ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES

America isn't the Third World. If a military coup does occur here it will be civilized. That it has never happened doesn't mean it wont. Describing what may be afoot is not to advocate it.

But there is more to this story. The 13-year old model "seduced" by Polanski had been thrust onto him by her mother, who wanted her in the movies. The girl was just a few weeks short of her 14th birthday, which was the age of consent in California. (It's probably 13 by now!) Polanski was demonized by the press, convicted, and managed to flee, fearing a heavy sentence.

And it ought not to matter that Polanski is a gifted artist. In fact, it ought to be held against him. He seduced -- if that can possibly be the word -- the 13-year-old Samantha Geimer with all the power and authority of a 44-year-old movie director who could make her famous. If this did not impress the girl, it must have impressed her mother. She permitted what was supposed to be a photo shoot.

At 15 Kinski began a romantic relationship with director Roman Polanski

"Man needs to be liberated from material oppressions, but more profoundly, he must be saved from the evils that afflict the spirit," Benedict told the crowd from under a white canopy beside a 40-foot-high stainless steel cross. The German-born pope spoke in Italian, and his words were translated into Czech.

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In his traditional Sunday Angelus blessing, Benedict urged the crowd not to forget their "rich heritage of faith."

"Maintain the spiritual patrimony inherited from your forebears ... guard it and make it answer to the needs of the present day," he said.

The title is a play on words, as it refers to both the mascot of the show's high school and the amped-up sexuality [that] 40-something divorcee Jules Cobb (Courteney Cox) struggles to contain. It's not Simone de Beauvoir, but Jules' struggles have a slightly feminist, "old ladies like doing it too" vibe …

What is funnier than a middle-aged woman who wants and enjoys sex? Literally nothing. It's like a dog wearing a sombrero!

The show is a re-imagining of the book and film The Witches of Eastwick for a modern audience, so hopefully won’t go down the semi-misogynistic route the book took …

it begins where sex scandals usually end: an errant politician expressing regret at a news conference while his shell-shocked spouse stands frozen at his side. … “The Good Wife” takes its cue from real life, not just the headlines, and is all the better for it.

Can fashion photos that have been retouched to make models look impossibly skinny pose a risk, say, to young, impressionable girls who see the photos and want to look like the models? Some French legislators think so.

About 50 members of France's Parliament have proposed a law that would require labels that say when fashion and advertising photos have been digitally retouched, the Telegraph reports.

The Breastfeeding Promotion Act of 2009 (H.R. 2819, S. 1244) includes five provisions:

* 1) Amends the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to protect breastfeeding women from being fired or discriminated against in the workplace.
* 2) Provides tax incentives for businesses that establish private lactation areas in the workplace, or provide breastfeeding equipment or consultation services to their employees.
* 3) Provides for a performance standard to ensure breast pumps are safe and effective.
* 4) Allows breastfeeding equipment and consultation services to be tax deductible for families (amends Internal Revenue Code definition of "medical care").
* 5) Protects the privacy of breastfeeding mothers by ensuring they have break time and a private place to pump (applies to employers with 50 or more employees, see text of legislation for details).

BREAKING: Democrats Hoping To Take Control Of Congress From Republican Minority In 2010

The findings underscore the challenges facing Obama and Congress as they try to reduce costs in the unwieldy health care system and provide coverage to millions of Americans without insurance.

Although there is widespread agreement that changes must be made in the USA, a strong majority say they are satisfied with what they have and don't want it upended.

• Eight in 10 say they are satisfied or very satisfied with the quality of the medical care available to them and their families.

• Six in 10 say they are satisfied or very satisfied with the cost of the medical care for themselves and their families.

• More than half say rising health care costs such as insurance premiums and out-of-pocket expenses are either no problem or a minor problem for them.

• Nearly two-thirds say reductions in what their insurance plan covers is either no problem or a minor problem.

"All people have heard are negative stories about the health care industry," says Robert Zirkelback of America's Health Insurance Plans. But "the vast majority of Americans are very satisfied with their health care coverage."

