• Welfare workers report that girls in gangs are often raped by the male members of the gang as part of initiation, but many of them accept this as routine. "The girls think they are going to be protected by the gang if they have sex with one person but then they find there are more boys there," said Teresa Pointing, chief executive of In-volve, a charity that works with teen girls. • According to White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, Sasha and Malia Obama have not been vaccinated for swine flu. The vaccine is currently unavailable to the twogirls because they are not at high risk. • Doctor Patrick O'Brian recalls being shocked at the state of pregnant women in Uganda, a country that apparently has some of the worst maternal care in the world. In efforts to address this issue, he started a program with the University College Hospital in London that works to distribute medicine to women in need and offer pre and post-natal care to mothers. • Researchers have found that breast reduction surgery may have unexpected benefits. Through testing the removed tissue, doctors may be able to better identify patients at risk for breast cancer. Another upside to breast reduction? Decreased back pain and increased range of movement. • According to a new study, well-educated older women who live alone report a lower emotional well-being than breast cancer patients who live with a partner. •  A little girl from Brooklyn has made the news for a heartbreaking letter she wrote to Sasha and Malia Obama. Bianca's mother was shot several years ago by an abusive boyfriend, and the 6-year-old and her father are still struggling. In her letter, she begged for help for her family, and readers of the Daily News have been quick to respond. • Researchers have found that sperm itself - and not just the fluid it travels in - may transmit HIV to healthy cells. Doctors previously suspected that sperm could transmit the virus, but they were unable to prove this until recently. • A revealing new poll from the UK shows that 90% of expecting mothers are denied the choice as to where they will give birth. The vast majority of women in Britain are not offered the option to give birth at home or at a birthing center attended by a midwife. • The Daily Beast on sexism in nonprofits: "Charity is not allowed to use the same tools as business because society subconsciously regards it as female, and discriminates against it the same way it has historically discriminated against women." Read the rest of their interesting take on charity here. • Good news: The Saudi king has decided not to flog a female journalist charged with participation in a television show in which a man spoke publicly about his sex life. • Among women with BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, breast cancer is diagnosed six years earlier than in previous generations. Doctors don't know if women are screened better today, or if hormonal and environmental factors are giving women cancer earlier. • Jury selection will begin today in the trial of the first 12 male members of the polygamist sect whose Yearning For Zion ranch was raided last year. Flora Jessop, who escaped the compound 15 years ago, said she's happy to see the men go on trial but, "What I'm upset the most about, I think, is the fact that none of the women have been indicted, as well. ... I think that the women were nothing but pimps on that compound and giving their daughters over to these perverts knowing what was going to happen to them." • A study by the National Center for Voice and Speech found that female teachers used their voices about 10 percent more than males when teaching and 7 percent more when not teaching. Female teachers speak louder than male teachers at work. All teachers spend more time talking than most professionals and are at a greater risk for hurting their voices. • Debbie Davis, 29, of Sunderland, England has been named Britain's top Avon saleswoman. She started selling the cosmetics when she was laid off five years ago and now she's making $408,000 a year. • 14-year-old Dutch girl Laura Dekker says she will wait until the school year is over to begin her attempt to become the youngest sailor to circumnavigate the globe. She had planned to head out in August but was stopped by authorities who said she was too young. The court is expected to rule on her case by Friday. • Elizabeth Edwards told a local news station that John Edwards said of their relationship, "Perhaps [it's] not the great love story that we hoped, but maybe a great love story nonetheless." Well, most great love stories don't involve the man possibly fathering a child with another woman. • After more than 120 years, the Beloit's girls reformatory school in Kansas closed for good in August. Before 1983 the institution often housed girls who hadn't committed criminal offenses, but were considered "incorrigible," "immoral," or had suffered abuse at home. Under some administrations, girls were punished with huge doses of vomit- and diarrhea-inducing castor oil, humiliated with forced hair clipping, or even sterilized. • After a "concerned citizen" in Yulee, Florida tipped the police that the Girls Gone Wild bus was in town, police organized an undercover investigation and arrested seven women who complied with the organizers' request that they "show their breasts so they could be photographed/filmed or so they could have their breasts spray painted. The women were charged with indecent exposure along with the bar's owner and two Girls Gone Wild employees, who were each charged with illegally operating a sexually oriented business. •

• Ashlee Simpson-Wentz has been fired from Melrose Place along with co-star Colin Egglesfield, with whom she was rumored to be flirting on-set.

