According to Klein, Clinton is a bundle of contradictions. She messed up an opportunity to advance fruitful peace talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians, except such talks are almost never fruitful. ("For the past 40 years, the awkward Middle East press conference has helped define the job of Secretary of State. You go to Jerusalem or Ramallah; you stand there 'guardedly optimistic' in public; in private, you try to move a comma, but the Israelis or Palestinians move a semicolon to block your comma. The result is almost always the same: gridlock.") Clinton's big mouth made the administration look bad — by reinforcing things Obama had already said. "The conventional wisdom," is that by installing Clinton as Secretary of State, Obama "succeeded in neutering her" (nice), but then, he also gave her the power to "become a torpedo aimed at the Oval Office." She's bungled diplomacy yet made enormous strides in improving America's image abroad. Her edgier tone has been evident from the start of the Administration" — in some cases irritating the White House — yet "her reticence during her first nine months on the job," did indeed bolster the impression that she was "neutered." (Dear Joe Klein and rest of world, Can we please find a better metaphor for being rendered ineffectual?) By all on-the-record accounts, her "relationship with Obama really - really - is strong," but anonymous "emanations," "burblings" and "Foggy Bottom body language" (say that 5 times fast) indicate otherwise, maybe, sort of.

"These tensions are well within the boundaries of normal, creative policymaking," writes Klein, but he seems determined to make something more of them nonetheless. An "essential rule of diplomacy," he says, is "boring is almost always better" — but obviously, an essential rule of journalism is the opposite. So I can sympathize with the need to jazz up a story that amounts to, "She seems to be doing a pretty OK job — not perfect, but whatever." But the way he does it is sort of dizzying. Is she fucking up or doing smart, new things? Is she too blunt or too retiring? Too powerful, or too [new metaphor]? Is she putting words in Obama's mouth or vice versa? Do they lurve each other or secretly plot against each other? The contradictory questions don't balance the portrait of a complex woman so much as they obscure it.

By far the most interesting and enlightening parts come in the middle, when Klein sits down and talks to Clinton, whom he's known for a bazillion years. They talk about her first trip to Pakistan in 1995 — he was there — and she gushes about the experience and admits what a Benazir Bhutto fangirl she was. In this section, Klein points out that "Ironically, the rise of Sunni extremist groups like al-Qaeda has brought Clinton's interests - microfinance, education and health care - to the center of national-security policy for the first time" — oh hey, she has interests! — and says Clinton's excellent relationship with military leaders at home has "helped make the relationship between State and the Pentagon less fraught than usual." She has "a palpable toughness" to her, and unlike a lot of journalists, Klein seems to mean that as a real compliment. He mentions repeatedly that she is intensely guarded and private, which undoubtedly explains a lot of his (and everyone's) difficulty in pinning her down, but still, this middle part is where we get a sense that he's talking about a real person with identifiable strengths, weaknesses, goals and accomplishments. That angle just couldn't sustain a whole feature, I guess.

Perhaps the big lesson to take from this profile, then, is that Hillary Clinton is nowhere near as predictable as we'd like her to be. For as long as she's been in the public eye (and under insane scrutiny to boot), it really seems like we ought to know her well enough to anticipate her next move — and fully understand her last. But it turns out we might not. Which makes it hard to analyze her but really interesting to watch her.

Hillary's Moment: Clinton Faces The World [Time]

Today's New York Times examines the situation, starting off with a grim portrait of the lengths women will go through to abort:

Gina Judilla already had three children the first time she tried to terminate a pregnancy. "I jumped down the stairs, hoping that would cause a miscarriage," she said. The fetus survived and is now an 8-year-old boy.

Three years later, pregnant again, she drank an herbal concoction that was supposed to induce abortion. That, too, failed.

Three years ago, in another unsuccessful attempt to end a pregnancy, she took Cytotec, a drug to treat gastric ulcers that is widely known in the Philippines as an "abortion pill."

