Sometimes I can really see why Chris Matthews insists that there's something robotic about Michele Bachmann.  She does resemble nothing more than a computer program written for the sole purpose of pressing right wing populist buttons. Christine O'Donnell should really take some notes.

Take this post from Alex Pareene at Salon's War Room about one of Bachmann's favorite stump stories.  A computer programmed to hit every note on the right wing nut resentment scale could hardly do a better job.  Bachmann claims she was a liberal until she read Gore Vidal's Burr, and suddenly switched over to a fire-breathing, tax-hating, science-denying Bible thumper, all because she found Vidal kind of snotty. Sure, it doesn't make sense in logical terms, but it's exactly the sort of myth that pumps the base up because she punches no less than ten right wing resentment buttons in that short little tale.

It's not just that Vidal is a gay (1) liberal (2) intellectual (3) with a wry sense of humor (4) who writes dauntingly thick novels (5) with pretentious titles (6) that require a lot of research (7), thus making him the perfect target for a Two Minute Hate. It's also that this story really hits that sweet spot between right wing populist envy and loathing of the "liberal elite" they obsess over.  (The best book I've ever read on the development of this envy-hatred-obsession loop is Nixonland by Rick Perlstein.)  This push-pull between envy and loathing produces the "ustabe" narrative, wherein said right wing nut can say, "I want to be an open-minded, thoughtful liberal type who wears well-fitted suits, but my moral fiber is too great for that."

The theme of this story is that Bachmann totally had the option to be the kind of person who reads morally complex novels, but her conscience wouldn't allow it (8).  And also that she totally had the option to be one of those liberals who thinks of the Founding Fathers as historical people who didn't always agree with each other, but her Real Americaness forced her to believe the Founding Fathers are demigods that exist so that your prejudices and ideology can be projected on them (9). Thus, her audience indulges the fantasy that conservatism isn't the result of knee-jerk authoritarianism, but something that you come to after actually entertaining the other side's arguments (10). Of course, I no more believe that as many conservatives used to be liberals than I believe that all the evangelicals that claim to have a past of Satan-worshipping actually did so.

After all, Bachmann's story of her supposed conversion changes depending on what flavor of right wing nut she's talking to.  If her audience is more evangelical than Ted Kennedy-obsessive, then her story is that Jimmy Carter broke her heart by being pro-choice. But when she's talking to the much-older Tea Party audiences, then she's going to reference someone they mostly know because he used to make William Buckley look like a fool (11).

Tags: gore vidal, jimmy carter, Michele Bachmann

Can we flash back, for a minute, to the question of school dress codes? Once upon a time in another era, protesting youth decried the infringement on their right to be free to be you and me. Conservative stodgy types defended bans on long-haired boys and pants on girls. "Students learn better in a controlled environment," they declared. "Some limits are good." But blue jeans prevailed. An older generation still decries a too-casual, laid-back world.

Somehow, the question of how to help kids in their struggle with the temptations that lead to obesity appears to have taken place in a parallel universe. How did liberal Democrats become the standard-bearers for what's at heart a conservative position? Conservative: disposed to restore traditional conditions (like family meals and dessert as a rare treat). Traditional in style or manner; avoiding novelty or showiness (like 1st Degree Burn Blazin' Jalepeno Doritos). Cautiously moderate (in eating habits). Having a tendency to conserve (the resources it takes to produce and ship said Doritos). Seriously, is there anything more conservative, thrifty, Republican than a hearty oatmeal breakfast? I'm not surprised that many Republicans are struggling with Sarah Palin's attacks on Michelle Obama's anti-obesity initiative. How poorly we should allow our nation's children to eat may indeed be a political issue. But it's not one that splits easily on party lines.

Dress codes turned out to be less black and white than that initial liberal/conservative divide suggested, too. A few years on, that controlled environment thing started to look like a pretty good (research-supported) idea. Most schools landed on some kind of happy medium: blue jeans, yes. Exposed navels, no. How kids eat when they're at school may need both liberals and conservatives to figure out a similar balancing act.

