"A perfect market requires perfect information"

[Forbes:] What do you think WikiLeaks mean for business? How do businesses need to adjust to a world where WikiLeaks exists?

[Julian Assange:] WikiLeaks means it’s easier to run a good business and harder to run a bad business, and all CEOs should be encouraged by this. I think about the case in China where milk powder companies started cutting the protein in milk powder with plastics. That happened at a number of separate manufacturers.

Let’s say you want to run a good company. It’s nice to have an ethical workplace. Your employees are much less likely to screw you over if they’re not screwing other people over.

Then one company starts cutting their milk powder with melamine, and becomes more profitable. You can follow suit, or slowly go bankrupt and the one that’s cutting its milk powder will take you over. That’s the worst of all possible outcomes.

The other possibility is that the first one to cut its milk powder is exposed. Then you don’t have to cut your milk powder. There’s a threat of regulation that produces self-regulation.

It just means that it’s easier for honest CEOs to run an honest business, if the dishonest businesses are more effected negatively by leaks than honest businesses. That’s the whole idea. In the struggle between open and honest companies and dishonest and closed companies, we’re creating a tremendous reputational tax on the unethical companies.

The leak I'm waiting for is, what's in it all for Julian Assange? I mean, if you think he's doing this out of the goodness of his heart, I have a bridge to sell you. Who's paying him?

Driberally tonight

Drinking Liberally is a weekly social gathering where progressives talk politics and get to know one another. In Center City Philadelphia, we meet on Tuesday nights at José Pistola's upstairs bar, where there are drink specials from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. And the more we tip the bartender, the more frequently he hands out free dishes of chips and dips. I hope to see you there!

José Pistola's is at 263 South 15th Street (15th and Spruce) in Center City, near the Kimmel Center and the Academy of Music. There's a parking garage across the street, but as filthy liberal hippies naturally we suggest public transit; both SEPTA and PATCO will get you there in two shakes of a lamb's tail.

This week's topic: Thanksgiving ain't over until the fat lady has finished all the pie in the fridge.

"Come for the beer, stay for the check"

State lawmaker in Minnesota totes gun around closed Planned Parenthood office, offers a disturbing excuse

A Republican state representative in Minnesota was briefly detained after a curious exchange in the parking lot of a Planned Parenthood on Tuesday 16 November. Thomas Hackbarth drove into the lot, placed a fully loaded gun in his waistband, got out of his truck, and walked around the back of the building. A security guard saw the gun and called police, who arrived as Hackbarth was about to drive away. Hackbarth, who has a CCP, is listed as co-author of a concern-troll bill about "coerced abortions" that adds paperwork and notification procedures for women seeking abortions, a bill that mandates piss tests for welfare recipients, and a "Tenther" bill. He says it was mere coincidence that the parking lot he ended up in was one for a Planned Parenthood. Rather, he explains, he was only looking for somebody he met online:

Hackbarth said he had coffee with the woman on Nov. 15, and asked her to dinner the next night but she told him she couldn't because of a commitment she had with a female friend in Highland Park. Hackbarth said he felt that she might have been seeing a man instead, so he parked his car and walked around the block looking for her car. [ ... ] "I didn't even know it was Planned Parenthood," [Hackbarth] said.

Well, a little bit of googlemapping and a streetview shows that the clinic has the standard "Planned Parenthood" logo clearly attached to the front of the building there. It was night, but the daytime streetview shows a floodlight there next to the security cameras.

And it's not that big of a parking lot.

I dug a little more and found that that the Highland Park clinic is the only Planned Parenthood in Minnesota that performs abortions; the others offer healthcare and counseling but can give only abortion referrals. When the general goal of most anti-choice legislation is to regulate abortions out of existence by making them more and more cumbersome and expensive to obtain, it's hard for me to believe that a lawmaker as anti-choice as Hackbarth doesn't know the location of the last remaining Planned Parenthood performing abortions in his own state.

But, OK, let's buy it and see where it gets us. Maybe he really didn't know that it was a Planned Parenthood, the only one in Minnesota offering abortions; maybe the floodlight was out and the streetlights didn't reach the sign. It's not his neighborhood, and really he spends more time co-authoring bills about hunting, casinos, and alcohol than about abortion. Did you dig his excuse for going out with his fully-loaded gun in his belt? He was stalking a woman who declined a second date with him.

