I don't know Cathy M., but I love her.

.... me three!

BTW, did you hear about the guy financing Santorum's campaign who told Andrea Mitchell today that in his day, there was an inexpensive form of birth control involving aspirin? Women held it between their knees.

Too lazy to hunt up the clip, but you really should see it. Mitchell was pretty much speechless.

"I look at this panel, and I don't see one single individual representing the tens of millions of women across the country who want and need insurance coverage for basic preventative health care services, including family planning. Where are the women?"

Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) ask this question then walked out of the hearings. Hear! Hear!

That's one of the quicker turnarounds for who seemingly has the upper hand on an issue. It's remarkable what a little hubris can do.

Was this a miscalculation and a near miss for the President, or was this another case of a well-set trap?

A few days ago, the White House was in damage-control mode, taking heat for an issue framed as governmental heavy-handedness infringing upon religious liberty.

Now we have Republicans, thinking they were going to be talking about religious liberty, showing their heavy-handedness for including no women on a panel where the discussion really lives within the context of women's health. Then there's the guy with the aspirin-between-the-knees-as-contraception comment.

What I wonder is if the White House stumbled through this, or if it was a calculated play, knowing the risks were lower than originally portrayed in the media, because of that statistic that 98% of Catholic women have used contraception? So the risk was really that some Catholic clergy would get worked up over the issue while their parishioners would shrug it off (at least the ones who aren't already FoxNews devotees), and the potential benefit would be to draw the Republicans out to show themselves once again as misogynistic cultural neanderthals.

The result? Few lost votes, and a strengthening of the women's vote for the President.

Issa is such a supreme idiot.

One of the smartest, funniest voices on the web (and in real life) in my opinion.

Rachel Maddow has posted this appropriate photo.