Like many commenters, I wholeheartedly agreed when Rachael howled in outraged protest at the prospect of St. Paul, MN schools banning all sugary, fatty, salty foods from the premises, lunch boxes included. But a little research left me wondering if my gut reaction was as short-sighted as Palin's attacks on Michelle Obama's efforts to help more kids make the kinds of good choices Palin's parents helped her make as an (active, healthy-eating) child. Few of us were even willing to listen to Anne, whose kids actually went to a sweet-free school in Warsaw. It worked, she said. They ate healthier, learned plenty, and ate what she wanted to feed them at home.  Anne's pragmatism didn't convince me, either. I was searching for evidence that the ACLU was moving in on St. Paul when I found, in (red state) Georgia, a school that's been sugar-free for more than a decade.

Brown Mills Elementary School in Lithonia, GA is sugar-free, and that doesn't mean they've replaced it all with variations on Splenda. It means school lunches  of tuna on wheat with peaches for dessert (not canned in syrup). It means corn kernels and broccoli, and breakfasts of omelets and sausage. It means no birthday cupcakes or bake sales, and no lunches of chicken nuggets, or, as my kids' old school offered as a regular entree, cinnamon buns. It also means fewer disciplinary incidents, counseling referrals and truancy rates. Anecdotal evidence (there's not enough data for a definitive result) suggests BMIs and weights are down, too. The only thing that's up? Test scores.

What if we took a deep breath, set aside our raised hackles about people trying to tell us how to raise our children and our sense that this is all part and parcel of banning Happy Meal toys and sucking away our nation's collective willpower, and imagined a sweet-free school? Imagine sending your kids off to school for their seven-hour day and knowing that they'd actually only had access to reasonably healthy, balanced food there. Rachael proposed that kids who were waiting to eat when they got home because they didn't like what was on offer at school would behave poorly and learn less, but the Georgia example suggests that may not be the case, and it may be worth a try. Maybe, as with dress codes, some limitations on personal freedoms can be good in some environments. Maybe that sweet-free school zone is less an intrusion on our parental prerogatives, and more a part of Michelle Obama's nudges towards healthy living. Most of us would agree that dessert is not a right. Possibly Doritos in your lunch box aren't a right, either.

As for a life without school bake sales and mandatory birthday treats for 24 kid classrooms? I am not a "liberal do-gooder."  I continue to think McDonald's has a right (and maybe even a fiduciary duty to its stockholders) to offer whatever incentives it wants to get customers in the door. But spending the night before my kids' birthdays reading them bedtime stories instead of juggling cupcake pans? I think I can imagine that.

Tags: Michelle Obama, Sarah Palin, St. Paul school district, sugar-free school, sweet-free school zone

I have never been a big fan of Virginia's Standards of Learning tests, our state's answer to the standardized testing requirements imposed on public schools by the federal No Child Left Behind law. Doubtless, there are virtues to a program that aims to measure school performance by making sure students master a concrete set of facts and methods. But from a parental perspective it's sometimes been hard to see what those virtues are. Instead, what I see are teachers obliged to teach to the annual tests, and my kids getting super-stressed every springtime, despite parental reassurances that these tests are meant to test their teachers, not them. The idea that the tests are actually in their interest seems to them, as they sharpen their No. 2 pencils, a bit far-fetched and hard to swallow.

Given all this, it's depressing to read that one unforeseen consequence of the "standards" movement has been error-riddled textbooks. According to a story in the Washington Post, Virginia's adoption of the SOL curriculum meant that schools had to acquire textbooks that contained the material the tests would cover. There was of course not enough money to do the job right, because there never is. Smaller publishing houses could fill the void, producing textbooks that were both compliant with the tests, and relatively cheap. A number of Virginia's history textbooks are produced by Five Ponds Press, which seems to have assigned the bulk of the writing to a single author, Joy Masoff, who is not a trained historian, and whose oeuvre also includes "Oh, Yuck! The Encyclopedia of Everything Nasty." Back in October, Five Ponds made headlines when it emerged that a Virginia history textbook included the discredited assertion that thousands of African Americans fought for the Confederacy. This eye-opening revelation led to a review of that and other textbooks by actual historians, who were appalled by the number of errors they found. One historian, Mary Miley Theobald, read "Our America: To 1865," and found it "too shocking for words."

