Someone above asked what other sport has rigorous out of cometition testing that requires athletes to report their whereabouts constantly.

The answer is that all Olympic sports do. The purpose of unannounced out of competition testing is to ensure that athletes are clean during the training periods. Otherwise, they could use for 11 months, let the stuff clear out before the races with drug testing, and gain the advantage of having built muscle, blood and endurance and take that enhanced ability into the race.

I am a low-level, marginal track and field athlete, not a professional by any stretch of the imagination because I have a full-time professional job in public health, pay my way to races and have only made about $5K in prize money in the last 3 years from racing. But I am ranked in the top-five-U.S. in my event and am on the out-of-comp testing list with USADA, the domestic version of the World Anti-Doping Agency. This means I have to account for my whereabouts all the time by updating my schedule on-line, whether I'm going camping for the weekend or will be out of the house at my kids' soccer games, and if the un-announced testers can't find me within 2 hours, I am presumed guilty of trying to avoid peeing in the cup, and have to fight to clear my name, and three missed tests in 18-months equals a 2 to 4 year ban, same as a positive doping test.

One of the problems with the Tour is that they test only the stage winner and a couple other guys out of 200 each day, and they inform teams in advance if they are going to test the riders, allowing them to employ various masking strategies. The vast majority of riders will never get tested. The Sunday NY Times just did a good story on this. The UCI testing program is a complete farce. My sport, track and field, is dirty, but cycling is 100 times worse.

My god, have they dumbed down public discourse so much that I have to explain cartoons to you illiterate trolls?

This is not principally a feminist cartoon. You white male anonymous idiots are missing the main point.

The reason she decries the infiltration of "nanny" over "police" is that the former term, "police state," resonated as a warning against fascism and loss of civil liberties. Now the conservative blow-hards who back the Patriot Act and never-ending War of Terror (TM), two couloirs (yeah it's French, look it up if you're not a mountaineer or skier) on the slippery slope to the police state and fascism, incessantly invoke the liberal "nanny state" about everthing from second-hand smoke regulations to dismantling the New Deal, Great Society and a half-century of civil rights, environmental and worker-safety protections.

It's about time someone drew the connection between police and nanny. I fear the police state far more than the nanny state.

to the person who said she doesn't believe all religious people are delusional or idiotic: well, I do. I wish they'd keep they're goddamned superstitions and fairy tales out of my white house, my congress, my judiciary, my children's schools, and on and on and so on

Firts, the difficulty in obtaining abortions doesn't cause an increase in teen pregnancies, just an increase in teen births. The teen pregnancy rate is calculated by taking all the births to teens, plus all the abortions to teens, plus an estimated 20 percent more to account for miscarriages, and dividing my all girls 15-19, and then multiplying by 1000. So access to abortions isn't a factor.

Now as for abstinence only education, it is completely consistent with research that abstinence only programs conducted a few years ago (this has been going on, publicly funded, for several years) should result in preganancies among older teens, 18-19. The resear5ch shows that the abstinence effect lasts for a short period, maybe a few days to a couple years from the time of the class of abstinence pledge, but then, when they finally do have sex, they are less like3ly to use condoms, not because they've never heard of them or can't learn how to use them, but because they've been preached to (word choice intentional, many publicly funded programs are church-based, sorry, we say faith based now, faith as in take it on faith that this is going to be effective) that condoms don't work very well, using outright phoney data. So, after the good boys and girls have been practicing abstinence (fondling, oral sex, anything but vaginal intercourse for a few months) and they proceed to baby-making, they're less likely to have a condom handy at the moment of passion. Voila!

If you still believe in abstinence-only "sex ed," you probably also believe that we went to iraq because of 9-11 or WMDs, and you believe God planted the dinosaurs and Noah's flood created the Grand Canyon 6000 years ago. It's all part of the same package.

Great comment, CT:

Oh wait. I may be overreacting. Lincoln did say:

The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here

And that is probably a pretty accurate description of Romney's tortured speech

nuff said

...First, from re-reading this and trying to figure out 1. what Obama's position might be on parental notification, 2. if the Post was trying to catch him in an inconsistency or infer that he's not a stalwart supporter of abortion rights, 3. trying to figure out if Tim Grieve was a. passing on the information as 'dirt' on Obama or b. dirt on the Post.

...Second from wondering why any of this would matter to anyone? Don't we all agree that Obama wouldn't appoint justices like Scalia, Thomas, Alito? Don't we all believe he'd do more to help developing counties prevent HIV with condoms/education? And on and on.

Big picture, folks.