"I was not a jealous boyfriend," said [protested too much?] Hackbarth, who is in the process of divorcing his wife of 25 years. "I was just trying to check up on her. It's totally a misunderstanding."

He stopped in the empty parking lot of a closed, full-service Planned Parenthood clinic to "check up on" someone who told him no, thanks to a relationship. This is not a "misunderstanding"; this is a pretty damn clear case of stalking, and I'm glad that the woman spotted Hackbarth's creepiness before she accepted a dinner date with him.

Driberally tonight

Drinking Liberally is a weekly social gathering where progressives talk politics and get to know one another. In Center City Philadelphia, we meet on Tuesday nights at José Pistola's upstairs bar, where there are drink specials from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. And the more we tip the bartender, the more frequently he hands out free dishes of chips and dips. I hope to see you there!

José Pistola's is at 263 South 15th Street (15th and Spruce) in Center City, near the Kimmel Center and the Academy of Music. There's a parking garage across the street, but as filthy liberal hippies naturally we suggest public transit; both SEPTA and PATCO will get you there in two shakes of a lamb's tail.

This week's topic: Though "[t]here has never been an explosive found on a flight from one U.S. city to another" according to one TSA administrator (CNN), undertrained federal security staff from coast to coast have been feeling up children, accidentally spilling ostomy bags, and forcing show-and-tells of breast prostheses, all in the name of anti-terrorism security. Are you planning to travel by air for Thanksgiving? Will you participate in National Opt-Out Day's statement against the backscatter x-rays and TSA gropers? And is that a naked picture of my ex-husband on National Opt-Out Day's homepage?

"Come for the beer, stay for the check"

When abortions are illegal, women will still get abortions (Thailand edition)

Thai police say they have found the remains of more than 2,000 foetuses, thought to be from illegal abortions, hidden at a Buddhist temple in Bangkok.

(BBC.) Thailand's anti-abortion law restricts the procedure to women and girls who are victims of incest, or whose pregnancies endanger their health. (Note that Senator-elect Toomey, R-Pa., wants an even stricter anti-abortion law than Thailand's.) When one clinic had to close because the provider moved (MSNBC), there was still enough demand for abortion services that a non-doctor stepped in. Abortion in the first two trimesters -- and especially in the first few weeks -- is, really, a straightforward procedure. But it's still safest in a regulated medical clinic, with trained and licensed professionals at hand, and with emergency facilities within easy reach. In Thailand, though,

[w]ealthy women can get abortions in safe facilities but the vast majority of Thai women wanting an abortion use clinics which could put their health and safety at great risk, [the BBC's] correspondent says.

When abortions are illegal or hard to obtain, women will still get abortions. They just get ones in less than ideal conditions (or outright dangerous, unsanitary conditions), or they have higher-risk abortions because they've had to delay the procedure until later in the pregnancy, or they delay treatment for complications for fear of legal consequences.

But they still get abortions, and you get horrific situations like this one.

Three pieces of bad news for women this week

It's been an unhappy week in women's news at the Glomarization homestead.

First, though the lame-duck Senate had nothing to lose, they killed the Paycheck Fairness Act anyway. It wouldn't have made anything newly illegal, but it would have uncapped punitive and compensatory damages against employers who were proven to engage in sex-based wage discrimination, and it would have limited the number of excuses legal defenses an employer could use in a lawsuit. When I say "uncapped compensatory damages," that means just what it sounds like it means: if you prove that you were underpaid because of sex discrimination on account of you're a woman, you may not necessarily win back all the pay that you were otherwise rightfully owed, because there's a cap on compensatory damages. Never mind that there should or should not be a cap on extra, punitive awards over and above the actual deficit in what you were owed -- but as the law is, you can't always get even what the employer should have been fairly writing on your paycheck. This bill would have fixed that unfairness in the damages equation. Here's some context: there have been equal pay laws in place in England since 1970 and France since 1972, but here in the U.S. all the real or imaginary extensions to the deadline to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment expired in 1982, three-state strategy notwithstanding.

Second, there's a serial woman-killer on the loose in Kensington. Over on Phawker, Jeff Deeney calls a spade a spade and says that the police are letting the women have their just deserts for getting addicted and then streetwalking to pay for it. And if that isn't a reasonable social solution to the problem, then what is? Oh, yeah: drug addiction prevention and treatment, equal pay for equal work, and, you know, investigating and prosecuting sex crimes, no matter who the victims are.