Only two in 10 Americans say their health insurance coverage and the quality of the health care they receive will improve if a bill passes Congress this year, despite President Obama's promises to improve the system for those with and without insurance.

With that in mind, I want to link this excellent post by Becky Sharper, who has a wonderful sense of irreverence in the face of people who are going to give you the least generous read imaginable when you suggest that perhaps porn isn't all roses and fountains of gold. I hesitate to open this can of worms, because when I pointed out that the facial exists in porn as a symbolic marker of female degradation, many, many, many people deliberately misread me, claiming that I said that coming on the outside was wrong, or that if any touched your face, it was wrong, or that you're a bad person if you like being degraded in bed. All I said was that it's funny to me that something that is overtly about employing the "this slut deserves to be humiliated" trope in porn gets to send its message to an audience that wants to hear negative things about sexual women, and the rest of us will pretend that they just didn't say that.

Even though, from my perspective, the implicit argument---that women who have a lot of sex, or with a lot of men are sluts who deserve humiliation---is anti-sex. In other words, for all the sex in porn, much of it adheres to the "family values" narrative, where a sexual woman is used up and deserves nothing but abuse. Being truly pro-sex, in my view, means believing that women who have sex, a lot of sex, or a lot of partners do not forfeit a single ounce of their dignity or humanity.

Becky notes that the heavy use of anal sex in porn has resulted in an uptick in anal sex in real life. And though I know a good half of the commenters will pretend I didn't say this: This isn't, in and of itself, a bad thing. Just like coming on the outside is a fine way to spice things up, anal sex also can be a lot of fun for straight couples in the right circumstances. But porn morphs rather mundane sex acts into tropes about hurting and humiliating women, and then those tropes are repeated in bedrooms for that purpose. The problem with this is that many of the women engaging in these deliberately humiliating behaviors don't get off on being submissives or being degraded. They're doing it just because they thing that's what sex is.

I repeat: like coming on the outside, there's a way to do anal sex that isn't about hurting, humiliating, and punishing a sexual woman. (If only I knew the secret number of times to repeat to avoid being misread!) There are entire excellent books about it, and whole lines of sex toys that exist solely to exploit the sensitivity of that area of the body. In fact, straight men can put things up their butt and like it, too! This is not being questioned. (I predict 5 comments before someone suggests I questioned this.)

But porn doesn't show anal sex in the pro-woman way that many practice it, where there's an attempt to warm you up, make you comfortable, go slow, and stop if there's any discomfort. Like Becky says:

Problem is, hetero mainstream porn isn't depicting the kind of careful, attentive interaction that makes anal sex pleasurable. In fact, in porn there's no attention paid to the woman's pleasure--or even her comfort--at all. The male actors just plunge in and start pounding.

In other words, there does seem to be a relationship between SG size and social perception, but it is not a simple male-female difference. Rather, the SG appears to reflect a person's "femininity" better than one's biological sex: women who are relatively less feminine show a correspondingly smaller SG compared to women who are more feminine, and ditto for men.

This finding—that brain structure correlates as well or better with psychological "gender" than with simple biological "sex"—is crucial to keep in mind when considering any comparisons of male and female brains. Yes, men and women are psychologically different and yes, neuroscientists are uncovering many differences in brain anatomy and physiology which seem to explain our behavioral differences. But just because a difference is biological doesn't mean it is "hard-wired." Individuals' gender traits—their preference for masculine or feminine clothes, careers, hobbies and interpersonal styles—are inevitably shaped more by rearing and experience than is their biological sex. Likewise, their brains, which are ultimately producing all this masculine or feminine behavior, must be molded—at least to some degree—by the sum of their experiences as a boy or girl.

In section III we explore these trends by demographic group, finding that the relative decline in women's well-being is ubiquitous, and holds for both working and stay-at-home mothers, for those married and divorced, for the old and the young, and across education distribution.

