MotherJones.com | MoJoBlog - Social Issues and Political Commentary: January 29, 2006

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February 3, 2006

Meet John Boehner

Putting aside the obvious irony of selecting someone from Ohio to clean up the Republican Party's ethical problems, it seems like a good idea to take a look at who John Boehner, the new House Majority Leader, is. Boehner emerged, of course, in a role most had considered destined for Rep. Roy Blunt of Missouri. Blunt, however, turned out to be too close to outgoing Majority Leader Tom DeLay for comfort, and Republican House members went with a safer choice.

How much safer? Boehner has taken more than $157,000 worth of free trips, placing him 7th among 638 current and former members of Congress in the last five years in acceptance of privately funded travel. Two dozen of his former staff members have gone from working for him to getting jobs as lobbyists or corporate public affairs specialists. Boehner preceded DeLay as the head of the K Street Operation, and, of course, he is famous for handing out tobacco company PAC checks on the floor of Congress.

Boehner is extremely conservative. Here are his ratings on major issues:

NARAL--0% (reproductive rights)
ACLU--7% (civil liberties)
CURE--30% (crime rehabilitation)
NEA--17% (public education)
LCV--5% (environment)
SANE--22% (military action)
FAIR--0% (immigration advocacy)
US COC--100% (business)
AFL-CIO--7% (labor)
ARA--0% (senior advocacy)
APHA--0% (public health)

His more moderate scores:

CATO--50% (free trade)
NTU--63% (tax reform)

And finally:

Christian Coalition--91%

Do Americans Have More Leisure?

Are Americans overworked? Almost certainly. But could they possibly have more leisure time than they have in decades past? Possibly, according to a new study by Boston's Federal Reserve Board, as written up by a byline-less writer in the Economist:

In fact, most of the official numbers have shown that American toil has not changed that much over the past few decades. Americans may put in longer hours at the office than other countries, but that is because average hours in the workplace in other rich countries have dropped sharply. In America, official studies tend to show women working more and men less, but the average working week has been fairly constant. …
Messrs Aguiar and Hurst think that the hours spent at your employer's are too narrow a definition of work. Americans also spend lots of time shopping, cooking, running errands and keeping house. These chores are among the main reasons why people say they are so overstretched (especially working women with children).

However, Messrs Aguiar and Hurst show that Americans actually spend much less time doing them than they did 40 years ago. There has been a revolution in the household economy. Appliances, home delivery, the internet, 24-hour shopping, and more varied and affordable domestic services have increased flexibility and freed up people's time.

That's all very interesting, and three (genuine) cheers for technological advances. But the quoted bit about how "the average working week has been fairly constant" came as a surprise, so I opened my trusty State of Working America: 2004-2005 to see what they had to say about this. Indeed, it's sort of true: according to EPI's analysis of the CPS data, a graph of "average weekly hours" among Americans shows little upward movement between 1975 and 2002—at their peak in 2000, average weekly hours were only 3.1 percent above their 1975 level. In that sense, the average working week has remained constant.

But that figure can be misleading, says EPI. "[T]he primary factor driving the flat trend in average hours is the entry of more women into the labor force over this period. Since women are more likely to work part time, their hours worked per week lowers the average of weekly hours, despite the fact that family members are clearly spending more time in the paid labor market." As an alternative to the workweek figure, the book graphs average annual hours worked by all families. That number is up 11 percent since 1975. And it's up even more for middle-income families.

So while workweeks, on average, are about as long as they were in the 1970s—with men working less and women more—families as a whole seem to be working quite a bit more. Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi get into this in their excellent book, The Two-Income Trap, noting that many families, in response to the rising price of health care and property values around decent schools, are increasingly sending two earners into the workplace to keep up. And that trend seems to account, in part, for the rise in bankruptcies—so long as families are entirely dependent on two incomes, and both parents are working all the time, they have no safety net if, say, one person loses his or her job.

Also, not all reductions in workweeks are equal. According to EPI, between 2000 and 2003 the middle quintile of earners saw a 2 percent drop in real family income, in large part because of a 4.6 percent drop in hours worked. I would assume that not all of this drop was voluntary—many people either couldn't find full-time employment, or else corporations have become increasingly adept at "managing" their employee's time to limit the number of hours they have to be paid. McDonald's has perfected the art of telling employees who arrive in the morning to wait around idly in the restaurant, without punching in, until customers start showing up. That's obviously not an increase in leisure, and McDonald's is hardly unique at this trick.

