(f) empowers police officers and authorised members of the State Emergency Service and the Rural Fire Service to direct a person within a World Youth Day declared area to cease engaging in conduct that is a risk to the safety of the person or others, causes annoyance or inconvenience to participants in a World Youth Day event or obstructs a World Youth Day event, and
(g) makes it an offence (carrying a maximum penalty of 50 penalty units, currently $5,500) to fail, without reasonable excuse, to comply with such a direction.

As an Australian Catholic lawyer, I am saddened that the state has seen fit to curtail civil liberties further in this instance than they have for other significant international events hosted in Sydney.

It is generally accepted today that the common good is best safeguarded when personal rights and duties are guaranteed. The chief concern of civil authorities must therefore be to ensure that these rights are recognised, respected, coordinated, defended and promoted, and that each individual is enabled to perform his duties more easily. For to safeguard the inviolable rights of the human person, and to facilitate the performance of his duties, is the principal duty of every public authority.

Thus any government which refused to recognise human rights or acted in violation of them, would not only fail in its duty; its decrees would be wholly lacking in binding force.

One of the principal duties of any government, moreover, is the suitable and adequate superintendence and coordination of men's respective rights in society.

This must be done in such a way that the exercise of their rights by certain citizens does not obstruct other citizens in the exercise of theirs; that the individual, standing upon his own rights, does not impede others in the performance of their duties; and that the rights of all be effectively safeguarded, and completely restored if they have been violated.

Maskirovka -- the Soviet dark art of denial, deception and disguise -- is alive and well in Pyongyang, years after the Soviet Union disappeared. Unfortunately, the Bush administration appears not to have gotten the word.

With much fanfare and choreography, but little substance, the [U.S] administration has accepted a North Korean "declaration" about its nuclear program that is narrowly limited, incomplete and almost certainly dishonest in material respects. In exchange, President Bush personally declared that North Korea is no longer a state sponsor of terrorism or an enemy of the United States. In a final flourish, North Korea has undertaken a reverse Potemkin Village act, destroying the antiquated cooling tower of the antiquated Yongbyon reactor. In the waning days of American presidencies, this theater is the stuff of legacy.

North Korea has consecutively broken every major agreement with the U.S. since the North's creation. The Bush administration provides no reason why this one will not be added to that long list except the audacity of hope. . . .

The extent to which Yongbyon's aggregate plutonium production has been weaponized and concealed is one critical unresolved issue. Moreover, analysis of the much-touted 18,000 pages of Yongbyon documentation previously turned over has uncovered significant gaps in information, especially concerning the reactor's early years of operation, that preclude making a truly accurate calculation. This is essentially the same problem that the International Atomic Energy Agency faced during its years of monitoring Yongbyon under the failed 1994 Agreed Framework, showing that the North is nothing if not consistent in its cover-up strategy.

Ironically, the documents themselves are contaminated with particles of highly enriched uranium, probably from that enrichment program North Korea still denies. This program's extent is crucial, because if it is production scope, the North will still have a route to fissile material no matter what Yongbyon's ultimate fate, proving yet again that leveling those aged facilities was a nonconcession. . . . The North's proliferation, such as the now-flattened Yongbyon twin in Syria, are important not only for what they prove about the North's ongoing duplicity, but for their potentially central place in the North's continuing nuclear weapons program. . . . North Korea alone benefits by phasing, by stretching out a process that enables Kim Jong Il to stay in power and to maximize the political and economic benefits he can extract through each excruciatingly lengthy and painful phase.

At its heart the Anglican Church is a reforming church, that is, it doesn't breakaway and create new churches so much as tries to reform, always from within. So the challenge of what's happened in Jerusalem , and the Archbishop's involvement in that, is a challenge to how we might order ourselves and form ourselves as church in the future. The Lambeth Conference will be another important part of that discussion.

I think what it will mean for us in Australia is that those of us who go to Lambeth will need to redouble our efforts with those who have not been there to establish a close understanding of each other.

