In case you needed convincing: The excellent Monkey Cage blog has a bunch of links to poli sci papers demonstrating, with the hardest of data, that voter identification laws depress the turnout of minority voters.

A lot of niceties are currently in dispute among Democratic candidates, for example on the question of whether health insurance should be mandated. In the meantime, Republicans are off the hook on matters that are surely of interest to voters. One example: the disappeared issue of contraception.

Consider this: "I fought to define life as beginning at conception rather than at the time of implantation." Thus Mitt Romney on a subject so banal and so revealing, so stunningly revealing, as to have eluded the attention of all the blowhard superintendents of debate at all the Republican encounters so far.

Isn't it past time that not only Romney but the current darling of authenticity, Mike Huckabee, be asked whether they think contraception ought to be curtailed?

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