The Failure of Plan Colombia

Last fall, Adam Isaacson wondered what we're actually getting for the $4.7 billion dollars we've spent over the past six years fighting drug wars in Colombia. Not a whole lot, it seems.

As a policy to curtail the drug supply, "Plan Colombia" has been a total failure. Cocaine and heroin are as cheap and pure as ever in the United States, and coca production in Colombia has been holding steady over the past two years, despite the fact that the government has been dumping herbicides anywhere it can reach. Coca growers, who depend on the crop for their livelihood, have become more innovative in response to the aerial spraying—cultivating smaller, harder-to-detect plots; developing new strains that grow more quickly; and planting in the shade.

And so long as the growers have no other options—alternative development programs are under-funded and reach only a small fraction of rural Colombians—they'll keep on innovating. Not to mention the fact that all that constant spraying makes growers more sympathetic to guerilla groups. Seeing as how the United States is currently in the middle of following a similar strategy to fight opium production in Afghanistan, these seem like lessons worth learning. Doubtful it will happen, though.

Now in 2002, the Bush administration expanded military aid to the Bogota government to help it fight FARC, one of the two leftist insurgency groups. Colombia has seen a few crucial security improvements over the past few years—under President Uribe, kidnappings have dropped by 57 percent, massacres by 71 percent, and murders by 31 percent (at least according to "official" figures). On the other hand, this can't count as an American success; most U.S. military and police aid simply doesn't go towards protecting civilians, so it's hard to credit "Plan Colombia" here. (Isaacson instead credits President Uribe's decisions both to redeploy troops in population centers and to induce the right-leaning paramilitaries to agree to a ceasefire.) And then there's the downside to all that military aid:

Since Plan Colombia's inception, Colombia's attorney general has demonstrated markedly less will to prosecute cases of human rights abuse by the military. The State Department's last human rights certification memo named only thirty-one military personnel… currently under indictment for human rights abuses or support of paramilitaries. This impunity undercuts much of the well-publicized improvements that the Colombian armed forces have made to their human rights training. If a soldier knows he stands almost no chance of punishment for committing an abuse, will the mere knowledge that the crime is wrong consistently prevent him from committing it.

Some numbers suggest that the Colombian government really is acting with more impunity. The share of abuses committed by the Colombian security forces rose from 5 percent in the late 1990s to 7.8 percent in 2003. Killings and disappearances of human rights activists rose from 29 in 2001 and 2002 to 33 in 2003. 340 people were tortured in 2002-03, up from 242 in the previous twelve months.

Nor has Plan Colombia improved the prospects for peace talks; indeed, there's some evidence that the specter of U.S. military aid may have helped scuttle the moderately promising negotiations in 2000 between the government and FARC and ELN by fostering mistrust among the guerrilla groups. And the counterinsurgency campaign isn't proving very effective either: in part because over 80 percent of the U.S. aid is of a military nature, the Colombian government has had the same trouble that coalition forces have had in Iraq—they can seize rebel-held territories, but they can't hold them once they withdraw. Not only that, but should the conflict in Colombia start escalating rapidly, the U.S. could find itself committing more and more resources to a major war in its backyard. Already some American policymakers have been linking FARC to Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, which should make for fun times.

Here's one comprehensive suggestion for a change in strategy in Colombia, which would involve: Less military aid; more support for institutions that bolster human rights. An end to crop spraying; more support for alternative development strategies in neglected rural areas. At home, drug treatment programs would be a much cheaper and actually effective means of reducing the demand for drugs; but this fraction of the $12 billion that the federal government spends each year on the "war on drugs" hasn't changed for a long while. Budget cuts this year focused on hacking up health care for the poor rather than taking even the slightest look at a billion dollar foreign policy adventure that doesn't seem to be achieving much of anything.

February 2, 2006

Where's the Anti-Immigrant Movement on This?

This is more than a little ironic (not to mention depressing). Stan Cox reports that hordes of American immigrants—at least 50,000 and growing—have been moving to Lake Chapala in Mexico over the years to retire, and end up trashing the place:

Despite needing little or no air conditioning or heating in Lake Chapala's delightful climate, immigrants from up north appear to be having a per-person ecological impact… which, by Redefining Progress' figures, is as heavy as that of about 4 average Mexicans.

