Quick Hits

• Due to the unfolding tragedy at Virginia Tech, the Senate Judiciary Committee announced that tomorrow's testimony from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was being postponed until Thursday. My immediate response, particularly in light of late-breaking developments, is that it gives him all the more time to resign and duck out on the committee, but of course, I doubt that a resignation would get the Judiciary Committee off his back. I suppose it's possible that Gonzales could be deft enough to wend his way through all the booby traps--most of them of his own making--in his path, but I haven't seen any evidence of such skill so far.

So I guess there are just two questions--will he resign before or after he testifies, and will he trip himself up in his testimony and slip over into perjury (or has he already dug himself so deep into a hole that even the truth can't set him free)?

• A report on abstinence-only education ten years in the making came out at the end of last week, and you know what? It doesn't work.

[It] does not keep teenagers from having sex. Neither does it increase or decrease the likelihood that if they do have sex, they will use a condom.

Authorized by Congress in 1997, the study followed 2000 children from elementary or middle school into high school. The children lived in four communities -- two urban, two rural. All of the children received the family life services available in their community, in addition, slightly more than half of them also received abstinence-only education.

By the end of the study, when the average child was just shy of 17, half of both groups had remained abstinent. The sexually active teenagers had sex the first time at about age 15. Less than a quarter of them, in both groups, reported using a condom every time they had sex. More than a third of both groups had two or more partners.

The best that the requisite Bush administration spokesman from the Department of Health and Human Services can come up with in response is a variation of, "Yeah? So what. We're not changing anything."

I've written about abstinence-only education a couple of times, so I won't go into a lot of detail here, but there's no responsible reason not to include information about contraception in sex ed so that those who need it now will have it and those who'll need it in the future (and pretty much everybody will need it sometime in the future) will have it then.

By the way, The New York Times had the story, too, but not wanting to offend anyone on such a contentious issue, they headlined it: "Conclusions Are Reported on Teaching of Abstinence." Yeah, that's one way of putting it. Fortunately, they didn't downplay the real story in the lead:

Students who participated in sexual abstinence programs were just as likely to have sex as those who did not, according to a study ordered by Congress.

It's not exactly expansive, but I guess it gets the job done.

• Following up on the theocracy post from a couple of days ago, via Think Progress, The Carpetbagger Report points out that Regent College has scrubbed its Website of the claim that 150 graduates hold positions in the Bush administration. Hmmm. I suppose we'll just have to guess who doesn't want to be associated with whom. Steve Benen at Carpetbagger also notes that Dahlia Lithwick at Slate had noted the claim before Krugman ran with it on Friday.

• The 2007 Pulitzer Prizes were announced on Monday. Cormac McCarthy's The Road took the Fiction prize, with David Lindsay-Abaire's Rabbit Hole picking up for drama. Over on the Journalism side, The Wall Street Journal won two (Public Service and International Reporting), and the rest being spread among a number of papers, including majors such as The New York Times (Feature Writing) and The Los Angeles Times (Explanatory Reporting). One alternative weekly (LA Weekly for Jonathan Gold's criticism) picks up a prize, and the award for Editorial Cartooning went to Walt Handelsman of Newsday. Ray Bradbury was given a special citation for his career, as was John Coltrane, a mere forty years after his death. Is late always better than never?