And finally, in South Africa, the kind of thing that's at the bottom of the slippery slope of societal devaluing of women. At the top, paying women less than men for doing the same work; in the middle, not bothering to go after the rapists and killers of prostitutes; at the bottom: criminal charges of underage sex against a 15-year-old girl who was gang-raped at school (BBC). This is the one where the boys spiked her drink and then other kids videoed the attack with their mobile phones. Within hours, the video was on sale on the Internet, but only after the teachers had had a chance to view it and laugh at it.

Is it Friday yet? Is it time for armed all-women rebellion yet?

Police slow to respond to possible serial killer of women in Philly

There is unanimous agreement among the women working the [Kensington Avenue prostitutes'] stroll that the police feel that sexual violence is simply an occupational hazard that women who choose this way of life should cope with on their own. That a serial killer would view the stroll as fertile territory for finding easy kills among disposable women, to them, only seems a logical outcome of the long standing unwritten police policies that condone the violence against them.

Jeff Deeney at The Newsweek Daily Beast on how the police have been slow to react to an apparent serial killer in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, because he targets prostitutes.

Anyway, here's a composite sketch of the suspect:



Is that an iPod?

Friday jukebox (early): Paul Simon

If the terrorists and shoe bombers and air cargo package bombers aren't using little kids as mules, then why is the TSA insisting on molesting children before letting them board ordinary commercial flights home from Disney World with their parents?



The bomb in the baby carriage
Was wired to the radio
These are the days of miracle and wonder

U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops moderating away from the pope?

In what looks to me like a rejection of the trend by some super-conservative Catholic priests to refuse Communion to pro-choice politicians and even threaten to excommunicate them, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has elected a relative liberal to be their president (MSNBC). The vote rejected the candidacy of bishop Gerald Kicanas, who had called for dialogue between extreme conservatives and less-extreme conservatives, so perhaps the election represents a sense of impatience with wasting time trying to find a middle ground with intolerant people who are more likely than not to reject the possibility of a middle ground in the first place. The Conference's new president is Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York. While he's no radical leftist, he has drawn the line against both denying Communion (a trend in Canada, too) and warning congregations that voting for a pro-choice candidate is tantamount to committing a mortal sin.

Dolan's position puts him out of line with Pope Benedict, who has said that excommunicating pro-choice politicians is the right thing to do under canon law. Is the Conference rejecting the pope's ultra-conservatism? Maybe the Vatican's utter failure to deal with its international pedophile ring? In a country where Catholic schools are closing left and right for lack of enrollment, and the dying populations of nuns and priests are not being replaced by new recruits, they sure do need to do something to keep believers in the fold.

Driberally tonight

Drinking Liberally is a weekly social gathering where progressives talk politics and get to know one another. In Center City Philadelphia, we meet on Tuesday nights at José Pistola's upstairs bar, where there are drink specials from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. And the more we tip the bartender, the more frequently he hands out free dishes of chips and dips. I hope to see you there!

José Pistola's is at 263 South 15th Street (15th and Spruce) in Center City, near the Kimmel Center and the Academy of Music. There's a parking garage across the street, but as filthy liberal hippies naturally we suggest public transit; both SEPTA and PATCO will get you there in two shakes of a lamb's tail.

This week's topic: The Newsweek Daily Beast Company -- I'm sorry, who's trying to boost their credibility here? I guess at this point Newsweek, which lost some $30 million in 2009 alone, just has nothing left to lose.

"Come for the beer, stay for the check"

Monday art house: Joe Boruchow

Paper cut-out artist Joe Boruchow has a new show up at the Bean Café, 615 South Street in Philadelphia:


Works include a portrait of Philadelphia artist Isaiah Zagar; a portrait of Ron Castille, Chief Justice of Pennsylvania's supreme court; and political commentary on tea party activists and pedophiles in the Catholic Church.

Text about modifying the mortgage interest deduction, from the proposal itself

It's on page 26 of the 50-page PDF from the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform:

Option 2: Wyden-Gregg Style Reform

[ . . . ]

Limit mortgage deduction to exclude 2nd residences, home equity loans, and mortgages over $500,000

I'm kinda OK with this idea, except that I don't like including home equity loans. For better or worse, in my anecdotal experience home equity lines of credit are how a few friends and family bridge-financed some expenses that were emergencies, or at least turned out to be higher than they'd planned. The circumstances involved expenses like college tuition that they'd saved money for since the kid was a toddler, but which rose out of proportion to the inflation rate during the kid's last couple of years in high school; or home repairs that weren't adequately covered by insurance; or a cross-country move when they were house-rich but cash-poor. They found that they could get more cash with a HELOC than with a personal line of credit from a bank. Not that these strategies were necessarily the wisest way to go, but when you need money you need money, and the rates were better and the limit higher than their credit cards.

