In defense of Planned Parenthood

Federal funding for Planned Parenthood is this week's topic of my Scripps column with Ben Boychuk. I suspect my pro-choice friends will not think me vigorous enough in defending the right to abortion, but my mindset was to persuade pro-lifers—to the extent they can be convinced—that Planned Parenthood is worthy of federal support. My take:

For many years now, pro-choice liberals have accused pro-life conservatives of being more concerned about the lives of the unborn than they are of living, breathing human beings. Often, that charge is a bit over-the-top and unfair. In the case of the Planned Parenthood debate, it's not.

In the course of a single year, Planned Parenthood carries out nearly 1 million screenings for cervical cancers. More than 800,000 breast exams. It provides contraception to nearly 2.5 million women. And it performs roughly 4 million tests for sexually transmitted diseases.

Planned Parenthood, in other words, helps keep a great many women healthy. The agency's efforts in this regard are for the unmitigated good.

The agency also provides more than 300,000 abortions a year. Federal funding does not directly subsidize those abortions, but let's be honest: If Planned Parenthood crumbles because it loses its federal funding, it can't carry out those abortions. But neither can it do all the other good stuff it does.

Which is why thoughtful abortion opponents should carefully consider their support for the effort to defund Planned Parenthood. Maybe they succeed in putting a dent in the number of abortions -- but they do so at the cost of condemning many women to late detection of (and death from) cervical cancer, breast cancer, HIV and more. Is that trade-off worth it?

Other conservatives will argue that, in a time of belt-tightening, the federal government can't afford to subsidize every good thing. Perhaps that's true, and we should set priorities. Public health, it seems, should be among the highest priorities -- a society can't function if it's sick and dying. Women's health is a huge part of public health.

And Planned Parenthood is perhaps the most reliable provider of women's health services. The funding should stay.

Ben has a different take, obviously. Click the link to read his side.

A quick note about James O'Keefe and 'undercover journalism'

James O'Keefe has a couple of NPR scalps on his belt, and good for him I guess. Jonah Goldberg tweets, "I remember when undercover stings are what made '60 Minutes' America's greatest journalistic enterprise," presumably hitting at hypocrite liberals who are irritated by O'Keefe's stings.

But O'Keefe's brand of journalism owes more to "Borat" than to "60 Minutes." In Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen's M.O. was to walk into situations and be the biggest, most annoying jerk he could. Sometimes people were irritated, in which case the comedy came from their consternation, or they remained polite—in which case the comedy came from them accommodating a huge jerk in their midst.

O'Keefe, I don't think, has ever unconvered real malfeasance at the organization he targets. Instead, he's mostly taken advantage of humankind's natural tendency to avoid confrontation or to be a little too solicitous. He's the kind of guy who'd videotape you listening to your grandfather's racist grumblings with a strained smile on your face, then release it to Fox News as an exposé of your own racism.

Most people aren't inclined to loudly confront wrongheaded people they've just met. As long as that impulse exists, James O'Keefe will have plenty more exposes he can release.

In the New York Times: Blaming the 11-year-old victim of a gang rape?

An awful story this morning from Texas, where 18 young men and teen boys are under suspicion for gang-raping an 11-year-old girl—under threat of being beaten if she didn't comply. The story includes this paragraph:

Residents in the neighborhood where the abandoned trailer stands — known as the Quarters — said the victim had been visiting various friends there for months. They said she dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s. She would hang out with teenage boys at a playground, some said.

I try to avoid using this language in public, mostly, but I think it might be appropriate here: Fuck. That. Shit.

This paragraph doesn't explicitly say that the 11-year-old girl brought a gang rape under threat of beating upon herself, but it certainly implies it. And it does so, as far as I can tell, without any pushback from a responsible person who might say, quite reasonably: "No matter how an 11-year-old girl dresses, there is never a reason or an excuse or any kind of mitigation for threatening to beat a woman and then raping her. Ever."

Instead, the story we're treated to is one in which we exclusively from people who feel some level of sympathy for the rapists:

The case has rocked this East Texas community to its core and left many residents in the working-class neighborhood where the attack took place with unanswered questions. Among them is, if the allegations are proved, how could their young men have been drawn into such an act?

“It’s just destroyed our community,” said Sheila Harrison, 48, a hospital worker who says she knows several of the defendants. “These boys have to live with this the rest of their lives.”

The Times, I gather, didn't make contact with the girl or her mother. Still, it would've been nice to have this story feature the voice of somebody saying, essentially, "This girl will have to live with this the rest of her life." We never do. Instead, we're treated to a version of adolescent slut-shaming. The Times can and should do much better than this.

NYT: Nation better prepared for rising gas prices

I, too, am better prepared for the rising cost of gasoline this time around. I live in the city and don't have a car!