A flood of immigrants with a high-consumption lifestyle flocking to its shores is the last thing that the already ecologically devastated lake needs. According to NASA, water volume has dropped perhaps 75% from its historic level, with two-thirds of that loss coming since 1986. Enough dry ground has been laid bare to accomodate the entire city of Washington, DC. And because of pollution, to quote the AARP article, "The lake is now a view, nothing more." Even the lake's aesthetic appeal is waning, choked as it is with water hyacinth.

Lake Chapala would be threatened whether or not the gringos had shown up, but piling even more big houses onto the slopes above the north shore, with their acres of pavement, and swimming pools (always filled despite growing water shortages), and septic systems that wouldn't pass code in the US, and bright green, well-watered, monocultural lawns, and heavy monthly spraying for insects, spiders, and scorpions, and washers and dryers running full blast, and no clothes lines in sight, despite the bright sun and low humidity (if there's one thing we gringos know how to do, it's "use appliances in our homes correctly"!), it's kind of hard to argue that immigration is having a positive impact around the lake.

And that's just in one small region. Each winter finds at least 700,000 North Americans residing in Mexico, and many of them stay year-round.

Maybe Mexico might want to think about investing in some Minutemen of its own…

What Will Be Left of Iraq?

Over the past month, insurgent attacks in Iraq have decreased somewhat—not that a drop from 100 attacks a day to 83 a day means that everything's fine and peaceful, but it is somewhat notable—and military commanders are reportedly discussing a major troop drawdown by the end of 2006, despite President Bush's recent insistence, during the State of the Union, that he was planning on "staying the course." Earlier this week, Mowaffaq al-Rubaie, Iraq's national security adviser, predicted that the number of U.S. and foreign troops would fall below 100,000 by the end of the year. And: "By the end of 2007," said al-Rubaie, "the overwhelming majority of the multinational forces will have left the country."

Al-Rubaie's prediction, of course, depends on a number of things: whether the relative decline in violence is permanent or just a statistical blip; whether the new Iraqi government can hold itself together and develop its own security force that can keep the country at least nominally stable. The usual issues. And then there's the whole "civil war" question. As Dexter Filkins of the New York Times pointed out, the fall in insurgent violence has been counterbalanced by a sharp rise in sectarian violence of late—between Shiites and Sunnis, as well as Sunnis and Kurds. The new fundamentalist government is becoming increasingly radical, so things don't look good on this front at all. If the various groups in Iraq can't reach any sort of decent political compromise, the United States will have to decide whether it wants to try use its military to break up the fighting between sectarian groups—a nearly impossible task—or continue drawing down regardless and leave the country to its own (presumably bloody) devices.

And if and when the U.S. does start leaving Iraq, what will it leave behind? The president has already announced that further aid for reconstruction will no longer be flowing to Iraq, and Western private contractors are already leaving the country. "We are not done by any stretch of the imagination," said the vice-president of one company, "but we are drawing down." It's true that much of the reconstruction was riddled by corruption, graft, and incompetence, as has been made clear by multiple government reports of late, the alternative to a shoddy reconstruction job could be worse, from Iraq's point of view. The World Bank estimates that it will still cost $56 billion to rebuild the shattered infrastructure in the country, but none of that seems to be forthcoming from anyone. Few of the international donors who have already pledged about $13.5 billion, it seems, are willing to lay down any money so long as violence is still shaking the country and making it difficult for anything to get built.

February 1, 2006

Zahn moves CNN even farther to the right

For some time now, CNN has been an effective mouthpiece for the Bush administration, mostly through innuendo, flag-waving, and omission. Now, with Paula Zahn's help, the network's shift ever farther right has become more overt. Media Matters for America has documented several of Zahn's recent stunts, including this one:

In a conversation with Paul Begala, Zahn said:

But security is still going to be a huge issue in this country, and whether you like it or not, you've got a lot of people out there saying, if you're Republican, we're going to keep the country safe, you know, if you vote for a Democrat, that basically you want to be bombed.

Media Matters has also documented Zahn's cheerleading for Rush Limbaugh. According to Media Matters' records, in the last six weeks, Zahn has aired clips from the Rush Limbaugh Show five times, and on three of those occasions, she offered no countering argument.

Zahn has often used Republic talking points, referring to Social Security privatization as "Social Security reform," announcing that Sojourners "admitted" it was a liberal publication, and "confronted" Al Franken with "lying" when he joked that he was writing a book about abstinence education.

The irony is that when Zahn was on Fox News, she was, more often than not, articulate and insightful--the only one on Fox who went beyond the surface of the issues being discussed.

