Two children are pictured on December 5, 2008 at an internally displaced people (IDP) camp near Kibati in Nord-Kivu. The government of the Democratic Republic of Congo and a rebel movement are to meet on December 8, in Kenya to formalise a ceasefire, Kinshasa's foreign minister said Friday, raising hopes of an end to months of fighting in the east of the country. At the same time Congolese and Rwandan armed forces are to launch operations against Rwandan Hutu rebels operating in the same region following two days of talks, a statement said. The UN refugee agency said Friday that more than 90,000 people were missing in the conflict-hit eastern Democratic Republic of Congo after three makeshift camps in rebel-held areas were found emptied. Photo by Pascal Guyot/Getty.
According to a new study, more intelligent men also have better sperm. A quote from Dr Allan Pacey, an expert in fertility at the University of Sheffield:
The fact that it's possible to detect a statistical relationship between intelligence and semen quality in adult men probably says more about the co-development of brain and testicles when the man was in his mother's womb, and therefore how well they both function in adult life, rather than suggesting that playing Sudoku can somehow stimulate more sperm to be produced.
By Patrick Appel The unemployment rate hit 6.7 percent yesterday and the underemployment rate hit 12.5 percent. What does it mean?:
It's yet another sign that this recession is a much bigger deal than the last two, in 2001 and 1990-91. But in percentage terms (it was a 0.39% drop) there were bigger one month falls in employment in 1980 and, repeatedly, in 1974 and 1975. There were also sharper drops in almost every year of the 1950s, but those were mostly the result of temporary layoffs that were reversed a few months later...It means a lot of people are losing their jobs. Beyond that, it's going to be hard to say what the significance is until we know what the next six months or so look like. If there are only a couple more months this bad, then it's a manageable if painful downturn. If the declines keep growing and growing, then it's something else entirely.
Patrick Ruffini says conservatives shouldn't dismiss Obama's fundraising advantage:
The real shift we should be thinking about is not the shift from large to small donors. It is the shift from direct mail to the Internet. Republicans have always had a small donor base (in contrast to the pre-McCain-Feingold Democrats). It is called direct mail, and it's why the RNC always outraises the DNC no matter what (even in 2008). But the problem is that 1) it doesn't scale, and 2) the transaction costs are very high -- usually around 30-40% for mailing a housefile and 100% to prospect for new donors.
To put this in direct mail-ese, the Obama campaign raised $500 million online after sending one billion "pieces" of e-mail. To raise half a billion, Obama spent no more than $25 million on all Internet efforts combined (I have to review the final numbers, but I think this is right), a 20x ROI. Sending a similar volume of snail mail would have eaten up the vast majority of the $750 million Obama raised overall.
Ayers may think that there's still a debate about the Weather Underground's effectiveness. And he might also think that he "acted appropriately in the context of those times." To me, though, he's just a shallow rich kid who took himself and his revolutionary rhetoric much too seriously, helped inspire people to do things that got them killed, and helped to discredit the anti-war movement and the left as a whole.
By Patrick Appel The rich are trying to pass as middle-class:
Now many bankers, along with discovering $15 bottles of wine, are finding other ways to cut back—if not out of necessity, then from collective guilt and fear: the fitness trainer from three times a week to once a week; the haircut and highlights every eight weeks instead of every five. One prominent “hedgie” recently flew to China for business—but not on a private plane, as before. “Why should I pay $250,000 for a private plane,” he said to a friend, “when I can pay $20,000 to fly commercial first class?” The new thriftiness takes a bit of getting used to. “I was at the Food Emporium in Bedford [in Westchester County] yesterday, using my Food Emporium discount card,” recounts one Greenwich woman. “The well-dressed wife of a Wall Street guy was standing behind me. She asked me how to get one. Then she said, ‘Have you ever used coupons?’ I said, ‘Sure, maybe not lately, but sure.’ She said, ‘It’s all the rage now—where do you get them?’”
One other important note from that internal New York
Times memo my colleague Zach got a hold of: The company reports it has
“more than 10,000 paid subscribers” to an electronic edition of the
newspaper on Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader. To my knowledge (please
correct me if I’m wrong), that’s the first time a major newspaper has
released numbers on how it’s doing on Kindle — a platform lots of
newspaper execs are eager to see turn into a saving grace for their
industry.