• Producer Todd Slavkin is trying to make it sound like it was always the plan to have Ashlee exit after filming episode 12 in January, saying, "we felt that once the murder mystery was resolved, the tone of the show was going to shift into a much more fun, romantic, sexy upbeat kind of show, and [her] character would move on." [Perez Hilton]
• Jessica Simpson and Gerard Butler: not on. A source close to Jess says: "There is nothing romantic there at all." [Us]
• Lil Wayne pled guilty to attempted weapon possession in New York today. Police say they pulled his tour bus over because they smelled pot and found a loaded gun in a Louis Vuitton bag. He is expected to be sentenced to one year behind bars. [TMZ]
• During a radio interview today, Chris Brown said he's learning a lot in his court-ordered domestic violence course and hopes fans can forgive him. "At the end of the day, I'm human," he said. "Of course you're gonna have your thoughts and opinions. I'm not gonna say they're wrong. But at the end of the day, it's not right to judge someone. People make mistakes all the time." [Radar Online]
• Teyana Taylor says her support of Chris Brown has never wavered. "A lot of people were jumping on different bandwagons and I really felt like that was wack," she said. "Before the incident between him and Rihanna, Chris had always been my brother... I've known him for four years and I was one of the only people that stood by his side when the situation happened... When he gets back to where he used to be, a lot of people are going to come running back and smiling in his face." [Vibe]
• You can listen to the moment that caused a judge to declare a mistrial in the John Travolta extortion case at the link. At a Progressive Liberal Party convention, Bahamian lawmaker Picewell Forbes screamed, "Pleasant Bridgewater is a free woman!" The judge declared a mistrial because he believes someone on the jury may have been "communicating" with Forbes. [TMZ]
• Picewell Forbes has been summoned to appear before the judge because he wants Forbes to explain himself in person. [TMZ]
• John Travolta's lawyer says "He was upset [about the mistrial] as he wanted closure. The family wants to privately begin the long and difficult healing process – as well as to properly honor Jett's memory – without the cloud of this litigation over their heads. But he said he is committed to cooperating with authorities so justice can be served." [People]
• Elizabeth Taylor was one of the first people to see the Michael Jackson concert documentary This Is It. She held a screening at her house over the weekend and, according to a source, said, "The film was pure genius and the most magnificent film," and gave it a standing ovation. [Entertainment Tonight]
• When asked if he and wife Khloe Kardashian are planning on having kids, Lamar Odom said, "Maybe one day, hopefully... That's what kings and queens are put on the earth for, to have offspring." [Us]
• Kris Jenner says the Kardashians "have a hunch" about who stole $100,000 of jewelry from Kourtney Kardashian's house. They think it was a group of "jealous" people close enough to the family to know when E!'s cameras weren't rolling and to sort out "what was real jewelry and what was costume jewelry." [Us]
• Dennis Quaid narrowly avoided a DUI when he got in his car outside a L.A. restaurant and moved it about a foot when a cop told him to get out of the car and go back inside and call a cab. A paparazzi yelled, "You don't want a DUI. You don't want to end up like Mel Gibson" and everyone laughed. [TMZ]
• Madonna will visit Malawi on Sunday to lay the foundation stone for a girls' school she's building for $15 million. [Reuters]
• So You Think You Can Dance host Cat Deely says last season when Katie Holmes was on the show Tom Cruise was, "an absolute sweetheart. He was taking videos of his little girl and wife. Just like any guy, he was incredibly proud of his spouse." [E!]
• Lady Gaga says her tour with Kanye West was cancelled because, "It just wasn't the right timing... I don't want to embellish on it too much, because I want to respect Kanye's privacy. But we just had our own reasons. We're real friends, real friends can make decisions like that, and we wanted to keep the momentum going in terms of pop music staying innovative with hip-hop and R&B, and we really wanted to do it, and it just wasn't the right time. But who's to say what will happen in the future?" [People]
• Now that the Fame Kills tour has been cancelled, Lady Gaga will do her own tour called The Monster Ball beginning on November 27. "I wanted to really put together a show that would be the most beautiful, expensive-looking, delicious show, but that my fans wouldn't have to pay a ton of money to come see," she says. [Rolling Stone]
• The Spice Girls may be reuniting for a new reality competition show in which they will search for the women to play themselves in a Spice Girls musical. [The Sun]
• Lisa Kudrow and Dan Bucatinsky are developing a comedy for Showtime based on the memoir Why the Long Face? about author Craig Chester coming to terms with his homosexuality as a child in a conservative Christian family. [Entertainment Weekly]
• Nicholas Rodriguez, a SATC newcomer who will play a "crucial" role in the wedding scene of the upcoming film, says that after the shoot Liza Minnelli said, "'I would like to have everyone's attention,' and they pulled out a stool for her at the piano and gave her a mic and she sang a favorite of her mother, Judy Garland. She said, 'Thank you for letting me play with you guys. It was so heartfelt and genuine. I got choked up and several people were sobbing like a baby, but I'm not going to name names because he might be really embarrassed." Was it Chris Noth? [People]
• Thyssen-Bornemisza museum in Madrid is planning to sell condoms featuring a portrait of David Beckham sleeping. [Guardian]
• The National Enquirer claims that John Edwards is paying for Rielle Hunter and their "love child" Frances to live in a million-dollar home near his family's mansion. Supposedly Elizabeth Edwards is fine with this. [National Enquirer]
• Robin Thicke and wife Paula Patton are expecting their first child. [Us]
• Robin Wright Penn says of the media coverage of her split from Sean Penn, "Yes, it's divorce; it's a given that it will be public. But … it's so disrespectful. 'You're an actress, you owe us this?' 'Fuck you,' is what I say." [People]
• Musicians who were outraged when they found out that their songs were cranked up to help break prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, including Pearl Jam, R.E.M., and Trent Reznor, have joined the National Campaign to Close Guantanamo. [AP]
• If Michael Lohan Tweets, don't worry: it' isn't really him. "I don't have a Twitter account, so whoever is sending these messages around is a fake and it's not me," says Lohan. [Radar Online]
• Olivia Newton-John says she feels bad for Britney Spears because compared to Brit, she didn't receive as much press coverage when she rose to fame in the late '70s. She says, "The poor girl. She has lived in a time where the paparazzi reign and we didn't have that problem at all. We'd have occasional intrusion, you know I had a few incidents, but it was nothing like it is now." [Daily Express]
• Ang Lee says he made Taking Woodstock because, "After making several tragic movies in a row, I was looking to do a comedy, and one without cynicism. It might seem a strange idea to make a comedy about Woodstock, but it was kind of bizarre and seemed like comedy material to me." [The Telegraph]
• "I won a 'Best Body Award' from Fitness Magazine and I was too embarrassed to accept it. I actually don't have a good body, but if everybody thinks so, I guess it means I'm a good actress. I have acted the part of the girl who has a very good body. If you know how to dress, there's some tricks you can pull." — Salma Hayek [Parade]
• Brace Paine says he new Gossip had hit the big time, "When we got asked to do The Simpson's theme song." [AP]
• Simon Van Kempen of RHONY says of Bethenny Frankel's impending motherhood, "Nothing prepares you for parenthood [more than] parenthood. That baby will change Bethenny for the better. It will smooth over the few rough edges she still has." [People]
• RHONY's Kelly Killoren Bensimon says she posed for Playboy because, "It's the ultimate compliment and every woman's dream. You get to be a sex symbol and work with top people in the business. It's such an honor." [Star]
• Carrie Fisher says the tackiest piece of Star Wars memorabilia she ever saw was, "The sex doll. No question. But there was one other item: There's that doll of me in the metal bikini, and George Lucas had a special one made for me where the top came off and I had tits." [NPR]