Most population and environment groups insist that they are against coercion, and maintain that linking family planning and climate change is a win-win solution for women and the planet. The reality is closer to lose-lose.

Historically, the U.S. environmental movement often has succumbed to apocalyptic thinking. Doomsday scenarios of population outstripping resources exemplify this philosophy.

The study found that 3.1 percent of adult women who attend religious services at least once a month have been the victims of clergy sexual misconduct since turning 18.

The co-ops can only compete in the small group and individual markets. That is to say, if the co-ops prove effective, and The Washington Post would like to offer co-op coverage as an option to its workers, it can't. The co-ops are not allowed to contract with large employers, which is to say, they can't compete with private insurers in the largest market, and they can't get the purchasing power that would come from a serious foothold among corporate customers.

As the morning commuter train rattled down the track, Chinu Sharma, an office worker, enjoyed the absence of men. Some of them pinch and grope women on trains, or shout insults and catcalls, she said. Her friend Vandana Rohile agreed and widened her eyes in mock imitation.

"Sometimes they just stare at you," said Ms. Rohile, 27.

Up and down the jostling train, women repeated the same theme: As millions of women have poured into the Indian work force over the last decade, they have met with different obstacles in a tradition-bound, patriarchal culture, but few are more annoying than the basic task of getting to work.

The problems of taunting and harassment, known as eve teasing, are so persistent that in recent months the government has decided to simply remove men altogether. In a pilot program, eight new commuter trains exclusively for female passengers have been introduced in India's four largest cities: New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Calcutta.

"Even on this train," Ms. Gahlot continued, "men sometimes board and try to harass the women. Sometimes they openly say, 'Please close the Ladies Special.'

"Maybe they think the government is helping out women and not men," she added.

Observers say it is part of a far broader campaign in the wake of the Great Recession -- including curbs on bankers' pay and a rigorous global hunt for tax cheats from Switzerland to Singapore -- that is suddenly putting the world's wealthy on notice.

In the United States, taxes on the richest Americans are one option for covering the cost of offering health care to the 46 million who are uninsured. The Obama administration has vowed to press forward with its ambitious agenda without raising income taxes on families earning less than $250,000. But the president's current budget calls for a rollback of the Bush tax cuts for the richest Americans that would increase their top marginal tax rate in 2011 from 35 percent to 39.6 percent, or the same as in the Clinton era.

In India, the government has launched an effort to track down billions of dollars in "black money" -- or hidden profits of the rich. In Germany, Parliament in July passed a law requiring the affluent to provide more information on the locations of their assets. Since the economic crisis began, there have been fresh tax increases for high-earners in the Netherlands, France, Ireland, Italy, Belgium and several other countries.

Analysts say the action marks the first time since before the Reagan-Thatcher era of the 1980s -- when trickle-down economics led to decades of lower tax rates on the wealthy -- that the world's moneyed have faced this level of pressure from such a wide array of governments. It happens as cash-strapped governments -- even as the global economy begins to recover -- are scrambling for scarce sources of revenue to fund expensive stimulus packages, combat the recession and expand services to the less fortunate.

There has been "an absolutely direct correlation between taxes and the financial crisis," said Jon Terry, head of reward practices at Pricewaterhouse Coopers in London. "If there was no financial crisis, I would have been surprised if taxes would have increased at all for high-earners."

Given the gap between the rich and poor that widened globally during the excess of recent years, many see the wealthy as the fairest, most likely source for funds in hard times. In the case of tax cheats, the campaign to root them out, many argue, is long overdue.

But for some, it is beginning to feel like governments are piling on when it comes to the rich -- who, through lost real estate and stock values, have already shed untold billions.

The secret lives of male alcoholics

The numbers are troubling: An estimated 17.6 million adults in the USA are either alcoholics or have alcohol problems, according to the National Institutes of Health. By some estimates, one-third of alcoholics are women.

Yet if you were to ask a woman's friends and family if she has a drinking problem, they might very well say no.

