Best of the Web
BY JAMES TARANTO
Tuesday, January 4, 2005 3:14 p.m.
Alarming New Trend: Adults Having Babies!
The Washington Post carries a bizarre story on a "problem" that has "crept up" recently: "More adult women are forgoing birth control, a trend that has experts puzzled--and alarmed about a potential rise in unintended pregnancies":
Buried in the government's latest in-depth analysis of contraceptive use was the finding that the number of women who had sex in the previous three months but did not use birth control rose from 5.2 percent in 1995 to 7.4 percent in 2002. That means that as many as 11 percent of all women are at risk of unintended pregnancy at some point during their childbearing years (ages 15 to 44). . . .
Because the survey is so large (more than 7,600 women) and known for its accuracy, "an increase of even two percentage points is worrisome," said John S. Santelli, a professor of population and family health at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. Even as he cheered the news that a growing number of teenagers are using contraception, Santelli wondered whether doctors are neglecting women.
"Maybe we're failing with women over 21," Santelli said.
Post reporter Ceci Connolly acknowledges that "unintended pregnancies can be welcome surprises," but then says: "The danger from a public health and societal standpoint is that many of the women are financially or psychologically unprepared for parenthood at that point in their lives."
What's so strange about this article is that it seems to go out of its way to avoid acknowledging the obvious point: that women having children is not a social problem at all--indeed, it is a social benefit, and a social necessity--when the women are married.
The (link in PDF) does have data on contraceptive use broken down by marital status. (Not surprisingly, married women are more likely to use birth control than unmarried ones, which is obvious given that the former are more likely to have sex.) Unfortunately, the marital-status breakdowns aren't provided for past years, so there's no way of knowing if the increase in contraceptive nonuse is confined to married women, in which case there would be no cause for worry whatever.
Still, one wonders why the Post article omitted any mention of marital status at all. Is it really that politically incorrect to draw a distinction between wed and unwed childbearing?
Would Dems Coddle Zarqawi?
Rumors have been flying today that the U.S. has captured Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Iraq's top al Qaeda terrorist. The Drudge Report says U.S. military and intelligence sources are denying the report, but we sure hope they're true--not just for the obvious reason, but also because confirmation hearings are about to begin for Attorney General-designate Alberto Gonzales.
Bizarre as it may sound, the Democrats apparently intend to accuse Gonzales of being insufficiently kind to America's terrorist enemies--presumably including Zarqawi, if he's captured alive. In a column today, the Washington Post's Richard Cohen likens the interrogation of terrorists, which he dubs "torture," to the tactics of the totalitarian state in George Orwell's "1984." Lost on Cohen is the distinction between trying to control the thoughts of innocent citizens and trying to prevent mass murder by extracting information from terrorists.
Obviously gratuitous abuses like those at Abu Ghraib are intolerable, and the perpetrators should be prosecuted (as they are being). But Cohen's and the Democrats' obsession with treating terrorists nicely bespeaks a dangerous moral vanity. They seem to think it is worth increasing the risk of another 9/11--or worse--in order for America to avoid the taint of being accused by the likes of the Red Cross of acts "tantamount to torture," whatever that means.
Yet this is dangerous not only to terrorism's prospective victims but also to the civil liberties the moralists claim to prize. If there is another attack, does anyone really think we will escape draconian restrictions on our liberties?
CJR Defends Fraudulent Reporting
Boy is this pathetic. The Columbia Journalism Review has an article by one Corey Pein defending the discredited "60 Minutes" story about President Bush's National Guard Service. The article itself is replete with errors--as bloggers Kevin Aylward , Charles Johnson and Jim Lindgren detail--but to us, one line from the Pein piece sums it up. "Indeed," he writes of the documents, "they could be fake but accurate." They really seem to be serious about establishing this as a new standard for journalism--or at least for stories that make Republicans look bad.
Meanwhile, a "60 Minutes" segment on the Google search engine offers this complaint:
[Google's] popularity has spread literally by word of mouth around the world, as people everywhere search for everything under the sun.
That includes the term "60 Minutes," for which Google's computers return 19 million search results in one-fifth of a second. But at first glance, the top results are all related to "60 Minutes" stories that have created some kind of controversy. And that's a big problem with Google: Its ranking system tends to put negative events or statements at the top of the list.