Back in 2008, John Edwards was riding high, having successfully rerouted the national conversation to include a substantial discussion of poverty and holding his own as a contender for the presidency. Less than eighteen months later, Edwards has faded from the limelight in the wake of an extra-marital affair that resulted in a child.

The LA Times' article explores the Edwards' uneasy existence in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where Elizabeth Edwards is coping by throwing herself into a furniture business and a quieter life, and John Edwards is struggling with picking up the pieces of his derailed life and career. The voices of the townspeople loom large in this analysis and the general consensus appears to be anger and betrayal.

Interestingly, a lot of the rage seems to stem from politics, and not Edward's moral failings:

The feelings of betrayal are particularly strong here in Chapel Hill, the famously liberal college town where the family moved after Edwards left the Senate in 2005. In some quarters, John and Elizabeth are both being blamed for pressing ahead with his presidential run despite their shared knowledge of the affair: If Edwards had secured the Democratic nomination, such critics say, the revelation might have meant Republican victory.

The article ends with a Freudian slip of sorts, a clear illustration of John Edwards' tarnished reputation:

The dean, who received a divinity degree in 1971, said Edwards' personal tragedy reminded him of a certain passage from the Book of Psalms. He pulled down a Bible from his office shelf, opened it to the 22nd Psalm and pointed out the line: "I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people."

