Republicans: Susana Martinez in New Mexico, Mary Fallin in Oklahoma and Nikki Haley in
The outcome spells the end of Pelosi's four-year stint as the first female speaker of the House—the highest-ranking elected woman in U.S. history.
South Carolina.
U.S. history.
Women's groups monitoring campaign sexism felt that some of the GOP attacks on Pelosi were misogynistic and were irked that conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh played "Ding-Dong! The Witch is Dead" on his radio show Wednesday to celebrate Pelosi's impending demotion.
three groups supporting an expanded political role for women teamed up in recent months with an initiative called "Name It, Change It," — intended to swiftly protest instances of perceived political sexism that surfaced during the campaign.
pagen.
On Thursday, the New York-based Women's Media Center and its partners announced "awards" for what they considered the most flagrant examples in the media.
years ago, and the Boston Herald, for a column in which a minor party candidate's hair was likened to a Brillo pad.
Among those cited were the gossip blog Gawker, for running a tawdry anonymous posting from a man claiming a brief romantic encounter with Christine O'Donnell several
to a brining Joining the teleconference was Krystal Ball, the losing Democratic candidate in a race for a U.S. House seat in Virginia. In mid-campaign, she had to deal with the fallout of an Internet-posted photo showing her in a suggestive outfit and pose at a costume party six years ago.
at a costume party for his fans. Ball sought advice from "Name It, Change It" on how to respond, and forcefully defended herself against what she said was a smear campaign. Though she lost, she said her decision to denounce the tactic as sexist helped her gain votes.
"There's no question in my mind that calling this out was the right thing to do," she said, expressing hope that other women wouldn't be deterred from running for office out of fear of being embarrassed by comparable tactics.
The issue of sexism has cropped up regularly in recent elections. In 2008, for example, both Clinton and Palin were criticized for dress and demeanor in ways that seemed belitling to women.
CRIME
Soldiers arrested for gun-running
ASSOCIATED PRESS
LAS VEGAS — A Navy SEAL in California and men in Nevada and Colorado have been arrested and accused of smuggling machine guns from Iraq into the United States for resale on the black market.
The special forces SEAL, Nicholas Bickle, 36, of San Diego, Las Vegas resident Andrew Kaufman, 36, and Richard Paul, 34, of Durango, Colo., were arrested Wednesday, the U.S. attorney's office in Las Vegas said.
A complaint filed Oct. 29 and unsealed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Las Vegas accuses the trio of conspiring to smuggle and sell 18 weapons and 14 other firearms since June to an undercover federal Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agent in Las Vegas and Colorado.
Bickle is accused of smugging about 80 AK-47 weapons
from Iraq or Afghanistan, including factory-made 7.62 mm Iraqi machine guns that the complaint said would be difficult or impossible to trace. Other weapons included Ruger handguns.
"According to the other members of the organization, this was possible because Navy SEALs are not searched when returning from deployments," the document said.
The investigation began on tip from a confidential informant who faced felony battery domestic violence and robbery charges in Nevada and is cooperating with authorities, the complaint said. Neither the informant nor the undercover agent is identified.
The complaint cited text message and bank records, and said at least one sale involved 10 AK-47 rifles for $1,300 each, and six handguns for $300 apiece.
If convicted, each faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
NATIONAL
Man's postonement of execution denied
ASSOCIATED PRESS
ATMORE, Ala. — An Alabama man convicted of killing his daughter's 16-year-old boyfriend awaited execution Thursday, and his daughter said she is still waiting for him to admit the damage he caused by killing the boy and abusing her for years.
Phillip Hallford, 63, lost a bid for a stay of execution by the Alabama Supreme Court just hours before he was to die by lethal injection at Holman Prison for the shooting death of Eddie Shannon at a rural south Alabama bridge.
Gov. Bob Riley also refused to
grant clemency. Hallford's attorney filed a final motion for a stay with the U.S. Supreme Court.
Melinda Hallford Powell, who was 15 and pregnant at the time of the killing, said her father forced her to lure Shannon to the rural site in Dale County, where he shot him to death and threw the body off a nearby bridge. Then, she said, her father made a necklace with the casings from the bullets and forced her to wear it.
Powell, who now lives in North Carolina and is married with three children, said she had been sexually abused by her father and had lived "a nightmare" for years.
'Gotta have that funk'
Adam Banks, an associate professor of writing and rhetoric at Syracuse University, speaks to students, faculty and others Thursday afternoon at the Kansas Union. Banks' speech talked about the role of funk music in the black society during the 1970s and what it means for the black community today.