When Paula Tokar, 26, told her friends she was getting sober and wouldn't be partying with them anymore, "They said, 'You seemed fine to us,' " says Tokar, now two years sober and living in Marshfield, Mass. That's because she'd worked hard not to hide her alcohol abuse. "I was doing the things many women do, hiding drinks around the house, hiding vodka behind the frozen veggie burgers."

Good mothers don't drink, and everyone says Schuler was a good mom, so she couldn't possibly have been an alcoholic. That's how the thinking goes, says Eleanor Schoenberger, 40. "Especially when it comes to mothers, there's such a strong inclination to believe 'she just wouldn't do anything like that,' " says Schoenberger, of Hanover, Mass. She writes a blog about being a mom in recovery and making jewelry at One Crafty Mother.

Schoenberger wonders if the national conversation would be the same if Schuler's husband, Daniel, had been behind the wheel when the accident happened. "The question would be, 'Where was the mother?' " she says. "A father who drinks is just as responsible for the welfare of his children, but the stigma isn't there."

Schwarzer, whose friend went into treatment and no longer drinks, says she won't be afraid of speaking up again. "Is politeness worth some kid's life? You convince yourself that it's just not that bad, but when a child's life is at stake, none of us should ever be that polite."

Just adding on to Glenn's post, much opposition to the government actually doing anything decent for people comes from the idea that the government is going to take my tax money and give it to people who don't deserve it.

A new White House Council on Women and Girls is assessing every government agency to see if its programs do enough to benefit women. The first senior adviser on domestic violence and the first ambassador for women's issues around the globe are developing programs to prevent violence again women at home and abroad. First lady Michelle Obama is highlighting women's achievements, helping families and pushing girls to succeed.

Conservative women are unimpressed.

"Obama's policies reflect the views of hard-core abortion and feminist groups," says Wendy Wright, president of Concerned Women for America. "Considering the diversity of views among American women, it is insulting to assume that there is one 'women's view' and it is represented by liberal feminist activists. … Obama's choices reflect a stereotypical view of women who are abortion advocates who are dependent on government."

He kissed me again, conveying that need as his hands ravaged my body. My own hands slid along the smooth perfection of his bare skin, awakening my desire....

While it may not come as welcome news, some women have sex out of sympathy, with one admitting: "I slept with a couple of guys because I felt sorry for them."

But many have more selfish motives, with financial or material rewards a major factor.

In one survey of students, nearly one in 10 women admitted to "having sex for presents". Others said: "He bought me a nice dinner", "he spent a lot of money on me early on", "he showed me he had an extravagant lifestyle".

And rather than love or romance, for many women sex is just about fun.

Six in 10 university students said they slept with a male friend who was not their boyfriend. "Life is too damn short to be waiting four years to have sex again," one said.

One woman even admitted to having sex just so her husband would put the rubbish out.

A 12-year-old Yemeni child-bride died after struggling for three days in labor to give birth, a local human rights organization said Saturday. Fawziya Abdullah Youssef died of severe bleeding on Friday while giving birth to a stillborn in the al-Zahra district hospital of Hodeida province, 140 miles (223 kilometers) west of the capital San'a.

TO get to school, the child leaves home by herself, proudly walking down the boulevard in a suburb of a small city in upstate New York. The crossing guard helps her at the intersection. She lives only a block and a half from school. Yet she walks by older children waiting with parents for buses to the same school.

She is 7, a second-grader, and her mother, Katie, hears the raised-eyebrow remarks: " 'Are you sure you want to be doing this?' " Katie said friends ask.

" 'She's just so pretty. She's just so ... blond.' A friend said, 'I heard that Jaycee Dugard story and I thought of your daughter.' And they say, 'I'd never do that with my kid: I wouldn't trust my kid with the street,' " said Katie, a stay-at-home mother, who asked that her full identity be withheld to protect her children.