Now, I do know one or two homeowners who have used their house like an ATM, and who refinanced over and over again, or took out HELOC after HELOC. For international vacations, or so they didn't have to look hard for a new job, or to finance a new-car habit. This is not only unwise, but it's also pretty scammy and makes the rest of us look bad, and when those types' banks are bailed out you get right-wing bumper stickers that say "HONK IF I'M PAYING YOUR MORTGAGE."

In conclusion: Ha-ha, Senator Gregg's website has an animated moose in silhouette walking across the top of the page. Er, I mean, let's focus on proposals to cut Medicare and Medicaid and to raise the retirement age, and not worry so much about this small line item in the Commission's first draft.

What is the actual proposal about eliminating the mortgage interest tax deduction?

I'm still looking for a primary source, but here's what a NASDAQ analyst says about the proposed change to the mortgage interest tax deduction:

The [National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform] specifically proposes to exclude mortgage-interest deductions for second homes, home-equity loans and mortgages over $500,000.

So . . . not a complete elimination, but a rollback that affects primarily wealthy homeowners. Might be time for your best Emily Litella at this point.

Friday jukebox: Janis Joplin

What am I doing in Casablanca?

Why I avoid buying stuff from China

Tilapia fish has been everywhere in restaurants and fish markets (or the fish section of your supermarket) recently. It's inexpensive; it's so bland that it takes on whatever flavors accompany it in a dish without adding a fishy flavor itself; and, while it doesn't provide the omega-3 fatty acids that cold-water ocean fish contain, it's a relatively low-fat and low-calorie food.

And just about all of it is produced in China, so I won't eat it. China doesn't care about the quality or safety of what it exports to the U.S., as long as it's getting good, hard dollars in exchange. Examples? Well, tainted Chinese-made drywall for one. If there have been 3000 formal complaints registered, I imagine there are tens of thousands of homes that are actually affected. The manufacturers clearly didn't care about poisoning American homes when they sold the drywall or donated it for Hurricane Katrina reconstruction.

But it's not just products for grownups. We've had recall after recall of lead-laced children's toys that were made in China. There's no concern here for what chemicals and poisons American children may ingest, or absorb through their skin. Hope you don't think it's just a disregard for foreign children, though. Remember the tainted baby formula scandal and tragedy? The manufacturers put melanine powder into the formula to stretch it -- much as I'll be putting pasta and beans into some soup tonight to make my leftovers last another day -- and then officials jailed the whistleblower. Three manufacturers were sentenced to death, this is true. But my point is that they let their profit motive do something that sickened tens of thousands of children, not just abstractly foreign children thousands of miles away but potentially the children living right next door, and you'd better believe that when the official records note that "at least six" kids died, it must actually have been hundreds.

This kind of behavior is something that American capitalists outgrew with the New Deal. And by "outgrew" of course I mean "were dragged, kicking and screaming and with a threat to pack the Supreme Court with supporters of the new administrative state."

As for Chinese politics? Coercive suppression of Falun Gong followers, bloody suppression of the protestors at Tiananmen Square, imprisonment of political prisoners, slavery conditions in factories, the absolute absence of a social safety net, whatever. I mean, don't get me wrong; I'm not a denier of, or a moral relativist about, or an apologist about human rights violations in China. What I mean is, all that aside, you can't trust products from China anyway, no matter what your opinion is about social issues in China. It's capitalism gone crazy. Pure, unregulated capitalism, the likes of which we haven't seen in the U.S. since 1937, only with solid-state technology and the Internet instead of vacuum tubes and telegraphs. And a world population approaching 7 billion.

