Via Twitter

Are you guys ready to read tweets from  Rep. Steve "The most conservative Congressman in Texas! 100% lifetime NRA, GOA, NAGR, Right to Life rating. Offended? Yell at @DonnyFerguson" Stockman?

Are you??! Because fair warning, he's got himself a new bumper sticker idea, and it definitely includes some nonsensical sloganeering about abortion, babies and guns.

So...you ready for it?

What does this even mean? Or, what does this statement mean to you? Because the best reading we've come up with is: "If fetuses had guns, no mother would have a chance to even try to carry it to the first trimester--let alone abort it--before it accidentally knocked off the safety and blasted itself out of utero."

Which would be...a...bad thing? No? So this is definitely a pro-fetal guns message? Really? Is that what this is?

Incredible. Happy Friday, everyone. Pick these up on your way out of the DMV and don't forget to buckle up, T.G.I.F.

The Knicks are Lin-ning! (Jim McIsaac/Getty Images)

With a couple of heavy-handed losses and a recent Saturday Night Live sketch addressing the inherent racism in jokes about a certain Chinese (and Taiwanese)-American basketball player, we had hoped that the month of terrible Jeremy Lin puns were over. Yet the New York Post started out the week stronger than ever, with a cover exclaiming “Lin-phomania!” The sexual Lin-nuendo of a headline was an even more troubling evolution of Linsanity, given his Tebow-esque devotion to Christianity. We almost wish that the Knicks point guard loses even more games, so his rise to fame isn’t the Lin-ch pin for more horrific puns. (Oh god, we can’t help it, either! Someone make it stop!)

Not that we’re the only ones with our eye on Number 17: Jay-Z and Beyonce made a rare public appearance last week to a Knicks game, despite the fact that Sean Carter had previously announced a change in his allegiances to the New Jersey Nets (soon to be Brooklyn Nets), of which he is part owner along with Mikhail Prokhorov and Bruce Ratner. He’s already told Knicks fans to start trading in their hats and turn their attention to worshiping Kris Humphries but maybe that doesn’t officially kick in until next season. (Then again, Mr. Humphries and his team did defeat the Knicks in a shocking Madison Square Garden game earlier this week, leading to many a “too much MSG” joke. Too many, perhaps?) “Humphries” isn’t nearly as punny as “Lin” but we’ll give him this: whatever Kim Kardashian did to him, it seems to have improved his game.

New York royalty Jay-Z and Beyonce weren’t the only superstars in the audience for New York’s newly hot-again basketball team: Mark Zuckerberg, whose company Facebook recently filed for an IPO, was also seen attending a sports game. If that $100 billion value projection is correct, the be-hooded wunderkind could be scouting out a team to buy himself. (By the way, you know what’s cooler than one hundred million dollars? Of course you do; we all saw The Social Network.)

Orange and blue aren’t the only colors that have caught the eye of New Yorks this week. There’s also red … like the color of newly-appointed Catholic cardinal Timothy Dolan’s new uniform, who was elevated to the position of cardinal on Saturday. He’s already laid out his four big priorities for his new role: two of them involve fundraising, one involves outreach, and the last involves convincing heterosexual Catholics to stop divorcing each other. (Homosexual Catholics, keep doing whatever you want; you’re going to hell anyway.) Last week Cardinal Dolan was leading the crusade with Congressional Republicans against President Obama’s reproductive rights ruling, which would have forced religious employers to pay for health insurance that includes access to contraceptives. Now the White House has compromised with a plan that requires health insurance companies to pay for the care, but neither group is placated. And now a certain presidential candidate is suggesting that use of birth control is morally wrong, which, if you count Mr. Santorum’s kids and assume no use of contraception, probably tells you something about his sex life.  But the posturing and disingenuousness in the so-called debate has been completely Lin-sane... Ahem. Insane. In-sane.

You know what? We give up. We don’t have the Lin-ergy to keep this up. Gooooooo Knickerbockers.