The T-Shirt Scourge

George W. Bush: Soft on torture, tough on t-shirts he doesn't like? The Carpetbagger Report has the details. Glenn Greenwald, meanwhile, has much more on Cindy Sheehan getting dragged out of the Capitol building during Bush's speech last night, despite having been invited by a representative, for wearing, apparently, the wrong sort of fashion apparel.

The Costs of Single-Payer

Economist Kash Mansori has a great post about the costs that would come with switching to a single-payer system in the United States. In some respects, a single-payer system would be more expensive than what we have now: people would end up consuming more health care, especially the 45 million who are currently uninsured. But on the plus side, these extra expenses would be outweighed by the cost savings that would come from eliminating a lot of the $400 billion we spend on administrative overhead and allowing the government to bargain down the price of services. Is there any evidence for this? Sure, look at Taiwan:

As another useful data point we can examine the case of Taiwan, a country that replaced a collection of different insurance schemes with a National Health Insurance program in 1995. The percent of Taiwanese with health insurance rose from about 60% in 1994 to 96% a few years later. It turns out that in Taiwan's case, the forces that would increase costs roughly balanced the forces that would decrease costs.

Moreover, providing preventive care to all people, especially those who are currently uninsured, would likely save money by preventing later, costlier hospital visits—it's much cheaper, for instance, to treat diabetes early on than wait for a patient to get rushed to the ER. According to the Institute of Medicine, covering all Americans continuously would save the country anywhere from $65 billion to $130 billion in better health outcomes. Note that this is more than the estimated $80 to $100 billion it would cost to cover the uninsured. On the surface at least, universal coverage makes economic sense.

The catch that's always mentioned, of course, is that some sort of single-payer system would force rationing of health care and stifle innovation. Innovation is a harder problem, but it's worth noting that we already do ration care—by income, by location, by age. But the case for switching to a system that would cost roughly the same, if not less, as our present dysfunctional mess, and would lead to universal coverage, has a lot going for it.

A Pittance for Research

In his State of the Union last night, the president got all environmental on us and proposed a few million dollars in subsidies for clean-energy research. About $264 million, according to David Roberts of Grist—not nothing, but a pittance compared to the billions of dollars in subsidies that Congress is giving oil and gas companies to drill and explore the earth last year. (In a year that Exxon earned a record $36 billion in profit, no less.) Oh, and that also comes after last year, during which funding for carbon-free energy sources was cut 3.6 percent.

Sorry to get critical—yes, yes, the president was making a baby step towards some sort of decent goal for once in his life—but this really won't cut it. Dramatic climate change is on the way, and little half-gestures won't help change course. Meanwhile, the president's proposal to increase spending on federal research and development by an additional $6 billion was a good call, and genuinely needed—most of this basic research is responsible for some of the major inventions of our time, including a variety of breakthrough drugs and of course the internet, and the U.S. is falling behind other countries on this front—but the betting line is that the Republican-controlled Congress won't actually approve anywhere near that much. Oh well, I'm sure it made for a good applause line, and that's all that counts, right?

February 1st...

Welcome to February, everybody. February reminds me of Walt Whitman, who wrote, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself.” That’s because February is simultaneously National Snack Food Month and National Heart Month. Oh, and also National Children’s Dental Health Month. All the best from Mother Jones.

January 31, 2006

Cracking Down on Protests

The Secret Service will have a much easier time breaking up protests and arresting protestors if the latest version of the Patriot Act passes, according to Fox News:

A new provision tucked into the Patriot Act bill now before Congress would allow authorities to haul demonstrators at any "special event of national significance" away to jail on felony charges if they are caught breaching a security perimeter.

Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, sponsored the measure, which would extend the authority of the Secret Service to allow agents to arrest people who willingly or knowingly enter a restricted area at an event, even if the president or other official normally protected by the Secret Service isn't in attendance at the time.

Just to be clear, the Secret Service already has the power to haul demonstrators away on felony charges if they breach a "security perimeter" while the president or other VIPs are around. But now, apparently, that power's being extended to occasions when no one important is in the area. From the looks of things, the Secret Service could name just about anything they wanted a "special event of national significance" and lock up anyone who crashes. Why? What possible security purpose does this serve, besides clamping down on dissent?

