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By Gore Vidal
$18.00
By Abraham H. Foxman
$24.95
$40
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By Ruth Marcus — Jenny Sanford was my role model, until I read her book. I once wrote that the wife of South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford offered “a new and improved version of the betrayed political spouse—neither enabler nor victim.” I was wrong.
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Why pork is the new Viagra, tech companies need to stop treating women like girls and what documentarians do when the cameras are off. All this and more on today’s list.
Posted on Feb 3, 2010
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Translating Shakespeare into English (sorry, snobbies), how to get kicked out of preschool (don’t cut your hair), “Android Karenina,” which right-wing nut job is going to replace Bill Moyers and more on today’s list.
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By Ruth Marcus — So the tables-turned, she-cheated-on-him political sex scandal we’ve all been waiting for has finally arrived, albeit across the pond.
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While the real-life Mrs. Robinson, an ultraconservative, “sanctity of marriage” homophobe from Northern Ireland, was shtupping a teenager, our feet were all getting bigger. Confused? Head on past the jump for clarification—and maybe even a little enlightenment.
Posted on Jan 12, 2010
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Flickr / ashwinnavin
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A highly publicized campaign against Internet pornography swept China in 2009, with 5,394 people arrested and 4,186 criminal investigations conducted against the circulation of “smutty and lewd pictures”—a fourfold increase in smut cases compared with 2008.
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It’s been kind of a lousy decade, but things are looking up. An Indian minister says TV works as birth control, coffee might not kill you, and there’s plenty more where that came from. Today’s list after the jump.
Posted on Dec 31, 2009
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Las Vegas is out to ruin the sanctity of prostitution, and the Joe Lieberman-shaped health care bill violates the Hippocratic oath to do no harm. These arguments and more in today’s list.
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AP / Koji Sasahara
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By Mark Heisler — The world is living from development to development, suggesting something much more important is going on. What will it take, exactly, before we butt out?
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Flickr / Brani's fashion dolls
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By Eugene Robinson — Tiger Woods has a Barbie thing so pronounced it suggests his philandering is as much about validation as lust.
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IAAF / Clyde Koa Wing
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It has been announced that Caster Semenya, the impressive 18-year-old South African runner, will retain her world title in the 800-meter race despite a public investigation/smear campaign against the athlete regarding the authenticity of her female gender.
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Flickr / Shazari
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A study has found that workers exposed to high levels of bisphenol A, a chemical widely used in the manufacture of plastics and other consumer goods, were at least four times likelier to report sexual problems, including erectile dysfunction. (continued)
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AP / Jae C. Hong
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By Chris Hedges — Pornography does not promote sex. It promotes masturbation. It promotes the solitary auto-arousal that precludes intimacy and love. Pornography is about getting yourself off at someone else’s expense.
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Flickr / NeoGaboX
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Bragging about one’s sex life is lame, but is it lame enough to earn 1,000 lashes and five years in prison? A Saudi man has been sentenced to just that punishment for going on TV and talking about his extramarital liaisons.
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By Eugene Robinson — Hasn’t Roman Polanski suffered enough? Didn’t he endure all those cool, gray, rainy Paris winters? Didn’t he also drug and rape a 13-year-old girl?
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AP / Kathy Willens
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By Eugene Robinson — If widely reported revelations about John Edwards’ childbearing affair are true, then the two-time presidential candidate is simply a bad person with no redeeming social or political value.
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congress.gov
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Rick Santorum is thinking of running for president, but he has a serious PR problem. The former senator’s rampant homophobia inspired sex columnist Dan Savage to launch a campaign to usurp the conservative’s name. The result: If you type “Santorum” into Google, you’ll find that, in addition to a former senator, it refers to ...
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Project on Government Oversight
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Much of the furor over the conduct of private embassy guards in Kabul appears preoccupied with what one whistle-blower describes as the “gay shit” rather than the exploitation of young Afghan women or the deteriorating security situation at the embassy. The latter, after all, was the major focus of the complaint that blew this story open.
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dailymail.co.uk
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Ever wonder what the Roman Catholic Church might have to say about the proper way to prepare for the friskier side of holy matrimony? Well, here it is anyway: A Catholic organization in Britain has come up with a bedroom benediction for officially recognized (read: heterosexual) married couples to consult prior to consummation in its handy “Prayer Book for Spouses.”
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Center for American Progress
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This is coming from the New York Post, so take it with a metric ton of salt, but the rag says former New York governor and “Client 9” Eliot Spitzer is thinking about getting back into politics, possibly challenging conservative Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand. Spitzer has repeatedly denied any interest in running again, but if the polling pans out he should. Here’s why…
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hotpot.se
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Here’s an oddball out of the empire: A new British study suggests that a girl’s “visual diet” affects attraction. Girls who attended same-sex schools were found to prefer more-feminine boys. (For boys in all-male schools, there was little or no indication they preferred more-masculine girls.) Maybe it’s a British thing?