That’s the lesson reasonable people will take away from the recent controversy involving the nation’s best-known breast-cancer advocacy group, the Susan G. Komen Foundation. Komen, in an act of political and moral cowardice, announced that it would no longer fund Planned Parenthood’s breast-cancer screenings because the organization has come under relentless attack from antiabortion groups. Planned Parenthood, of course, also provides contraception and abortion services in addition to breast-cancer screenings.

Thanks to the quick action of tens of thousands of women, Komen reversed its decision. That’s a good result, but the controversy itself remains very troubling. Why did such a well-known and admired organization feel the need to defund Planned Parenthood in the first place?

The answer is that antiabortion zealots have poisoned the debate over abortion and contraception, as Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum’s frightening campaign has demonstrated. In their world, Planned Parenthood is nothing short of evil, and any organization that gives a penny to it is judged to be a coconspirator. Never mind the possibility that women surely will die without access to the organization’s breast-cancer screenings.

The public outrage over Komen’s original decision is heartening, for it shows that some people understand what is happening in this cultural war over abortion and women’s health.

That battle, however, is far from over.

Mary Mahoney and Lauren Mitchell of The Doula Project (Photo credit: Jackie Snow)

At 9 a.m. on a recent Sunday in a small conference room on the 13th floor of a Manhattan hospital (The Observer agreed not to name the facility), Lauren Mitchell, a 27-year-old gynecological teaching associate, invited a group of 15 medical students and one reporter to introduce themselves. “So go around, state your name, why you are here...and your star sign,” she prompted, sitting at the head of a conference table.

Awkward pause.

Astrology probably isn’t what any of them expected when they signed up for the class, which will account for the first 6 of the 40 hours of  classroom required to volunteer as an abortion doula.

One by one, the students introduced themselves. One was male, the rest female. There were a smattering of future OB/GYN’s, a few pediatricians, and an unusually high percentage of Earth Signs.

An abortion doula is a new concept, pioneered by the Doula Project, of which Ms. Mitchell is a cofounder. In essence, it’s the same as a birth doula—in fact, most practitioners do both—except that she provides support to women getting abortions who’ve chosen not to take their pregnancies to term, offering counseling, back rubs and reassurance.

A familiarity with the zodiac, it turns out, can come in handy.

“We often ask patients their star-sign,” Ms. Mitchell told The Observer in an interview after the class let out. She was petite and wore a denim dress. “When a patient is nervous or anxious, telling them a little about their sign can take their mind off the abortion—everyone loves to hear about themselves.” (It occurred to us that talking about birth signs might have the effect of reminding women of, well, birth, but we went with it.)

New York has been called the abortion capital of the U.S., a title granted by pro-life organizations and made official earlier this year in a column by Ariel Kaminer in The New York Times. Ms. Kaminer cited a health department report released in December of 2010 which found that about 40 percent of pregnancies in New York City end in abortion, about 90,000 per year. “New Yorkers seeking to terminate a pregnancy can choose from more kinds of procedures at more kinds of facilities with fewer obstacles—and more ways to pay—than just about any place else,” she wrote, noting that it was covered by Medicaid here, unlike many other states, and that there were few of the restrictions involving parental consent, waiting periods and viewing sonograms found elsewhere. Last week, a local blog devoted to bargain living, brokelyn.com, even published a guide to local providers.

Despite the failure last week of Mississippi’s “personhood” amendment, which would have given a fertilized embryo the status of a human being in the eyes of the law—criminalizing all abortion as well as some forms of birth control, like the IUD—state legislatures, buoyed by Republican election gains, did pass more than 80 laws restricting abortion in 2011, making it a watershed year for the pro-life movement. Meanwhile, pro-lifers are working on personhood initiatives in six other states. Ohio is considering a “heartbeat bill,” which would outlaw abortion as early as six weeks. Other states have adopted restrictions like mandatory ultrasounds, mandated counseling, and bans on coverage of the procedure by Medicaid and even private insurance policies. Today, 88 percent of U.S. counties have no abortion provider, and in non-metropolitan areas this statistic rises to 97 percent, according to the US National Abortion Federation, an organization of abortion providers. As a result, New York has increasingly become a magnet for women from other states who are seeking to terminate their pregnancies.