The article reveals that abortion in the Philippines is illegal, and, though reproductive health services are available through a private medical system, as much as 70% of the population is too poor to access birth control methods and information. While the state-run health care system does provide for some of these services, it is implemented by local authorities, many of whom promptly banned birth control citing religious reasons.

More recently, however, family planning advocates have been making headway in their campaign to change that. Legislation before the Philippine Congress, called the Reproductive Health and Population Development Act, would require governments down to the local level to provide free or low-cost reproductive health services, including condoms, birth control pills, tubal ligations and vasectomies. It would also mandate sex education in all schools, public and private, from fifth grade through high school.

Supporters of the bill cite urgent public health needs. A 2006 government survey, which interviewed 46,000 women, found that between 2000 and 2006, only half of Filipino women of reproductive age used birth control of any kind. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit organization based in the United States that researches reproductive health policy, 54 percent of the 3.4 million pregnancies in the Philippines in 2008 were unintended.

Most of those unintended pregnancies - 92 percent - resulted from not using birth control, the institute said, and the rest from birth control that failed. Those unintended pregnancies, the institute says, contributed to an estimated half-million abortions that year, despite a ban on the procedure. Most of the abortions are done clandestinely and in unsanitary conditions. Many women resort to crude methods like those Ms. Judilla tried.

Opponents of the bill are finding their support in churches, saying:

The Rev. Melvin Castro of the Episcopal Commission on Family and Life, an arm of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines, said the Catholic Church and the laity would fight the bill, if passed into law, up to the Supreme Court.

"The Constitution is very clear that the state should protect life from conception up to its natural end," Father Castro said."Regardless of their religion, Filipinos are God-fearing and family-loving. This bill will change that culture."

Interestingly, both sides are arguing that they are working in the best interests of women. The opposition explains they want to "to protect [women's] wombs from those who want to take away life." They do not provide a reason why women like Judilla have to suffer to protect their ideology.

(Image Credit: Luis Liwanag for The New York Times)

Bill to Increase Access To Contraception Is Dividing Filipinos [NY Times]

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1. Copious quantities of mind-altering drugs: they didn't make Anna Nicole Smith any less crazy and they probably didn't help Steve!
Alexian. Clozaril. Cogutin. Cylert. Depacote. Lithium. Paxil. Prozac. Risperdal. Seroquel. Zyprexa. Look, I alphabetized them for no reason at all, think I'm OCD too??? Anyhow, those drugs garner numerous occurrences of free product placement throughout this story, but curiously Kazmierczak's only respite from his demons comes when he violates his group home's orders and goesoff the meds, cold turkey because he's obsessive that way. Then he turns his life around, aces school, wins a Dean's award, meets a girlfriend who loves him, devotes himself to helping people, etc. But Steve is so obsessive-compulsive that his obsession with staying off meds sort of sets him up for failure, which is to say, repeated Craigslist casual encounters and that SAW movie, which is not such a bad thing in itself, but he has this sort of Puritannical way of obsessing over small infractions, as if his whole life is one long juice fast, which brings me to…

2. Yes, America, We Are Fat. So fat we have somehow turned being not fat into the new American Dream.
And speaking of! It's only subtly addressed in the story, but Steve is obviously waging a personal War On Fat. His parents are to blame; his mom being a "fleshy, enormous" insomniac blob on the couch whose sole contribution to Steve's reserves of cultural capital is an addiction to horror films; his father is an alcoholic who goes into diabetic shock at one point; you know what that means. Steve is skinny but balloons to over 300 pounds on the meds, then loses it all when he gets off meds and enlists in the military. Later he freaks out that Prozac will cause weight gain, even though Prozac actually tends to do the opposite, but Steve, like many members of the progeny of the obese, can't face the thought of losing control of his body the same way. And this is where I really do wish we valued brains a little more in this country, because there REALLY SHOULD BE BETTER THINGS TO WORRY ABOUT. But the same way the first American Dream moved us all out to the suburbs only to strand us there alone with our cable and ice cream and placid lawns and sad fleshy dead-eyed moms who can't bother driving us anywhere, this new American Dream of fastidiously monitoring our intake and expenditure of energy units is really just another big distraction from the real problem, which is to say:

