"[McCain] also voted against requiring insurance companies to cover birth control."

Is there any special reason why the federal government in particular, or any level of government generally, should mandate by law that all insurance companies have to provide coverage for certain areas like birth control, which are readily available in the marketplace to begin with?

If enough people want insurance coverage for birth control, the companies that provide such coverage will attract more customers than companies that do not offer such coverage.

On the other hand, if enough people don't care whether such coverage is provided, why should the law require that I have to pay for coverage for items that I may or may not chose to use?

Carly is an intelligent, amazing political performer, yet clearly clueless about politics. Strange combination.

Depends on your whole viewpoint about the "women having sex other than to have babies while in wedlock" business. If you think that women should only have sex while married for the purpose of having babies, and that this is some kind of realistic scenario, neither birth control nor abortion is needed. If, on the other hand, you acknowledge that people have sex who don't want to have babies, pushing birth control as hard as possible to everyone possible will bring down the abortion rate (generally not a bad thing, as long as any woman who reasonably wants or needs one can get one) by bringing down the demand. You can't rely on the market for this, since people often make poor decisions in a vacuum, and a pharma company's priorities are profits, not public health. Enter the government...

Well, to paraphrase the woman, "there is no American job (benefit) that is a God-given right anymore" you'll have to compete with other medical conditions, in our new global context, too, no less.

I can see we're going to have to keep on going right on the down the line.

Once, not so long ago, I pointed out to a pro-life conservative during an argument about abortion that if you talk to very successful women, e.g., CEO's and actresses and the like, you will find that a huge number of them are pro-choice. And the reason, I posited, is because since the religious conservative dream that nobody unmarried (or at least no unmarried female) has sex is not one that the populace accepts, and because accidents happen among sexually active people, you will find that many successful women have either in fact had abortions or at least have a belief that an unplanned pregnancy could have derailed their career and prevented them from getting to the top.

In response, the pro-lifer offered me a couple of women-- Fiorina and Meg Whitman-- who support Republican causes and were very successful CEO's. I replied "how do you know they didn't have abortions", which my pro-life interlocutor thought was defamatory. (It wasn't-- I wasn't saying they had had them, only that we don't know their feelings about the matter.)

Fiorina is a successful businesswoman. Of course she thinks contraception is crucial. Otherwise she couldn't have had a sex life and a successful career. And not having a sex life isn't an option that many women are going to choose.

The thing is, the Democrats have to use this to paint the Republicans as anti-sex and anti-21st century. Everyone is afraid of admitting that nobody believes in traditional sexual morality anymore. But nobody does, except for the extreme right, and they aren't voting for Obama anyway.

“There are many health insurance plans that will cover Viagra but won’t cover birth-control medication. Those women would like a choice,” she said.

Why would a woman choose Viagra?

Well, this is embarrassing for former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, John McCain’s favorite ambassador to Ladytown.

Why? Because reporters rushed to point out that it doesn't jibe with McCain's anti-woman policies and votes? Yeah, I'll bet the contradiction received tons of coverage on CNN.

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