Given that the electronic Times costs $13.99 a month,
that would mean the NYT Kindle edition is generating in the
neighborhood of $1.68 million a year. How much of that goes to NYT Co.
and how much stays with Amazon is unclear.
by Chris Bodenner NYU prof. Clay Shirky discusses the underappreciated impact of "Dear Mr. Obama," which he calls "the single most affecting video of the election":
I am an anti-Iraq-war Democrat, and it nevertheless brought tears to my eyes (and I don't cry easy -- will.i.am's Yes We Can left me fairly cold.) ... It was seen 13 million times in 3 months, which topped Obama Girl in absolute views, and I've got a Crush...on Obama was up a year and a half. ... The video was
largely circulated via homophilous
forwarding along conservative channels. Despite the incredible
viewership, I'm betting that the ratio of BoingBoing readers who have
seen Obama Girl to those who've seen Dear Mr. Obama is at least 10:1. (When my students presented it to ~100 NYU students on election eve, something like 3 of them had seen it.) ... Dear Mr. Obama was a trifecta. For the base, a muscular but
polite attack on the very issue that brought Obama into the spotlight.
For the undecided, the emotional charge is much likelier to sway them
than argumentation. And for the Dems -- nothing. The video might as
well not have existed for all it was seen in Democratic circles. Since
the video's sole speaker can't be criticized without making the
criticizer look churlish at best, almost no Dems forwarded it, linked
to it, talked about it. ... Dear Mr. Obama was music to Republican ears while being inert in Democratic hands; expect it to be a template for 2010.
[Blodget] runs through a typical housing bubble scenario - somebody buys a house late in the game and loses his shirt - and argues that almost everybody involved, from the homebuyer to the real-estate agent to the mortgage broker to the people on Wall Street and Washington who enabled the whole thing were making the same kind of mistakes, and indeed, were acting "just the way you would expect them to act under the circumstances." Now in a sense, this is convincing. But at a same time, our hypothetical homebuyer had very different responsibilities than a hypothetical Wall Street banker. His decision to buy at the height of the bubble put him at risk to lose, say, tens of thousands of dollars and perhaps the roof over his head. Those are high stakes, obviously, but they're high stakes for him and for his family. Whereas the risky decisions being made the people running, say, Citibank had serious consequences for millions of people, in America and around the world. And this distinction ought to matter, both to how people should be expected to behave, and how they should be judged.
What I want to do by writing the names of anything connected with the 2.0 life... [on] the slums of the third world is to point out the gap between the reality we still live in and the ephemeral world of technologies. It's a kind of reminder, for people like me..., I'm an Apple user and also have social-network accounts, that the real world is deeply far from the idealization we have of it...
By Patrick Appel From a study on happiness and social networks:
The happiness of an individual is associated with the happiness of people up to three degrees removed in the social network. Happiness, in other words, is not merely a function of individual experience or individual choice but is also a property of groups of people.
By Patrick Appel Larison responds to Reihan's thoughts on Iraq and Afghanistan:
Reihan is as smart and fair-minded a person as you can find among supporters of the war, and if I could imagine persuading anyone on the other side that the war was, in fact, an exercise in illegal aggression that did nothing to benefit American national security and served no vital U.S. interests that person would have to be Reihan. Right away, however, I am struck by a basic difficulty: how can a war opponent honestly call the war what he regards it to be while persuading a reasonable war supporter that he should no longer support it? Debates over the war have been as fruitless as they have been in part because the core assumptions and foreign policy visions of people on either side are so wildly divergent and contradictory that they are barely talking about the same thing.
Reihan unpacks what he means by a "strong national defense"
I will say that I’m struck by those who argue that those who adhere to
the Bush-Obama policy of keeping the United States engaged in Iraq are
the ones who want to “prolong” the conflict, as the shadow war between
these two countries has been going on since at least 1990, if you
include the devastating effect of sanctions and the low-level air war.
There is real chance that the war might finally end, provided we extend
security guarantees and help achieve a durable political settlement.
And yes, I understand that my use of the “Bush-Obama policy” will
raises hackles. It’s meant to — the gap at this point between AEI and
the Center for a New American Security is small and shrinking, as the
post-2006 shift in Iraq has forced informed observers to take a more
pragmatic approach.