Given their string of legislative losses, there seems to be a shift of energy underway in the pro-choice movement, as activists back away from policy debates and instead turn their attention to practical matters, organizing to assist women in navigating the shifting legal landscape. In New York, they are offering hands to hold and backrubs, opening up their apartments to women from out of town, and helping them deal with insurance claims. “It is about finding the flesh and blood approach, rather than the theoretical one,” Ms. Mitchell said.

Rebecca Stanton, a professor at Columbia University, felt a little guilty when she and her husband purchased a roomy two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan, she told The Observer over tea, in front of the impressive view from her Harlem apartment. “We had all this extra space and it seemed sort of silly,” she said. A friend directed her to Haven, an organization that finds volunteers willing to house low-income women and their partners who are traveling to the city for abortions. Haven was founded in 2001 when Catherine Megill, an abortion clinic social worker, discovered that a number of patients were forced, due to financial circumstance, to sleep on park benches or in their cars.

Ms. Stanton remembered one family she hosted, who’d driven up from Virginia in a dilapidated station wagon. The bumper sticker on their car made her draw a hand to her heart. “It said, ‘I am the proud parent of an honor roll student at [so and so] middle school,” she recalled. The honor roll student was the one seeking the abortion. She and both parents crashed in Ms. Stanton’s extra bedroom the evening before the procedure.

The girl’s parents had already extended the lines on their credit cards to initially make the trip. That afternoon, an ultrasound indicated she was further along, by four critical days, than previously thought, tacking another $400 onto the medical bill. As Ms. Stanton busied herself ordering Chinese food, the girl’s parents called bank managers. When that didn’t work, they called in favors.

“The girl was very quiet,” Ms. Stanton recalled. “I am not even sure if she knew she was having sex. She was overweight, and her family didn't find out she was pregnant until she was 21 weeks along.”

Another volunteer, author and political activist Jane Weissman, opens up her spacious Greenwich Village apartment for Haven when she’s not traveling. Ms. Weissman said the roughest part of the experience is dropping the patient off at the clinic, sometimes walking her past protesters—each party knowing they will likely never see one another again. While most women Haven sees are getting second trimester abortions, Ms. Weissman said they often just want to go straight home after the second day, regardless of how they feel.

Approximately 4,000 women have been assisted by abortion doulas trained by The Doula Project, which was started by Ms. Mitchell and Mary Mahoney in 2007. The group partners with clinics and public hospitals to, as the website delicately puts it, “support people across the spectrum of pregnancy.”

“The mission of our project is to support people who would otherwise not have access to doula services,” Ms. Mitchell said. “So we see, for instance, people who are undocumented and can’t apply to Medicaid, or folks who are really lacking in resources.” They started the project after undergoing doula training in college. Ms. Mitchell says she went to a “hippie college, where it seemed everyone was training to be a doula.” The idea of an abortion doula, she said, was a way to stand out. Originally, the project caught some flack from the pro-choice community. As Marisa Meltzer wrote in a 2010 Slate piece, “Even as a pro-choice feminist, when I heard about abortion doulas my first thought was: Are women really so fragile that they need to hire a complete stranger to hold their hand at the doctor's?”

“We were concerned about that when we first started, that the pro-choice movement wouldn’t exactly embrace us,” Ms. Mahoney said, “because we come from the reproductive justice movement, which is more holistic and looks at people’s feelings and individual experiences, not just policy.” Ms. Mitchell added that some abortion providers were skeptical at first, as well, but that they now they find that the doulas make their job easier.

During the doula training, one instructor explained how to help clients who don’t speak English. She sucked in her breath, and moved her arms encouragingly. “I try to mime how to breathe, like an owl: ‘who, who.’ At first they think you are crazy, but they realize you are trying to help.”

Ms. Mitchell estimated that doulas see about 15–20 later term abortions a week, and about 75 first trimesters. In training, the instructors explain that many women seeking abortions are nonetheless not politically pro-choice. She handed out flash cards with real-life situations. The first read: “A woman tells you, ‘I just killed my baby.’ How do you respond?” The students broke into groups to discuss the question. Many came up with a similar answer: Explain that the procedure is legal because the fetus is not a baby, it just has the potential to be one.

