Newsweek has an article out debunking much of the health advice shilled by celebrities on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Most famously, Jenny McCarthy has been on Oprah several times claiming that vaccines caused her son's autism (the vaccine/autism link has been scientifically disproven). But, more entertaining is the anti-aging regime that Suzanne Somers promoted in January:

Each morning, the 62-year-old actress and self-help author rubs a potent estrogen cream into the skin on her arm. She smears progesterone on her other arm two weeks a month. And once a day, she uses a syringe to inject estrogen directly into her vagina ... Next come the pills. She swallows 60 vitamins and other preparations every day. 'I take about 40 supplements in the morning,' she told Oprah, "and then, before I go to bed, I try to remember ... to start taking the last 20.' She didn't go into it on the show, but in her books she says that she also starts each day by giving herself injections of human growth hormone, vitamin B12 and vitamin B complex. In addition, she wears 'nanotechnology patches' to help her sleep, lose weight and promote 'overall detoxification.'

The authors of the Newsweek article argue that by allowing Suzanne Somers on her show to spout off about "nanotechnology patches" unchallenged by medical professionals, Oprah is tacitly condoning Somers' wackadoo advice. Though Oprah is arguably the most powerful woman in America, I find it hard to believe that more than one or two of her millions of audience members would run out and buy syringes to start injecting their hoo-has with estrogen just because someone on the Oprah show recommended it.

Tags: health, Mehmet Oz, Oprah, Suzanne Somers, TV

A friend recalls her visit to Dr. George Tiller's clinic. You can read another memory of Dr. Tiller here:

It was horrible. We were driving onto the grounds and the protesters were there with their ugly pictures yelling at us. Just yelling. Then we got inside and it was calm, very professional. Those people are miracle workers, every last one of them, from the littlest nurse to the admin guys. They had to know their lives were in danger, and there was security everywhere, but they just wanted to reassure us.

The baby had contracted a virus and you could see on the MRI that its organs were all messed up. It looked like there were bubbles in them, instead of solid masses like they were supposed to be. Then they figured out that the baby had been exposed to Fifth disease. All sorts of researchers contacted us, because they wanted to study it.

That was at about 20 weeks. I got a blood transfusion and I thought everything was cool. We went on vacation. But then we came back, and the doctor realized everything wasn't cool. His brain had a hemorrhage. The MRI reminded me of my other son's. He's autistic, and when he was three he'd had an MRI that also showed abnormalities. At a minimum, they said the baby would have developmental delays. But the doctor also used the words: "This child could not make it into childhood." I was six months along then, and I was already showing. But we couldn't handle having another special needs kid. Psychically, we just couldn't handle it.

It was definitely not a threat to my life. My doctor sort of indicated that there were other options but he didn't give us any contact info. He basically said we had to go to Wichita, Kan., and we'd be in good hands. It was an unusual environment. There were about 10 of us, with our husbands. We stayed in a hotel with all-night security. They were parents from all over the country, and racially mixed. Some of them definitely could have been Republicans, and Christians. Some wanted to give the fetus a name, and bury it, but I didn't want that. Most of them had babies with Down's Syndrome. They wanted us to go through this together, and in therapy sessions they let us talk about it.

After they injected us with something to kill the fetus, they used some kind of seaweed stick, to make the process more organic, so the body would naturally start to abort the fetus. The whole thing took two or three days. We were all pulling for each other.

There were elections going on at the time, and in my hotel room I remember seeing Sam Brownback, a senator from Kansas, on T.V. giving some big speech, and he kept saying this is a message for Americans and for the "unborn children." And I thought, "this is just horrible." This is a very difficult decision, a very personal decision, and it shouldn't be up for debate in this kind of forum. It seemed totally inappropriate.

I cry all the time, and that will be for the rest of my life. Because I really, really wanted that baby. It's so sad, that no matter what was wrong with it, it was trying to grow, that my body was still trying to make that body grow. It could even have looked like a perfect baby—it probably did look like a perfect baby. So it's just weird and sad that nature is trying to do this thing, and everything is working against it.