I'd have to say that, probably on the ground our people are more focussed on Jesus and talking to people about the possibility of new life in Christ. Whilst this is an important issue, I don't believe it's the one that dominates conversations in parishes. . . We have people of profound faith who come to different conclusions on important matters, so yes, we have a crisis now, but in the same way as we always have a crisis. That is there are matters that must be discussed and must be dealt with.

clearly worried about how Anglicans in different provinces might interpret the recent service at St Bartholomew the Great, Smithfield, at which the partnership of two gay priests was celebrated. This can be the only reason they produced their brief but erroneous statement on Tuesday that clerics in the Church of England are "not at liberty simply to ignore" the Church's teaching on sexuality, which they define, interestingly [and again wrongly], as: the 1987 Synod motion, the 1991 Bishops' statement Issues in Human Sexuality, the 1998 Lambeth Conference motion 1.10, and the House of Bishops' 2005 statement on civil partnerships.

The service is Smithfield is a little thing, not deserving of pronouncements by archbishops. Its only political purpose is to show the impossibility of carving up the Anglican Church into conservative and liberal provinces or dioceses. Or even parishes: some of those interviewed at St Bartholomew's at the weekend approved of the Rector's actions, others did not. The challenge for the Lambeth Conference, and for GAFCON before it, is to demonstrate how Christians can disagree profoundly and yet recognise the working of the Holy Spirit in those with whom they disagree.

Mugabe's post-colonial generation of nationalist leaders has more often than not used political power in an arbitrary and tyrannical fashion, accompanied by the corrupt plundering of national coffers for personal gain. They have generally subverted for their own advantage the institutions they inherited. Opinion in the West has been slow to blame them for this, perhaps from post-colonial guilt and a fear of sounding racist.

The only route that will avoid yet more bloodshed is a negotiated transition of power in which legal immunity and guarantees of safety are given to the very men who have been responsible for the violence of the past few months. I am not referring primarily to Mugabe. It is the security and police chiefs around him who hold the key. . . .

Zanu-PF, the ruling party, remains an efficient hierarchy. Its top men can call off the so-called liberation war veterans and other jobless youth who have been terrorising the opposition Movement for Democratic Change since the first round of elections in March - and may be unleashed again when the runoff is over. The trick is to get them to want to.

The MDC's wiser heads have long recognised this. They have held intermittent talks with Zanu-PF's leaders with the aim of forming a government of national unity that will maintain jobs for some Zanu-PF figures while allowing others to retire with dignity. The key issues concern the role of outside mediators, what pressures should be applied to get Zanu-PF to accept that power must be shared, and who should lead the new government. . . .

The best model for Zimbabwe happens to be European. October 2000 in Belgrade is the pattern that Zimbabwe, with luck, will follow. The scenario is uncannily similar. A ruthless strongman loses the first round but gets his election commission to say the opposition did not reach 50% and therefore a runoff is needed. The opposition refuses to take part for fear the ruling party will organise its cheating better the second time; and street protests are held. . . . [The fact that the police did not intevene] mainly flowed from orders after behind-the-scenes negotiations that Vojislav Kostunica, the opposition candidate, led with Slobodan Milosevic's security chiefs. They were assured of safety if they changed sides. Milosevic met Kostunica next day and threw in the towel. . . . Milosevic's downfall came . . . when the hard men realised it was better to sacrifice their boss than themselves. Their Zimbabwean counterparts are probably making similar calculations.

. . . It will be painful to let killers go free, but this is a case where justice should give way to pragmatism. The liberty of a few dozen thugs is the necessary price for millions of Zimbabweans to have a chance of life.

Everyone wanted to believe in Robert Mugabe. White Rhodesians longed to retain the agreeable lifestyle to which black Zimbabweans aspired. Britain saw democratic Zimbabwe as a Foreign Office trophy. Conflicting hopes survived for 15 years after independence despite the slaughter by Mugabe's personal militia of thousands of people loyal to the opposition leader Joshua Nkomo in the early 80s. Virtually everyone who should have cried foul looked the other way; whites because they were grateful to be out of the range of fire; the British government because it had to stand by its man up north while trying to bring majority rule to apartheid South Africa; and the international media because it had backed Mugabe to the hilt and could not contemplate its flawed judgement.

. . . Looking back ever since, I realise that I and many other well intentioned individuals may have helped Robert Mugabe to become the man he is today. If we had reacted differently to the early signs of his paranoia, could Zimbabwe have been saved from its current abyss? If whites in the country had been more realistic and acknowledged the impossibility of shifting smoothly from a police state of their creation to the democracy of their self-serving dreams, would they have been more respectful, less provocative? Or is Robert Mugabe simply an example of how power corrupts?