It's true that some of my costs will still go up, in the form of rising prices on food and goods that have been shipped to Philadelphia, where I live. But not having and using a car provides a rather substantial cushion against the shock of an oil-price spike. I guess this lifestyle isn't for everybody, but—despite the overall higher costs of living in a city than living in Kansas—it's probably better-suited to my pocketbook.

Today in inequality reading: CAP and employee compensation

One of the things that has struck me as unjust about growing income inequality in the United States is that American workers have vastly increased their productivity over the last three decades—and yet have seen almost no income growth as a result. Today, the Center for American Progress offers a suggestion to solve that issue—suggesting, in essence, that all employees (and not just top executives) share in a firm's growing wealth:

The reform encourages firms to develop broad-based incentive compensation systems that link employee earnings to the performance of the firm. This reform would give employees access to the capital-related earnings of their companies comparable to that of the senior executives who run these firms.

Specifically, our plan would give favorable tax treatment to compensation systems that link incentive pay to company performance if all of the company’s full-time employees participated in them and if the value expended on the top 5 percent of employees by salary was also expended on the bottom 80 percent of employees by salary.

I've not read through the details of the report, and I don't really know what arguments exist against encouraging firms to spread performance-based compensation down the food chain. But I do suspect that publicly traded firms have rewarded CEOs based on quarterly reports and how they affect a company's stock price—encouraging top leaders to focus on short-term tricks rather than the long-term value of their company. If this suggestion would exacerbate that problem, I'd be hesitant. Republicans, I suspect, will cry "socialism" over the matter—but if it's a choice between better-compensating employees in order to get a tax break or having taxes taken and redistributed to support the safety net, I imagine they could be convinced to support the former.

Fan mail: Charlie Sheen

Ed Spondike, who is quickly becoming one of my favorite correspondents, writes in response to this week's Scripps column about Charlie Sheen. An excerpt:

I must comment on one statement that was in your column. "Too much wealth and privilege can be corrosive in the wrong hands. And there's nothing Americans love more than watching the rich and powerful crash and burn." Unfortunately, I have to disagree this statement. Entertainers, including actors, singers, and sports stars, constantly are given multiple chances to redeem themselves from crime and bad behavior. Most of the people who idolize them seem to be quite willing to forgive their transgressions, and in some cases, actually excuse their behavior.

My response: I do think we like to see the rich and powerful crash and burn. But we're all human: We also like to see a good redemption story. If Charlie Sheen can pull himself out of the crazy spiral and come back in five years to earn an Oscar nomination, Americans will eat it up—particularly if he gives some contrite, wrly self-deprecating interviews on TV. There are plenty of second acts in American life. That doesn't mean we don't also enjoy watching train wrecks.

Solving the library e-book problem

HarperCollins has announced that it will allow libraries to lend e-books 26 times before demanding those libraries pay, essentially, a replacement fee:

Its sales president, Josh Marwell, believes that's only fair: 26, he claims, is the average number of loans a print book would survive before having to be replaced. ... Clearly, printed books last a lot longer than 26 loans," says Philip Bradley, vice-president of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals.

I'm also skeptical that a print book only lasts 26 checkouts. And I'm interested in the topic since I finished reading an e-book edition of Neil Sheehan's "A Fiery Peace in a Cold War" that was "borrowed" from the Philadelphia Free Library. What's frustrating about HarperCollins' idea is that it tries to force a print-book scarcity business model upon e-books. That's unnecessary, and probably dumb. Why not come up with a new model that fits the new medium?

Here's what I suggest:

• Instead of forcing libraries to "purchase" e-books and then purchase replacement copies, publishers should set up a subscription-type licensing service. Charge the libraries (say) a $50 annual fee to make 100 e-books available. (I'm throwing out a number, here, for the sake of argument.) That gives the publishers the renewable source of income they need to continue operating without imposing silly rules.

• The libraries would be bound by somewhat similar rules as they are now. If they wanted to have, say, 10 copies of a "Harry Potter" book as part of their 100 licensed books, they could, but each book could only be checked out one at a time: If 10 people were already reading "Harry Potter" then subsequent readers would have to wait until a copy was free. That would prevent people from bypassing paid e-books entirely—lots of people want their copy of a book now, or they want access to their copy in something like perpetuity—leaving libraries in something like the same role they fulfill now. And libraries could revise their stock at any time, discarding five Harry Potter licenses when the book becomes less popular in favor of other selections.

Full-disclosure: This idea is inspired by my Macworld colleague Lex Friedman, who has written about wanting to see a "Netflix for e-books."

In any case, it's clearly silly to make a library purchase a "new" e-book when the "old" e-book hasn't (and can't) degrade in the same way as a print book. Rather than force libraries to live by a model that doesn't fit the digital medium, make a new model. HarperCollins' solution is short-sighted and doesn't actually serve its customers all that well.