autorave/politics

Evangelical Protestant teen-agers are significantly less likely than other groups to use contraception. This could be because evangelicals are also among the most likely to believe that using contraception will send the message that they are looking for sex. It could also be because many evangelicals are steeped in the abstinence movement's warnings that condoms won't actually protect them from pregnancy or venereal disease.

More provocatively, Regnerus found that only half of sexually active teen-agers who say that they seek guidance from God or the Scriptures when making a tough decision report using contraception every time. By contrast, sixty-nine per cent of sexually active youth who say that they most often follow the counsel of a parent or another trusted adult consistently use protection.

"They could come up with some bulletproof way of protecting his e-mail and digital correspondence, but anything can be hacked..The nature of the president's job is that others can use e-mail for him."

An essential political tool.

Transition officials call it Obama 2.0 -- an ambitious effort to transform the president-elect's vast Web operation and database of supporters into a modern new tool to accomplish his goals in the White House. If it works, the new president could have an unprecedented ability to appeal for help from millions of Americans who already favor his ideas, bypassing the news media to pressure Congress.

A ridiculous update on a ridiculous lawsuit: In August I wrote about a carpooling startup called PickupPal. The idea is that people can gather on the site to find others traveling to the same places, and carpool there to save gas.

Great idea, right? Wrong. The bus companies freaked and sued under an Ontario law that limits carpoolers to traveling only from home to work and back, riding with the same driver every day and paying only by the week.

"The Prince," Machiavelli's how-to guide for sovereigns, turned out to be "a scandal that Western political thought and practice has been gazing at in horror and in fascination since its first publication,"

"Is Vladimir Putin a savior, a man whose eight-year reign has elevated Russia to new economic heights? Or is he a bully, a strongman who uses violence to maintain a hold on power? The likely answer is both."