No, no, Boger said. On second thought, that was not the one he was thinking of.

The Dividing Line On John Edwards [LA Times]

Earlier: John Edwards Always Knew He Would Disappoint Women

Of course, Hitchens can't resist injecting himself into the review in various obnoxious ways, from the name-droppy ("Perhaps here is the moment for me to say that I used to see a good deal of them both in Washington, beginning with my writing a profile of him in 2002, and that we have been on friendly social terms in each other's houses. I think I may refer to her as "Elizabeth" rather than "Mrs. Edwards" from now on.") to the intellectually snobby (mocking the book's publishers for inserting an explanation of who Edmund Wilson is, as though we didn't all know). He also indulges in some annoying gender stereotyping when he discusses Edwards's mourning for her son, killed in a car crash at the age of 16. He writes,

As to the other great supposed cure for isolation, the consolation of religion, Elizabeth is at the same time vulnerable and skeptical. In describing the dreams and superstitions and fantasies that assailed her when she lost her boy, she confirms something that I have long thought to be true about the apparent conundrum of female religiosity: Why is it women who keep up the congregations in male-dominated places of worship? That's easy: women do all the childbearing, and they will try anything-anything-to ward off the illness or death of an infant. They will also grieve over and commemorate such a catastrophe long after the menfolk have "moved on."

Does Hitchens really need to make Elizabeth Edwards stand in for all women in opposition to "menfolk," especially when her particular story is so tragic and captivating? To his credit, though, Hitchens's review paints Edwards as a tough-minded woman with a complex view of both grief and human nature. He writes that she "unflinchingly records her mother's conviction that the gallant captain had been unfaithful to her while she was 'buried in babies'" and that she "remarks tenderly" that her father's flirtation with a nurse in his assisted-living center is an expression of his will to live. Hitchens also says,

In the unequal battle between life and death (as she understood in her father's case), Eros has its part in warding off Thanatos, and if this really was-as I believe-her husband's first lapse, it might have been partly because of the death-haunted context in which, for all his money and charm, he found himself.

My first reaction to this was outrage: so John Edwards cheated on his wife because he was afraid of death? What about her? But I don't actually think Hitchens means to excuse Edwards's behavior here. Rather, I think he's putting it in a larger context that Elizabeth Edwards herself establishes — that men are more than the sum of their sins, and that fear of the abyss can manifest itself as prurience just as easily as "religiosity."

That it did so in John Edwards is inexcusable, but Resilience focuses more on Elizabeth Edwards's grief over the deaths of her father and son than on anything her husband did. Hitchens writes of her approach to grieving, the antithesis of "any too-Oprah-like search for comfort or 'closure.'" And he mentions, perhaps surprisingly, "how much the Internet came to her aid, first when her son was killed and second when she discovered that a term had been set on her own life." He adds,

The importance of this medium in bringing about a great unspoken social reform-the abolition of loneliness-has not to my knowledge been better evoked.

Of course, the Internet may add to Elizabeth Edwards's loneliness as well, especially today, when several sites are reporting the results of a paternity test showing John Edwards to be the father of Rielle Hunter's child. Elizabeth Edwards's fame is a mixed blessing — Hitchens calls her "quite a darling of the Democratic rank and file," and perhaps she has benefited from the public outpouring of support during her battle with cancer. But it's hard to imagine — despite widespread sympathy for her — that having to negotiate her husband's infidelity in the public eye has made her life any easier. In her circumstances, a decision to retreat into private life would be more than understandable. But just as the Internet made her less lonely, perhaps her book will do what David Foster Wallace said all good writing should — help people "become less alone inside."

The Pain Of Elizabeth Edwards [The Atlantic]
Report: DNA Test Proves Edwards Fathered Videographer's Daughter [FOX News]
John Edwards Secret DNA Test Proves He's The Daddy [National Enquirer]

Earlier: Sex & The Single Homewrecker: Caitlin Flanagan Slams Rielle Hunter, Helen Gurley Brown

In an essay of epic and varied nastiness in the new Atlantic, Flanagan argues that Brown was no champion of working-class women — she was a champion for home-wreckers. Flanagan quotes Jennifer Scanlon, author of Brown bio Bad Girls Go Everywhere, saying,

As Scanlon aptly notes, Brown "appointed not predatory or non-committal men but married women as the sorry counterpoint to her sexy girls." For the reader with moral qualms? "I'm afraid I have a cavalier attitude about wives," Brown announced from the outset of her public life. To Scanlon-whose besotted encomium may constitute Brown's final caress in this vale of tears-the attitude amounts to "she who keeps the man happy keeps the man," a point of view the biographer hails, several times, as being fundamentally "libertarian." By this, she means that when two women bid for a man, no advantage shall be given to the one who might have children with him, or an economic dependency built upon their marriage. There is only the marketplace of feminine wiles, in which a concubine's feigned interest in a man's workday trumps a wife's quiet plea for help around the house, in which young is better than old and new is more exciting than familiar.