The irony here is glaring. The national "standards" movement, of which Virginia's SOLs are a reflection, owes an intellectual debt to the work of scholars like the University of Virginia's influential E.D. Hirsch, Jr., who in the 1980s and 1990s called attention to a dearth of shared knowledge, a lack of a common intellectual well that all students could draw from. He argued that civil society (and social equality) depends on a citizenry educated in certain crucial facts--cultural literacy is the term Hirsch used. Those of us who were alive during the culture wars will recall that these arguments were seen by some as well-intentioned and correct; by others as reactionary nostalgia for the days of a single canon, which had been exploded by the inclusion of women and minority authors, one reason the reading experience had become more individualized and fragmentary.

How extraordinary, though, that a movement to instill facts and common knowledge has led to what appears to be the abandonment of other standards one associates with the good old days--things like fact checkers, copy editors, eagle-eyed review boards that work in advance. The president has proposed overhauling No Child Left Behind, to see if there might be a better way of measuring school performance. Virginia seems like a good place to conduct a review. It would be interesting--and seems important--to know whether the same problems exist in other states; whether corners have been cut in the interest of churning out textbooks to go with the tests. How ironic it would be if, in the interests of giving America's schoolchildren a shared core of knowledge, what we are really giving them is a shared set of errors and misconceptions.

Tags: Five Ponds Press, no child left behind, Standards of Learning, Virginia history textbooks

I wasn’t surprised to read in the Annals of Internal Medicine recently that elderly men are thinking about sex. The study in question, which was conducted in Australia, found that one-third of men over 75 were sexually active, and almost half remained interested in sex. The reason I’m not surprised? It’s not that, as a primary care physician, I dutifully ask my older patients about sex (though I should).

No, it’s the men who ask me, and the reason, quite simply, is drugs. When a male patient of a certain age starts to mumble and stare at the floor, I know that a request for Viagra is imminent. Discussion of other medications also may help break the ice. Take trazodone, a sleeping pill with a rare but serious potential side effect: priapism, an erection that lasts for hours. (Many wrinkled eyes widen with interest as I start to warn them about this, though priapism is a medical emergency, and can be painful.)

With my elderly women patients, it’s different. There’s no Viagra equivalent, priapism is a non-issue, and I’ll be honest: Like many doctors, I have a bad habit of assuming that they’re not having sex. This isn’t true. According to a 2007 study in the New England Journal of Medicine, 17 percent of women between 75 and 85 reported sexual activity in the preceding year, and of them, more than half had sex at least two or three times per month. In other words, although older women do it less often than older men, they still do it. But why don’t they do it even more—why do older men want (and have) sex more frequently than older women?

Depression plays a role. Elderly women are more likely to be depressed than elderly men, and lack of interest in sex is a common symptom. Yet another problem is that doctors aren’t exactly bursting forth with remedies for the older woman. It makes sense for elderly men to discuss erectile dysfunction with their doctors; we have treatments to offer them, from the notorious blue pill to vacuum devices to penile implants. There’s no equivalent quick fix for women. For problems such as vaginal dryness, lubricants may help a little, but the best treatment, estrogen, has risks. For other problems, such as lack of interest, inability to climax, and pain, we can refer older women to specialists, but progress tends to be slow and treatment can be costly. This paucity of options is another reason we don’t bring up sex enough with elderly women. (Our failure is particularly inexcusable given that some of the medications we prescribe, including beta blockers and antidepressants, can be part of the problem.)

Finally, there’s the gender ratio: Since women live longer, more elderly women than men lack partners. The man shortage may be worst in assisted living facilities, where gender ratios are notoriously skewed, and competition for eligible men can be fierce. Also, elderly women don’t tend to poach from other age brackets the way elderly men sometimes do, and this, too, limits their sexual opportunities. Where, after all, is the 84-year-old woman’s answer to Hugh Hefner?

Tags: elderly men; elderly women; sex; Viagra; estrogen

File under "Least Surprising Post-Election News": Christine O'Donnell is under federal investigation for misuse of campaign funds.  The accusation that O'Donnell mainly runs for office to avoid having to hold a real job that makes real money is hardly a new one.  During the primary against Mike Castle, O'Donnell's campaign manager for a 2008 bid for Senate recorded robocalls accusing O'Donnell of living off campaign donations. That the same accusation is being floated now should be no surprise.