The fear of abduction by strangers "has become a norm within middle-class parental circles," said Paula S. Fass, a history professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of "Kidnapped: Child Abduction in America." "We try to control our fears to the nth degree, so we drop our children off right at school. It's a confirmation that 'I'm a good parent.' "

In 1969, 41 percent of children either walked or biked to school; by 2001, only 13 percent still did, according to data from the National Household Travel Survey. In many low-income neighborhoods, children have no choice but to walk. During the same period, children either being driven or driving themselves to school rose to 55 percent from 20 percent. Experts say the transition has not only contributed to the rise in pollution, traffic congestion and childhood obesity, but has also hampered children's ability to navigate the world.

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Critics say fears that children will be abducted by strangers are at a level unjustified by reality. About 115 children are kidnapped by strangers each year, according to federal statistics; 250,000 are injured in auto accidents.

Last spring, her son, 10, announced he wanted to walk to soccer practice rather than be driven, a distance of about a mile. Several people who saw the boy walking alone called 911. A police officer stopped him, drove him the rest of the way and then reprimanded Mrs. Pierce. According to local news reports, the officer told Mrs. Pierce that if anything untoward had happened to the boy, she could have been charged with child endangerment. Many felt the officer acted appropriately and that Mrs. Pierce had put her child at risk.

A California lawmaker who resigned after he was caught on tape bragging about his sexual exploits with two women, one of them reportedly a lobbyist, denied on Thursday that he was having extramarital affairs.

Mike Duvall stepped down from the California Assembly on Wednesday, one day after a videotape surfaced in which the married legislator is heard telling a colleague that he enjoys spanking one of the women -- who he boasts is 18 years younger and favors skimpy, "eye-patch" sized underwear.

"I want to make it clear that my decision to resign is in no way an admission that I had an affair or affairs," Duvall, a 54-year-old family-values Republican from Orange County, said in a statement posted on his website.

"My offense was engaging in inappropriate storytelling and I regret my language and choice of words. The resulting media coverage was proving to be an unneeded distraction to my colleagues and I resigned in the hope that my decision would allow them to return to the business of the state," he said.

Premier Silvio Berlusconi brushed off questions about any possible resignation over his sex scandal, saying Thursday that he has been Italy's best premier ever.

Berlusconi also said he was considering suing the woman at the center of the scandal. Patrizia D'Addario, a self-proclaimed prostitute, claims she tape-recorded Berlusconi during a night she says they spent together at the premier's home last year.

The left-leaning newsweekly L'Espresso obtained copies of the tapes, including one in which a man it identified as Berlusconi is heard telling D'Addario to wait for him on the big bed while he showers.

Berlusconi said Thursday he was considering taking legal action. He said he had been the "victim of an attack by a person who wanted to create a scandal" — an apparent reference to D'Addario.

Berlusconi repeated his insistence that he "didn't pay a lira, a euro, for a sexual favor" and never had.

He spoke at a news conference with Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero after an Italian-Spanish summit on Sardinia.

"I say this also because, for those who love to conquer, the joy and the most beautiful satisfaction is in the conquest," Berlusconi said, as an expressionless Zapatero looked on. "If you have to pay, I ask you, what joy is there?"

The scandal broke last spring, when the 72-year-old premier's wife, Veronica Lario, said she was divorcing him, citing his presence at the 18th birthday party of Naples model Noemi Letizia and his party's lineup of TV starlets as candidates for European Parliament elections.

Berlusconi said Thursday that three candidates who attended a course his party offered had all been well-educated, multilingual, sophisticated women who were doing a fine job representing Italy in Europe.

After Lario's accusations, several young women including D'Addario went public with stories that they were paid to attend parties at Berlusconi's homes by a Berlusconi acquaintance, Gianpaolo Tarantini.

Tarantini has apologized for creating a scandal for the premier. He says he reimbursed the women for travel and other expenses but that Berlusconi never knew about it.

