Example: Robert Stacy McCain explains why women shouldn’t use contraceptives. We’re supposed to be out dropping calves, you know.

I’ve written this before, but here it is again –

Tons of data collected around the world over many years reveal that there is one sure way to reduce abortion — increase the use of contraception. From Alan Guttmacher:

Publicly funded family planning clinic services already enable U.S. women to prevent 1.4 million unintended pregnancies each year, an estimated 600,000 of which would end in abortion. Without these services, the annual number of unintended pregnancies and abortions would be nearly 50% higher. Among many other benefits, family planning clinic services also save $4.3 billion in public funds each year.

[Update: See also "Contraceptive Use Is Key to Reducing Abortion Worldwide"]

The irony is that Planned Parenthood may very well prevent more abortions than all of the anti-choice organizations combined.

These are what those of us in reality land call “facts.” R.S. McCain thinks facts are “silly.” I have a word to describe R.S. McCain, but I’m going to refrain from using it.

By about this time tomorrow someone will be the lucky winner of the Obama limited edition messenger bag eBay auction! And the auction is sizzling hot! Bidding has gone from $5.00 to $5.75. I’m stoked.

I’m expecting a last-minute flurry of frantic bidding, so remember to check the auction tomorrow or you will lose out. I’ll even autograph the bag if the lucky winner requests it.

It’s not really news that the Iraq “reconstruction” effort was and is the Mother of All Boondoggles, and that billions of taxpayer dollars have been pissed away in waste and fraud. But the New York Times has a new story about it, so I’ll comment anyway.

The Times got hold of a 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq being circulated in Washington. This report was not supposed to be released until February, after Dear Leader had left office.

An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.

The article doesn’t name the “Pentagon planners.” Want to bet it was the civilians who reported to Rummy — Doug Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, etc.?

No takers, huh?

It’s been obvious all along that BushCo. was utterly incompetent to handle anything as complicated as a kids’ birthday party, never mind reconstructing Iraq. Other stuff we already knew:

• The Pentagon has been lying its ass off all along about the “progress” being made in Iraq.
• Much of the money allocated for various projects was diverted into a “spoils system controlled by neighborhood politicians and tribal chiefs.”
• To this day, “the government as a whole has never developed a legislatively sanctioned doctrine or framework for planning, preparing and executing contingency operations in which diplomacy, development and military action all figure.”
• Rummy didn’t think the U.S. would need to spend $1 billion to reconstruct Iraq. He was right; so far, we’ve spent $117 billion.

Among the overarching conclusions of the history is that five years after embarking on its largest foreign reconstruction project since the Marshall Plan in Europe after World War II, the United States government has in place neither the policies and technical capacity nor the organizational structure that would be needed to undertake such a program on anything approaching this scale.

We’ve become a can’t-do nation.

The bitterest message of all for the reconstruction program may be the way the history ends. The hard figures on basic services and industrial production compiled for the report reveal that for all the money spent and promises made, the rebuilding effort never did much more than restore what was destroyed during the invasion and the convulsive looting that followed.

You’ll like this part:

¶When the Office of Management and Budget balked at the American occupation authority’s abrupt request for about $20 billion in new reconstruction money in August 2003, a veteran Republican lobbyist working for the authority made a bluntly partisan appeal to Joshua B. Bolten, then the O.M.B. director and now the White House chief of staff. “To delay getting our funds would be a political disaster for the President,” wrote the lobbyist, Tom C. Korologos. “His election will hang for a large part on show of progress in Iraq and without the funding this year, progress will grind to a halt.” With administration backing, Congress allocated the money later that year.

That was only $20 billion for a “show of progress” so Bush could get re-elected. Congressional GOP saw to it BushCo got every dime it asked for since. But Detroit auto workers? They can drop dead.