The questions are endless. What, if anything, could the former colonial power and the international community have done to curtail Mugabe's economic mismanagement before its effects spiralled into disaster? Can we legitimately heap all the blame for Zimbabwe's demise on Mugabe, or did he have some respectable accomplices? Were we who supported Robert Mugabe wrong about him all along?

. . . What happened to the gifted scholar who used his time in Rhodesian jails to acquire a long list of degrees; whose only frivolity was a passion for Elvis Presley? Is the story of Robert Mugabe a tragedy - greatness brought low - or is the tragedy entirely Zimbabwe's?

How can Robert Mugabe be framed in terms of other despots? He is certainly no buffoon like Uganda's Idi Amin. And he is far too detached to have blood on his own hands like Jean-Claude Duvalier of Haiti or Mobutu Sese Seko of the then Zaire. Accumulating personal wealth, like Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos of the Philippines, is not Mugabe's motive for tyranny either.

The story of Robert Mugabe is a microcosm of what bedevils African democracy and economic recovery at the beginning of the 21st century.

Let me be very clear -- in doing this, they [the Opposition] are extending the discrimination experienced by same-sex couples. The issue of interdependency was addressed thoroughly in the Same-Sex: Same Entitlements report.

Applying an interdependency test to same-sex couples instead of the de-facto test applied to opposite-sex couples automatically means that a loving same-sex couple have to prove their relationship under a different set of criteria to a loving opposite-sex couple. These criteria, as they seek to prove interdependency between two people, rather than a de-facto relationship, are much harder to satisfy. Our report also found that the repercussions of this form of discrimination present a great level of uncertainty for the same-sex couples. After being together and caring for and relying upon one another for a significant period of time, they, unlike an equivalent opposite-sex couple, are not assured that they can provide financial security for their partner or their children if they were injured, taken ill or died. This is (a very painful form of) discrimination. Finally, applying the test of interdependency to same-sex couples instead of the de-facto test applied to opposite-sex couples is a symbolic gesture. It says that same-sex relationships are not as valid as opposite-sex relationships.

If the [opposition] Coalition really wanted to investigate payment of benefits to interdependent people, they could have passed the Bill for same-sex couples, and conducted this investigation separately.

I know that some members of the coalition support economic justice for same-sex couples, and that gay and lesbian Australians are numbered among their family and friends. But I question the real motivation of the other Coalition members.

This issue is about discrimination--painful, ongoing discrimination. The coalition should remember that this time last year 71% of Australians wanted to give same sex couples a fair go. Instead of prolonging the pain, they should remove the discrimination which we [the Human Rights Commission] found, and turn that 71% opinion into law.

These trials speak of a time when love and the legislature were intertwined, when desire fell within the jurisdiction of the courts and lawmakers mused about lust and love.

We like to think of the 19th century as an age of almost totalitarian sexual repression. Yet when we consider the current debate around same-sex superannuation entitlements, it is our own legislature that ends up looking embarrassingly Victorian. Brendan Nelson appears to be daintily choking on the term same-sex couple or, more specifically, on the sex part. This week saw the Coalition use its Senate majority to delay Labor's bill extending superannuation and death benefit rights to gay couples. . . .

Why? Because Dr Nelson prefers the term interdependent to gay and lesbian or same-sex. . . . In effect, Dr Nelson wants to take the sex out of same-sex relationships and to quarantine law from Eros. In placing same-sex relationships on the same footing as good friends or cohabiting siblings, the Coalition is reducing gay and lesbian couples to fictive or invisible legal positions. Dr Nelson's proposed amendments would give gays and lesbians the same rights as under Labor's bill but on the condition that their sexuality remain legally closeted. The amendments amount to a linguistic repression of same-sex desire and a legislative closeting of gay love. If Dr Nelson is serious about dealing with gay and lesbian injustices then he must realise that visibility and recognition in the public sphere and in law is crucial to overcoming discriminatory attitudes. He must allow desire a legitimate place within parliamentary debate and love a place within law.

is that they saw love as a matter of concern within the public sphere."They did not recoil like Nelson at the mention of desire. The struggle for gay and lesbian rights has largely been a struggle for privacy, or the right to freedom from unwarranted state intrusion into one's private and sexual life. While this is still clearly necessary, we also need to think about privacy as including the freedom to express our emotional and sexual desire. Amorous interactions, emotions and desire occupy too vast a territory of public space to be banished from parliament or relegated to the fictive and benign categories of friendship or family. Ultimately, justice should be as libidinous and emotive as the subjects it governs.