So fuck low prices. Maybe I'm an outlier, but I'll go ahead and pay a few dollars more for housewares, clothes, tools, building materials, office supplies, and so on, if it means that I won't be poisoning myself with every use. I buy a lot of things I need at thrift stores and charity shops, which has a double advantage now: low prices, and a selection of stuff made in North America or western Europe, made back in the olden days when America used to have factories. Realistically, Chinese products are unavoidable -- the vast majority of electronics and their components, any reasonably priced clothing, etc. -- and having a product assembled or "finished" in one country often means it was mostly made in China anyway. So I try my best, much as I try all the local shops in my neighborhood or the KMart in Center City before I resign myself to making the trek to South Philly's Walmart, which I otherwise try to avoid unless I have a dire, dire need for something I can't find nearby.

For political, worker justice, and environmental reasons, and because so much of their merchandise is made in China.

Opening soon: two new clinics in the U.S. for late-term abortions

Hot diggity damn, LeRoy Carhart, one of two abortion providers in the U.S. who still performs late-term abortions, has announced that he will be opening two new clinics, one near D.C. and one in Iowa (WashPost). The clinic near D.C. will open in December and will be easily accessible by Metro. The D.C. area is just a hop, skip, and a jump by air from just about anywhere in the lower 48, even Nebraska, where Dr. Carhart has been legislated out of providing late-term care.

Women choose late-term abortions for a lot of reasons. Most commonly the reasons are something like intrauterine fetal death or fetal abnormalities that are not survivable after birth (like mermaid syndrome or anencephaly), diagnosed late in the pregnancy due to errors, delayed prenatal care, or ordinary errors by the imaging technologist. In these cases, terminating the pregnancy is safer than enduring childbirth, whether a vaginal delivery or a C-section. (In fact, the maternal mortality rate for elective abortion is lower than that for childbirth. See Abortion Surveillance -- United States, 2003 and World Health Organization.) Other reasons for a late-term abortion generally involve deadly pregnancy complications, such as extreme pregnancy hypertension, heart conditions, or incompatibility with cancer treatments -- conditions where the mother has a high or near-certain risk of perishing if she attempts to continue the pregnancy. And again, frequently these conditions are diagnosed late in the pregnancy, or they appear late and unexpectedly.

Some women choose late-term abortions because they live in one of the 88% of all counties in the U.S. with no provider at all, or their state laws imposed a waiting period, or they had trouble raising the funds. These kinds of obstacles can delay a woman's access to prenatal care and counseling and thus push the pregnancy to a later term -- which makes the abortion riskier (though still safer than childbirth), more complex, and more expensive.

About a million abortions are performed in the U.S. every year. About 10,000 are performed after 21 weeks (CDC). Anti-choice zealots like Senator-elect Toomey (R-Pa.) would have you believe that all these women are terminating their pregnancies on a whim; they're selfish; they're having abortions for birth control; they're duped by abortion providers who want their money. But nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is that very, very few of these women want a late-term abortion. The circumstances are usually, at best, imposed on them by legal obstacles, and at worst, life-threateningly dangerous or tragic.

Late-term abortions should be safe, legal, and available on demand. Abortion is healthcare and when women cannot control this part of their healthcare they do not have full control over their destiny. Dr. Carhart is doing American women a great service, and I'm heartened to know that once that clinic is open near D.C. I'll be that much physically closer to a late-term abortion service if I should ever need it.

Why I don't have cable TV

Hard-hitting, incisive, important commentary here at Glomarization Central today. Cable TV!

Subscribers are fleeing cable television in droves. But because cable providers appear to have given up on the theory of supply and demand, rates are still going up. Around these parts, basic cable plus internet starts at about $150 per month after a promotional period.

I have two reasons why I don't have cable TV, other than the obvious problem of price. One, my local providers don't offer CBC, CTV, or Radio-Canada. Two, you can't get à la carte service.

See, no Canadian channels means no Hockey Night in Canada, no extensive French-language programming, no non-U.S. news analysis, no comedies that aren't Two And a Half Men, and no Don McKellar. And also we're stuck with NBC or their Windows-only website for Olympics coverage.

But that's almost OK. I can catch up on a lot of Canadian TV and movies by scouring the local independent film screenings -- few and far between though they are -- or dig deep into Netflix/Hulu/iTunes, or look for Olympics stuff on the BBC website. The bigger issue for me is that you can't pick and choose what channels you want to have.