By Patrick Appel A group of editors and book critics debate the significance of a settlement between Google and the Association of American Publishers, a deal which will allow Google to make searchable digital copies of millions of books that have gone out of print. Carlin Romano, literary critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, is optimistic:
Both Google and authors emerge as winners. Google wins because, for a tiny $125 million settlement, it gets to set up another near-monopoly business, the selling of out-of-print books online, and take a 37 percent cut. Authors of out-of-print books win because they’ll get otherwise unobtainable revenue for online purchase of older books that normally would not produce any royalties.
The losers, aside from the would-be online competitors of Google, are sellers of used books, both companies and individuals. Google’s service will surely lessen demand for out-of-print books. But that doesn’t violate the philosophy behind copyright, because authors traditionally receive no remuneration for sale of used copies of their books.
The new Atlantic is now online. Henry Blodget's article on the economic mess is worth a read:
As we work our way through the wreckage of this latest colossal bust, our government—at our urging—will go to great lengths to try to make sure such a bust never happens again. We will “fix” the “problems” that we decide caused the debacle; we will create new regulatory requirements and systems; we will throw a lot of people in jail. We will do whatever we must to assure ourselves that it will be different next time. And as long as the searing memory of this disaster is fresh in the public mind, it will be different. But as the bust recedes into the past, our priorities will slowly change, and we will begin to set ourselves up for the next great boom.
By Patrick Appel "Every conventional wisdom has been turned on its head in the course of the Iraq War. And political ironies abound. The vilified George Bush did largely accomplish his goal of liberating an entire nation. A democratic regime can function in the Middle East. And there was in fact a military “solution”–one that preceded the political reconciliation," - Jennifer Rubin, celebrating way too early.
Balko's theory that "Prohibition was the pièce de résistance of the early
20th-century progressives' grand social engineering agenda" isn't right.
The temperance movements of the 19thC & 20thC
were classic Protestant Christian movements, conservative in nature. Wesleyans,
Methodists, arts colleges, working men's clubs, self-improvement, all that sort
of thing. You could just as easily say it was "early 20th-century
conservative Christians' grand social engineering agenda". All the more
compelling since the war on drugs is its direct descendent
and prosecuted just as vigorously by contemporary Christian
conservatives. Failed social engineering can be a
conservative enterprise as much as anything else.
Prohibition occurred during what is commonly referred to as the Progressive Era and was considered part of the progressive movement's agenda. And while "failed social engineering can be a conservative enterprise" there are plenty of modern-day self-proclaimed progressives who still back the war on drugs.
I'm an ERISA employee benefits attorney who started out working for Nebraska's state pension plans. I've thought a lot about the "defined contribution" (e.g. 401(k)) versus "defined benefit" (e.g. traditional state pension) debate. I tend to agree with most of the criticisms of 401(k) plans that you cited -- But I think you need to think more about the actual state of large state defined benefit pension plans.
By Patrick Appel The Economist evaluates the situation in Pakistan:
The problem of Islamist militancy in Pakistan is very unlikely to be addressed satisfactorily in the near future. US efforts—at least in their current form—to force the issue are as likely to worsen the situation as to improve it. Perceived US interference in the region may seriously undermine the Pakistani government's will to tackle the problem. But even with the best intentions, a whole range of problems will hamper Pakistan's ability to improve the situation. For one, the government's efforts will depend on a military that has historically sought to undermine it, and that has already expressed reservations about Mr Zardari's handling of the current crisis. Also worrying is the increasing evidence that militant groups which initially fought for local causes (primarily the Kashmir issue) have now conflated their regional goals, training and tactics with the broader movement of global Islamist jihad.
Newsweek'snew poll shows what we already knew, support for gays civil rights is growing:
One reason that tolerance for gay marriage and civil unions may be on
the rise is that a growing number of Americans say they know someone
who's gay. While in 1994, a NEWSWEEK Poll found that only 53 percent of
those questioned knew a gay or lesbian person, that figure today is 78
percent. Drilling down a bit more, 38 percent of adults work with
someone gay, 33 percent have a gay family member and 66 percent have a
gay friend or acquaintance.
In this latest article -- mostly, a repackaged version of this speech to National Defense University -- Gates seems to be taking aim at the F-22 again. "The Defense Department has to consider whether in situations in which the United States has total air dominance, it makes sense to employ lower-cost, lower-tech aircraft that can be employed in large quantities and used by U.S. partners," he writes. That sounds like a plug for the smaller, cheaper (and internationally procured) F-35. As Axe noted here earlier this week, with Gates in line to lead the Pentagon under President Barack Obama, the F-22's future is starting to look less than bright.