That, of course, is the murky distinction that makes the issue so difficult for everyone it touches. As the executive director for Feminists Choosing Life of New York, Kelly Brunacini has thought a lot about about the flip-side, how to convince someone that a fetus is a baby: “The quickest way to change a pro-choicer’s mind is to let them see the procedure,” she said. “A lot of the argument is intellectual: ‘My body, my choice’ sounds really good. When you see an abortion or you go through the mourning process with a woman who has aborted, it becomes less intellectualized, and more real.”

To some extent, Ms. Mitchell sees her point. In an interview with The Observer, she joked that she sometimes wants to automatically reject the abortion doula applications of pro-choice activists, because it’s so hard to go from pro-choice rhetoric to supporting real people who don’t necessarily find their abortions empowering.“Those pictures pro-life activists flash are real,” Ms. Mahoney said. “That is what a fetus looks like when its head is crushed. When you see the procedure, you must decide, as a pro-choice person, whether you are in or out.” She’s thought about it a lot. “I have never been more in,” she said.

As restrictions on abortion have tightened, talk has grown among members of Haven and the Doula Project of creating a national network, an underground railroad of sorts, made up of women who would provide places to stay and/or transportation to and from clinics all over the United States. “Abortion doulas can offer someone to travel with, so they could have a support person the whole way, and not just your Mom or husband who is freaking out,” Ms. Mahoney explained. Other pro-choice organizations have begun raising money to help women pay for abortions, including The New York Abortion Access Fund, which earlier this year held a fundraiser, sponsored by Jezebel, that included a screening of Dirty Dancing.

During the doula training Ms. Mitchell demonstrated the manual vacuum aspirator for the class. Reaching beneath the conference table, she removed several small cups green Jell-O and placed them on the table. “I remembered the green this time,” she said, to nervous titters all around. “The last group, we had red, and I think it scared some of the doulas.”

Ms. Mitchell stood up and placed the end of the device, which resembled a very large syringe, into the cup. She pulled the handle. There was a loud slurping sound as the Jell-O was sucked into the chamber and liquified.

“Does it sound like that in the room?” we asked.

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“You should play music or something.”

Ms. Mahoney said that some clinics do in fact turn on a radio, but sometimes the song can be wildly inappropriate, i.e., “Papa Don’t Preach.” “One time ‘Everybody Hurts’ came on,” she recalled, “and the doctor slammed it off.”

The students then tried out the procedure for ourselves. The Observer found it fairly easy, but some students had more trouble. There were squeals when one glob of Jell-o flew across the room and landed on the table in front of us.

The purpose of the demonstration was to familiarize us with the procedure, but some pro-choice activists have begun to consider whether they would break the law if abortion became illegal. “Doing them underground is a major last resort,” Ms. Mahoney said. “I would be willing to, if things came to that.”

Such actions recall the work of the Jane Collective, which was one inspiration for the Doula Project. The collective was a feminist organization in Chicago that performed more than 11,000 illegal abortions in the 1960s, before the passage of Roe v. Wade. Women calling to make appointments would ask, “Can I speak to Jane?”

When the Jane Coalition was uncovered by the police, seven women were arrested. They were looking at lifetime prison sentences. But while they sat awaiting trial, Roe v. Wade passed and the group walked.

Since The Doula Project launched, a handful of similar collectives have popped up across the country. The Observer spoke with abortion doulas in places like Ohio and Illinois, for whom a ban on abortion is considerably more likely. They agreed performing them underground is a last resort, but not off the table.

What is more feasible, some advocates told us, is insurance fraud. At many public hospitals in New York, abortion is on a sliding-fee scale like any other surgery. With proof of residence and a low income, a patient can be treated for around $150, payable over time. “Find a friend in New York City, get an address and mail yourself something, go to New York the next week and get your abortion fee scaled,” one pro-choice advocate suggested.

