Buried in Susan Faludi's New York Times sprawling op-ed regarding the anger many women are expressing that Hillary Clinton did not win the Democratic nomination, how women are covered in the press, and the history of the white suffragette movement, there is a crucial paragraph with vital facts about our current political state. Faludi notes:

While many women are devastated by Obama's selection of Joe Biden as a running mate, those concerned with achieving higher rates of female representation in elected offices should remember that the game is not over this election year. There numerous progressive women running for office all over the nation. Since an enormous portion of laws and policies that affect women are make outside of the Oval Office, don't write off 2008 as a big year for women just yet.

Have you seen presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain's education plan? McCain presented his plan in a speech to the NAACP last week. What's most interesting to me about the plan is that it combines federal and very local oversight of schools--and in so doing presents a number of conundrums and possibilities.

We'll be among the bloggers covering speeches by Sens. McCain, Obama and Clinton (in that order) at this year's annual convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. We hope you'll join us. (I'm not using the royal "we" -- I'm expecting at least one other BlogHer CE to join me.) In the meantime, feel free to share your thoughts either about the election, or about the news coverage of the election to date.

Should Americans be required to show photo identification in order to vote? Do laws requiring photo IDs prevent voter fraud or suppress minority votes? Opinions abound on all sides, but the answers to these questions could determine the fate of a key Bush administration nominee, a Supreme court case, and the perceived fairness of the 2008 presidential election. Let's start with the basics. Tova Anderson of the Century Foundation has a nice, concise overview:

It was a gray Tuesday today in central New Jersey,with intermittent rains falling steadily as fresh tears. There was little overt acknowledgment of the 9/11 anniversary, just over an hour away from Manhattan. No need -- the shadows of memory are palpable. That day in 2001, sitting in a computer lab that my students and I used to launch our local coverage, I wrote: "On the morning of September 11, 2001, individual Americans and people around the world siezed upon the Internet, as well as television, radio and telephones as a way of making sense of madness. What we saw and heard seemed scripted by some B-grade Hollywood hack: first the news that a plane had crashed into one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center, then live images of a second plane, and the towers imploding, and then the word about the Pentagon and the rumors of elsewhere, and there were no words to be said, and no sense to be made, but we kept searching...." Six years later, we are still searching: for a way out of the morass in Iraq, for clues to the enigma of Osama bin Laden and his confederates, for clues about how we to make our differences a source of strength, instead of fear.

As the weekend’s Labor Day festivities begin across the United States, the news comes that the search for six entombed Utah miners has been suspended indefinitely. I suppose they’ll be planting another flag in the interactive map of workplace deaths that the House Education and Labor committee has been compiling. In 2006, 5,703 workers died on the job in the United States, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The news makes the question Ken Ward asked earlier this month in an article for Nieman Watchdog all the more poignant: “First and foremost, why is it acceptable for the coal industry to break the law?”