Tim Dickinson does a No on 8 postmortem. The thrust of the piece:
"This was political malpractice," says a Democratic consultant who operates at the highest level of California politics. "They fucked this up, and it was painful to watch. They shouldn't be allowed to pawn this off on the Mormons or anyone else. They snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, and now hundreds of thousands of gay couples are going to pay the price."
...we should acknowledge our contemporary struggle with prohibition. The war on drugs has led to gang violence, trampling of civil liberties, and military interventions abroad. Federalist principles are routinely ignored in medical marijuana raids, doctors face prosecution for prescribing painkillers, and ordinary adults must show their ID just to purchase effective cold medicine. The United States now has more than 300,000 people imprisoned for drug violations.
You know, there are many instances of anecdotal evidence that show the UK health system as wonderful, and many that show the UK health system as dreadful. There are also many instances of anecdotal evidence that show the US health system as wonderful, and many that show the US health system as dreadful. The point is, one can always find anecdotal evidence for whatever side of an argument one takes. The question which no one seems interested in tackling in this particular discussion is: For the average person in the average situation, which health system -- UK or US -- is more consistently better?
I'll do my best to keep some semblance of normalcy around here while Andrew gets much deserved rest. I'm
always working behind the scenes reading, writing, researching, and arguing with Andrew. On any given day I work on twenty to thirty of the posts you read. I will be manning the inbox; please continue to send window views,
dissents, corrections, tangents, rants, and thinly veiled threats to the regular account.
I'm taking a few days off the grid, for my long-delayed post-election coma. My trusty colleague at the Dish, Patrick Appel, will be filling in. Patrick already contributes so much to the Dish, acting as an extra pair of eyes and ears and often, more sober judgment than I sometimes exhibit (yes, the Dish has often intense internal debate - especially over Down Syndrome babies). He really is a core pillar of this website and as the last year has gone by, I cannot imagine doing it without him. He'll be joined by Chris Bodenner, a Dish alum, and constant emailer of tips and Youtubes and news stories. They're both what is now becoming a slowly growing graduated class of alums of the blog. It's been on of the greatest of many pleasure at the Atlantic: a community of sorts, building this site into the best it can be.
I'll be back by next weekend. I figure a gnome with a Nazi salute is a suitable send-off.
An art installation titled 'Dance of/with the Devil' by German artist Ottmar Horl, featuring hundreds of Nazi-saluting garden gnomes, forms part of the the Flanders Expo - LineArt Exhibition on December 5, 2008 in Ghent, Belgium. The international 'fusion' art fair runs from Dec 5-9. By Mark Renders/Getty.
The remaining part of DC was donated by Maryland. Give it back to them, minus a carve-out for the White House, Capitol, Supreme Court, and Mall...If Maryland won’t have DC back, simply count DC residents as part of Maryland for the purposes of U.S. Senate representation and allow them to vote for Maryland’s two Senators. Give them a House seat that’s counted as a “Maryland” seat but whose boundaries are fixed and excepted from the Baker v. Carr rule of equal size. (This may require a Constitutional amendment but strikes me as within the spirit of the Constitution, since representation would still remain with states.)
As a woman who is the mother of 2 grown kids, I know what emotions can be involved.
Palin was 43 or 44 when she had Trig. Her children were almost grown up and she was going places in her career. She gets pregnant and doesn't want to be. Guilt.
Guilt and denial do things. She was obviously in denial for a long time, maybe she, and I stress maybe, she toyed with the thought of aborting or hoped to miscarry. That alone would make the guilt unbearable for her being a religious far right person.
Women who go into denial over pregnancy have been known to even diet to keep from showing for as long as possible. Older women are no different from teenagers in some respects. The emotions are the same. And Palin is somewhat immature anyway.
The mind does strange things when traumatized and this can be with an unwanted pregnancy.
I have lived and worked in the US and the UK.
In the summer of 1999, I disappointed a work client by deciding
against a planned move from the UK to the US. I had my visa in place,
I had scoped out housing and childcare. In the end, I didn't think it
was worth the trouble of moving my family, with a young son and a baby
daughter, thousands of miles away from friends and relatives.
