In Pennsylvania, the dead don’t vote, they win elected office. At least that’s what happened in Tarentum and Freeport, both cities in Allegheny County, when the two candidates for mayor — both of whom died in September — ran unopposed. James Wolfe, who served as mayor of Tarentum for 32 years, died Sept. 10, and it is unclear why his name wasn’t taken off the ballot before ballots went to the printer on Sept. 21. His family or the state Democratic party would have had to request it. Bob Ravotti, who was mayor of Freeport for 28 years, died after the deadline on Sept. 28.

The Pittsburgh Tribune review spoke to Angie Reeves of Tarentum, who said she did not cast a vote for mayor. “No, I didn’t know who to vote for,” she said. “I didn’t want to vote for James Wolfe because he died. Why the heck would you vote for a dead person? I would rather not vote.”

Others felt voting for the dead was a fitting tribute. Frances Alter said she voted for the deceased Wolfe because “We won’t find anyone as good as him.”

Bad, but not surprising news from the Hudson Institute’s Anne Bayefsky about the United Nations monitoring discrimination against women. As she reports, “the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and member states expressed their opposition to the idea of setting up a new Special Rapporteur who would monitor laws that discriminate against women.”

The establishment of this “mechanism” to monitor women’s rights has been on the table since 2005, and is supported by the Secretary General’s office and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. But when the Islamic states line up against something, there’s not a snowball’s chance that it’ll get any traction.

Meanwhile, don’t look for the current U.S. administration to lead here. President Obama is concerned about women’s rights, but only a bit. He mentioned it in his recent speech in Cairo. “The sixth issue — the sixth issue that I want to address is women’s rights,” he said. Sixth?

If women’s rights had been topic No. 1, it would have made for a more ground-breaking speech. But rankings aside, defending women’s rights in Middle Eastern countries is a true post-partisan issue that progressives and conservatives agree on and thus, the type of issue President Obama is supposed to love. Indeed, some of Obama’s supporters from the Left took issue with his speech. Peter Daou criticized Obama for his empty rhetoric, the American Prospect’s Dana Goldstein agreed, while some outraged French ladies accused the President of “seeking to reconcile the United States with Muslims ‘on the backs of women.’”

Since President Obama seems unmoved by justified criticism from his right, is it too much to hope that complaints from his supporters on the Left might make a dent?

Michael says, “Military action against Iran should be the very last option and used only if everything short of it fails.”

But if Marty Peretz is right, the administration has taken that “last option” off the table. As Jennifer pointed out, he seconded a report that Dennis Ross is apparently out as special envoy on Iran. I found this detail particularly interesting:

I had an inkling of trouble a few weeks ago when The New Republic was negotiating to publish a small part of a new book, Myths, Illusions and Peace: Finding a New Direction for America in the Middle East, which Ross co-wrote with David Makovsky. Yes, the text of the book raises the possibility of a strike of last resort against Iran’s nuclear installations. In any event, the State Department wouldn’t give its approval. And you now know why. Or do you? I believe it’s because the administration has given up the military option.

By the way, Peretz sort of speeds past this, but it would have been bad enough had Ross been removed because the Iranians demanded it.

I’d like to nominate Lenore Skenazy as “Heroine of the Day” for her sane approach to child rearing. She is the so-called “worst Mom in America” who agreed to let her 9-year-old son get home on public transportation alone. He successfully rode the subway solo, she wrote a column about it, tons of angry mail and lots of media attention followed and poof a movement was born: Raising kids to be safe but without all the worry. Her book, Free-Range Kids is out today and she’s been hitting the airwaves, including a great interview with Brian Lehrer. One thing she said that is especially significant: “We’ve forgotten how competent our kids are.”

As Skenazy points out, parents have become indoctrinated to believe that there is danger everywhere and that no toy, no playground, no neighborhood is safe. Parents are supposed to supervise their kids all the time because supposedly the only way they can be safe is if their guardian is with them 24/7. But not allowing them any time by themselves, to play outside, to ride their bikes, to ride the bus alone, only stunts their development into responsible, reasonable adults.

She says parents are afraid of letting their kids walk down the block. One guy who wrote to her blog “wouldn’t let his kid use the basketball hoop” in front of their house because he might be abducted. “Parents are even supposed to stand with their kid at the bus stop,” she says. Indeed, I witness just this scene every morning, and the kids aren’t that young either.

