Punting the Pundits

At the Conservative Political Action Conference last week, Ann Coulter mocked the Obama administration for requiring health insurance to cover birth control by saying "birth control costs $20 a month; an abortion is $400 or $500 at the most, you don't get insurance for that." First of all, Coulter is wrong, or lying. Perhaps she's never been without insurance herself and she doesn't understand the difference between a co-payment and what something costs without birth control. Twenty dollars per month might be what one pays for the pill with insurance. Without it, you can pay over $100. This is, in other words, precisely what you have insurance for.

Lois Utley: Employees Need Birth Control Coverage Mandate

For the women employed by the former Hackley Hospital in Muskegon, Michigan, last week's news couldn't have been better. President Obama's announcement that Catholic hospitals and educational institutions must provide contraceptive coverage to employees should mean those women will finally be getting back the insurance coverage for birth control they lost in 2007, when their hospital merged with a nearby Catholic hospital. That is, unless the Catholic Bishops and their allies in Congress succeed in unraveling the birth control coverage mandate for the hospital's employees and millions of other American women.

Just as the Bishops had demanded, Obama announced that Catholic hospitals, colleges and social services agencies would not have to pay for contraceptive coverage for their employees. Instead, under what Obama characterized as an "accommodation," the hospitals' insurance companies would be required to offer the coverage at no extra charge to employees and their dependents. Insurers are expected to be willing to pay the birth control cost, since they save money by avoiding more costly pregnancy care.

Eugene Robinson: Pay Close Attention to China

China, for better or worse, is a serious country. The United States had better start acting like one.

I got a glimpse of the future Wednesday in the vast ballroom of a Washington hotel where hundreds of august dignitaries-and some journalists as well-gathered at a luncheon in honor of Vice President Xi Jinping, who is widely expected to become China's top leader after a year-long transition.

Xi's status is such that he was introduced by no less than Henry Kissinger, who spoke, not for the first time, of the Nixon-to-China breakthrough four decades ago. It is useful to remember that the country we now think of as a trillion-dollar creditor and the manufacturer of iPads was once a Maoist bastion, hermetically sealed against the capitalist influences of the Western world.

Richard Reeves: Comes the Revolution

LOS ANGELES-Andrew Breitbart, the publisher of Breitbart.com and a couple of other popular websites, set the tone for a program at the University of Southern California last Wednesday by calling George Stephanopoulus of ABC News a little rat with a runny nose.

He continued by equating mainstream newspapers and television news, National Public Radio, Hollywood and American universities with totalitarians around the world, citing Joseph Stalin, Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, cultural Marxism and storm troopers.

He was joined by Jon Fleischman, founder of FlashReport.org, a popular website out here that aggregates and reports on California politics, government and cultural life. He offered the opinion that "President Obama represents the abyss. He is taking us over the socialist cliff."