A few months later, my 4-year-old son was diagnosed with leukemia.
“It’s not that you don’t want to earn as much money as you can — it is your obligation, of course — but companies have obligations beyond that and they certainly have obligations beyond that at certain times, in the times in which they operate. And they also certainly ought to know that meeting and beating expectations is probably yesterday’s game and it will be increasingly so, which would be by the way very healthy for companies. Running a company that meets and beats expectations, and that runs their company accordingly, are companies that I would question why anyone would invest in,” - Barry Diller.
...what does all this say about the widespread view that societies are dumbing down, educational standards are crumbling and people’s ability to concentrate is collapsing? The reply must be that it cannot be true across the board and that for a significant number, the opposite is the case: people want more intellectually demanding things to see and hear, not fewer. Surely both things are happening at once: part of the population is dumbing down, part is wising up. But something has changed. H.L. Mencken, the so-called sage of Baltimore, said: “No one in this world...has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.” A growing number of people are proving him wrong.
Ever asked an academic about their research only to be subjected to 20 minutes of nonsensical droning? Thanks to YouTube, it just got a whole lot easier to explain a complicated thesis at a cocktail party. In early October, Ph.D. students worldwide were challenged by Gonzo Labs/AAAS to re-create their dissertations through interpretive dance and post the videos on YouTube. Dozens of performances were submitted, ranging from tangos to Lindy Hops to night-vision hula-hooping. The choreography was scored on its ability to bridge the gap between art and science, though you should feel free to judge based on levels of jubilation and pure absurdity.
My own first reaction, in discussing the attacks with a friend, was that if they resulted in a nuclear exchange in South Asia, ten guys would have essentially changed the course of human history ...
Jennifer Vanasco disapproves of the prop 8 boycotts:
A boycott is good when a company is bad. When it harasses its LGBT employees; fires them for being gay; will not promote them; sells anti-gay products or services (say an anti-gay t-shirt).
A boycott is bad when a company is being targeted because of the personal donations of someone in the company — especially when the company itself is pro-gay or gay neutral, as Cinemark is (it has high ranking, open gays in its leadership, it supports LGBT film festivals, it's running Milk). Or, for example, Marriott — which, yes, is owned by a Mormon family, but which also scored 100 in the 2009 HRC Corporate Equality Index.
The sad fact is that the U.S. auto industry has essentially failed. Even if car sales come roaring back from their current anemic pace next year, there's no guarantee the Big Three will return to health, that they'll be able to stay current on debt payments and raise capital from tough-minded investors. The executives and union leaders speak as if the bailout money is simply needed to tide them over until the sun comes back out. Exuding and instilling such confidence is a big part of their jobs. But increasingly, it seems that the federal funding they're requesting is necessary to help manage failure, not to stave it off.
Jacob Sullum studies a new report from the National Center for Policy Analysis:
If [Social Security and Medicare benefits] were funded by investments, they say, the government would have to set aside $102 trillion ("about 7 times the size of the U.S. economy") to keep the programs solvent. Assuming the government continues to use current tax revenue to pay for Social Security and Medicare, the two programs will consume one-tenth of the federal budget by 2012, almost half by 2030, and 80 percent by 2070.
Sorry, Andrew. Having lived with a woman who gave birth to four children (one still born at eight months), Palin looks very pregnant to me, especially considering the fact that she’s wearing a loose overcoat. The fact that she had what looks like excessive weight gain with an earlier child does not prove anything. Weight gain with each pregnancy varies depending on the health of the mother, the health of the fetus, and the mother’s diet and exercise regimen. I see nothing in that photograph that makes me think she’s faking a pregnancy.
Another adds:
Just a quick note to say that from my skeptical, untrained eye, you can't say for certain that she's clearly not pregnant from the picture. I only say this because my co-worker down the hall, who's 6 weeks away from delivering her third, is an expert at hiding it. When I talk to her, I regularly forget that she is pregnant, and a picture of her wouldn't convince anyone that she was.
In 2010 there will be a redistricting in New York state, a process that the Democrats will at least now be able to control. Therein may lie our hope for marriage equality in 2011.
Relying on Democrats for anything seems to me to be quixotic at best.
As Dish readers know, there are only three public photographs that I could find of Sarah Palin pregnant with Trig (the McCain campaign insisted there were "loads" and then was forced to retract). But we now have another. The date of this photograph, which turned up on a Flickr account, has been clearly established as March 26, 2008:
Here's a link from the Alaska state website discussing the event. Here's a news video.