Here Flanagan takes the worst kind of antifeminist rhetoric — the kind that speaks of women in terms of quasi-monetary sexual "value" — and makes it run both ways. Now women are "bidding" on men, using their riches — the "concubine" (!?) her youth and "wiles," the wife her children and "economic dependency." Both men and women are reduced here — men, for a change, are commodities, but women are merely sexual pocketbooks competing in an auction. And wiles win out, but not for long.

Flanagan jumps from Brown to John Edwards's paramour Rielle Hunter, a loose woman perhaps influenced by Brown's celebration of single sluttiness (because, of course, adultery was invented in 1962). Flanagan has some incandescently insulting things to say about Hunter, including this:

Hers is not an intelligence or an ambition difficult to plumb, and her dream is almost certainly to have Elizabeth shuffle off the mortal coil so that she can instate herself in the North Carolina pleasure dome and become the fun, hip, "Being Is Free," bleached-blond, super open-minded, videographing, Power of Now stepmom, a prospect so hideous that it makes Elizabeth Edwards's last-chance book tour look like what it is: a desperate attempt to protect her sweet, sad children from the influence of this erstwhile cokehead and present-day weasel after she has died.

Flanagan (who, as the tabloids say, does not treat Rielle Hunter) knows exactly what Hunter wants, down to the intellectually lightweight cultural references. And she knows she's not going to get it:

Deep within Rielle-this little minx of pleasure and profit-guess what there is? A heart that aches like a woman's but breaks just like a little girl's. [...] I don't imagine that Rielle's decision to have her baby (whoever the father) came from a strongly pro-life position, or from a plan to jack some cash out of the ambulance chaser. It came, surely, from the powerful emotions that accompany all pregnancies, but especially those that occur in women who probably thought they would never get to have a baby, and who find out, at the 11th hour, that the dream might come true after all, and they might have a home and a child, and (please, God) a husband and father to go with that child.

So, to recap, Helen Gurley Brown made it sound like it was okay to steal someone else's man, but it really isn't, not only because marital commitment should override "wiles," but also because a married man will never leave his wife for you. The wages of sin are ... still being single, a prospect Flanagan seems to abhor. She writes of "the desperate, Blanche DuBois tinsel of [Brown's] new creation-the single girl" and "the possible pitfalls and sorrows of life as a sexually liberated, 'all the time in the world' unmarried woman" in such a way as to leave no doubt that she views Hunter as the ultimate loser in the affair — and to imply that unmarried women in general are really kind of sad.

But it's men who fare the worst in Flanagan's moral reckoning. Amy Benfer of Broadsheet offers a smart roundup of Flanagan's many insults (Brown was "pee-on-the-side-of-the-road white trash;" the "ladies of the steno pool" include "Bertha in Accounting, with the hair on her chin;" anyone who hasn't had a kid is "just guessing about love, gesturing toward it, assuming it's the right name for a feeling you've had"), but she doesn't mention Flanagan's implicit denial of male autonomy. Flanagan makes much of Rielle Hunter's pickup line to John Edwards: "you are so hot." She writes,

"You are so hot," Rielle Hunter said to John Edwards 10 years after he and his wife buried their first boy, and after they had started a new family, and after they had given their all to a presidential campaign-with the personal losses and long separations that come with it-and after Elizabeth had been diagnosed with cancer and undergone a disfiguring surgery and chemotherapy and lost her hair and been handed a recalculated set of odds about her life expectancy with two very small children who needed their mother. "You are so hot," Rielle Hunter said, because she turned out to be another woman with a cavalier attitude toward wives.

Interestingly, these words were also the subject of an article in last month's Cosmo, about how to keep your man from cheating. Both Brown's former magazine and her modern-day critic act like Hunter made Edwards sleep with her using these simple words. But Rielle Hunter didn't break John Edwards's vows. She didn't cheat on his wife in her hour of need. He did.