Instead, Skenazy rightly advocates teaching kids to live in the world. She argues for teaching them to read a map, or how to get help from strangers if another stranger bothers them, and how to say no to a grown up. As she wrote in the Washington Post yesterday:

It strikes me as the height of IRRESPONSIBILITY to supervise a child at all times, because then they never learn how to do anything by themselves. What happens the day you’re not there and they don’t know how to cross the street? One lady I spoke to said, ‘But I always WILL be there.’ Who is the nut case here? The parent who prepares her child for independence? Or the one who assumes she will never, for a second, be separated from them?

Reminds me of the old Jewish joke about the Miami doorman who is asked to carry a young boy out of the backseat of a limousine. The doorman asks the boy’s mother, “Oh my God, can’t he walk?”  “Of course he can walk,” she replies, “but God willing, he’ll never have to.”

Israeli blogger Carl in Jerusalem captures the insanity of Knesset elections with one photo. Question: How was he even allowed to take the picture?

Mukhtar Mai of Meerwala village, in the South Punjab region of Pakistan has been threatened with “grave consequences” if she does not drop her case against the men who gang-raped her in 2002.  The Supreme Court of Pakistan is due to hear the case next week.

The Bohemia Foundation reports:

On December 11, 2008 a message was sent to Mukhtar Mai by Sardar Abdul Qayyum, a sitting Federal Minister for Defense Production, to drop the charge against the accused.  According to Mukhtar Mai, the Minister called her uncle Ghulam Hussain and passed on a message to Mukhtar that she should drop the charges against the 13 accused of the Mastoi tribe who were involved either in the verdict against Mukhtar or gang raped her.  The Minister said that if she does not comply, he and his associates will not let the Supreme Court’s decision go in favor of Mukhtar.  It is believed that the Mastoi clan has political influence of sufficient weight to bring pressure to bear on the Supreme Court.

Mukhtar was gang raped on the order of a council of elders (panchayat) as punishment for her 12-year-old brother’s alleged affair with a woman of a higher clan, the Mastoi. Instead of taking her “punishment” quietly Mukhtar decided to speak out. Common custom would have been for her to commit suicide. Instead, she went to the police, her rapists were apprehended and an Anti-Terrorist Court sentenced six men to death; four for raping her and two for being a part of the panchayat that decreed the rape. The remaining eight accused were released. The government of Pakistan also awarded Mukhtar a judgment equivalent to $8,000 with which she started a school for girls. But in March 2005, the Lahore High Court reversed the trial court’s ruling. Five of the six were acquitted, while the death sentence of the sixth was commuted to life imprisonment. Mukhtar appealed and the case has been pending in the Supreme Court since July 2005.

During her last visit to the United States in 2007, Mukhtar gave an audience in Sacramento a progress report on her efforts. “First there was no school — now there is a school. There was no light — now there is light. There were three students — now there are 1,000 — and people know how to fight oppression.”

Today’s Jerusalem Post editorial brought to mind the late, great David Bar-Illan. A concert pianist and longtime contributor to COMMENTARY, Bar-Illan joined the Jerusalem Post in 1990 as editorial page editor and soon inaugurated a column called Eye on the Media. The point was to expose media bias against Israel, and the response from some of our co-workers at the paper (where I was then employed) was less than enthusiastic.

I caught David in the hall after one of his first columns appeared. As we chatted, an oh-so-helpful colleague approached him with a scowl and waving a finger at him declared, “Come the revolution, they’re going to string you up!” I was shocked. David smiled and replied, “I’m right here, I’m waiting.”

At the time, methodically pointing out that major media outlets were peddling falsehoods and distorting the truth because of their anti-Israel bias wasn’t exactly mainstream. David was considered a hard-line, right wing hawk and his focus on the media was viewed by many as nothing so much as anti-Left fanaticism.

Today, The Jerusalem Post has another David at the helm but editor David Horovitz isn’t a right-winger by any stretch of the imagination (I worked for him too at the Jerusalem Report). Horovitz is a Zionist, though, and he obviously recognizes that the scourge of anti-Israel bias in the news media is so serious it must be exposed and denounced. Indeed, choosing the worst example of anti-Israel reporting for the editorial must have been a real chore. Mike McNally goes so far as to praise Israel for keeping journos out of Gaza.