And file under "Second Least Surprising Post-Election News": O'Donnell is responding to the investigation by fronting like there's a conspiracy to take her down because she's such a powerful and threatening figure. Since she's publicly denied practicing witchcraft, I have to wonder where all this might come from.  Perhaps she feeds off laughter aimed in her direction, and one day when she's absorbed enough power from the pointing and laughing, she'll erupt, female-action-hero-style, into an ass-kicking machine that will permanently remake the state of Delaware into a conservative paradise where everyone's too busy praying and making money off capitalist enterprises to find time for more carnal pleasures.

It's hard not to feel sorry for O'Donnell, though.  You can see why she picked "right-wing charlatan" as a career path, since it seems like the easiest way on the planet to be swimming in millions in no time.  Just weep over a couple of broken hymens, denounce poor people for needing help, and get your hair done regularly, and soon you'll be cashing multi-million-dollar book advance checks, right?  If Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and Mike Huckabee can do it, it should be easy.  And yet O'Donnell can't even get it together to do this.  Her lies are just a tad too silly, and her grin is needy even beyond the attention-whore displays of her competitors.  But what other options does she have?

Photograph of Christine O'Donnell by Jessica Kourkounis/Getty Images.

Tags: christine o'donnell, justice department, right wing charlatans

Engaged and pregnant. Pregnant and engaged. No matter the order of the adjectives, Natalie Portman delivered the pitch perfect tabloid package this week when she announced—on a Monday, right before the weekly magazines closed, thereby guaranteeing prime coverage during a slow news week – that she is both engaged to her Black Swan choreographer and costar Benjamin Millepied and expecting his child.

But could one bombshell have dropped without the other? Engaged – of course. (This holiday season has seen a rash of celebrity engagements, most recently that of Reese Witherspoon and Jim Toth.) But pregnant? Not for Portman, who was just 14 when many of us first saw her in Beautiful Girls, and who has been carefully burnishing her image as one of Hollywood’s good girls ever since.

Hollywood may not be a place that adheres to the doctrine of first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the Bugaboo, but consumers of celebrity (the ones who buy the movie tickets) still like their happy endings old-school.

There are exceptions: Eva Longoria can appear on the cover of In Touch magazine under the headline: "A Baby on My Own.”  But Eva (who is not yet pregnant), like Sandra Bullock before her (who adopted a son), can have that baby on her own because she was scorned by a bad man this year.

Likewise, women like Nicole Richie and Kourtney Kardashian can have baby daddies instead of husbands because they're reformed bad girls – the fact that they’ve settled down at all, even without rings, earns them public approval.

Not Natalie. Portman, now 29, has spent more than half her life cultivating her image. To break that stereotype during this pivotal moment in her race for a best actress Academy Award just wouldn't be prudent. The script says that good girls, when they find themselves pregnant, marry the baby’s father. Or at least they seriously consider it.

Yes, marriage appears to be on the decline across much of America. But people still idealize marrying, even if they’re not doing it themselves.

“In this country there are a lot of people who still frown on people having babies out of wedlock, or living together rather than being married,” says Kathy Campbell, executive editor of celebrity baby Web site Hollybaby. Even if they don’t shun a single woman who has a child out of wedlock, Campbell says, “most Americans want the neat little package: marriage and a baby.”

And then there are the Oscars to consider.  The academy seems to like a married (or soon-to-be-married) pregnant lady – think Catherine Zeta-Jones grasping her best supporting actress statue in 2003, crying, “My hormones are way too out of control to be dealing with this!” Or Rachel Weisz, who in 2006 – while engaged to director Darren Aronofsky and sporting a baby bump – won a little gold man for best supporting actress in The Constant Gardener.

As StyleList celebrity editor Ben Widdicombe told me: “Getting engaged was definitely required of [Portman] in this situation. Awards season is a political campaign and happy families win votes.”

Tags: Natalie Portman; pregnancy; marriage; Academy Awards; Eva Longoria; Sandra Bullock

Two years ago when I was working at Jezebel, I wrote a post about a woman who started a blog called What to Expect When You're Aborting, where she wrote about ending her pregnancy in great detail. At the time, she said she started the Tumblr because, "When I found out i was knocked up I obviously googled 'abortion blog'. The shit that came up was absolutely awful and distasteful propaganda. I thought the next time some one googled it this might show up." I thought that was a fairly noble reason to talk about her true experience—and my hope is that when girls google abortion information today, they come upon the MTV special that aired last night: No Easy Decision.

