Your Abbreviated Pundit Round-up

Sleep-in Wednesday punditry.

Amy Walter:

Democrats had their own intraparty fight the other week over abortion coverage in the health care bill, and the battle lines were decidedly gender-based. The fight to include restrictions in the House bill was led by two men, Bart Stupak of Michigan and Brad Ellsworth of Indiana, while two women, Diana DeGette of Colorado and Louise Slaughter of New York, are now leading the charge to strip the abortion restrictions from the final bill. Furthermore, two women, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley and Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, were the first Senate candidates to say they'd vote against a Senate bill that included restrictions on abortion coverage.

For years, the goal of feminism was to get reproductive rights out of the realm of "women's issues" and into the category of "family issues." And many have wondered if EMILY's List, an organization dedicated solely to electing pro-choice Democratic women, has outlived its usefulness. After all, in an era that saw a woman come so close to being elected president, a women's-only group can sound as outdated as the three-martini lunch. Yet it was striking that on an issue as central to the Democratic party ideology as this one, it was up to women to define and defend it.

Amy's one of the sharpest analysts in the business.

NY Times:

Despite new recommendations that most women start breast screening at 50 rather than 40, many doctors said Tuesday that they were simply not ready to make such a drastic change.

Medicine practice doesn't turn on a dime. One reason is appropriate doubt about new findings (let it be verified!) but don't fool yourself. Another reason is that many docs haven't heard or read of the new findings yet. There needs to be less outrage and more thoughtful debate about the new guidelines.

Errington Thompson (surgeon):

The reason that this is important, is that it relates to the imaging modalities that physicians use to diagnose breast cancer. Mammograms are very sensitive in patients with fatty breasts. Mammograms become far less sensitive when women are young and their breasts are very dense.

So, it is clear that mammograms in women who are in their 20s and 30s are extremely difficult to read. This is the reason why most physicians do not recommend routine mammograms in this age group. Mammograms in women over 50 makes sense because they are relatively easy to read and the incidence of breast cancer in this age group is increasing. For over 30 years, the question has been what to do with women between the ages of 40-49...

This is an extremely important topic. I’ve only scratched the surface of the complexity. I’m extremely disappointed that the talking heads of the media have gotten a hold of this issue and are using it as a way to drive ratings. I urge women to talk to their physicians. If you don’t like your physician, find another one. This topic is critically important. You need to understand the various recommendations that are out there. Finally, it is important to realize that the American Cancer Society, the National Cancer Institute and several other organizations have stated that they will not change their own guidelines.

To have a physician, get health reform passed.

Charles Blow:

Allow me to reprise my role as The Man Who Stares At Votes to provide an addendum to my most recent column, "The Passion of the Right," which warned that:

"[Republicans] are likely to make significant gains [in the 2010 midterm elections], not because of their anachronous tenets, but because of historical patterns and an electorate exasperated with seeming Democratic ineptitude."

To buttress that theory, I’d like to point out more supporting data.

And here is the supporting data from Pew.

Maureen Dowd:  

Of course, the subtitle of Sarah Palin’s book is "An American Life."

Because she is the lovely avatar of real Americans — ordinary, hard-working, God-fearing, common-sense, good, ordinary, real Americans.

If you are not living an American life, you are, to use a Palin coinage, living "bass-ackwards."...

It is also real hard to be a real, ordinary, hard-working American if you are part of "what used to be called ‘mainstream’ national media," as Sarah scornfully writes. "The time has come to acknowledge that it is counterfeit objectivity the liberal media try to sell consumers," she says. "A period in the great American experiment has passed."

I was beginning to panic. I pored over the book to see if there was anything that I shared in common with this apotheosis of traditional American values.

Thomas Frank on Sarah Palin:

Maybe in their business lives, conservatives are the stern, unforgiving masters of capitalist lore. But when it comes to politics, oh, do they love a whiner!