Mark Kleiman

Driving to Charlottesville recently for a talk at U. Va., I got to listen to a local radio show focused on the ultrasound bill. Turns out that Jon Stewart wasn’t exaggerating. Here’s the technical scoop, per a professor of OB/GYN: The bill requires an ultrasound before any abortion. For a second-trimester abortion, the fetus is […]

Any chance Rick Santorum will give up bigotry for Lent? [Cross-posted at The Reality-Based Community]

Matt Drudge has now picked up the Right Wing Watch story about Rick Santorum’s speech at Ave Maria University. That has brought the speech to the intention of Red bloggers who didn’t bother to notice the original story because they are so deeply cocooned that it takes an accredited Red source to drive a fact […]

Question for those who believe that requiring coverage of reproductive health services in employer-paid health insurance plans is a violation of religious freedom if it applies to employers such as hospitals and universities affiliated with churches which oppose contraception: Some churches, including the Society of Friends (Quakers) and the Mennonites, have a long-standing “testimony” against […]

The Washington Post has a long piece by Jason Horowitz about Helen Radkey, an extraordinarily unpleasant woman who, having been excommunicated from Mormonism, spends her life trying to embarrass the LDS church. Her focus is on the practice of posthumous baptism and marriage, especially of Jews. The story is well-written and compelling: the weirdnesses of […]

This NYT story shows that, even as the racial gap in educational attainment has been shrinking, the income-class gap has been growing. Note how huge the gap is: “one unit” of difference is three grade levels, and the current rich-poor gap is more than one unit. So a fifth-grader from a rich family reads better, […]

As far as I can tell, the Obama Administration is offering the perfect phony solution to the phony problem of employers whose “consciences” require them to deprive their female employees of health care that might allow them to enjoy having sex. Instead of requiring employers to pay insurance companies to provide basic reproductive health services […]

When the Romney slime, and the Romney Super-Pac slime, start to hit Rick Santorum, he’s going to need some responses. And the best defense is a good offense. So here, in the spirit of “love your enemies, and bless them that curse you,” is some free advice for the Santorum campaign: ask Mitt Romney whether […]

Some of the wingier wingnuts have convinced themselves – or hope to convince the marks – that the Obama campaign, the liberal commentariat, and the mainstream media all think that Mitt Romney would be the weakest GOP candidate in November. (That’s true, in a Churchillian sense: he’d be the weakest candidate except for Gingrich, Santorum, […]

You have to believe this was staged. Update Or Photoshopped. [Cross-posted at The Reality-Based Community]