Guessing the NFL gives #Vikings' Adrian Peterson a two-game suspension for child abuse. Well, until the video comes out.
— @TomOatesWSJ
Health Affairs:
Making birth control pills available OTC has merit, and the Guttmacher Institute is part of a coalition that has been working toward this goal for years. Leading medical groups have also endorsed such a move, including the American Medical Association and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. By removing the need to obtain a prescription, OTC status would eliminate this potential barrier to contraceptive use and thereby increase access.
This is especially true for uninsured women and those who don’t have time for a doctor’s visit or otherwise can’t readily reach a health care provider. However, if the goal is to truly expand access to contraceptive care—and not just provide cover for undercutting insurance coverage for contraceptives—the case to move birth control pills to OTC status should proceed alongside several other important policies and goals:
Dana Milbank:
Proving a case of excessive force against a police officer is difficult, and I’m not in any position to determine Wilson’s guilt. But that doesn’t justify declining to prosecute such cases. There’s no dispute that Brown ran away after Wilson shot him in a scuffle, and that Wilson shot Brown several more times after that. Several witnesses — including those in a newly discovered video showing the immediate aftermath of the shooting — claim Brown had his hands up in surrender. The alternative account offered by Wilson — that Brown charged at him — requires us to believe that the unarmed and wounded man ran away, reconsidered, and ran back toward the man pointing a gun at him.
And McCulloch won’t even have his prosecutors recommend involuntary manslaughter? If he persists, and if the governor won’t intervene, their behavior will confirm suspicions that justice is rigged.
More politics and policy below the fold.
Greg Sargent:
House GOP leaders appear set to push through a measure giving President Obama the authorization and money he has requested to train Syrian rebels for the fight against ISIS — a rare display of unity between Republicans and the president. This would be separate from any measure authorizing Obama’s ramping up of American military operations, which apparently isn’t going to get any Congressional vote.
However, there are internal disagreements among Republicans over how to vote on the narrower question of arming the rebels, with some conservatives demanding a vote on this separate from one on the “continuing resolution” temporarily funding the government. The White House wants GOP leaders to package the two together.
This is more than just an arcane Congressional procedural dispute. A separate vote on arming the rebels may be the closest thing we get to a Congressional vote on war, since Congress has no plans to vote on the escalation itself.
Upshot:
Who Will Win The Senate?
According to our statistical election-forecasting machine, it’s a tossup. The Republicans have about a 53% chance of gaining a majority.
Looking pretty toss-uppy today.
More from Nate Cohn:
A few months ago, the Democratic path to a Senate majority looked long and arduous. It has started to look easier.
The Democrats started the campaign with a clear advantage in enough races to end up with 45 seats, well short of the 50 needed to retain control of the chamber. To get to 50, the party was going to have to run the table in five battleground states where polls were already showing Republicans with an occasional lead — or replace one of them by holding either Arkansas or Louisiana, two deep-red states with Democratic incumbents in jeopardy. Doing so would have been challenging under any circumstances. It seemed especially daunting this year, given the president’s low approval ratings and the long history of the president’s party suffering a “midterm penalty.”
But today the Democratic path to victory looks as clear as it has at any point this year. That path remains narrow, to be sure. The Democrats will probably still need to sweep those five fairly close races. Yet with just two months to go, the party appears to have an advantage in four of them. And the Democrats have other opportunities that might give them more breathing room.
Sam Wang is also looking optimistic (D control 79%) as well as our own
Poll Explorer which predicts D's winning 50 seats.
And this from HuffPollster:
IS HUFFPOLLSTER 'OUT ON A LIMB'? -- As of this writing, the HuffPost Pollster Senate Forecast gives Republicans a 44 percent probability of gaining a Senate majority, which is slightly lower than similar Senate forecasts as of this writing, such as the Daily Kos Poll Explorer (48 percent), The Washington Post/Monkey Cage's Election Lab (54 percent), New York Times/Upshot's Leo (57 percent) and the FiveThirtyEight forecast (58 percent). [HuffPost Pollster Senate Forecast]
A friend of HuffPollster emailed yesterday, asking, "are you lonely out there on that limb?" Our answer is, it may feel a little lonely, but HuffPollster does not consider our estimate to be as far "out there" on a limb as some may believe. The models cited above are all telling is more or less the same thing: It's a "toss-up." We don't know with meaningful confidence which party will control the Senate.
ESPN:
NFL players are likely to suffer chronic brain injury at a "significantly higher" rate than the general population and also show neurocognitive impairment at a much younger age, according to documents filed on behalf of the league in federal court Friday.
Former players between 50 and 59 years old develop Alzheimer's disease and dementia at rates 14 to 23 times higher than the general population of the same age range, according to the documents. The rates for players between 60-64 are as much as 35 times the rate of the general population, the documents reported.
The figures, compiled by actuarials hired by the NFL, appeared to be the first public admission by the league that retired players incur brain damage more frequently than the general public. The report did not specify why the rates for retired players are significantly higher.
Leslie Morgan Steiner:
He held a gun to my head. I loved him.
Just before I fell in love with a man who abused me, I spouted off to my New York City roommate that I’d never be stupid enough to stay with a man who hit me. Like most people who are naive about the complexities of relationship violence — victims and bystanders alike — my dismissal of the dangers of abusive love cost me dearly.
When I see footage of Ray Rice knocking his then-fiancee, Janay Palmer, unconscious in an Atlantic City elevator — and her subsequent defense of Rice after he was cut from the Baltimore Ravens and suspended indefinitely from the National Football League this past week — I recognize how hard it can be to leave a violent relationship.