Mollie Hemingway

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Speak softly and carry a big recording device

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Back in December, Daniel Pulliam looked at the rather curious lack of coverage pertaining to undercover videos of Planned Parenthood employees providing advice that could violate Indiana criminal statutes. A University of California – Los Angeles student, posing as a 13-year-old impregnated by a 31-year-old boyfriend, had taped Planned Parenthood counselors at two Indiana clinics telling her how to avoid state laws about parental-consent on abortion and the reporting of child sex-abuse.


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Ghosts in the Armenian genocide

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On Friday, President Barack Obama broke a campaign promise to Armenian voters to declare the 1915 massacre of Armenians an act of “genocide.” As Glenn Kessler noted in a March Washington Post story anticipating that this might happen, Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Vice President Joseph Biden for years have not minced words about labeling as “genocide” the deaths of Armenians. They regularly lambasted President George W. Bush for not using the word “genocide.” And Obama’s promise that he would use the word — compared with Sen. John McCain’s position — got him enthusiastic support among the Armenian community.


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Let's work on those analogies

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Newsweek has an interesting story about black parents adopting white children headlined “Raising Katie: What adopting a white girl taught a black family about race in the Obama era.” As you may have picked up from the headline, the story struggles a bit with trying to pack way too much into one family’s story. Still, it’s an interesting piece:


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Distinctions with a difference

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One of the more interesting stories regarding stem cell research is one that has been woefully under-reported. Even though scientists have been performing embryo-destructive stem cell research for a decade, there are no clinically available treatments that have resulted from the research. In the past two years, however, scientists have discovered ways of inducing pluripotent stem cells that many see as more promising.


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The ethics of embryonic stem cell research funding

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The National Institutes of Health posted their draft guidelines for the federal funding of embryonic stem cell research last Friday. When President Barack Obama announced his new embryonic stem cell funding policy in March, he said guidelines would be set by the NIH. The new draft guidelines can definitely be changed in response to responses received during the comment period or through promised legislative action, but here’s how they stand now:


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Lottery tickets and sharia

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Somalia, in the news recently for its pirates, has faced chaos within its border for decades. Militia groups are fighting the government and the government is having trouble getting control. The New York Times ran a story about a recent attempt by the government to get an upper hand:


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Got news? Georgetown University edition

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Can you believe it was seven years ago that Attorney General John Ashcroft was outed for covering up the statues of the naked ladies in the Department of Justice building? He apparently didn’t like being photographed in front of the statues (representing “The Spirit of Justice”) when he gave speeches and press conferences. It was major news and, as a result, fodder for weeks of late night talk show jokes.


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Why Iowa?

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When the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that marriage should be redefined to include same-sex couples, many media reports quoted people saying Iowa seemed an unlikely candidate for such a radical change to marriage law. Certainly Iowans never would have voted in support of such a change to their laws. But even though the decision is weeks old, media outlets have been strikingly incurious as to how gay rights activists managed this tremendous coup. One might imagine that if social conservatives had managed to, say, outlaw abortion on demand, the media might have been a tad more interested in how that political battle had been won.


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