Latest From Our Writers

It's true that Tom Delay , R-Texas, is the Republican liberals love to hate. His bad taste in Grecian Formula is enough to turn me against him. But it's not his social conservatism that rankles us—those are beliefs to which he's entitled. It's his abuse of power for partisan advantage—threatening those who won't vote his way, just for starters. As majority leader of the House of Representatives, he holds immense power and deserves the scrutiny he's finally getting. But so far members of Congress have been too silent about what the Campaign for America's Future's Project for an Accountable Congress calls "DeLay's escalating pattern of ethical misconduct." So they're calling on people to call their representatives and ask them whether they think DeLay is fit to serve as Majority Leader. Click here for more info.

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A recent news story in The Washington Post detailed a phenomenon that was documented by Planned Parenthood last year: Some pharmacists are refusing to fill women's prescriptions for birth-control pills based on their opposition to contraception. In fact, in several states, pharmacists who refuse aren't breaking the law. Those states have "refusal clauses" that make it legal for individual pharmacists to refuse filling prescriptions for medicines to which they're morally opposed. So far, that seems to pretty much exclusively mean birth-control and morning-after pills. No one is refusing to fill prescriptions for Viagra or Levitra, which are obviously prescribed specifically for having sex. It seems to me that the double standard here is pretty obvious: Prescription drugs that assist men in having sex are a-okay. Prescription drugs that allow women to have sex are morally wrong.

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Now making its way through the House , the legislation is a boon to the credit card industry because of the roadblocks it erects for people filing for bankruptcy. Opposition to the bill came from consumer advocates on the left and the right, yet it passed the Senate in early March. The latest entry in the special "bankruptcy bill blog" over at TalkingPointsMemo documents the banking and credit-card industry contributions that might have purchased pro-industry votes from the senators.

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