Ultimately, Flanagan and Brown make the same mistake: assuming that women can control men. Sex and the Single Girl wasn't all that far off of the seduction manuals George Sodini read, in that both taught readers that fulfilling relationships with the opposite sex could be had through manipulation. Flanagan might not agree with the "fulfilling" part, but like Brown, she seems to see an adulterous affair not as a choice made by both a man and a woman, but as a competition between wife and "concubine." The man is just the prize.

Of course, they're both wrong. Rielle Hunter may not be a good role model, but ultimately the blame for Elizabeth Edwards's pain rests with her husband. Because women — single or married — can't actually control men. Luckily, it's not our responsibility — it's theirs.

Sex And The Married Man [The Atlantic]

Relate: Who You Calling White Trash? [Broadsheet]

Like Elizabeth, Sherri's former husband had an affair, which resulted in a baby. (No paternity test has been conducted to determine the father of Rielle Hunter's child. Yet.) Sharing a similar experience, Sherri tried to approach Elizabeth about this topic on a "personal" level, asking her whether or not John would take a paternity test, and how that would affect her life if she ended up having a "stepchild". Elizabeth maintained what she said on Oprah, and said that the baby in question has nothing to do with her or her relationship with her husband.

In the clip, Elizabeth said that there's "no excuse for women" to sleep with married men. But what's the married men's excuse? She sounds a lot like Monica in "Sideline Ho."

Elizabeth was promoting her book Resilience, in which she talks about John's affair as well as her own battle with cancer. Oprah read a passage from the book, that also seemed to point the finger at Hunter:

And the misery of having your past and your future taken away by something so unpleasant as a woman with nothing but idle time to spend hanging around outside of fancy hotels would be avoided but we cannot, they cannot turn back.

Rielle Hunter, the woman John had an affair with, has a child that could very well be his, but he insists is not. Rielle said that a DNA test would not be conducted. For her part, Elizabeth says that it doesn't matter if the baby is his or not, because either way, she won't let it affect her life, but her general tone sounded much more like she won't let it enter her life.

Hunter, who originally claimed that former Edwards staffer Andrew Young fathered her child but didn't put his name on the birth certificate, is reportedly about to demand a DNA test from Edwards.

John Edwards' furious mistress is demanding he submit to a DNA test, The ENQUIRER has learned exclusively!

Rielle Hunter - the longtime secret lover of the disgraced 2-time presidential candidate - wants definitive proof that Edwards is the father of her 14-month-old love child Frances and is working with a lawyer to take legal action, say sources.

And why, you might ask, is she furious? Her friends explain!

"But now she can see there's never going to be a future with John - and she feels he's lied about his promise to keep Elizabeth from trashing her in the book," the insider divulged.

"Rielle is so infuriated by his and Elizabeth's actions that she's throwing her loyalty to him out of the window!"

Rielle — though friends, again — threatened to do something in February if the wife of the man whose mistress she was said anything mean about her.

But, as one insider exclaimed yesterday: "What is Elizabeth thinking?" Certainly the minute she does any publicity for "Resilience," the first questions will be about Rielle Hunter and her baby daughter. And don't think for a minute that Hunter is going to allow herself to be portrayed as a groupie, sycophant or gold digger.

Apparently, Rielle preferred that her lover's wife portray her as his soulmate. But Elizabeth Edwards for the former route in the sole passage that she talks about Rielle.

In months of talking with him, I have come to understand his liaison with this woman, if I have, not as a substitute for me. Those with any fame or notoriety or power attract people for good reasons and bad. Some want to contribute and some want to take something away for themselves. They flatter and entreat, and it is engaging, even addictive. They look at our lives, which from the outside in particular are pictures of joy and plenty, and they want it for themselves.

And, thus, apparently, is the battle engaged. Rielle will sue for paternity — a paternity, in fact, that Elizabeth Edwards neither confirmed not denied to Oprah this week. The whole case will get dragged through the mud. Rielle Hunter will look like more of a gold-digger, John Edwards like more of a heel, Elizabeth Edwards like more of a cuckold and Rielle's child — well, who cares about the kid, really, when you can get back at your ex and his wife for her publicly saying she doesn't like you and earn some cash in the process?

John Edwards' Mistress Demands DNA Test For Baby [National Enquirer]

Related: Elizabeth Edwards To Appear On Oprah Winfrey Show [Associated Press]

Earlier: Elizabeth Edwards' Resilience And Rielle Hunter's Revenge
Elizabeth Edwards Talks Directly About John's Affair, Many Lies

I don't want to say, "I told you so," but I did suggest, the day the affair broke, that John hadn't told Elizabeth the whole truth. She backs up my assertions.