State of the Union

Can't imagine why anyone would possibly want to watch the State of the Union, but it's tonight for those interested. Charlie Cook pointed out the other day that the only address in recent memory that was even remotely "important" was Bill Clinton's in 1998, when the president strode in after the Monica Lewinsky scandal had erupted and showed everyone that it was business as usual in Washington, life would go on, and there was no constitutional crisis in the offing. (Well, more specifically, the purpose of the speech was to show the media that life would go on; most of the rest of the country didn't actually think the affair was the end of the world.)

At any rate, E.J. Dionne has a great column today noting that whatever President Bush might say in his speech tonight about "boldness" and "vision" and "reform," it's been business as usual in the Republican-controlled Congress, where the upcoming budget vote will slash genuinely important programs for the poor while cutting taxes on the wealthy. (And increasing the deficit all the while—as it turns out, anti-poverty programs are relatively cheap, while tax cuts blow a big hole in the budget.) Dionne's right, there should be moral outrage over this.

There aren't really any new and dazzling ways to spin the GOP's disastrous budget, although we can note some of the consequences: among other things, the non-partisan CBO pointed out that as a result of recent Medicaid cuts, millions and millions of low-income Americans could lose their coverage or face higher payments. The indefatigable folks at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, as usual, have the gory details.

January 30, 2006

Vets for Congress

Eric Massa is an interesting character. He’s a naval veteran running for Congress as a Democrat in New York’s 29th district. He was profiled at Mother Jones, along with other vets running for Congress, back in October and since then the meme has really taken off. Yesterday Massa posted at TPMCafe (where he’s a regular contributor) in an effort to let the world know the vets-for-congress movement has now reached 53 Democrats. Massa is extremely bright and his campaign website has lots of content on tough issues, all thought through and written by the candidate himself. (He even has a blog.) He’s running against an incumbent who barely won his last race—this puts Massa in a different position than most of his fellow veterans. A lot of the Democratic veterans are running in solidly Republican districts, where they hope their military background will make voters comfortable with voting for a Democrat.

The Pentagon's Private Army

This seems like it should be bigger news. Congress has recently granted the Pentagon $200 million to aid foreign militaries, a sum which the executive branch can now spend without oversight from either the State Department or the legislature. That means the military can spend money training and equipping foreign armies without following constraints that require that the aid recipients meet certain standards, "including respect for human rights and protection of legitimate civilian authorities." And military leaders will now be able to set a small but potentially important aspect of foreign policy without input from the State Department.

Perhaps there's a case to be made that the old oversight rules were too byzantine, and, as administration officials argued to the Post, the old way of doing things was hindering U.S. attempts to provide security assistance in "crisis situations." But the opportunities for abuse here are pretty self-evident. Among other things, the Pentagon wants to use the funds for "fighting terror and bolstering stability" in Africa. But we know that the United States has fostered a "close intelligence relationship" with, for instance, the regime in Sudan that's currently responsible for genocide in Darfur, all in the interest of fighting terror. Is further assistance on the way? Is this really the sort of thing that demands less, rather than more, oversight?

What Baby Boom Crisis?

Ezra Klein puts up a few nice charts and graphs showing that, relatively, the retirement of the Baby Boomer generation simply isn't going to be the devastating demographic shift that many pundits make it out to be. Good stuff; and as a bonus, here's my favorite way to put the so-called "old-age crisis" in context. As we've heard many times, the future unfunded increases in spending associated with the aging of the population are going to require a tax hike of about 6.5 percent of GDP to close the gap. (Personally, I think it will be much less than that, since the problems with both Social Security and Medicare are wildly overstated, but let's say 6.5 percent.)

That sounds like a lot, but it's hardly unprecedented. Between 1950 and 1952, note, the federal tax burden jumped suddenly from 14.4 percent to 19 percent as a result of the Korean War, a leap in defense spending that was more or less permanent for the duration the Cold War. Now that increase came in just a few years—rather than gradually over decades, as would be the case to pay for Social Security and Medicare—and it was entirely manageable. The economy didn't implode. Life went on.

It would be nice to figure a way to curtail the cost of health care in the future, and obviously a lower tax burden is better than a higher one whenever possible, but even in the worst case, we're not talking about Armageddon here. We wouldn't even be up to European levels of taxation. As Max Sawicky has gone over in gruesome detail, bringing federal revenues back up to around 20 percent of GDP—only slightly higher than the long-term historical average—is perfectly adequate to maintain current spending levels and keep our debt ratios sustainable. Beyond that, thanks to the magic of productivity, those "overtaxed" Americans of the future will still be much richer in real terms than people are today. Slicing up a bit more of all that extra pie to ensure that the workers who brought this country to where it is today can have a decent retirement is a perfectly sensible way to go.

