Fred Schwartz........."You’ve heard the statistic that 1 in 4 teenaged girls has a sexually transmitted disease. On the same day that story came out, newspapers reported another study showing that 17 percent of middle-school students had used alcohol within the past year, and 6 percent had been drunk within the past month. A previous study had shown that 47 percent of eighth graders have had alcohol, 20 percent had done so in the last month, and 12 percent had consumed “five or more drinks in a row in the previous 2 weeks.” The researchers suggest that these figures can be reduced with “alcohol prevention programs prior to the sixth grade” and “truly universal anti-alcohol messages.”

Makes sense, right? But compare that with what happened when the STD study came out: Planned Parenthood said the results showed that abstinence education doesn’t work, and teen-agers should instead be taught “safe sex.” Using the same logic, instead of unrealistically expecting tweens to abstain from alcohol, shouldn’t we be teaching them “safe drinking”? You know — it’s O.K. to knock back a brewski while playing Grand Theft Auto after school, but be sure to stop at one; eat something before you start chugging punch at the Halloween party; take a hair of the dog with your Froot Loops if you’ve had too many the night before; stuff like that. Education of this sort would kill two birds with one stone, since unsafe drinking often leads to unsafe sex; at least, that’s how it works with grown-ups."

NRO

NYT

NRO

A Telling Comment   [John Hood]

Last night, a couple of my staff members were presenting at an anti-tax event in rural North Carolina (believe it or not, there are many important elections going on in our state right now than just the Obama-Clinton slugfest, including a host of local tax referenda). During open discussion later in the event, a young soldier stood up and told the audience that he had just returned from a tour of duty in Iraq. He was proud of his service, and of his unit's accomplishments.

"Then," he said, "I came home and found out we were losing the war."

05/02 10:45 AM

"In local elections in the U.K. yesterday, Gordon Brown's ruling Labour Party recorded its worst results since proper records began in 1973 - and a worse result than lame duck John Major recorded in 1995.  The beneficiaries were not the alternative leftist party, the Liberal Democrats, but the Conservative Party.  I'd optimistically suggested that the Tories would gain 222 seats, but so far they've gained 213 and there are still 20 councils to go.  Labour has lost 248.  My old mate Boris Johnson is poised to become Mayor of London, which is a mind-boggling concept.

Meanwhile, London's leading newspaper, the Evening Standard has a very amusing front page today that fans of Tony Blair, as well as Conservatives, will enjoy.  Scroll down a bit here to see it."

Ian Murray from NRO"

Goldberg on Tuskegee

Wright says the U.S. government “purposely infected African-American men with syphilis.” This is a lie, and no knowledgeable historian says otherwise. And yet, this untruth pops up routinely. In March, CNN commentator Roland Martin defended Wright, saying, “That actually did, indeed, happen.” On Fox News, the allegation has gone unchallenged on Hannity & Colmes and The O’Reilly Factor. Obery Hendricks, a prominent author and visiting scholar at Princeton University, told O’Reilly “I do know that the government injected syphilis into black men at the Tuskegee Institute. Now we know that the government is capable of doing those things.”

To which O’Reilly responded: “All right. All governments have done bad things in every country.”

".....True enough. And what the U.S. did at Tuskegee was indeed bad, very bad. But it didn’t do what these people say it did.

So what did happen? In 1932, public health researchers set out to study syphilis, particularly among African Americans, who had higher infection rates than whites. They recruited 399 black men who already had syphilis. The doctors infected no one. In fact, the patients were selected in the first place because they were tertiary-stage syphilitics who were no longer contagious.

The researchers studied the progress of the disease, without treating it, for 40 years.

Prior to the availability of penicillin in the 1940s and 1950s, the researchers couldn’t have treated the men even if they wanted to. Even after standardized penicillin treatments were available, it wasn’t clear that the patients could have been helped. Some of the doctors believed that treating the decades-long infections would kill the men.