Salon's Lynn Harris has a great post about what's so excellent about this one-off show, which you should read here. But she laments the fact that the show was "buried" without publicity, and that MTV has no plans to reair it as of now. I contacted MTV's P.R. department—they don't have numbers yet on how many people watched last night's episode. I would contend, though, that young women today get their info primarily online, and it doesn't matter whether or not they watched the show when it aired. Take Markai, the featured teen in No Easy Decision (she was also on MTV's 16 and Pregnant this season). She becomes pregnant again because she doesn't properly understand how her Depo Provera shot works—she doesn't realize that if she misses an appointment the hormones are no longer in her system. In a discussion with Dr. Drew, Markai says that she is angry with herself, beause she should have known about the Depo, "I should have looked my birth control up on the internet."

MTV has done a great service making this show available online, and Markai is so brave to share her story (USA Today notes that Markai is taking a lot of heat already on her Facebook page). In connection with the show, the nonprofit organization Exhale has started a Web site called 16 & Loved to let women who have had abortions know that they are not alone. Extended clip from No Easy Decision is below.

Tags: 16 and pregnant, MTV, no easy decision

Close on the heels of the news that Bristol Palin has purchased a house in Maricopa, Ariz., via Jezebel comes the speculation that perhaps she'll be joined by other members of her family, including mother Sarah. Maybe the materfamilias just wants to keep tabs on her daughter while she's enrolled at Arizona State (one rumored reason for the move), maybe it's the sunshine, maybe it's the draconian immigration laws. Or maybe she just wants to get out of a state where her charm has worn threadbare: The first clear indication that Alaska had turned on Palin was Lisa Murkowski's Senate win over Palin's pick, Joe Miller (today also brings news that Murkowski will be finally certified as the winner). And now a new poll shows that in Sarah Palin's Alaska, a full 58 percent of those polled have a negative view of her. Moreover, her Republican base is far less keen on her in Alaska than nationally, and independents REALLY dislike her there. Only in Massachusetts, of the ten states polled, was she more disliked than on her home turf. Even in a recent NBC/WSJ poll in which Palin was the least liked of any public figure on the survey, that unfavorable rating stood at 50 percent. If she moves, perhaps absence will make the heart grow fonder, or maybe she's going more for out-of-sight, out-of-mind. I wonder if Palin wouldn't mind being out of the state by May 11, the date when the much-delayed, much anticipated release of the e-mails from her time as the state's governor has been scheduled.

Tags: alaska, arizona, Bristol Palin, Sarah Palin

Unsurprisingly, Rachael, I'm going to disagree strongly with you on whether or not the ACLU is in the wrong to fight the Catholic Church when it requires hospitals to let patients die rather than perform abortions. The right to determine what services you provide is an important one, but there's already an established pattern in the United States that puts the right of citizens to equal treatment above the right of institutions to discriminate. And just as I reject the argument that a lunch counter should be able to refuse to serve black customers because their private beliefs are racist, I believe the Catholic Church cannot force hospitals to refuse to treat pregnant women because they hold misogynist beliefs that women's role as vessels matters more than their rights as individual human beings.

When you have an emergency situation with a pregnancy that requires that you get an abortion or you'll die or be crippled for life, your right to protect yourself shouldn't be constrained because of religious dogma.  As you note in your post, one-third of hospitals in this country are Catholic, which means that if Catholic hospitals set aside pregnant women as a class who don't deserve equal access to life-saving treatment, then that means many women will have no other options.  With emergency abortions, speed is often necessary to prevent death or dismemberment.  If you live in an area with hospitals that don't practice discrimination against pregnant patients, you can often put a patient in an ambulance and pray that she gets her abortion before the stroke or infection sets in from her rapidly deteriorating pregnancy, but if there's not one nearby, the stark choice between letting a woman (and her fetus) die or only letting the fetus die becomes your responsibility.  When you're facing that choice--or even the choice to risk a woman's life by delaying treatment--what some piddling Catholic clergy who have never had to face life-threatening medical situations think shouldn't matter.