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By Terrence McNally, AlterNet —
One writer spent four years inside the world of modern-day slavery, an industry that produces huge profits and countless wasted lives.
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Flickr / kevindooley
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Are Americans sacrificing the possibility of a more tolerant humanity for a suffocating guarantee of fidelity, a frigid prospect that seemingly unites the commissars of the politically correct left as much as it does the thought police of the puritanical right?
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Flickr / ECohen and White House / Eric Draper
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Yet another report confirms, as The Guardian explains, “that rates of teen pregnancy and STDs are, after more than a decade of decline, once again on the rise.” Thanks to President Bush’s abstinence-only sex education agenda, black, Hispanic and poor women are more likely to have unwanted pregnancies.
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AP photo / Sucheta Das
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Homosexual relations between consenting adults are no longer considered criminal in India, thanks to a court ruling that overturned a long-standing federal law. The BBC rounded up some reactions from Indian citizens after news of the judgment broke around the country.
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By Marie Cocco — The decline in contraceptive use may cheer those who have promoted faith-inspired school curricula, but now we have sad and clear evidence that political foolishness among adults is leading to foolish and harmful behavior among kids.
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Rainer Hachfeld, Neues Deutschland, Germany —
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switched.com
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Craigslist is seeking legal action against South Carolina’s Attorney General Henry McMaster after McMaster criticized the online classifieds site despite the removal of its erotic ads section. Craigslist is, amazingly, looking for “declaratory relief and a restraining order” from the vigilantly moralizing Southerner.
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guardian.co.uk
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Trying to raise some ... consciousness about sex education in China, an entrepreneur plans to open the country’s first sex theme park in October. It’s raising some local eyebrows too as development continues in the southwest city of Chongqing.
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The New York Times gets an inside look at a Pakistani fetish factory located next door to a fundamentalist Islamic mosque. Globalization doesn’t get more entertaining than this.
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By Ellen Goodman — Vermont, Ohio and Utah are among the first states trying to back away from laws that treat a teenager with a cell phone as if he or she were a child pornographer. They know there’s a difference between truly dreadful judgment and a felony.
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amazon.com
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Amazon fell into hot water with the gay community after gay-themed books began disappearing from the site’s sales rankings. Amazon blamed the problem on a “glitch” and has restored some of the titles, but one author says a representative from the site told him his work had been recategorized as “adult.”
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This Canadian Planned Parenthood commercial makes the argument for (or against?) sex education.
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Simanca Osmani, Cagle Cartoons, Brazil —
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tyrashow.com
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What’s a former would-be-son-in-law of Sarah Palin to do once his time as an adjunct member of the family is over? Why, go on “The Tyra Banks Show” of course, as Bristol Palin’s ex, Levi Johnston, has done in an episode slated to air Monday. This media-baiting move has clearly angered Mama Bear Palin.
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By Marie Cocco — A court ruling offers a chilling compendium of accounts by doctors and other FDA professionals who were routinely thwarted as they tried to make the “morning after” pill available, especially to teenagers.
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No one expects the former “Inside Edition” host and Fox News provocateur to be a class act, particularly not since he made his intentions with that falafel clear, but what Bill O’Reilly does with a pipe metaphor in this clip is just lame.
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AP photo / Andrew Medichini
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On his way to his first visit to Africa, Pope Benedict XVI told attendant members of the press that he believes encouraging condom use not only doesn’t help in the fight against AIDS, but actually worsens the situation.
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Wikimedia:Carterdriggs
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Where in this great nation would you think the per capita consumption of pornography would be at its highest? Perhaps a decadent coastal blue state such as California or New York? Guess again, people—the answer is Utah.
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By David Sirota — One thing is obvious after Michael Phelps’ marijuana “scandal”: Our society is addicted to fake outrage—and to break our dependence, we’re going to need far more potent medicine than the herb Phelps was smoking.
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By Ellen Goodman — The president took his swing in the 25-year-old game of ideological pingpong known as the global gag rule, but he also made it clear he’d like everyone to put their paddles down.
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abc.go.com
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As previously reported on Truthdig, there’s a lot going on in Homeland Security that doesn’t make it onto the reality show of the same name. The Center for Investigative Reporting’s G.W. Schulz continues to dig into the department’s unsavory bits, including an immigration officer who was arrested for allegedly having sex with an 11-year-old girl in Rio while there on official business.
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By Ellen Goodman — “Virginity pledges” are one of the ways that government officials measure whether abstinence-only education is “working.” They count the pledges as proof that teens will abstain. It turns out that this is like counting New Year’s resolutions as proof that you lost 10 pounds.
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pbs.org
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A new study looking at virginity pledges—promises made by teenagers to wait until marriage for sex—has found that such vows largely fell flaccid, as sexual behavior of pledged teens was little different than non-pledgers, and that, hilariously, a whopping 82 percent, five years later, had either forgotten or denied taking the pledge.
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