The self-proclaimed defender against the "War on Women" could not possibly believe in such an irrational policy on the merits, the story went. But last month, the Obama DOJ announced that it would appeal the judge's ruling in order to win permission to impose a 15-year-old age limit on who can purchase Plan B over-the-counter, making clear that they do indeed believe in the policy.
Imposing an arbitrary age limit on who can freely purchase Plan B makes absolutely no sense. Supporters of the Obama policy try to distort the debate into one about whether young adolescent girls should be encouraged to have sex, but Plan B is used only by people who have already had sex, and it's used to prevent unwanted pregnancy. The mentality that leads to restrictions on its being freely accessed is the same one that demanded that clean needles, contraceptives and other vital health products not be made available: that they "encourage" behavior that is deemed "bad."
The reality is that denying access to these products does nothing more than damages people's health and enable proliferation of bad health outcomes. That's why the FDA, based on studies that Plan B has almost no side effects, recommended that it be made available for everyone on an over-the-counter basis.
Yesterday, the Obama DOJ sought to defend its new age limitation to the federal judge, and Salon's Irin Carmon reported on some of what the judge said. In particular, he blasted the Obama DOJ for copying the policy and mindset of the Bush administration, for playing political games with health and science, for bad faith and dishonest legal arguments, for pretending to unveil a new policy favored by women's groups just two days before announcing the appeal, and then asking: "You're disadvantaging young people, African-Americans, the poor... that's the policy of the Obama administration?" It's remarkable how similar the patterns are from this administration over and over in all sorts of seemingly disparate issues.
(6) At the White House Correspondents' Dinner two weeks, ago, President Obama, referencing the trend of political officials becoming media pundits, said this:
"Some of my former advisers have switched over to the dark side. For example, David Axelrod now works for MSNBC, which is a nice change of pace since MSNBC used to work for David Axelrod."
(7) This Friday night, I'll be on Bill Maher's "Real Time" show on HBO. Yesterday, along with Michael Hastings and David Sirota, I spent an hour on Cenk Uygur's "The Young Turks" show discussing a variety of interesting issues. One short segment can be seen here, while others can be seen here, here, here. Here's a video of one of those segments from below:
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
3
2
2