Well, we did such a search, and only three of the top 10 hits were about controversial stories (two on the National Guard fraud, one on another bit of Bush-bashing, the thin story about missing weapons in Iraq). If "60 Minutes" doesn't want Google searches to turn up so much negative stuff, maybe the show should drop the Columbia-approved "fake but accurate" standard and try just reporting the truth.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy Web site has a photo of Dan Rather on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln in the Indian Ocean. Rather, who has just returned from a helicopter tour of tsunami-hit Sumatra, is wearing a flight jacket. Maybe the reason he's so anti-Bush is because he wishes he were Bush.
Metaphor Alert
From a column by Helen Thomas, American journalism's crazy old aunt in the attic: "I have observed that whenever a major news outlet is stung with the label 'liberal' and feels the hot breath of ultra-right critics on its neck, it circles the wagons and hires yet another conservative commentator. Take PBS, for example. Running scared after giving [Bill] Moyers the spotlight over the years, PBS made amends by hiring two conservatives."
CNN Exec Is All Wet
"Industry insiders are aghast at new CNN chief Jonathan Klein's appalling lack of sensitivity to the tsunami disaster in his ongoing media tour today," according to the Drudge Report:
Klein told USATODAY that CNN was "able to flood the zone immediately."
"It's jarring," said one news executive. "This guy's obsessed with associating himself with the coverage of this tragedy and he royally sticks his foot in his mouth his first time out of the gate--could there be a worse choice of words to use after 150,000 people just died in an epic flood of waves?"
CNN better shake up its management before the next earthquake.
Liberals Against Liberal Racism
Writing in the Chicago Tribune, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, a self-described "card-carrying Democrat" who is black, blasts the new Senate Democratic leader for his racial insults to Justice Clarence Thomas:
Do not get me wrong. I am no follower of Thomas. I do not espouse his views, nor do I take issue with any comments directly challenging his legal ideas. But I wonder if Reid can identify any opinions by Thomas that he believes to be poorly written or if the senator has actually read an opinion written by Thomas. If Reid did, he would have seen that Thomas has performed quite capably as a writer and, more important, that Thomas infuses a uniquely black conservative voice into his opinions in certain areas.
Indeed, Thomas' voice is quite distinct from Scalia's and adds a certain complexity to the court's decisions. For example, in Chicago vs. Morales, Thomas argued in favor of an ordinance that the majority (rightfully) struck down as too vague while describing how the ordinance worked to protect poor citizens who were being terrorized by gangs--many of whom were racial minorities. Additionally, in Grutter vs. Bollinger, Thomas argued for the end of affirmative action while at the same time challenging the use of criteria, such as the LSAT, that disproportionately harm African-Americans. Is it these reasons--those of a black man asserting conservative views (with a twist) that he is not "supposed" to hold--that (unlike Scalia's) Reid finds so easy to dispute?
Why not attack Thomas as someone who should not be chief justice--in charge of assigning opinions--because his extreme views make it hard for him even as an associate justice to write opinions that will garner a majority? Heck, why not criticize Thomas' views directly? Instead, Reid falls prey to this unconscious form of racial stereotyping. It is the black justice who cannot write opinions, articulate independent thoughts, or perform his job well. You don't believe me? The exact same comments were made about the late Justice Thurgood Marshall.
Of course, as we noted yesterday, Reid has cited one case in which he claims to find Thomas's opinion "poorly written." And as blogger John Kranz writes, "If President Bush names four more ultra-right-wing justices, the protection afforded our citizenry by Hillside Dairy v. Lyons could be taken away--this President will roll the clock back to 2003!"
You Should Have Seen Him Before They Killed Him
"Police: Man Killed After Traffic Stop Turns Violent"--headline, Houston Chronicle, Jan. 3
The Great Books Series
"Scott Peterson's former mistress confesses in a book to be released this week that she 'still thinks about Scott from time to time,' " reports Los Angeles's KABC-TV. "She also confesses that 'I sometimes wonder if he thinks about me.' "
Wow, this sounds like a literary masterpiece. Then there's this love scene, reported by the Associated Press:
"As the evening progressed, Scott said that he was looking forward to settling down, but that he hadn't yet found the right person," Frey wrote, according to a news release issued by the publisher. "The way he looked at me when he said that made me feel he might be wondering whether I was that person."
KABC adds that "the 214-page book, published by Regan Books, has chapter titles such as 'Oh My God! Laci's baby is due on my birthday!' and 'Isn't that a little twisted, Scott?' " But wait. What's this about a "baby"? According to KABC, "[Laci's] remains and those of her 8-month-old fetus were discovered" after Peterson murdered them (emphasis ours). Maybe there's a chapter called "Chill out, Amber, it's only a fetus."
The AP story is headlined "Frey's Book Focuses on Peterson Affair." Apparently only a few pages are devoted to quantum physics. |
