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We keep hearing from proponents of health care reform that government rationing of health care is a “canard.” We don’t have health care reform yet, but with the new recommendations from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force that women shouldn’t get mammograms until the age of 50, and then only every two years, it feels like we’re getting the ...

Emily and Meredith, you’ll be completely unsurprised to hear that I greeted the passage of the Stupak amendment with more of a cheer than a groan. However unfair it might be that well-off women have more access to abortion than low-income women, the solution should not be to compel those who are morally opposed to abortion to pay for them with ...

Amanda, Before I begin, I want to clarify something. I’m not “anti-choice.” I am anti-abortion. That might sound like semantics, but I think it’s a sign of the gulf between abortion-rights supporters and abortion foes. “Anti-choice” has a connotation of “anti-woman,” that being against abortion means you think women shouldn’t have control ...

It’s been a whole day since I first read Jason Whitlock’s Foxsports.com column defending ESPN baseball analyst Steve Phillips, who was fired from the network after having an affair with a 22-year-old production assistant, and I’m still not sure what to make of it. Whitlock’s main point is that “[a] little off-the-books nookie should not ...

When I first read about the pregnant Arizona woman whose hospital stopped performing VBACs, prompting her to plan to drive 350 miles to Phoenix to a hospital that would allow her to deliver her baby vaginally, I sympathized. I wouldn’t have made the same choice, but I sympathized. Now, though, the Daily Beast reports that the woman painted ...

School is where we send our children not only to learn—reading, writing, arithemetic—but also, one would hope, to think. It’s hard to see how kids are supposed to do that, though, when they go to schools where the grown-ups appear incapable of engaging in any form of critical thought or useful decision-making ... (Read more in DoubleX.)

So, Mark Penn writes in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal that “heyday of the soccer mom is passing.” Darn. Here we are just completing our first season of soccer, and already I’m uncool. Or so I thought until I actually read the article. What we have here is what my Slate colleague Jack Shafer would call a “bogus trend story” ... (Read more in ...

CNN’s morning show did a segment on this new breast-cancer PSA that’s making the rounds on Break.com and YouTube ... (Read more in Double X.)

Emily, I cringed last night when I saw the clip of Joe Wilson screaming “You lie!” during Obama’s speech. I’m on the record as thinking it was silly for people to pull their kids out of class rather than listen to Obama’s back-to-school speech. But do you really think the vitriol that Obama faces is worse than what President Bush faced? ...

It looks like President Obama managed to deliver a speech to (some of) the nation’s schoolchildren without mentioning health care (unless you count the advice to wash your hands) or otherwise touting the benefits of socialism. I hope that we can all heave a big sigh of relief and get on with more important things. Because that would be better than ...