Irrationality in Politics

Is there a neurological explanation for blind partisanship? According to this press release, scientists, using fMRI scans, have found that when "committed Democrats and Republicans" are faced with criticism of their favorite politician, they show no increase in activity of the parts of their brains associated with reasoning. (Incidentally, or not, the subjects of the study were all men.) That's not all that surprising, really, although I wonder whether this holds equally for all education groups, or whether it's possible to train oneself not to do this. At any rate, one could note that a good number of media types who worship at the altar of "non-partisanship" tend to turn off the rational bits in their brains fairly frequently…

On a related note, economists Sendhil Mullainathan and Ebonya Washington recently put out a paper suggesting that voters have an irrational preference for the candidates they've just voted for. They found that twenty-year-olds who had voted in a particular election two years prior showed more polarization in their opinions about the elected candidates than did nineteen-year-olds who, incidentally, missed the chance to vote that year. (Assuming, of course, that there's no other reason why twenty-year-olds and nineteen-year-olds should have such different political views.)

Meanwhile, Senators who are elected in high-turnout presidential years are more polarizing figures among the public than those elected in off-years. That could partially explain why incumbents keep winning, and suggests that term limits, perhaps, could inject a bit more rationality into politics. Although if that's the goal, we're a fair ways off.

January 29, 2006

Substantial amount of AIDS funding goes to religious groups

There was a time in America when the above headline would not have aroused suspicion;; we would have expected a certain number of religious organizations to apply for and receive grants to help fight a serious syndrome that causes devastating disease and death. Religious organizations have taken an active role in promoting a number of social programs, from the Vietnamese resettlement effort to providing food for the nation's poor.

What makes the headline different this time around is the conflict between what is needed to overcome the AIDS virus, and what is taught by many of the religious organizations receiving grants. Take, for example, Catholic Relief Services, which was awarded $6.2 million to teach "abstinence and fidelity" in three countries. The group claims it offers "complete and accurate" information about condoms, but does not promote, purchase, or distribute them.

Or World Relief, a group established by the Natonal Association of Evangelicals. World Relief receieved $9.7 million to do abstincence work in four countries. Samaritan's Purse provides community education about AIDS, though not without education about Christianity, and World Vision, also operates an educational prevention program which "may include" information on condom use.

In other words, 23% of the White House's $15 billion AIDS package has gone to groups who either do not even mention the word "condom," or who mention it only as a last resort.

It is important to point out that the use of condoms is not a tidy solution to the problem of AIDS in poor countries:

Many men in Africa, especially South Africa, believe that having sex with a virgin will cure AIDS. This belief (a 3-year study of 28,000 men in South Africa showed that 1 in 5 of them believed in this "cure") has led to a rise in infant rape.

In South Africa, a woman is raped every 20 seconds.

In poor countries, girls and women are often forced into prostitution by poverty or family coercion.

In many cultures, the use of condoms in marriage indicates a lack of trust, yet in these same cultures, there is often a lot of sex outside of marriage.

To solve these very serious problems, there must be massive education, and strong programs to empower women. Rape victims, prostitutes, and adolecent brides cannot expect to have any success in suggesting the use of condoms or--in the case of the latter two groups--providing condoms to their sex partners. But condoms are part of the answer for family planning, for marriages in which AIDS education has taken place, and among young men and women who learn about what causes the spread of AIDS.

Though condom use cannot solve the problems of rape (including sanctioned marital rape), forced prostitution, and female powerlessness, it is a vital part of the solution once AIDS education and female empowerment have begun to take hold. Teaching abstinence to hundreds of thousands of potential rape victims, on the other hand, does nothing but further endanger the people it is supposed to be helping.

February 3, 2006

Meet John Boehner

Do Americans Have More Leisure?

The Failure of Plan Colombia

February 2, 2006

Where's the Anti-Immigrant Movement on This?

What Will Be Left of Iraq?

February 1, 2006

Zahn moves CNN even farther to the right

The T-Shirt Scourge

The Costs of Single-Payer

A Pittance for Research

February 1st...

January 31, 2006

Cracking Down on Protests

State of the Union

January 30, 2006

Vets for Congress

The Pentagon's Private Army

What Baby Boom Crisis?

Irrationality in Politics

January 29, 2006

Substantial amount of AIDS funding goes to religious groups

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