Some pro-choicers are also considering medical school. Ms. Megill, the founder of Haven, is currently doing her residency in order to become a provider. “What is most needed is for doctors to go into this line of work and to be willing to set up clinics in places where abortion is unavailable,” she explained.

“The fact that medical schools don’t teach abortion procedures as a matter of course is criminal,” Ms. Stanton said.

While the pregnant 13-year-old made the biggest impact on Ms. Stanton, she said all of the women she has hosted had excellent reasons for terminating their pregnancies. “One woman said over dinner that she didn’t believe in abortion, she was a Christian. But she had two kids already. She said, ‘I know I have to take care of the two kids I have first.’ This was her making the best choice she could, between two things she believed in.”

Those behind the restrictions of 2011, believe that more laws will equal less abortion. New York has yet to pass any restrictions on abortion, and in fact, state Sen. Andrea Stewart-Cousins has introduced the Reproductive Health Act, which among other things, grants “the fundamental right of every female to determine the course of her pregnancy.”

“New York is primarily a democratic state” Ms. Bruncini said. “This is a tough state for us. I don’t think legislation can end abortion. That would have to be s shift in peoples hearts, a cultural shift.”

According to a recent report by the Guttmacher Institute, abortion rates declined by 8 percent between 2002 and 2006.

Correction: An earlier version of this story erroneously reported that the Doula Project had placed an announcement on its website stating that it would provide support to women taking Cytotec. It also misattributed two quotes to Ms. Mitchell that should have been attributed to Ms. Mahoney. The Observer regrets the errors.

(Chiascuro Foundation)

Did you know that New York City had 87,273 abortions in 2009? That's like 1 percent of the city's population. Thanks to the anti-abortion group the Chiascuro Foundation (motto "fight for the protection of all human life from conception to natural death"), we now even know which are the naughtiest neighborhoods through a helpful interactive map.

Chiascuro, which points out 41 percent of all New York City pregnancies are terminated, got the city to break out its abortion numbers by zip code, and the resulting map is both enlightening and puzzling. Zip code 10012, smack in the middle of Greenwich Village has a 60.3 percent abortion rate, which makes sense considering its proximity to N.Y.U. Less clear is why 10018 tops this list—it's the Garment District and that neighborhood we love, Hellsea, so it's not exactly a bustling hood.

Other interesting facts? Greenpoint has more abortions than Williamsburg, the Upper East Side is more prudish than the Upper West, and many of the city's minority communities—Bushwick/Bed-Stuy/Brownsville in Brooklyn; Jamaica, Queens; the South Bronx; Coney Island—have high abortion rates.

The Chiascuro Foundation has developed a plan to stave the city's abortion rate: don't have sex!

"The City and it’s extremist allies will tell you that only so-called “comprehensive” sex education works, and that “abstinence-only” curricula have been “proven” not to work," the Chiascuro Foundation's website says. " They recommend a program focused solely around abstinence.

But fear not. The group's anti-sex plan is super informative about contraceptives too.  "Abstinence-centered programs contain plenty of information about contraceptive methods: how frequently they fail to protect young people from pregnancy and STDs, and how condoms provide no protection against HPV and only reduce the risk of contracting herpes by about 30%." Thanks for the advice guys!

The Observer talked to Planned Parenthood of New York to hear their take on the stats—numbers, it should be said, the group does not dispute. "Making abortion less available isn't going to do anyone any favors in terms of health," Erica Sackin said. "New York City has one of the highest rates of unintended pregnancy int eh country. That's something we should be focusing on."

Yesterday, St. Patrick's Cathedral was packed to the vault-ribs with onlookers at a three-hour mass that formally invested him with the office of Archbishop. These are the kinds of moments that non-Catholics thrill to: the smell of incense, the rows upon rows of funny-hatted priests, all looking to someone unused to the spectacle like hundreds of Cardinal Richelieus from a Monty Python skit.

