Why Liberal Women Dislike Hillary Clinton

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Such is the curious phenomenon of many educated, professional, liberal women of a certain age when it comes to Hillary Clinton, the Los Angeles Times reports. In fact, upper-middle-class women on the left are "historically her toughest crowd," the paper reports.

Why is this? The Times offers a handful of possibilities:

1) They're not as worried about job security as their more blue-collar peers (who are more pro-Clinton), so they feel free to judge the New York Senator as a peer.

2) They're disgusted by the fact that, while they struggled to break through barriers in the workplace, Clinton hitched her star to her man and followed him to the top.

3) They're disappointed by her support of the Iraq war and the fact that she has recreated herself as a centrist.

4) Women hold each other to an unrealistic standard.

5) She's trying to act too much like a man.

"What you may be hearing is the commitment to pacifism that some women associate with feminism," said Wendy Kaminer, a 57-year-old author and lawyer. "It's what I think of as the 'feminine' strain of feminism that sees women as bringing something to the table because they are not militaristic, work by consensus and don't play the boys' game. And Hillary is someone who has played the boys' game exceedingly well."

Jane Fonda perhaps summed up this view best in an interview with the LA Weekly last May, in which she called Clinton "a ventriloquist for the patriarchy with a skirt and a vagina." (It would be such a great quote, except when was the last time Hillary wore a skirt?)

The Times says Clinton has been working to overcome this skepticism from her sisters by appearing on "The View" and telling a Chicago audience that "I'm your girl."

Why this should endear her to feminist peers, I'm not quite sure, but something seems to be working. Support for Clinton among college-educated women jumped from 29 percent in June to 50 percent in October, according to the latest LA Times/Bloomberg poll.

The Most Expensive Weapons Program Ever

Believe it or not, the biggest financial concern for the U.S. military isn't how to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Washington Post reports. Those are being taken care of by supplemental appropriations.

Rather it's figuring out how to pay the $200 billion estimated price of upgrading the largest war machine in history into the robotic, wireless, Buck Rodgers-esque force of military leaders' dreams.

The project involves creating a family of 14 weapons, drones, robots, sensors and hybrid-electric combat vehicles connected by a wireless network. Experts say it's the most ambitious modernization of the Army since World War II and the most expensive weapons program ever.

This vision has a name: Future Combat Systems, or FCS. It also has a growing number of grumbling critics - most notably in the Government Accountability Office - who say the billions that have been burned on the upgrade since it was envisioned in 1995 have not yielded anything all that great so far. Its long-term program is scheduled to kick into major production mode in the next decade.

The original story of the program is a little scary, given this week's developments in the U.S. relationship with Iran. Back in 1995, Maj. Gen. Robert Scales Jr. assembled a team of 700 who warred over two years in a huge simulation center in Pennsylvania. The blue team represented the Americans. The red team represented - remember, this is 1995 - the Iranians.

In one scenario, the Iranians captured Riyadh and began executing the royal Saudi family on live television. That drew the blue team into the streets of Riyadh, which, choked with heavy armor, became a bloody mess. Scales called the exercise the "aha moment" in which he learned that the United States needed to develop a lighter, quicker kind of warmaking.

An Era Ends In New York

For most of the last year and change, New Yorkers couldn't hear the words Daniel Doctoroff without it being accompanied by the epithet "the next Robert Moses."

The city's old master builder was experiencing a posthumous renaissance of sorts, thanks to several exhibitions dedicated to questioning the negative way he was portrayed in Robert Caro's Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Power Broker."

And it seemed like Doctoroff, the city's longest-serving deputy mayor for economic development with some power-brokerly tendencies of his own, was shining brighter for the reflected glow.

But in the New York Times' story about his resignation, the paper reports that Doctoroff leaves his post with a decidedly mixed legacy.

Despite his many achievements, much of his agenda remains unrealized. His defeats - the failed West Side Stadium and congestion pricing plans - are perhaps more famous than his victories. Nevertheless, in saying goodbye to the man who would soon go to work for a different wing of his empire - as president of Bloomberg L.P. - Mayor Mike Bloomberg couldn't resist the cliché comparison one last time.

"As chief architect of our five-borough economic development plan, Dan Doctoroff has done more to change the face of the city than anyone since Robert Moses."

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