The present study does not allow narrowing of potential explanations, which are probably multifactorial, including interplay between pre- and postnatal testosterone and estrogen, the androgen and estrogen receptors, and the testosterone-degrading enzyme aromatase. It nevertheless contributes to the ongoing discussion about sexual orientation by showing that homosexual men and women differed from the same-sex controls and showed features of the opposite sex in two mutually independent cerebral variables, which, in contrast to those studied previously, were not related to sexual attraction. The observations cannot be easily attributed to perception or behavior. Whether they may relate to processes laid down during the fetal or postnatal development is an open question. These observations motivate more extensive investigations of larger study groups and prompt for a better understanding of the neurobiology of homosexuality.

[E]ven after 18 years of seeing everything that gets thrown up in this chamber, one can still be surprised by the level of absolute, bare-faced, extraordinary hypocrisy being put forward by the coalition [i.e. the Opposition] here. After seeing all the things that get put forward for political reasons with the most ludicrous propositions being used to justify decisions and actions that are clearly politically driven, this is something that still leaves me breathless. I guess in some ways it is nice to not be so drenched in cynicism that I can still be surprised, or maybe the coalition is so creative that they can still find new ways to absolutely dredge the depths of debauchment of democratic process, weasel words and two-faced positions. The sorts of justifications that are being put forward by the coalition . . . are nonetheless a disgrace and an insult to the intelligence.

... Some of the suggestions that are being put forward to justify what is being done are completely offensive.

... A whole range of bills are being sent off for August reporting dates ... containing the wording not that the committee report by a set date, but that the committee not report before that date. Quite what that means, I am not sure. It is quite an interesting innovation whereby, even if the committee examines the matter, decides it has all it needs to look at and finishes its deliberations, according to this motion it is still not allowed to report before the date that the coalition is insisting on.

... [T]he bill relating to superannuation entitlements for people in same-sex relationships who have public sector superannuation, they are sending off, potentially, forever. It is quite an amazing reference: they are sending off the bill for the committee to inquire into and report on, but the committee is not actually allowed to conclude its inquiry into that bill and report back on it until they have looked at any other related bills that might be introduced down the track to give effect to the recommendations of a human rights commission report. Who is going to determine whether or not every single bill that is ever going to appear in regard to a recommendation from that report has appeared? Is it going to be the committee? Is it going to be the Senate? It is not stated.

What we have is an open-ended inquiry--one, potentially, going on into the never-never--that is not able, according to this form of words, to report back until every related bill that may ever be introduced has also been examined. How farcical! How disgraceful, particularly when it is on a basic matter of justice, and particularly on a matter which, the coalition would have us believe--Senator Ellison's own words would have us believe--they support in principle. Do not be so ludicrous. If you support that matter in principle, you would not send it off to a Senate committee to inquire into but never report on. It is simply a disgrace.

Adding to the disgrace is the history of this legislation and the issue involved. The Same-Sex Relationships (Equal Treatment in Commonwealth Laws-- Superannuation) Bill 2008 deals with a matter that has been examined time and time again by Senate committee inquiries. It was examined as part of a general, wide-ranging inquiry that was reported on to this chamber back in 1997. It was examined in part of a Senate Select Superannuation Committee inquiry into work patterns in the mid-1990s. It was examined again by the Senate Select Committee on Superannuation, specifically in regard to another private senator's bill, in 2000. The legislation of the Democrats that specifically aimed to address this matter has been debated in this chamber on at least one occasion, if not more, as have many individual amendments specifically relating to superannuation. The issue was examined specifically in relation to superannuation by a Senate committee as part of inquiries into the government's superannuation laws and the superannuation choice laws in early 2000. The government, with the support of the Democrats, passed legislation containing similar measures to what is in this bill, in regard to personal superannuation, through this chamber. Yet we have Senator Ellison saying: 'We cannot deal with this single bill in isolation from all these other measures, even though we support it in principle, because it would be irresponsible, because it requires careful scrutiny.' How much more careful scrutiny do you need?

