I ran into the story of The Political Candidate Formerly Known As Marvin ‘Pro-Life’ Richardson this morning.

Long story short, an Idaho strawberry farmer has pared his legal name all the way down to ‘Pro-Life,’ that being the only way for him to appear specifically as Pro-Life on the upcoming ballot to succeed Senator Larry Craig (and every subsequent Idaho ballot until he meets Janis Joplin).

Considering he advocates murder charges for those who seek and perform abortions, he could have gone the Prince route and changed his name to an ultrasound picture. (Or one of those other ones… you know… *full-body shiver* from the protests. How would the DMV handle that?)

Well, duh.

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee on Monday endorsed a proposed Colorado Human Life Amendment that would define personhood as a fertilized egg.

Of course, Preacher Huck hasn’t stopped to ponder all the practical and logistical nightmares this kind of silliness would engender. For instance:

• If my wife is pregnant, can I claim Unborn, Jr. as a tax exemption?
• Does this make the legal drinking age 20 years, 3 months? Full Story »

It’s good that everybody knows that the people involved in the pro-life movement are directly responsible for the decline in abortions.

— Wanda Franz, president of the National Right to Life Committee, on a report that the abortion rate nationally has fallen 25 percent from 1990 to 2005.

Yes, we won 35 years ago — but women have been losing ground, losing rights, losing options, losing access, losing availability and just plain losing nearly every day since.

— Nancy Keenan, head of NARAL Pro-Choice America, in a recent speech.
Full Story »

Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left. Whatever your position in that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘re-education camps,’ and ‘killing fields.’

— President Bush in Aug. 22 speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention in Kansas City.

The only relevant analogy of Vietnam to Iraq is this: In Iraq, just as we did in Vietnam, we are clinging to a central government that does not and will not enjoy the support of the people. Unless the president acts on that lesson from history and works toward a federal solution in Iraq, there is no prospect that when we leave, we will leave anything stable behind. In fact, the president’s policies are pushing us toward another Saigon moment — with helicopters fleeing the roof of our embassy — which he says he wants to avoid. Al Qaeda in Iraq didn’t exist before we invaded. It is a Bush fulfilling prophecy.

— Presidential candidate Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, criticizing the president’s speech, saying the president “continues to play the American people for fools.”
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[C]learly this was not something that we expected to happen, given the history of this bridge, the inspection process, and how this bridge was rated.

— Mary Peters, secretary of Transportation, during an Aug. 4 White House press briefing about the collapsed Minnesota I-35W bridge that “[s]tate bridge inspectors [had] warned for nearly a decade before its collapse that the Interstate 35W bridge had ’severe’ and ‘extensive’ corrosion of its beams and trusses, ‘widespread cracking’ in spans and missing or broken bolts … [with] certain components were ‘beyond tolerable limits’ … ”

This record is not tainted at all, at all. Period. You guys can say whatever you want.

— San Francisco Giants right fielder Barry Bonds at a press conference after breaking Hank Aaron’s career home-run record of 755 home runs Tuesday night.
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The United States has the highest teen pregnancy rate of any country in the industrialized world; Texas has the highest teen pregnancy rate (63 births per 1,000 females ages 15-19) of any state in the nation, according to a newly released study of children’s health, KIDS COUNT Data Book, issued by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

Texas achieved this title in 2003 and it seems nothing really changed in 2004. More concerning, Texas surpasses the national average of 41 births per 1,000 teens by nearly 20 points. According to the National Vital Statistics Reports, in 2003 the number of teen births in Texas was 51,091. Full Story »

We were afraid long before 9/11.

As so many have observed, fear causes us to trade freedom for security, real or perceived. Fear makes us sheep, a lesson that’s not lost on those who seek to acquire, retain and extend power. Fear causes us to follow not those who’d deliver us from fear or its causes, but rather those who profit from it.

But why are we so afraid?

This is a question I’ve been thinking and studying on for some time - longer even than I realized. As it turns out I did a good bit of research in the ’90s that bears directly on the issue, and while I don’t claim to have a definite answer nailed down, I do believe I have a theory, and maybe it’s one we can leverage as we try to infuse the Republic with a bit more reason. It’s longish, but bear with me - hopefully the payoff will reward your patience. Full Story »

Using only the third veto in his 6 years of presidency, Bush shot down legislation to expand federally funded stem cell research. The bill would have allowed research using donated embryos already slated for destruction. He went on to issue an executive order encouraging the use of stem cell research without the destruction of human embryos.

In his message to Congress, Bush disingenuously blasted the bill as crossing an ethical line.

The Congress has sent me legislation that would compel American taxpayers, for the first time in our history, to support the deliberate destruction of human embryos.

Full Story »

I firmly believe that hypocrisy is fundamental to being a human being. I suspect that everyone reading this has, at one point or another in their lives, done something that ran counter to their beliefs or their stated ethics and morals. As a parent, I’m quite sure that there will come a point where I say to my children “do as I say, not as I do.” And when there isn’t one-to-one correspondence between our actions and our words, that’s hypocrisy.

But just because I believe that everyone is fundamentally a hypocrite, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t different types of hypocrisy. After all, bad habits are hard to break, psychological conditions may be impossible to compensate for, etc. And I hold intentional hypocrisy as fundamentally dishonest (and thus unethical and/or immoral) as opposed to unintentional hypocrisy.

But there’s a kind of hypocrisy that I hold in utter contempt - religious hypocrisy. If you are a strong believer in a religion but don’t always hold to its tenets when they become “inconvenient,” too hard to handle, or because you want to avoid responsibility for your actions, you’re either deluding yourself that you are actually a strong believer, or you’re a hypocrite.

And so, today I have Exhibit A in religious hypocrisy. Full Story »

Today, May 2, is Prevent Teen Pregnancy Day; a good day to remember that abstinence-only education is a miserable failure. One billion taxpayer dollars have been given to a program that does not make teens more likely to abstain from sex or delay when they become sexually active.

Impacts for Title V. Section 510, Abstinence Education Programs: Final Report (pdf), released in April, was posted on a Government web-site with no press release or advisory, James Wagoner said: “The ‘stealth release’ of this study on an obscure government website on a Friday afternoon is clearly meant to bury its contents..”

“After 10 years and $1.5 billion in public funds these failed abstinence-only-until-marriage programs will go down as an ideological boondoggle of historic proportions,”

Full Story »

Despite claims by anti-choice groups, a new 10-year study has concluded, once again, that having an abortion does not increase a woman’s risk of breast cancer.

Researchers base the findings on a study in which they followed 105,716 women for 10 years. They found no link between abortion and breast cancers that occur before menopause.

Earlier studies showed no link between abortion and breast cancers that occur after menopause.

The recent study, named after Harvard researcher Karin Michels, Sc. D., Ph. D shows, “The globality of evidence supports no link between induced abortion and breast cancer.” Full Story »

Events of such magnitude as the Virginia Tech shootings and the Supreme Court upholding the partial-birth abortion ban have consequences both immediate and distant. Like ripples in a pond, the repercussions from both actions (both of which I consider tragic, for different reasons) are going to resonate far beyond the immediate actions and reactions.

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Today the Supreme Court upheld the misnomered “partial birth” abortion ban implemented in 2003.

While the bill itself is named The Partial Birth Abortion Act of 2003, it refers to a medical procedure called “intact variant of D&E”, dialation and extraction as opposed to dialation and curettage. In writing the act, Kennedy chose to use the more inflammatory term to shore up support for the bill. Full Story »