Quick Hits

1. I’m still not sure, even having read this story three times, what Mark Bell is trying to insinuate with all these quotation marks. Was there not really an attack? Do people not really feel bad? Was it a fake beating? Did they turn the heat down at the Tennessean and poor Bell was trying to keep warm by adding extra key strokes wherever possible, just to keep his fingers from freezing? What?

2. This whole article is worth reading, though most of it is not anything that didn’t fly around the feminist blogosphere when the story first broke, but this?

Johnson’s account is so plausible and rich in detail that even Planned Parenthood seems not to have investigated whether this event ever took place. At my request, the staff at the Bryan clinic examined patient records from September 26, the day Johnson claims to have had her conversion experience, and spoke with the physician who performed abortions on that date. According to Planned Parenthood, there is no record of an ultrasound-guided abortion performed on September 26. The physician on duty told the organization that he did not use an ultrasound that day, nor did Johnson assist on any abortion procedure. “Planned Parenthood can assure you that no abortion patients underwent an ultrasound-guided abortion on September 26,” said a spokesperson. It’s difficult to imagine that Johnson simply got the date wrong; September 12 was the only other day that month that the clinic performed surgical abortions.

By the time you get that far in the article, you kind of know it’s coming, but it’s still like, wow, did she really think that no one would check? I’m convinced, though, that, yeah, pretty much people will say all kinds of stuff that is easily proven wrong because they really don’t think anyone will check.