The ACLU isn't trying to force health care providers to offer elective abortions. They are simply saying that our country has laws that say emergency rooms cannot discriminate based on race, sexual orientation, or citizenship status when you have an emergency, nor should they be able to discriminate based on gender or pregnancy status.  In this case, refusing treatment would have not only killed the woman in question, but it would have left her four children without a mother.  As the ACLU blogged here, another case involved a doctor being forbidden from operating on a woman whose fetus was dying and whose septic miscarriage was so bad "that the sclera, the white of her eyes, were red, filled with blood." The ACLU protects the right of misogynist pharmacists to refuse to handle icky birth control pills, and of doctors in general to not have to provide abortion if they wish.  But I agree that they should stand for the American practice of requiring emergency rooms to treat all patients as equally deserving of the right to emergency medical treatment, and that includes pregnant women whose pregnancies are threatening their lives or health.

Here's an interesting example from Peru of what happens when a fetus has more rights than a woman who needs emergency medical care: lifelong paralysis for her, and no baby in the end.  Because the brutal fact of the matter is that even if you view women as merely vessels, if the vessels don't have good health of their own, they're not going to produce good babies.

Tags: ACLU, Catholic hospitals, pro-choice, pro-life

Will you watch the Oprah Winfrey network? Discovery, the channel's owner (OWN will replace the Discovery Health Channel) is betting on it. So is Oprah, who may not need anything additional in the way of wealth, fame, or influence but surely wants success for her newest venture just the same. With the recent addition of Cablevision, OWN will be available in 85 million homes starting Jan. 1. But cable is a crowded field, jam-packed with talk and reality. Media watchers, harkening back to the failure of the much-touted Oxygen network, have largely spoken doom. Above all, many seem to doubt that OWN brings anything new to the table.

But the application of Ms. Winfrey's winning "live your best life" message to an entire slate of programing would indeed be something new, or at least something that's missing. That faint rebuke with its promise of redemption has made her partnership with Hearst into that company's second-most profitable title, brought her fans who never watched her talk show and filled a gap in the newsstands that no one but the media queen spotted. It's a gap that's recreated itself in our cable guides. Just as high-end women's magazines had left behind positive messages in favor of either celebrity or fashion, the lifestyle genre of reality television has long since abandoned any real notion of improving or portraying people's real lives behind in favor of snark and an ever-present quest to see who can sink lowest. You like organizing shows? How about a show about people with really messy houses? Ooh, no, how about a show about people whose messy houses are actually a sign of clinical disorder? And what if their children have been taken away or their families have left them as a result? That would be really good!

Well, no. Plenty of people, myself included, just found it relaxing, and maybe a little inspirational, to see someone with a messier closet than ours get it straightened out, or see a fashion-challenged person get help without humiliation, or watch a couple of rooms get redecorated minus the tragic backstory or talk-show worthy battles that made watching more guilty than pleasure. Oprah, who's long complained about the descent of talk shows like her own into overly confrontational territory, seems to want to understand that while schadenfreude sells, there's a fine line between vicarious appreciation of a voluntary train wreck, a la Real Housewives, and gratuitous rubber-necking.

OWN's line-up includes classic lifestyle remake shows that promise not to peel away too much of participants' dignity, like "Enough Already," on organizing and clutter and Kidnapped By the Kids, which promises to help kids get more time with workaholic parents. It includes cooking shows with "real" cooks and cooking shows with chefs. Its Master Class series will offer "first-person insight into the minds" of  modern "masters" we "respect, love and admire," including Lorne Michaels, Condoleezza Rice, Jay-Z, and Diane Sawyer.

But even when she gives us celebrities to emulate, Oprah doesn't skip the train wreck. A special version, titled Master Class: Finding Sarah is a six-part "documentary" in which Oprah luminaries like Dr. Phil and Suze Orman try to remake the "morally bankrupt" Sarah Ferguson into a contributing member of society. I have a sneaking suspicion that may prove as irresistible to this channel surfer as an ESPN classic showing of the 1991 Duke/UNLV basketball championship does when my my husband is wielding the remote. Oprah Winfrey struck the right blend of inspiration and aspiration in her magazine. If she can rightly meld inspiration and schadenfreude in her network, she may once again fill in a gap no one else saw.

Photograph of Oprah by George Burns/Harpo Productions Inc. via Getty Images.

Tags: Oprah and Sarah Ferguson, Oprah Winfrey, Oprah Winfrey Network, OWN, Sarah Ferguson Master Class