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The Welcome End of Abstinence-Only Sex Education
Tweet Share on Facebook December 16, 2009 Comment (18)By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
For those of us who feel we've been trapped in a time warp on the issue of sex education, normalcy is about to return. The 2010 Omnibus Appropriations bill just approved by Congress eliminates funding for abstinence-only education. Can we imagine that public school students can be taught real, true, biologically-accurate sex education? That, instead of religious propaganda, even if they attend schools that receive federal funds? Wow!
Back to the future we go. There was a time in America when there was no such thing as abstinence-only education. Funding for "abstinence only sex education" (which really means, skewed so-called sex education teaching kids not to have sex until marriage and little or nothing about biology or birth control) was actually appropriated for the first time under former President Clinton. But it flourished under the Bush administration and Republican Congress, even while studies revealed it was largely ineffective.
Biologically-accurate sex education has always taught teens that the only completely reliable way to remain STD-free is to abstain from sex. Same for girls who don't want to become pregnant. But can you imagine what would happen if liberals tried to press a version of sex education that only encouraged teens to have sex, without teaching them how to avoid STDs and pregnancy? That would be the polar opposite of "abstinence-only" education. And yet the public would be in an uproar.
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Health Reform Politics Proving Hazardous to Democrats
Tweet Share on Facebook December 16, 2009 Comment (4)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
President Obama invited the 60 members of the Senate Democratic Caucus down to the White House Tuesday for a healthcare pep talk. Apparently, it didn't do much good. The president's advice, according to sources inside the U.S. Senate, was for his fellow Democrats to try to have more fun trying to get the bill through; so much for the teleprompter. And so much for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who is seemingly on his own now that senior White House communications personnel are putting out the word that the bill needs to be done before Christmas or it won't get done at all.
Reid has, for some time, been announcing that he has a deal, an agreement on language the 60 senators who are not Republicans will support, dislodging the bill from limbo and freeing it from a filibuster--but that's not really true. The senior senator from Nevada has talked about concepts and asked the Congressional Budget Office to figure out how much certain approaches will cost, but he has not been able to come up with a solution that satisfies his party colleagues on what now appear to be the three key problems with the bill: the tax hikes, the increase in insurance premiums, and the cuts in Medicare that are needed to pay for it. For every Democrat and independent he appears to win over, he seems in danger of losing one or two more.
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Howard Dean Wrong to Urge Killing the Health Reform Bill
Tweet Share on Facebook December 16, 2009 Comment (17)By Robert Schlesinger, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Howard Dean wants to make like Dr. Kevorkian on the current version of the senate healthcare bill. Telling Vermont Public Radio that the bill's current form--no public option, no Medicare buy-in--is "essentially the collapse of healthcare reform in the United States," Dean argues that it's time to scrap the whole thing and start over. "Honestly the best thing to do right now is kill the Senate bill, go back to the House, start the reconciliation process, where you only need 51 votes and it would be a much simpler bill," he said.
It would be much simpler. There would, for example, be no ban on excluding people from coverage based on pre-existing conditions. That's because reconciliation is a budget short-cut, meant to avoid filibusters on revenue raising and spending. So a lot of the regulatory guts of the bill--the ones that have the broadest public support no less--would disappear.
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The GOP's Big Chance: Cultivate 'Whole Foods Republicans'
Tweet Share on Facebook December 16, 2009 Comment (5)By Mary Kate Cary, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Okay, I'll admit it. I'm not "highly educated"—just a college grad here—but otherwise I seem to fit the bill as a "Whole Foods Republican" as defined by Michael Petrilli of the Hoover Institute in Monday's Wall Street Journal:
What's needed is a full-fledged effort to cultivate "Whole Foods Republicans"—independent-minded voters who embrace a progressive lifestyle but not progressive politics. These highly-educated individuals appreciate diversity and would never tell racist or homophobic jokes; they like living in walkable urban environments; they believe in environmental stewardship, community service and a spirit of inclusion. And yes, many shop at Whole Foods, which has become a symbol of progressive affluence but is also a good example of the free enterprise system at work. (Not to mention that its founder is a well-known libertarian who took to these pages to excoriate ObamaCare as inimical to market principles.)
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The Price of Health Reform
Tweet Share on Facebook December 16, 2009 Comment (5)By John A. Farrell, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
I am generally late in embracing a television show. At home we tend to stick to movies and sports, until a friend whose taste we respect raves about something—Deadwood, The Wire—that we absolutely gotta see, and then I get addicted and start renting or buying the DVDs. So it is with House, M.D. which hooked us this fall.
Dr. Gregory House (played by the skilled Hugh Laurie) is a genius whose team of specialists are called upon, each week, to solve a baffling medical mystery. Like all television geniuses, House is a lovable curmudgeon, addicted to sarcasm, who provides most of the entertainment. He and his doctors toss around enough medical mumbo-jumbo as they discuss exotic viruses and order up MRIs, labwork and other hi-tech tests, to keep things interesting until the 47th minute of each hour-long episode, when the killer bug or syndrome is finally brought to ground. Oh yeah, and the fetching hospital administrator wears low cut blouses.