The premier on Thursday confirmed that he had been at a few functions with Tarantini, but he stressed that the "beautiful women" Tarantini brought along were his own friends, not Berlusconi's.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, often the high court's swing vote, but a firm opponent of many campaign restrictions, at one point told the government's lawyer, "Corporations have lots of knowledge about environment, transportation issues, and you are silencing them during the election."

Fees on insurance companies, drug makers, medical device manufacturers and insurers. Tax of 35 percent on insurance plans costing above $8,000 for individuals and $21,000 for families, applied to premium amounts over the threshold. Cuts to Medicare and Medicaid. A fee on employers whose workers receive government subsidies to help them pay premiums. Fines on those who fail to get coverage, up to $950 for individuals, $3,800 for families.

BENEFITS PACKAGE: The government would set four benefit categories ranging from coverage of around 65 percent of medical costs to about 90 percent. No denial of coverage based on pre-existing conditions. All plans sold to individuals and small businesses would have to cover basic benefits, including primary care, hospitalization and prescription drugs.

A Sudanese woman who wore pants in public was fined the equivalent of $200 but spared a whipping Monday when a court found her guilty of violating Sudan's decency laws.

The woman, Lubna Hussein, an outspoken journalist who had recently worked for the United Nations, faced up to 40 lashes in the case, which has generated a swarm of interest both inside and outside Sudan.

Mrs. Hussein vowed to appeal the sentence and even marched into the court in Khartoum, Sudan's capital, wearing the same pair of loose-fitting green slacks that she was arrested in.

Manal Awad Khogali, one of her lawyers, said the judge hearing the case called only police witnesses to testify and refused to allow Mrs. Hussein — who has pledged to use her trial to bring attention to women's rights in Sudan — to defend herself.

It was the potential lashing, customarily carried out with a plastic whip that can leave permanent scars, that seemed to raise so many eyebrows. On Monday, diplomats from the British, French, Canadian, Swedish and Dutch Embassies showed up at the Khartoum courthouse, along with a throng of women protesters, many wearing pants. Witnesses said several bearded counterprotesters in traditional Islamic dress also arrived and yelled out "God is Great."

Riot police broke up the demonstration and carted away more than 40 women. Sudanese officials said they were released shortly later. Witnesses said the police beat up at least one woman.

A long time ago, I attended the funeral of a teenage boy who died the way Wade Edwards did, in a car that flipped badly and killed him quickly. I remember standing at the burial site, under a hot Los Angeles sun, a large crowd of us waiting for the parents to arrive. The cortege turned in through the gates, snaked up the winding road, and pulled up to where we were gathered. For a long time nothing happened, the car doors all stayed closed, and you realized—in a misery of embarrassed voyeurism that occluded even the sadness—that a drama was going on inside the car containing the mother, that getting her to stand out in the sunshine with us was going to involve someone persuading her to allow her son to be dead.

At last the car doors opened, and you felt you should look away, but that wasn't right either, and so you watched, and it was a bad thing. At first, the procession faltered forward. The family made it down to the graveside, and a rabbi spoke. The pine box was lowered into the ground and the time came for the boy's brother to spade the first shovel of dirt onto the coffin, and that's when things fell apart. I'd known the boy well—he had been a student at the school where I taught English—but I hadn't loved him. In fact, I had never loved anyone yet, because I was years away from having a child of my own, and until you've done that you're just guessing about love, gesturing toward it, assuming that it's the right name for a feeling you've had.

Things fell apart when they tried to spade in the earth, and there was screaming and titanic grief, and you were in the position of watching someone being forced—physically forced—to bear the unbearable. At last it was done, and the family stumbled back up the hill to the air-conditioned cars with the liveried drivers, and the mother collapsed into one car, and the door was shut solidly behind her, sealing her into her shadowed madness.

How Helen Gurley Brown inspired a generation of home-wreckers, and brought down John Edwards

I don't really agree with this Caitlin Flanagan piece on Helen Gurley Brown (it feels weirdly gender-nationalist to me) but I enjoyed it a lot.