The next morning he told me why, or told me a version of why. He had made a terrible decision and had been with the woman. After I cried and screamed, I went to the bathroom and threw up.

And the next day John and I spoke. He wasn't coy, but it turned out he wasn't forthright either. A single night and since then remorse, was what he said. There were other opportunities, he admitted, but on only one night had he violated his vows to me.

That, she learned later, was untrue.

Like most wives - or husbands - in my position, I wanted to believe his involvement with this woman had been as little as possible. A single night, another opportunity, but that was it and he had wanted away from her.... It turned out that a single time was not all it was. More than a year later, I learned that he had allowed [the woman] into our lives and had not, even when he knew better, made her leave us alone.

I'm saddened to think what she means by saying that John let Rielle "into our lives," because it doesn't sound like she's just talking about the affair.

If you'll recall, Elizabeth took a lot of heat for "allowing" John to continue campaigning — heat that I thought was ugly and unwarranted, in part because I figured he probably hadn't ever really told her the full truth of the situation. Elizabeth finally responds to those criticisms, too.

So much has happened that it is sometimes hard for me to gather my feelings from that moment. I felt that the ground underneath me had been pulled away. I wanted him to drop out of the race, protect our family from this woman, from his act. It would only raise questions, he said, he had just gotten in the race; the most pointed questions would come if he dropped out days after he had gotten in the race. And I knew that was right, but I was afraid of her. And now he knows I was right to be afraid, that once he had made this dreadful mistake, he should not have run. But just then he was doing, I believe, what I was trying to do: hold on to our lives despite this awful error in judgment.

In other words, he told her about the affair two days after his formal announcement — not before, and then pressured her to continue despite her misgivings while she was vulnerable.

The worst you can say about Elizabeth is that she's no fan of Rielle Hunter and is rather unimpressed by her husband's choice of mistresses.

It didn't occur to me that at a fancy hotel in New York, where he sat with a potential donor to his antipoverty work, he would be targeted by a woman who would confirm that the man at the table was John Edwards and then would wait for him outside the hotel hours later when he returned from a dinner, wait with the come-on line "You are so hot" and an idea that she should travel with him and make videos. And if you had asked me to wager that house we were building on whether my husband of then 28 years would have responded to a come-on line like that, I would have said no.

Lest you think that Elizabeth is being less than charitable, that's about how Rielle Hunter described their meeting to Newsweek just before John told Elizabeth about the affair.

Elizabeth goes on to suggest that Hunter is a moocher and a hanger-on.

In months of talking with him, I have come to understand his liaison with this woman, if I have, not as a substitute for me. Those with any fame or notoriety or power attract people for good reasons and bad. Some want to contribute and some want to take something away for themselves. They flatter and entreat, and it is engaging, even addictive. They look at our lives, which from the outside in particular are pictures of joy and plenty, and they want it for themselves.

Which, as the cuckolded wife in this scenario, is an understandable way to feel about the woman who, by all accounts, pursued and had an affair with her husband. But Hunter's own friends — and even the New York Post — described her in a similar manner in early 2008.

The New Age hippie, who friends say "mooches off other people and sleeps on their couches because she doesn't believe in money," tells anyone who will listen about her fling with the good-looking guy. She recently walked up to a Page Six pal she'd just met and said, "Oh, I'm so stressed out. I've been having an affair with [a candidate]."

And with the reports that Edwards' finance chairman, Fred Baron, bankrolled her move to the West Coast and her lifestyle there until his death, that might not be terribly far from the truth.

As much as I enjoy a good salacious political scandal, I do have to ask: can we go back to talking about health care reform really soon? Because, honestly, the latter is more important.

Elizabeth Edwards: How I Survived John's Affair [Time]

Related: John Edwards, Untucked [Newsweek]
Just Asking [Page Six]
Dallas Lawyer Fred Baron Paid For Edwards' Mistress To Relocate [Dallas Morning News]

Earlier: Elizabeth Edwards' Resilience And Rielle Hunter's Revenge
John Edwards Always Knew He Would Disappoint Women
Hey Ladies, Lay Off Elizabeth Edwards (And That Means You, Bonnie Fuller)
Elizabeth Edwards: "I Think We Have The Capacity With Great Leadership To Change Things"
Elizabeth Edwards Talks About Issues Unrelated To Infidelity

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• Gisele Bundchen is on the cover of the new Vanity Fair and though she's semi-nude in some of the accompanying pictures, it's still nothing we haven't seen before. [Egotastic]
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• Oprah Winfrey interviewed Elizabeth Edwards at her home over the weekend. The interview will air on May 11th. [Politico]
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In fact, in a health care system that financially rewards doctors for emergent care more than intermittent preventative care, encouraging people to seek preventative care regularly is better for the financial and physical health of everyone involved. You'd think that the people in charge of pricing your health insurance would know that. But as today's New York Times reports, you'd be wrong.