... [L]ast year this chamber considered a proposal by me to review a piece of legislation that would implement the recommendations of the human rights commission inquiry--the very report that you now say has to be examined in extensive detail, potentially forever. And that proposal, to examine a piece of legislation that would give effect to the recommendations of that report, you blocked. You [the Opposition] stopped it being looked at, at all--not even in a one-week inquiry. Why? What was the pathetic, dishonest, dishonourable excuse you gave at the time? It was: 'It has already been inquired into. We do not even need to look at it because it has already been looked at.'

You make me sick. But what makes me even more sick is that people have been waiting for this injustice concerning superannuation and same-sex couples to be rectified for a long time and, year after year, they have had to listen to weasel words like 'We support it in principle.'

... The current government proposes to act on one part of the issue which, according to the majority view, the coalition actually support but now want to send off to a committee with no reporting date. It is disgusting.

... It makes me angry to be treated like an idiot. Part and parcel of being in this chamber is that you have to listen to people give laughable excuses and then they expect you to take them seriously ... but this is an issue of injustice and it is a very serious injustice. ... To use such facile excuses to delay justice once again, potentially indefinitely, is not only unjust--obviously--but extremely hurtful to a lot of people. Many people have been waiting for that injustice to be rectified for a long time. One of the reasons that it is time-critical, apart from the fact the bill has a 1 July start-up date--although that can be changed--is that injustices come into effect in this area particularly when a person's partner dies. That time is often very distressing to people. To have that distress compounded by this ongoing injustice is, I think, unconscionable.

People recognise that occasionally things take a while, but excuses are being used to indefinitely delay the implementation of measures that have a big impact on people. Those people whose partner dies between 1 July and however long this legislation is delayed for will bear the brunt of this political gutlessness. That is what is at play here. If anyone can make a good argument for what is being done here, I would like to hear it. You can say that this is to allow proper consideration and prevent anomalies--I have heard those sorts of excuses many times when I have moved amendments in this place--but what you are really doing is pandering to bigots.

The wedge confronting Nelson on this issue is both internal and external. Internally it refers to his relentless and endless need to shore up support within the Right of the party in order to preserve his leadership against the juggernaut that is Malcolm Turnbull.

And externally it is grist to Labor's mill, cranking up the image of an Opposition Leader constantly forced to walk both sides of the street on social policy in order to remain electorally relevant, while struggling to survive factionally within his own caucus.

... This reform is well overdue. How do we know this? Because immediately after his ascension to the Liberal leadership, Nelson told me so. In an interview conducted for News Limited's Sunday mastheads, Nelson was passionate in his advocacy of such a move.

... The trouble is, though, many in the Liberal Party don't want to embrace such progressive stands. And the further trouble for Nelson is that most of those MPs belong to the Right of the party, the block of votes that delivered him the leadership by the narrowest of post-election margins.

... The Government says [the reference of the bill to a Committee] will delay the benefits flowing from the same-sex benefits entitlements from July 1 at least until September. If you're gay and die in the meantime with a dependent partner, stiff cheddar.

Which is the political point. Nelson initially adopted a socially courageous stand on long-term gay relationships and the equivalent heterosexual economic benefits that should flow. But in then doffing his leadership hat to the Right in the party when the legislation is introduced, he risks losing any political benefits from the gay community. . . . For Nelson, this is a familiar territory. Remember the Stolen Generations apology? Nelson backed the idea but he then salted his parliamentary response to Kevin Rudd so heavily in deference to the Liberal Right that he received credit for neither backing the apology nor opposing it.

... The Right of the Liberal Party will be watching closely. As will the MP with the highest concentration of gays in the country in his electorate: Turnbull.

unconvincing even to many who otherwise support same-sex marriage, because in finding such a fundamental right the court judged the state's expansive law establishing same-sex civil unions to be unconstitutional. That law, as the dissenting judges pointed out, granted civil unions all the substantive rights and benefits of marriage. What remained in dispute was whether by reserving the term "marriage" to heterosexual couples the state was treating same-sex couples in an unlawfully discriminatory manner. Dissenting from the majority opinion, Justice Carol Corrigan argued for the constitutionality of the distinction the legislature had made between marriage and civil unions. "The people are entitled to preserve this traditional understanding in the terminology of the law, recognizing that same-sex and opposite-sex unions are different. What they are not entitled to do is treat them differently under the law," she wrote. "Plaintiffs, however, seek to change the definition of the marital relationship, as it has consistently been understood, into something quite new. They could certainly accomplish such a redefinition through the initiative process. As a voter, I might agree. But that change is for the people to adopt, not for judges to dictate."