Born in an Arkansas hollow in 1922, fatherless by 10, Brown was poor—dirt poor—from the get-go, and she was raised by women who tended to step off the road and pee when the urge hit them. Clearly, there is something Appalachian about the easy truck with bodily functions that became so important to Brown's mission and message. While the Mount Holyoke grads were meeting in embarrassed little encounter groups to discuss possibly putting a mirror down there, Brown was telling her readers to embrace all aspects of their body, including the various functions and products of the alimentary tract.

In another woman, one whose life journey began elsewhere, this might be described as a hard-won, anti-bourgeois earthiness, but Brown never was bourgeois. The central tension of her work, and what has made it such a success, is that her ideas, launched at women who desire to gain or maintain position in the middle-middle class, emanate from the sort of person who gives that group the deepest and most reflexive shudder of all: pee-on-the-side-of-the-road white trash.

“everybody is judging what I do by that. … I read today in the Washington Post, I think, that fans are calling [‘Dollhouse’] a feminist screed, and it’s not. It’s a work of fiction that I’m creating. If you use drama for didacticism, it’s not drama; it’s speech writing.”

There are two things that interest me, and they’re both power. ... One is not having it and one is abusing it. … In my life … I went through a period, for a long time, of having none; not realizing I had it and abusing it; to an understanding of that and wishing to be redeemed of that.

Besides selling a fantasy about how easily a semi-delinquent, unemployed father-to-be could be turned into Prince Charming, Palin also spent her campaign trying to give the impression that running for vice president and taking care of five children, the youngest a baby with special needs, was as easy as falling off a snowbank. Politicians who don't want the federal government to address child care issues like to imagine that's true. It absolves them from dealing with the question of who takes care of the kids when women make up almost half the work force.

As he enters what senior adviser David Axelrod calls the "eighth or ninth inning" of the debate, Obama is caught between liberals who want to revamp the insurance market with a government-funded "public option" and moderates who favor an incremental approach.

Both efforts have stumbled. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said the public option wasn't essential. Six senators seeking a compromise ran into trouble after one, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, urged his donors to defeat "Obama-care."

Don't you see that children are God's best gift?
the fruit of the womb his generous legacy?
Like a warrior's fistful of arrows
are the children of a vigorous youth.
Oh, how blessed are you parents,
with your quivers full of children!
Your enemies don't stand a chance against you;
you'll sweep them right off your doorstep.

Quiverfull parents try to have upwards of six children. They home-school their families, attend fundamentalist churches and follow biblical guidelines of male headship--"Father knows best"--and female submissiveness. They refuse any attempt to regulate pregnancy. Quiverfull began with the publication of Rick and Jan Hess's 1989 book, A Full Quiver: Family Planning and the Lordship of Christ, which argues that God, as the "Great Physician" and sole "Birth Controller," opens and closes the womb on a case-by-case basis. Women's attempts to control their own bodies--the Lord's temple--are a seizure of divine power.

Though there are no exact figures for the size of the movement, the number of families that identify as Quiverfull is likely in the thousands to low tens of thousands. Its word-of-mouth growth can be traced back to conservative Protestant critiques of contraception--adherents consider all birth control, even natural family planning (the rhythm method), to be the province of prostitutes--and the growing belief among evangelicals that the decision of mainstream Protestant churches in the 1950s to approve contraception for married couples led directly to the sexual revolution and then Roe v. Wade.

"Our bodies are meant to be a living sacrifice," write the Hesses. Or, as Mary Pride, in another of the movement's founding texts, The Way Home: Beyond Feminism, Back to Reality, puts it, "My body is not my own." This rebuttal of the feminist health text Our Bodies, Ourselves is deliberate. Quiverfull women are more than mothers. They're domestic warriors in the battle against what they see as forty years of destruction wrought by women's liberation: contraception, women's careers, abortion, divorce, homosexuality and child abuse, in that order.