According to a study by the Times, women in the individual insurance market — the one McCain wants us to get our health insurance from if he becomes President — pay significantly higher premiums throughout their working lives than men do. In cases from Colorado to Florida to Ohio (swing states all!) women could expect to pay between 22 and 49 percent more than their male counterparts. (Note that the federal government currently does not allow employer-sponsored health insurance — the kind McCain wishes to wipe from the map — to distinguish between men and women when pricing.) And, according to insurers, there's one basic reason: women use preventative care.

In general, insurers say, they charge women more than men of the same age because claims experience shows that women use more health care services. They are more likely to visit doctors, to get regular checkups, to take prescription medications and to have certain chronic illnesses.

Oh, the same insurance company apologist try out the whole load of shit that it's about the expenses of being the ones that push out the babies, but even in states that allow women to opt out of pregnancy coverage, women still pay significantly more. Like a woman in the article, in fact, I don't have medical coverage if for some reason my multiple birth control methods fail:

Crystal D. Kilpatrick, a healthy 33-year-old real estate agent in Austin, Tex., said: "I’ve delayed having a baby because my insurance policy does not cover maternity care. If I have a baby, I’ll have to pay at least $8,000 out of pocket.'

Marcia D. Greenberger, co-president of the National Women’s Law Center, also points out that, the differential in pricing based on gender, McCain's tax credit for purchasing health insurance — $2,500 for you single ladies out there — will actually erode in value faster for women than men.

In the meantime, insurance professionals have one good reason not to make insurance pools gender-neutral:

Cecil D. Bykerk, president of the Society of Actuaries, a professional organization, said that if male and female premiums were equalized, women would pay less but "rates for men would go up."

Mr. Bykerk, a former executive vice president of Mutual of Omaha, said, "If maternity care is included as a benefit, it drives up rates for everybody, making the whole policy less affordable."

Oh, well, gosh, Cecil, we wouldn't want to deny men the benefit of really low-priced health care just so our health insurance, that covers of the furtherance of the species, is remotely affordable or obtainable! Have to keep that Viagra cheap for you! Luckily, the head insurance regulator in Maine — probably through her use of preventative care — has a few more brain cells functioning than old Cecil:

Mila Kofman, the insurance superintendent in Maine [where they prohibit gender discrimination in the individual insurance market], said: "There's a strong public policy reason to prohibit gender-based rates. Only women can bear children. There's an expense to that. But having babies benefits communities and society as a whole. Women should not have to bear the entire expense."

In fact, I'll go further than that. The whole purpose of insuring pools of people is to spread the costs across many — you know, sort of like roads and schools and shit. And so taking out the lowest cost group of people increases the cost of those who remain, undermining the fucking purpose of pooling risk.

In addition, as I noted above, preventative care does cost more at the outset than never going to the doctor. The difficulty is that, from a long-term perspective — which these insurance companies obviously lack as they pursue quarterly profits and stock prices to to exclusion of their business — is that foregoing preventative care ends up being far more costly when easily preventable problems turn into emergent care. Getting a Pap smear every year might cost your insurance company $150 and treating early cancer that said exam might find might be more expensive, but it's all fucking cheap compared to a hysterectomy with hospital stay and months of chemotherapy and then a lifetime of follow-up care. Of course, in the individual market they can just tell you to fuck off after a year and not renew your coverage, so I guess it might not be that expensive for an insurance company after all. The insurance companies — for all their rationalizations about post-childbirth urinary tract complications late in life being expensive, which is what one spokesman actually claimed as a reason for gender differentials in the Times piece — aren't interested in long-term cost lowering. They are interested in short-term profit maximization and figure that, by the time you're old, they probably won't be your insurance company anyway and, if they are, they can just easily boot you off their rolls.

Women Buying Health Policies Pay a Penalty [NY Times]

Related: Health Insurance And The Single Girl [Glamocracy]

Earlier: Elizabeth Edwards Talks About Issues Unrelated To Infidelity
Before First Pitch, Obama Hits One Out Of The Park