And the setting, St. Patrick's, is certainly amenable to photography. In other words, the story calls for some spectacle, and for placing the new Archbishop at the center of it. Sacrificing a close-up of Archbishop Dolan's face for a photo that conveys the gravity of the occasion is the right move—even if the marketing department wants that endorsement photo of the Archbishop mugging with a framed copy of your yesterday wood. The coverline reads, “It's his day!” and it certainly was. But the rest, “New archbishop wins over New York,” is probably a bit of a tautological proposition given the image. He certainly won over the city's front pages. More on this below! But first, we should address the News' second story, a refer to coverage of the season opener at Yankee Stadium: “HOME RUN! New era starts for Yankees in Stadium opener: SEE 20-PAGE SPECIAL SECTION AND SPORTS.” 20 pages? That is a lot of pages! The presentation here is white on black, which probably was necessary to avoid offsetting the Dolan story too completely. And the information about the size of this insert was probably enough to sell the package. No doubt there was no question of selling it on the front: pages are costly, and if a 20-page insert can't be recruited to move copies off the newsstand, why bother?

The New York Post: Let's go inside first, to Cindy Adams. “NOT that I've majored in archbishops or anything,” she leads, “but a first meet 'n' greet with St. Patrick's newest CEO brings up one Prince of the Church ago. John Cardinal O'Connor. Easy smile. Loved a joke. Once showed me his bedroom, and the inside of his personal closet. Would invite to his private quarters for an Irish oatmeal and Jewish bagel breakfast. His Eminence remained as accessible as he always told you God was. Those same vibes radiate from Archbishop Timothy Dolan.

“The man has it together. Milwaukee, Shmilwaukee, he's in a New York frame of mind.”

This was possibly the best summation of the day of ritual—both liturgical and political—that dominated the city's elite yesterday. If the tone is a tad admiring, it's the only concession: Ms. Adams is interested in people who have power, and people who show her little off-message cordialities. Timothy Dolan is congenial, warm, self-effacing, politically shrewd and doctrinally sound. The reassessment of Cardinal O'Connor's tenure as archbishop revealed his political acumen in retrospect, and also the warm feelings that City Fathers (and Mothers) had for him even when they were doing battle with him. Archbishop Dolan's investiture was like a statement: the Church is back as a political player in New York. If Cardinal Egan was a bit of a cold fish, it's only because his mission was largely internal to the Archdiocese. He had to get the thing back in working order. Now the pulpit of St. Pat's can return to its former position as one of the most important political pulpits in New York, and Archbishop Dolan showed yesterday that he can get that job done nicely.

Why is none of this conveyed on the covers of the tabloids this morning? The Post comes close: it's headline is “Dolan's Mass appeal.” In other words: the Catholic Church is once again a power-constituency. Read inside and you'll see that on the very day of his investiture he made sure the press knew he planned to fight for pro-life causes and fight gay marriage. The headline comes close, that is, to stating the premise: this guy is a leader of men, and not just a top administrator.

As for the art, the Post has always been a little less of a “catholic” newspaper than the News. What do I mean by that? It's hard to say. But you can't help but think that the News covers the Catholic church the way a New York City Catholic would talk about it with other Catholics, while the Post (and the Times, if it's relevant) always seem to talk about it a bit as though they've just wandered in to a church for a Midnight Mass at Christmas, or had to sit through a wedding mass or something. All the pomp is called out, all the kneeling and standing, and lots and lots of quotes from the most metaphorically obscure and turgid parts of the homily.

And so the Post cover image, naturally, gives us Archbishop Dolan standing as if he is giving the Sermon on the Mount, with lots of bishops looking like little chess pieces tittering about at his foot. Yesterday was a spectacle of Roman proportions, and the Post didn't shy away from picturing it thusly.

General observations: There is the sense looking at the two tabloid covers that decorum, on an occasion like this, demands the setting aside of the political in favor of … what, exactly? For what purpose besides politics were Michael Bloomberg and David Paterson, along with a host of other current and former city and state politicians, present here? Of course, the Archbishop himself is not known for restraint in his political speech. For geniality, straightforwardness, and diplomacy, yes; but polite restraint, no. In a question-and-answer session with reporters he was straightforward about his intention to wage a public battle against the legalization of same-sex marriage in New York, to which the Governor will be devoting a chunk of his day today as he introduces legislation meant to put New York on the list of states where gays can marry.