That's barely three weeks before she gave birth to Trig, a full-term, 6 pound baby. It's also around a week before video footage of Palin, captured here. Since Palin refused throughout the campaign to provide any medical records (although, in classic Palin style, says she has), we only have three photographs of her pregnant and one doctor's letter, released hours before the polls opened November 3. If you're interested in why any sane person would ever doubt a mother's announcement of her own pregnancy, read this.
Maybe this photo has been photo-shopped. Maybe Palin had an anomalous pregnancy that showed far, far less than her previous ones, one that went from close to nothing to a serious bump in two weeks. Maybe the angle in the photo is misleading, and leaning toward us her pregnancy is concealed. Maybe her fifth labor really did take 26 hours combined via a speaking engagement (as amniotic fluid was leaking) and an 11 hour airplane flight (when a birth could have begun at any moment at extreme risk to the child), and maybe the bizarre and, to my mind, incredible stories she has told about the pregnancy and labor are true (there is still a chance they are). But if all these things are true, the Palin camp has had months to provide what would be instantly available records to dismiss all and every "insane" blog speculation about this. And yet none came - on or off the record.
I begged the McCain campaign by private email and in a private meeting to give me something - anything - to kill the story off. I promised to run any evidence that would blow this out of the water. That offer still stands. Please make me look like an idiot for asking these questions. But they didn't offer a thing, asserting that even asking the question was an outrageous reputation-destroying offense. Maybe Michelle Malkin is right that this is truther, tin-foil hat territory. But Malkin's only substantive point rebutting the photographic evidence is:
We’re all obstetricians now!
Actually, the Dish went out and interviewed eight of the leading obstetricians in the country and laid out all the facts of the case and asked the experts for their take. While none would say that this pregnancy could not have happened, and none would comment on a case they hadn't examined personally, all of them said it was one of the strangest and unlikeliest series of events they had ever heard of and found Palin's decision to forgo medical help for more than a day after her water broke and risk the life of her unborn child on a long airplane trip to be reckless beyond measure.
Malkin also equates the story with the Obama birth certificate affair. But we have documentary evidence of the certificate, and Palin has produced no hard evidence at all for her pregnancy. All that's needed is some medical records of her pregnancy which, as a Down Syndrome pregnancy, would have a large pile of medical documentation easily released. There is no formal record of Trig's birth at Mat-Su Regional Medical Center, although there is a record of two other babies born on the same day.
Maybe I am crazy to even wonder. Or maybe we have witnessed one of the biggest frauds in American political history and the biggest failures among the American media in a very, very long time.
More evidence that the Wasilla whack-job was getting pretty Barbra by the end of the campaign. The McCain camp spent over $100,000 on make-up and styling for Palin in the last two months of the campaign, and there's another $30,000 in clothing allowance has yet been spelled out. When you put it all together, we're talking about a woman who, if this carried on, would have an annual budget of something close to a $1 million for clothes and make-up alone. Some hockey mom. No wonder this beauty pageant contestant who once claimed she smelled of fish and longed to meet Ivana Trump, doesn't want to leave the stage (or go back to Alaska which she pretends to govern).
And it's all perfectly fine if your goal is to provide a bimbo hood ornament for horny old white male voters. Just please don't tell me any of this has anything to do with a serious political party.
Elizabeth Nolan Brown doesn't understand why social conservatives are pissed that Indiana Planned Parenthood is giving away gift cards:
Unless all the folks wringing their keyboards about it are way stupider than I think they are, they’ve got to realize that Planned Parenthood offering gift certificates is going to do absolutely nothing to increase the rate of abortion (which they ostensibly care about lowering). As I mentioned in my post on Ladyblog Tuesday, only about 3-5 percent of PP services are abortion-related anyway; the majority are actually aimed at preventing abortion (by preventing unwanted pregnancies), with the rest devoted to basic women’s health services (mammograms, pap smears, etc.). If anyone is actually going to purchase and give out Planned Parenthood gift cards, it will probably be, say, women’s shelters and charitable organizations that want to help low-income women obtain contraception, STD testing, or basic gynecological care.
Although this point seems lost on the Pope, contraception helps prevent abortion.
November 30, 2008 - December 6, 2008
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