Say I want to make a fruit salad. I figure I'd like today's salad to include an orange, some grapes, a kiwifruit, a banana, and a cantaloupe. I go to a grocery store, and at the store I can buy an orange, some grapes, a kiwifruit, a banana, and a cantaloupe. The store doesn't restrict me to a choice between the "preferred fruit salad combo" (pears, pineapples, mangoes, and maraschino cherries) versus the "premier plus triple XF fruit salad bundle" (yellow and ruby grapefruit, navel and valencia oranges, three varieties of apple, and a lime), neither of which packages includes the exact combination of fruit that I want.

Or say I want to paint a few rooms in my house. I want a green livingroom, a red bedroom, and a yellow kitchen. So I go to the paint store and buy a gallon each of green, red, and yellow paint. The paint store doesn't require me to buy a bundle of six cans of paints (green, red, yellow, as well as blue, white, and orange) -- or worse, two bundles with even more unwanted colors -- just so I can get my green, red, and yellow. And the one paint store in town is owned by the only grocery store in town.

But this kind of coercive bundling by a limited number of companies is exactly what happens with cable TV. Maybe all the TV I want is Animal Planet, Showtime, and Fox Soccer Plus. Animal Planet is part of basic cable, which includes a hundred other channels I don't want; Showtime is a channel you can get only with another cost-added bundle; and Fox Soccer Plus is available with one of the two local cable providers, but not the other. And I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but you'd have to be one seriously naïve cat to believe that the TV media giants don't discuss this kind of thing between themselves every once in a while.

Call a spade a spade: this isn't merely coercive bundling; it's called tying, and in any industry other than cable TV it's unacceptable, if not outright illegal under the Clayton Act. Though apparently the Ninth Circuit disagrees with me, I'm still not going to get cable TV until I can pick and choose my channels. I want my Hockey Night in Canada!

Nearly 1 in 5 Americans has no health insurance

[I]n the first quarter of 2010, an estimated 59.1 million people had no health insurance for at least part of the year[.]

(MSNBC.) In other words, nearly 1 in 5 Americans has no health insurance. And it's not just the sorely impoverished; about half of the uninsured live well above the federal poverty level.

Nearly 1 in 5 Americans has no health insurance.

And it's not just the healthy, either; more than 40% of the uninsured have a chronic disease such as asthma, hypertension, or diabetes.

Nearly 1 in 5 Americans has no health insurance.

The Republican response? Kill health insurance reform by chipping away at it, piece by piece. Block funding for programs, close low-income clinics, and roll back consumer protection progress until they've achieved what Representative Eric Cantor (R-Va.) calls "full repeal."

What does Rep. Cantor consider "full repeal"? Nearly 2 in 5 Americans with no health insurance? Half of all Americans? I don't mean to be disingenuous; I know he means that he wants everyone to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and fund their own personal medical savings accounts (whether ordinary savings accounts or money-market accounts or accounts with funds invested in the stock market). That kind of account is a great idea if you have (1) seed money to begin with; and (2) generally good health, so that you can earn money by working and you don't need a lot of expensive healthcare anyway.

It's all very rich coming from someone with a gold-plated federal employee health plan. Has Rep. Cantor opted out of his federal benefits program? Has he put his money where his mouth is?

Nearly 1 in 5 Americans has no health insurance.

Let's see those ranks swell with elected Republicans who campaigned on destroying health insurance reform.

Election redux: welcome to bloody red Pennsylvania

So it's come to pass, now that the election is done and gone, that Pennsylvania is a red state. Here at Glomarization's homestead, that means one thing (well, of course it means a lot of things, but it means one huge thing in this household): we've gotta start seriously looking out for the right of women in Pennsylvania, and in the rest of the nation, to choose abortion when they want it.

Reproductive healthcare is healthcare. It's a subcategory of healthcare; it's not an entity on its own, like personal finance, or housecleaning, or anything else you'd hire a service provider for. Health insurance companies may say, essentially, that your teeth and eyes aren't part of your body, by not providing dental and optical coverage with their insurance policies; but they can't say the same thing about your uterus and ovaries. This is because reproductive healthcare is not a separate, carved-out part of women's health and bodies. It is fundamentally part of their daily lives. For the vast majority of women between the ages of about 15 and 45 -- or for about a third or half of their lifetime -- every single month there is an uncertainty. Am I pregnant, or did I dodge the bullet again this month? (Or the other side of the coin: did we manage to get pregnant this time, or will we be trying again?) Did I replace the spare pad in my purse after I used the last one a few weeks ago? Will I get a good roll of the dice when I schedule my week down the shore next year, or will I end up sitting on the sand in a pair of shorts? Why did I have to get my driver's license photo (or work ID, or school portrait) taken this week, when I have blemishes all over my chin from PMS?