And not only in this Q and A session but from the pulpit, he was forthright about his intention to use the pulpit to amplify the Catholic Church's well-known position on legal abortions. But politicians present at St. Pat's didn't take any of the bait, preferring to say noncommittal stuff about how they were psyched to have “dialogue” with the pleasant Milwaukee priest. Make no mistake: none of them underestimates the man whom The New York Times in its lead sentence today described as “ a congenial cleric with a taste for baseball and fast food and a firm commitment to Roman Catholic orthodoxy.”

His political talents are formidable, and the fact that at his installation he could bring the crowd of St. Patrick's to its feet with a line about protecting life “in the womb” without anybody seeming to point out that, from a citywide point of view, this is pretty controversial stuff, and without this element of his investiture being even hinted at on the front pages, may just be evidence of that.

In other words, the tabloids followed the lead of David Paterson, of people like thrice-married Rudy Giuliani, or avid pro-choice advocate Hillary Clinton, and offered the new Archbishop a broad, noncommittal smile. Can't wait to Dialogue with you, Archbishop Dolan!

Of course, in the inside pages both papers covered all of it. How could you not? But the big message of today's wood was just, “We're glad to be back in business with St. Pat's again.”

Winner: The New York Post

But he's not giving up on Iowa altogether, knowing that a strong second (or even third) place showing in January might still be interpreted as a momentum-building "win" that would bolster his standing in subsequent primary states.  And, for that matter, he doesn't seem to be giving up on the Christian conservatives in the state.

Campaigning in Council Bluffs yesterday, the heart of conservative western Iowa, Giuliani pledged to appoint "strict constructionist judges, because judges interpret the Constitution. They should not be allowed to make it up."   The language is significant because, well, can you think of a single pro-choice politician who has ever talked of appointing "strict constructionists" to the courts?   Only after making that point did Giuliani add that “the abortion question is not a litmus test. Roe against Wade is not a litmus test; no particular case is a litmus test."

Many would consider those statements flatly contradictory, since it is generally understood that "strict constructionists" favor rescinding Roe. Giuliani, of course, used the "strict constructionist" line earlier this year, before his campaign realized that he would have to come clean about his pro-choice position, which he finally did back in May.  

The most likely explanation for what Giuliani is doing now is that he sees an unexpected opening among social conservatives.  

Of the big-name Republican candidates, John McCain had the most reliably anti-abortion record; but he's tuna fish now, and anyway the right never completely trusted him for other reasons.   And there are still questions about the sincerity of Mitt Romney's "conversion" on the abortion issue – and on so many others – in 2004.  Most notably, though, is that the news of Giuliani's remarks in Iowa coincides with confirmation – finally – that Fred Thompson, who was supposed to fill the vacuum on the right, was indeed a paid lobbyist for an abortion rights group last decade.

In that context, no one is perfect.  Giuliani seems to be calculating that for conservatives sympathetic to him on other issues, his position on abortion will be good enough.

Reactions to the late-term-partial-birth abortion ban from the 2008 candidates was quick and broke along party lines.

Hillary Clinton's favorable ratings sunk in a USA Today/Gallup survey.

John Edwards may be having lunch with Mario Cuomo today.

The West Islip Fire District spent $615 of taxpayer money on porn.

Diana Fortuna said the state budget "didn't bring about nearly enough change."

Eliot Spitzer won't be mentioning ethanol in his energy speech today.

Spitzer issued his first veto.

Mike Bloomberg is expected to advocate some kind of congestion pricing during his environmental speech later this week.

The City Council proclamation given to the founder of Scientology was criticized by Bloomberg, and may lead to new rules in the Council.

Ed Koch said that Al Sharpton would be a "crossover leader" if he apologized for the Tawana Brawley hoax.

Pedro Espada denies he wants to take over the GOP in the Bronx.

And the Daily News editorial board blasts Jon Corzine for speeding to meet with Don Imus and the Rutgers basketball team.