The Post is reporting that it’s over, and — mercifully — peacefully so. And so to the obvious political question: How does this change the race? Certainly it gets Clinton a week of positive and sympathetic coverage, featuring tearful interviews with the young men and women held hostage. But it might also have an effect on the intensity of the Clinton-bashing over the next couple of weeks, as people take a step back and re-evaluate to what an extent the misogyny directed against her by her political opponents can combine with alcohol or mental illness to lead to real violence. At the very least, we need to consider the hostage-taker’s actions in the context of the greater level of insanity and violence directed against women in this country. Reports The NYT:

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer reported that Mr. Eisenberg had been calling the cable network’s Washington bureau throughout the afternoon. Mr. Blitzer said that Mr. Eisenberg had been complaining about the mental health care system in the United States. Also, WMUR reported Mr. Eisenberg had been scheduled to appear in Strafford County Superior Court at 1:30 p.m. today with his wife for a domestic violence hearing.

Has there ever been an incident of this kind before during a presidential race? And directed at someone who is not even a major party nominee?

High-profile women in other fields routinely attract mentally ill obsessives, according to speakers at the Women and News conference I attended today. Asked by speaker Arianna Huffington (prior to news of the hostage incident) about whether they’d attracted stalkers in the past, a number of women raised their hands, including Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman. “Too many women on television have that problem,” concurred CBS Evening News executive producer Rick Kaplan — Katie Couric among them. “It’s a common problem.”

Obviously, taking people hostage is a step or two beyond stalking, but I think it may be useful going forward to consider to what extent the hostage-taker’s actions were part of a continuum of violence and insanity that takes women as its object, and to consider how women in public life are forced to deal with this continuum as they seek to take on historically male positions of prominence.

UPDATE: Readers remind that there have been two assassination attempts against Democratic presidential primary candidates in the past, one successful: New York Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was shot and killed in 1968 and George Wallace was shot and partially paralyzed during his third presidential bid in 1972.

What happened yesterday in New Hampshire seems rather significantly different to me, as the candidate was never at risk, and the hostage-taker appears not to have even had a bomb. But if others choose to situate the Rochester incident within the context of that presidential primary history, my bet is this incident winds up hurting both Clinton and Barack Obama, in that it will give new substance to fears — far greater in the case of Obama than Clinton — that their ground-breaking candidacies make them assassination targets.

Also of note, in light of my earlier comments, the Rochester incident suspect, Lee Eisenberg, in April was charged with two counts of stalking, according to The Washington Post.

The outrage that people are expressing over the presence of questioners with campaign affiliations during the Republican CNN-YouTube debate is depressing. Where has everyone been over the last four years? The idea that average everyday citizens would be able to submit questions to a national political forum without having to compete with the more sharply-worded and compelling products of people with a stake in the outcome of the contests in question goes against everything we’ve learned over the last four years about who is engaged with online media, and even who participated in sending in questions to the earlier CNN-YouTube debate.

The New York Times‘s Michael Cooper gets down to business:

In almost every appearance as he campaigns for the Republican presidential nomination, Rudolph W. Giuliani cites a fusillade of statistics and facts to make his arguments about his successes in running New York City and the merits of his views.

Discussing his crime-fighting success as mayor, Mr. Giuliani told a television interviewer that New York was “the only city in America that has reduced crime every single year since 1994.” In New Hampshire this week, he told a public forum that when he became mayor in 1994, New York “had been averaging like 1,800, 1,900 murders for almost 30 years.” When a recent Republican debate turned to the question of fiscal responsibility, he boasted that “under me, spending went down by 7 percent.”

All of these statements are incomplete, exaggerated or just plain wrong.

That’s some refreshingly blunt language there.

Coming back from St. Thomas, I was asked for my passport in order to re-enter the mainland. Of course, having been under the impression that I did not need my passport to travel to the island, a U.S. territory purchased in 1917 that’s reachable by domestic overseas flight from JFK airport in New York, I hadn’t brought one. One low-grade scene later, I’d talked the U.S. border control agent into accepting my D.C. driver’s license as proof of citizenship, and to let me back in. And while I am grateful to have been allowed to return to the mainland, it does seem to me that either the border agent was being overly strict, as the state’s tourism authority says U.S. citizens only need government-issued photo IDs to travel there and back, or else overly lax, in terms of allowing a traveler to come to the mainland U.S. with only a state driver’s license. Either way, a system by which a U.S. territory allows the use of easily forged U.S. driver’s licenses to enter the mainland while also not having particularly enforceable standards about who is on the island in the first place — St. Thomas has a lot of coast line, and a lot of boats sailing thither and yon from tiny, semi-private coves all day long, as does St. John — seems like an invitation to mischief.

Online space hasn’t only opened up room for women’s secondary conversations — those sotto voce just-between-us-girls talks that have historically taken place only outside the glare of public life — to be brought into wider view, but it’s brought men’s secret, single-gender conversations into public space, as well. The results aren’t pretty, reports Newhouse News Service’s Jonathan Tilove:

In the coming months, America will decide whether to elect its first female president. And amid a techno-media landscape where the wall between private vitriol and public debate has been reduced to rubble, Sen. Hillary Clinton is facing an onslaught of open misogynistic expression.

Step lightly through that thickly settled province of the Web you could call anti-Hillaryland and you are soon knee-deep in “bitch,” “slut,” “skank,” “whore” and, ultimately, what may be the most toxic four-letter word in the English language.

We have never been here before.

No woman has run quite the same gantlet. And of course, no man….

Pascoe warns that the broader society ignores the implications of the conversations being conducted on these sites at its peril.

“This is the new world that’s coming,” she said.

Facebook, popular with high school and college students, has dozens of anti-Hillary groups, many of which take great, sweaty delight in heaping abuse on Clinton as a woman, imagining her reduced to a subservient role, and visiting violence upon her.

One is “Hillary Clinton: Stop Running for President and Make Me a Sandwich,” with more than 23,000 members and 2,200 “wall posts” — Internet graffiti in which discussants have fantasized about Clinton being raped by a donkey.

Eschewing the slightest wit or subtlety, some high school boys in Olathe, Kan., created “Punch her in the c—!!”. With about 200 members, this group features the discussion topics “Why we hate Hillary Clinton,” “Why you REALLY hate Hillary Clinton” and “What will we do if Hillary becomes president,” which drew two replies — “death” and “shooter in the cooter?”

Another Facebook group, more temperate in tone and with about 13,000 members, is “Life’s a bitch, why vote for one? Anti-Hillary ’08.” Like several other anti-Clinton sites, this one promotes a T-shirt: “Hillary for President. She Puts the C— in Country.”

What’s going on here?

Is this merely some adolescent “guys gone wild” (most but by no means all of the Hillary haters are male)? The rank rituals of the rec room revealed for the whole world to see?

The proprietors of the Facebook group “Hillary Clinton Shouldn’t Run for President, She Should Just Run the Dishes,” with 2,159 members, offer a pre-emptive disclaimer to offended visitors:

“Do not message just to say how sexist we are and how the Lord will strike us down for hating women. That is just ignorant. It’s been really hard to respond to all of the e-mails without saying the C-word, don’t make us start now.”

As they say, read the whole thing. I sometimes wonder if we haven’t all massively underestimated what a major shift it would be to have a female president — or even female major party nominee — and the sort of backlash that could go along with it.

You know how this goes.