Given the disappointment of so many Hillary Clinton supporters that the woman they thought would be America's first female president will not be, the more they hear the suggestion that Sen. Barack Obama's win is illegitimate the more likely they are to bolt. If Senator Clinton's voters embrace that story that "a man took it away from a woman," denying her a victory she rightly deserved, they're at risk of staying home come November, or holding back from the volunteering and the get-out-the-vote efforts necessary for the Democrats to prevail.

That's why it's so unfortunate that Clinton continues to claim that "we are winning the popular vote." Because that statement is a lie - and it undermines every word she has spoken about the need for the party to come together.

Look at Clinton's math. She leads only if you give her 328,000 votes for the Soviet-style Michigan election, while giving Obama zero for not being on the ballot. And we count her full Florida margin, though Obama couldn't campaign there and do what he did in state after state by erasing all or most of once-massive Clinton leads once he began to campaign.

An American soldier’s sexual assault of a 14-year-old Okinawan girl has caused a diplomatic crisis that could result in Japan’s refusal to increase its participation in the Iraq war, creating a rare situation indeed: an instance in which rape matters to the U.S. military.

President Bush apologized. Condi Rice even told Japanese leaders that the United States would “try” to prevent such incidents from happening again. My opinion: “Try” is already an admission of helplessness.

The military has no idea what to do with its rape problem because it’s part of the core contradiction out of which today’s military tradition has grown. Military rape, and the denial and/or blame-the-victim vehemence with which it is generally greeted, exposes, perhaps like nothing else, the lunacy of so much of our foreign policy, which is built on assumptions of that tradition that have long been abandoned in most other spheres of life, beginning with the need for a dehumanized, soulless “other” who is the “enemy.”

For the past several months I have been receiving TIME magazine. The subscription originally started as a gift from someone unknown, with my last name spelled wrong, lasted for a year. When it came up for renewal, I stalled until the price came down to fifty cents a copy, a much more reasonable price for the quality of the magazine (I could have had another half year free if I had stalled about a month longer). I finally renewed, not because I admire the quality of the magazine but because, even though it is the “Canadian” edition (it has some Canadian advertising in it) it provides a good snapshot of Middle-American thinking.

The fastest growing group of people serving in America's military is women. More than 155,000 women have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan since 2002. Veterans Administration officials estimate that the number of female veterans who use VA services will double in the next five years. Our women veterans face unique physical and mental health care needs, especially in regards to Military Sexual Trauma.

Urge your Senator to improve the health care for our women veterans
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The Women Veterans Health Care Improvement Act of 2008 (S.2799), a bipartisan legislation introduced in the Senate last month, will dramatically increase the care available to our women veterans, including authorizing programs to improve care for Military Sexual Trauma. The bill will also increase research on the current barriers to care and expand staff positions for women at the VA.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- The world's most famous political prisoner, Aung San Suu Kyi, was due to be freed from house arrest this weekend, but the international community and Burma's military junta have been focusing on aid for cyclone victims instead of her liberation.

During her more than 12 years of house arrest, Mrs. Suu Kyi has always been able to walk out of her lakeside, two-story villa in Rangoon, if she permanently leaves the Southeast Asian country which her assassinated father helped create.

If she left Burma, however, the junta would most likely never allow her to return, which is why she did not attend the funeral in England when her husband, British academic Michael Aris, died several years ago.

Now unwilling to travel to see her two adult sons in Britain, Mrs. Suu Kyi was recently barred from becoming Burma's leader after the junta pushed through, on May 10, a new constitution disqualifying candidates who have foreign relatives.

One year ago, the junta extended her house arrest for another 12 months, due to expire on Saturday (May 24).