I bring this up because the great unanswered mystery in House is the very same query that dominates the current debate on healthcare. Every time I watch the show the political junkie in me shouts: "Who is paying for all those tests?" If you want an explanation for what is happening this week on Capitol Hill—watch House. Forget the conservative and liberal conspiracy theories about creeping socialism or the greedy insurance industry. What we are all really talking about is, "Who is paying for all those tests?"
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Editor & Publisher's Demise Another Nail in Print Journalism's Coffin
Tweet Share on Facebook December 16, 2009 Comment (6)By Jamie Stiehm, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
The news struck like a Dickensian knell right in time for Christmas: the abrupt closure of Editor & Publisher, the fine authoritative journal that covered the American newspaper industry for more than a century. Don't they know that newspapers are the republic's lifeblood, ever since the glory days of the 1790s?
The Nielson Company, corporate owner of the shuttered publication, played Scrooge to the hilt. It also announced the demise of Kirkus Reviews, a respected trade journal for the book publishing industry and another boon to a literate citizenry.
Many journalists like me, who will never get the ink out of their blood, are left with little except scant hopes and dreamlike memories in a bleak, fallow season for our field. As a refugee from the Baltimore Sun writing in Washington, I picture the paper in a time of high cotton—with a couple of Pulitzer Prizes to greet new hires in our first two springs about a decade ago. After covering a ghastly "50 cents" murder trial early on, I was sent out to write a tulip garden story—80,000 bulbs in a feature headlined "Rhapsody in Bloom"—to see the other side of life.
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As Obama's Approval Rating Sinks, His Hubris Grows
Tweet Share on Facebook December 15, 2009 Comment (32)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
The lower President Barack Obama's approval numbers go the more certain he seems to be about his vision for the country. In the Rasmussen Daily Presidential Tracking Poll for December 15, 41 percent of those surveyed across America give Obama's performance as president a highly negative review.
On healthcare, the issue that is at this moment at the forefront of the debate, 56 percent of those surveyed by Rasmussen now say they oppose the bill working its way through the Senate. Yet he continues to press ahead with signature issues like healthcare as though the sentiments of the electorate mattered not at all to him, never once pausing to admit that he has been wrong about anything or that he has failed to live up to the promises he made during his presidential campaign.
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Read This Disturbing Column on Rapes in the Congo
Tweet Share on Facebook December 15, 2009 Comment (6)By Mary Kate Cary, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
I'm sorry to have to pass this link on to everyone, because it's so disturbing. It's an op-ed by my friend documentary filmmaker Mary Lou Hartman about the fact that the Congo is now the most dangerous place in the world for women and girls, because of the mass rapes that are taking place there every day. Mary Lou makes a powerful case for standing up to the evil destroying the lives of Congolese women. Once you read it you won't forget it.
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Democrats Could Lose Obama, Biden Senate Seats
Tweet Share on Facebook December 15, 2009 Comment (10)By Doug Heye, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
"President Obama and Vice-President Joseph R. Biden won't be on the midterm ballot next year, but their former Senate seats will be," writes the Washington Times' Donald Lambro.
Though the states, Delaware and Illinois, are both considered blue--and Obama and Biden would have been shoo-ins for reelection--their Senate seats are not only on the ballots, they're up for grabs.
In Delaware, state Attorney General and Iraq war veteran Beau Biden is widely expected to throw his hat into the race against longtime GOP Congressman Mike Castle.
Castle, who represents an at-large district and has been elected statewide repeatedly (he's also the former governor), is well liked by Delaware voters--including Democrats. Attacking Castle is a strategy likely to backfire. Indeed, campaign observers wanting to see fireworks won't see them here--a Biden/Castle campaign could be one of the friendliest in memory. Current polling shows Castle leading Biden and the Rothenberg Political Report has listed the race as a "lean Republican takeover."
Illinois' Senate race looks to put state Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias, the Democrat, against Republican Congressman Mark Kirk. Rated a toss-up by both the Cook Political Report and the Rothenberg report, polling shows the race to be a deadlock--a recent Rasmussen poll had Kirk down, but within the margin of error, 42-39. That Illinois Democrats are still stinging from the Rod Blagojevich scandal and appointment of Roland Burris to the United States Senate, along with allegations of Giannoulias' own scandal-related issues can't help.
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Joe Lieberman Bows Before Special Interests on Healthcare Reform
Tweet Share on Facebook December 14, 2009 Comment (45)If there are descending circles of hell, then there must be descending circles of infamous behavior in politics.
In Washington, bowing before a special interest is bad, but almost all elected officials, from time to time, have to do it. Ditto with partisan or ideological myopia. Or carting pork home to hungry constituents.
So who qualifies for the lower circles of hell?
How about a politician who abandons interests, party, and constituents, and screws things up for the rest of us just to stroke his ego? How about Joe Lieberman?