Or less universal, but still very frequent, questions: How many days of work will I miss this month because of my debilitating cramps? Will I need another D & C for the fibroids that keep coming back? Why doesn't my state insurance commissioner require my health insurance provider to cover my pills? And is that a stroke I feel coming on from taking the Pill and smoking this cigarette at the same time?

I'm listing this stuff lightheartedly, but questions, concerns, and thoughts related to our reproductive healthcare are frequently on our minds, to one degree or another. For some of us, these thoughts are constantly on our minds. Why? Because our reproductive health and our overall health are so intimately intertwined that they are really the one and the same thing.

Republican extremist Senator-elect Pat Toomey would imprison doctors who perform abortions (video). At least he's somewhat intellectually honest: if abortion is murder, then abortion doctors are criminals. But you can't have an abortion without a woman who gets it, so she must therefore be an accomplice to the "crime" and should be in prison, too -- if you're being fully intellectually honest. And let's be clear: that would be a million American women per year.

A woman who cannot choose what to do about her reproductive health -- which is not an aspect of our overall health, but is integral to our overall health -- is not in full control of her destiny. When an American Senator would imprison women for obtaining healthcare, one million of them every year or a third of all American women over the course of their childbearing years, we have a problem in this country.

Driberally tonight

Drinking Liberally is a weekly social gathering where progressives talk politics and get to know one another. In Center City Philadelphia, we meet on Tuesday nights at José Pistola's upstairs bar, where there are drink specials from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. And the more we tip the bartender, the more frequently he hands out free dishes of chips and dips. I hope to see you there!

José Pistola's is at 263 South 15th Street (15th and Spruce) in Center City, near the Kimmel Center and the Academy of Music. There's a parking garage across the street, but as filthy liberal hippies naturally we suggest public transit; both SEPTA and PATCO will get you there in two shakes of a lamb's tail.

This week's topic: Fewer than 12 hours after the new South Street bridge opened to vehicle traffic on Saturday, the police arrested a trio of knuckleheads, spraypaint cans in hand, who (allegedly) wanted to be the first to tag the shiny new structure. In other words . . .  folks in University City and West Philly are back to having an E-Z route into Center City for Drinking Liberally: the 40 bus travels on Spruce Street through the University of Pennsylvania campus, crosses the Schuylkill River on the new bridge, and then continues eastbound on South Street. Get off at 15th Street and you're just 3 blocks south of José Pistola's. Bonus! The new bridge doesn't rattle at all and doesn't drop chunks of concrete into the river, the way the old one did.

"Come for the beer, stay for the check"

When boys dress like girls

A five-year-old boy dressed up as Daphne from the Scooby-Doo cartoons, and a crew of moms from his kindergarten gave his mom a hard time. Mom fought back in a blog post that's been making the rounds:

Thirdly, I am not worried that your son will grow up to be an actual ninja so back off.

Ah, now that brings back memories! Memories of me and my BFF Stu when we were kids, playing superheroes and fighting over who got to play Wonder Woman, or playing Donny and Marie and fighting over who got to play Marie. And Stu never turned out -- oh, wait. No, hmm. Actually, as a matter of fact, Stu did turn out to be queer as a three-dollar bill. And he's in show business now.

But you know what? I love my big gay friend Stu, and I always will! Here's to you, Stu!

Driberally tonight

Drinking Liberally is a weekly social gathering where progressives talk politics and get to know one another. In Center City Philadelphia, we meet on Tuesday nights at José Pistola's upstairs bar, where there are drink specials from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. And the more we tip the bartender, the more frequently he hands out free dishes of chips and dips. I hope to see you there!

José Pistola's is at 263 South 15th Street (15th and Spruce) in Center City, near the Kimmel Center and the Academy of Music. There's a parking garage across the street, but as filthy liberal hippies naturally we suggest public transit; both SEPTA and PATCO will get you there in two shakes of a lamb's tail.

This week's topic: We've resolved our dispute with Christine O'Donnell, so our election night party is back on schedule. We're co-hosting a returns-watching party with the Philadelphia chapters of the National Lawyers Guild and the American Constitution Society. The party won't end until the races are called, so come on down any time after 6:00 or after the Pennsylvania polls close at 8:00.

"Come for the beer, stay for the check"