God used a ladies' Christian email list to bring me to the conviction that God should be in control of our wombs.

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The excuses that I gave for not wanting more children were all selfish and unBiblical:

1. " I can't handle the ones I have...I'm so tired! " - I truly needed to cast my cares upon the Lord. I was so wrapped up in "poor me" that many times it caused me to take my eyes off of Him.

2. "We can't afford more children...."- God supplies for our needs. If I am truly trusting him and acknowledging that all we have comes from Him, then I should be confident that He will supply what is needed for each additional child that He places into our hands.

Small wonder that many Darwinian-minded observers of human mating customs have long contended that serial monogamy is really just a socially sanctioned version of harem-building. By this conventional evolutionary psychology script, the man who skips from one nubile spouse to another over time is, like the sultan who hoards the local maidenry in a single convenient location, simply seeking to "maximize his reproductive fitness," to sire as many children as possible with as many wives as possible. It is the preferred male strategy, especially for powerful men, right? Sequentially or synchronously, he-men consort polygynously.

Women, by contrast, are not thought to be natural serializers. Sure, a gal might date around when young, but once she starts a family, she is assumed to crave stability. After all, she can bear only so many children in her lifetime, and divorce raises her risk of poverty. Unless forced to because some bounder has abandoned her, why would any sane woman choose another trot down the aisle — for another Rachael Ray spatula set? Spare me extra candlesticks, I'm a one-trick monogamist.

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Yet in a report published in the summer issue of the journal Human Nature, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder of the University of California, Davis, presents compelling evidence that at least in some non-Western cultures where conditions are harsh and mothers must fight to keep their children alive, serial monogamy is by no means a man's game, finessed by him and foisted on her. To the contrary, Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder said, among the Pimbwe people of Tanzania, whose lives and loves she has been following for about 15 years, serial monogamy looks less like polygyny than like a strategic beast that some evolutionary psychologists dismiss as quasi-fantastical: polyandry, one woman making the most of multiple mates.

In her analysis, Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder found that although Pimbwe men were somewhat more likely than their female counterparts to marry multiple times, women held their own and even outshone men in the upper Zsa Zsa Gabor end of the scale, of five consecutive spouses and counting. And when Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder looked at who extracted the greatest reproductive payoff from serial monogamy, as measured by who had the most children survive past the first five hazardous years of life, she found a small but significant advantage female. Women who worked their way through more than two husbands had, on average, higher reproductive success, a greater number of surviving children, than either the more sedately mating women, or than men regardless of wifetime total.

He argued for covenant marriage, a legally distinct type of marriage intended to make it more difficult to obtain a divorce. He advocated character education programs in public schools to teach "traditional Judeo-Christian values" and other principles that he thought many youths were not learning in their homes. He called for less government encroachment on parental authority, for example, redefining child abuse to "exclude parental spanking." He lamented the "purging of religious influence" from public schools. And he criticized federal tax credits for child care expenditures because they encouraged women to enter the workforce.

"Further expenditures would be used to subsidize a dynamic new trend of working women and feminists that is ultimately detrimental to the family by entrenching status-quo of nonparental primary nurture of children," he wrote.

He went on to say feminism is among the "real enemies of the traditional family."

McDonnell said in his statement that he is "fully supportive of the tremendous contributions women make in the workplace. My wife and daughters work. My campaign manager in 2005 was a working mother. I appointed 5 women to my senior staff as Attorney General."

No vacationer plans on getting sick, but many do fall ill, and seriously. All too often they land at hospitals that are anything but temples of healing.

In the popular sitcom Royal Pains, ritzy folks in the Hamptons hire a concierge doctor to tend their ills rather than an inept local hospital.

In reality, it's no comedy. A USA TODAY analysis finds two dozen hospitals near popular travel destinations, as compiled by the National Travel Monitor, have death rates among the worst in the USA. A separate analysis shows that one of every four hospitals with high death rates for heart attack, heart failure or pneumonia — 94 of 402 — are near state parks.