Clearly the problem Bar-Illan exposed nearly 20 years ago has gotten so bad that now even liberal members of the Israeli media can see the truth. Is that an improvement over bitter denial?

Either way, we miss you David Bar-Illan.

Embarrassing. Last night, Ms. Couric interviewed Hillary Clinton for “60 Minutes.” Given the level of access and deference that show receives, both Couric’s Clinton interview and the preceding Steve Kroft interview with Barack Obama were up to the minute and might have turned out to be enlightening and news-making interviews. Instead, Couric shamed herself with a vapid and childish series of questions to the potential Commander-in-Chief.

Among the tidbits we learned: Clinton drinks tea not coffee, that she’s given up diet sodas because “they give you a jolt but it doesn’t last,” that she washes her hands or uses Purell to stay healthy and that were she to lose her bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, she’ll be happy to return to being a simple senator from New York. Is any of this information relevant when she’s facing the mother of all nomination battles?

Early on, Couric couldn’t seem to let go of one really nagging question: Doesn’t Mrs. Clinton get down? In her deepest darkest moments, doesn’t she think about losing? Thankfully, Clinton didn’t lower herself to the bait. She smiled and when Couric finally stopped blathering, replied that she didn’t let herself think that way.

Even when the interview got to substantive issues, Couric didn’t listen to her subject and failed to ask any challenging – or really any – follow-up questions. Clinton attacked John McCain for saying he’d be OK with the U.S. staying in Iraq for 50 or 100 years, saying she wold never let that happen. But we’ve been in Germany for over 60 years and we’re still in Korea and Vietnam, does Clinton want to get us out of those commitments, as quickly as she seems intent on getting out of Iraq? Couric didn’t care to find out. (Steve Kroft didn’t see fit to follow up on Obama’s similar attack on McCain, either.)

At the time, there was a lot of discussion about Couric moving from fluffy “Today” into hard news and becoming the first woman news anchor. Whether she can indeed deliver a serious news broadcast every evening is not at issue here. What is at issue is her ability to sit down with serious people, who are engaged in serious endeavors and talk to them at their level. Her performance last night proves that she really should just stay behind the desk and deliver the lines scrolling on the teleprompter.

David Hazony is actually too kind to “Israel’s paper of record,” Haaretz, when in an earlier post he says one of its editorials exposes the paper’s “severe disconnect with the Israeli public.” Haaretz is not disconnected; rather, it is connected—fiercely so—to its vision of what Israel should be.

Two recent stories serve as perfect examples. First, an op-ed column by Tom Segev on the 60th anniversary of the United Nations vote to partition Palestine into two states—one Jewish and one Arab. Segev is one of Israel’s preeminent historians and a regular Haaretz contributor. On this occasion, rather than express any sense of celebration, gratitude, or even mild happiness that the UN voted in favor of a Jewish State, Segev decides to question the legitimacy of his own country. “With every settler who moves to the territories and with every Palestinian child who is killed by Israel Defense Forces fire, Israel loses some of the moral justification that led to the decision on the 29th of November 60 years ago,” Segev explains. The editors of Haaretz publish such opinions—and worse—on a daily basis.

But Haaretz’s ideological crusade is not limited to the editorial or opinion pages. Its editors are only too happy to publish defamatory feature stories as well. On November 30, the weekend section of Haaretz (the equivalent of the New York Times’s Sunday Magazine) featured a cover story on the Shalem Center, a Jerusalem think tank that, incidentally, used to employ Mr. Hazony. A shorter English version of the article is available here. So egregious were the mistakes and so blatant the inaccuracies that the Shalem Center posted the following response on its own Web site. Haaretz has thus far issued no correction nor has it provided space to rebut the claims made in its original article. And for good reason: The sole purpose of the story is to disparage a think-tank whose world-view the editors of Haaretz oppose. But instead of a feature analyzing the center’s stated beliefs versus its accomplishments, or even questioning the legitimacy of Shalem’s Zionist mission, the story deals in gossip, supposed improprieties, and the personal habits and salaries of Shalem’s founders. This is worth 4,500 words? It is when your goal is to defame an organization whose success you envy and whose vision you loathe.

Haaretz is often described as Israel’s New York Times, and when it comes to ideological crusading, the two papers do resemble one another. Except that the New York Times doesn’t stoop this low.