You can read other tales from inside Tiller's clinic here and here.

Tags: George Tiller, murder, third trimester abortion

The murder of Dr. George Tiller in his church this Sunday sent a special chill down my spine; not the kind one gets when someone young, or important, or defenseless is gunned down in cold blood, but the kind one gets when domestic terror strikes. I don't mean to be too alarmist about the first killing of an abortion provider since 1998. Of course, any such assassination is illegal and wrong. But the lawlessness and vigilantism of this particular murder—or, as the anti-abortion zealout who allegedly shot him might put it, judgment—is very worrisome. Is total anarchy just around the corner?

Michelle Goldberg finds a reason to be worried. At The Daily Beast, she narrates how a strengthening pro-choice, pro-gay, pro-progress consensus (otherwise known as a Democratic president) has left anti-abortion and religious groups embittered at the loss of political power. Goldberg flags the infamous Department of Homeland Security report on right-wing fringe groups, and speaks with a hate crimes specialist who sees the far right becoming, as it had been under the last Democratic administration, "restless, apocalyptic, and ready for action."

Earlier this spring, conservatives went into paroxysms of outrage after a leaked report from the Department of Homeland Security warned of the possibility of right-wing violence. “Paralleling the current national climate, rightwing extremists during the 1990s exploited a variety of social issues and political themes to increase group visibility and recruit new members,” the report said. “Prominent among these themes were the militia movement’s opposition to gun control efforts, criticism of free trade agreements (particularly those with Mexico), and highlighting perceived government infringement on civil liberties as well as white supremacists’ longstanding exploitation of social issues such as abortion, inter-racial crimes, and same-sex marriage.”

Tiller's slaughter may thus be seen as the result of growing radicalism combined with growing political impotence. Goldberg continues:

That’s especially true with regard to abortion. “They see the mainstream anti-abortion leadership as being traitorous or emasculated at best,” Levin says of the radical anti-abortion movement. After all, Rick Warren gave the invocation at Obama’s inauguration. Notre Dame gave him an honorary degree and invited him to speak at commencement. A recent Gallup poll showed that, for the first time ever, more Americans identify as “pro-life” than “pro-choice,” but the anti-abortion movement still can’t find momentum. “They feel like their leadership is not carrying the ball on this and has basically become patsies or traitors,” says Levin.

Jonathan Chait thinks he's found "a unified theory of Obama"—which is that, while negotiating touchy issues both foreign and domestic, Obama likes to assume good faith, and thereby alienate individuals who are obviously pissing in the legislative or diplomatic soup. This may be true (Mark Schmitt has written persuasively on this subject as well); but warring over reproductive rights is something different entirely. If true villians exist, they create a moral space in which they must be stopped. And anti-abortion activists, including prominent hit men like Bill O'Reilly, had made Tiller, who performed therapeutic late term abortions and saved many women's lives, a villain.

We saw the seeds of this entropic, extralegal movement in the Republican men and women who yelled "terrorist!" at then-candidate Obama during campaign rallies. So while Obama has tried conciliation (the Notre Dame speech is a great example), the "common ground" he seeks may not exist—Tiller was the latest victim of this Manichean world view. What's worse, the search for common ground, however clever and symbol-laden, may actually encourage murder.

So, I'm sad to say, domestic terror is back.

UPDATE: Adam Serwer at TAPPED offers a working defintion of terrorism. Ann Friedman lays out Obama's policy options.

Tags: abortion, Bill O'Reilly, George Tiller, Notre Dame, Obama, Terrorism

Dana, on your recommendation, I saw the scream-filled, sharply funny Drag Me to Hell this weekend, and I didn't think the protagonist was punished for being a striving woman. I thought she was punished for trying to raise up from her humble farm girl origins. (Spoilers ahead!)

As you said earlier, the heroine is Christine Brown (Alison Lohman), a lithe blonde with an exceptionally innocent face. She is a former fat farm girl with an alcoholic mother and a dead father, who is trying as hard as she can to distance herself from her upbringing by getting promoted at the bank and dating a wealthy, upper-class boyfriend, Clay (Justin Long). She is cursed by Mrs. Ganush, an ancient, decrepit gypsy who becomes infuriated when Christine will not extend the bank loan on her home.