3. Wouldn't it be cool if guys like this didn't feel like they had to join the Army?
Raise your hand if you don't have issues with your ratio of control:security! Okay, so all Steve wants to do is be disciplined and focused and work hard and feel a sense of control over his conduct, but he craves structure and order and job security, so where does he look? The only place that really offers that anymore: the Army. They find out about all the meds and discharge him. So he goes to school and immerses himself in studies and people think he's weird at first but things get better and suddenly he gets a Dean's award and later, when his grad school plans get derailed for lack of funding in his program, looks to the prison system for a job pursuing his passion for (the irony!) rehabilitation. But it's kind of hellish and if you're even one minute late you have to start back at day one (the irony!) of training and one day he gets pulled over and that's the end of his whole life. And you can probably relate to that, because I remember being in my early twenties and full of energy and brain power I just wanted to put to use somewhere, and no job prospects. Yeah, looking for a job blows, especially at that age, because at that age all they can judge is how you sell yourself, and any decent twentysomething knows he doesn't have much to sell quite yet. Oh yeah, and so you intern, maybe with the "understanding" there's a job waiting upon the passage of some unclear but finite period of time, or you temp, or you sign on as an independent contractor for three months with no benefits and at some low point if it's peacetime it probably occurs to you that the Air Force might be less soul-wearying than teaching. Because you just can't face the reality of all those kids out there with their fat parents and big cars and psychiatric meds and credit card debt that they can maybe pay off by enlisting.

4. Self-professed libertarian Nietzsche devotees should not derive their greatest pleasure from tutoring dumbasses and rehabilitating prisoners, but somehow, EVERYDAY IN THIS COUNTRY, they totally do.
"[Steve] is extremely patient and calm when tutoring students who are stressed out about statistics and the high standards imposed on them. He has the highest ethical and academic standards, he thinks abstractly and analytically, and relates at an emotional and empathetic level with others,” is what Steve's professor wrote about what a nice good tutor he was. And when he got his job at the prison, it was demoralizing because he didn't feel like he was helping enough. And yet! Steve’s favorite author is Nietzsche. The superman, above moral code. Only the weak let themselves be ruled by morality. "Weak," of course, is what Americans generally are, which brings me to a little thing I learned recently about the Serenity Prayer, which we tend to associate with admitting we are powerless before the temptations of alcohol, but actually it originated in the thirties somewhere and is generally credited to a guy whose main claim to fame at the time was being a prominent Christian socialist. In other words, it's the economy, stupid! You can blame your demons or your addictions or your horror films or your personality disorders or your hundred pounds of excess flab, but really the hardest thing is living in an economy that profits so handsomely from reminding you that you have all this control when the little control will you actually do possess is too busy plotting your next tattoo.

5. Guns need to be banned duh!
When Steve was 16, some girl told everyone he had a small penis. But he was obsessed with guns before that. Then in college he wrote a paper called (No) Crazies With Guns, advocating a ban on gun sales to people on anti-psychotic medications. Here's a crazy idea: what about a ban on gun sales, period? Of course, second amendment defenders would argue to retain the right to defend themselves against such crazies, but maybe for once we should listen to the crazy person telling us he's the one most qualified to tell you that you can learn all sorts of things from statistics but you can't much control whether you become one.

A Portrait Of The School Shooter As A Young Man [Esquire]

Anyway supremely weird-looking Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff (seriously, what sort of rodent does he look like? Or is it a skeleton? Anna is going with "eagle muppet," which I can sort of see) is said to be the leading contender to replace.

Embattled Attorney General Resigns [NY Times]
Attorney General Resigns [Washington Post]