As the church has long recognized, not everything that is immoral should be illegal. In many cases, prohibiting or criminalizing activities whose morality is deeply disputed is a mistake. In a democracy, people govern themselves. In that light, it is also a mistake for the courts to foreclose the relatively new public debate about same-sex marriage. Democratic cohesion is difficult to sustain when one side or the other feels its concerns have not been fairly heard. When it comes to how a society defines civil marriage, the voices of citizens, not judges, should be decisive.

we think it plain that the social and legal institution of marriage as it pertains to Australia has undergone transformations that are referable to the environment and period in which the particular changes occurred. The concept of marriage therefore cannot, in our view, be correctly said to be one that is or ever was frozen in time. The relevance of this conclusion for the purposes of these reasons for judgment, is that on the sources we have had to identify for ourselves, there is no historical justification to support Mr Burmester’s contention [as leading counsel for the Attorney-General] that the meaning of marriage should be understood by reference to a particular point in time in the past . . .
--- Kevin and Jennifer (2003) 30 Fam LR 1, 22 (Nicholson CJ, Ellis and Brown JJ)

Anti discrimination Act 1977

49ZT Homosexual vilification unlawful
(1) It is unlawful for a person, by a public act, to incite hatred towards, serious contempt for, or severe ridicule of, a person or group of persons on the ground of the homosexuality of the person or members of the group.
(2) Nothing in this section renders unlawful: (a) a fair report of a public act referred to in subsection (1), or (b) a communication or the distribution or dissemination of any matter on an occasion that would be subject to a defence of absolute privilege (whether under the Defamation Act 2005 or otherwise) in proceedings for defamation, or (c) a public act, done reasonably and in good faith, for academic, artistic, religious instruction, scientific or research purposes or for other purposes in the public interest, including discussion or debate about and expositions of any act or matter.

For years, with the help of compliant Republicans and frightened Democrats in Congress, President George W. Bush has denied the protections of justice, democracy and plain human decency to the hundreds of men [among them citizens of allied countries like Australian and the UK] that he decided to label "unlawful enemy combatants" and throw into endless detention.

Twice the Supreme Court swatted back his imperial overreaching, and twice Congress helped Bush try to open a gaping loophole in the Constitution. On Thursday, the court turned back the most recent effort to subvert justice with a stirring defense of habeas corpus, the right of anyone being held by the government to challenge his confinement before a judge. . . . It was a very good day for people who value freedom and abhor Bush's attempts to turn Guantánamo Bay into a constitutional-rights-free zone. . . . It was disturbing that four justices dissented from this eminently reasonable decision. . . . There is an enormous gulf between the substance and tone of the majority opinion, with its rich appreciation of the liberties that the founders wrote into the Constitution, and the what-is-all-the-fuss-about dissent. It is sobering to think that habeas hangs by a single vote in the Supreme Court of the United States. The ruling is a major victory for civil liberties--but a timely reminder of how fragile they are.

[T]hrough a series of blunders and the appearance of a once-in-a-lifetime opponent, she saw the prize slip through her grasp despite a valiant personal effort that lasted through the final contests in South Dakota and Montana. Both Clintons often seemed out of touch with the political times--cautious when they should have been bold, negative when they should have been inspirational. Exquisitely attuned to the political winds in 1992, they watched Obama almost effortlessly ride the wave in 2008.

Hillary Clinton didn't lose the Democratic presidential nomination because she is a woman, and gender no longer is a big deal in American elections. There are two basic reasons the most formidable front-runner in contemporary presidential politics failed: Barack Obama is a sensational candidate who assembled a crack campaign team, whose campaign out-thought and out-strategized Clinton at every turn; and Hillary Clinton, in the most important venture of her life, picked the wrong people and adopted the wrong strategy.

Hillary has brought back that old feminist religion, at least for now. She should not have pitted the women against the men. She did it to her detriment within her own campaign . . . And Hillary did it to Obama's detriment with her female fan base, stirring up such fury that some women are still vowing to jump to John McCain, even if it means voting against their self-interest. She should not have repeated the mistake she made after her health-care plan failed. Instead of simply admitting her own mistakes in judgment, she played the victim and blamed sexism. . . . She didn't lose because she was a woman. She didn't lose because America isn't ready for a woman as president. She lost because of her own--and her husband's and Mark Penn's--fatal missteps.