While one could read the movie as punishing Christine "for choosing to prioritize her job over human relationships (i.e., for not being 'nice' to the old woman)," as you astutely noticed, Dana, another reading could be that Christine is damned to hell because she doesn't know her socio-economic place in the world. She barely speaks to her mother; she used to be fat and is clearly upset by her former physical imperfections; she wants to be more educated and is very ambitious. For these transgressions, her soul is eventually eaten by demons. Mrs. Ganush is a poverty stricken crone with a creepy yellow jalopy. When she tries to save her house from foreclosure, and resorts to begging, she is rebuffed by Christine, and dies shortly after cursing the heroine to hell.

The one wealthy character, Christine's boyfriend Clay, is unscathed by the curse (well, except for his girlfriend getting damned to hell and all). In fact, it's his money that even gives Christine a chance to beat the devil—he gives her $10,000 to pay a medium who has the potential to banish the demon forever. At the end of the movie, he and Christine are en route to his family's cabin in Santa Barbara, when she realizes she made a fatal mistake and demons suck her down to Hades. The last image of the film is Clay standing on the platform of the train station, with tears in his eyes. But, the Santa Barbara cabin is still intact, as is his soul.

Tags: Alison Lohman, class, Drag Me To Hell, horror movies, Lorna Raver, poverty, Sam Raimi

As Nina pointed out last week, and the Times pointed out over the weekend, Disney's The Princess and The Frog, its first animated feature to star a black heroine, Tiana, is already controversial, and it doesn't come out until December. Watching the trailer for it on the big screen over the weekend (it's playing before Pixar's totally awesome Up!) got me thinking about another potential source of contention: Tiana's voice.

There are currently eight Disney Princesses (Tiana will be the ninth), and whatever the other princesses' ethnicity—five are white, and Jasmine, Mulan, and Pocahontas are Persian, Chinese and Native American respectively—they all speak in clearly enunciated, accentless, standard American English. Tiana does not. She has a Southern-Cajun drawl, which, in Disney's defense, is probably what a girl born and raised in New Orleans, as Tiana supposedly has been, would sound like. That said, what constitutes a "black voice" versus a "white voice"—not to mention the stereotypes attached to Southern accents in particular—is hugely fraught: It's not just a meaningless character quirk that the black princess is the only princess who sounds different from all the rest. It can't be.

It's vaguely plausible to me that Disney didn't think about this, that giving their first black princess a Southern accent signifies something more than just geographical accuracy. After all, this is the company that had to scrap the initial version of the film because they didn't realize that having their first African American princess be a maid named Maddy was boneheaded to the point of ignorance. Perhaps they only intended Tiana's voice to be "sweet" and "different"—and maybe to some viewers that's all it will be. Maybe if Tiana had sounded like the other princesses, some viewers would have been incensed that Disney had chosen to white-wash her. Am I making too much of this?

It seems to me that when it comes to the princesses, there's good in difference—every little girl, of every race, deserves to feel represented—and also good in sameness. Whatever the various princesses' races or cultural backgrounds (and certainly, Disney could have more variety in this regard), they're all similar: resourceful, plucky, kind-hearted, and Kewpie eyed, with some adorable animal friends, a habit of bursting into song, and luck with the princes. The more different kinds of princesses that there are available, the more similar little girls' experiences of the princesses become. Every little kid who has a princess that she feels connected to, represented by, akin to will know what it feels like to want to be a princess, dress like a princess, and beg her parents to buy all the tons and tons of schlocky merchandise branded with a princess' face. Belle and Pocahontas are different, and may appeal to different children, but adoring Belle or adoring Pocahontas probably feels pretty much the same. So, to bring it back to Tiana, does her voice add to the good difference, subtract from the good sameness, or change nothing at all?

Tags: Disney, Disney Princess, Princess Tiana, the princess and the frog