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Some other bloggers questioned if the issue isn't really about providing those women who need it – but can't afford it - with access to health care. As the article notes, women who can't afford to see a doctor aren't likely to be able to get their "pre-pregnancy care" either, since obstacles to this "include getting insurance companies to pay for visits."

As Ezra Klein blogs, "There was something more to be seen in the report."

"It offered a loud call to increase health care coverage among poor women, a full-throated defense of Medicaid, and a recommendation to increase the use of family planning waivers," Ezra says.

And others just don't like the idea of grouping all women together. "It's basically assuming that all women capable of reproducing should be doing so, or at the very least be prepared to do so," a blogger writes at Not My Spot. "It defines women by their function as reproductive units and incubators rather than as individuals."

Jamie Ward agrees. "I'm sorry, but this whole thing comes off as yet another overbearing paternalistic attempt to control women," she writes.

But not everyone shares the bloggers' criticism. Schroedinger sums up the opinion of many bloggers who say the report is a wake-up call to men and women. "Somehow I can't see anything wrong with encouraging women to not smoke, control their asthma and diabetes, and stay generally healthy," Schroedinger writes. "It's going to help you whether you ever have a baby or not."


Waging War Against Spam

Is the fight against spam a war that can't be won? When a Silicon Valley company, Blue Security, asked spammers to stop sending junk e-mail to its clients, the company decided to crib from spammers' play sheet: Blue Security bombarded the spammers with requests from all of its customers at the same time.

The controversial strategy worked, clogging spammers' in-boxes and disrupting the spammers' ability to send e-mails...but only to a point. Not long after, a spammer counterattacked, flooding Bluesecurity.com with so much traffic that it could not operate. And, the counterattack was also waged on other sites too, including Craigslist and Six Apart. As a result, Blue Security was forced to close its site, the Washington Post reports, the victim of a Denial-of-Service attack.

Disheartening? Many bloggers think so. "I find the entire episode, including Blue Security's surrender, fascinating and disturbing. Basically there is an unspoken understanding out there that the bad guys rule and nothing can be done to stop them," Warner Crooker writes on Life on the Wicked Stage. "WWW stands more for Wild Wild West than Word-Wide Web."

Sandeep Singh Rawat is equally disturbed. "The fact that a spammer can hold millions of Web sites hostage just because he is upset that someone is meddling in his business is disturbing," he blogs.

Still, it's not surprising, Sandeep adds. He says it's a reminder that "the underlying framework that the commercial Web rests upon was never designed with mutual trust and security in mind. As such, it will take a lot more than clever gimmickry to give businesses and consumers the upper hand over Internet hucksters, spammers and criminals."

Some bloggers, like Kevin Dee, are worried about what this means for their own company. "It is a very scary thing to know that someone, with the knowledge and power to seriously hurt your company, has launched an attack," he writes on The Eagle Blog. "...I think I will sleep a little less soundly knowing that my company, like most companies, is this vulnerable."

Other more tech-savvy bloggers wrote in with their own recommendations for how Blue Security could improve its server issues. When CmdrTaco posted an entry about the Post story on SlashDot, bloggers offered their own technical solutions, ranging from an Orion/Router style network to a SETI project, "a nice graphical screensaver that uses spare processor cycles to send email spam to known spammers."


Miller Time

Former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who notoriously spent 85 days in jail in connection with the CIA leak investigation, has resurfaced. She recently wrote an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal, and is rumored to be at work on a piece for The Atlantic Monthly.

But this week, she played a starring role in the blogosphere, with her vocal critics latching on to her revelation that prior to 9/11, she had a tip about a domestic terror attack.

Posted on Alternet.com Monday, Miller says in the interview that the report was sparked by the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole, which increased her reporting on al Qaeda. She says that ultimately led, in July 2001, "to a still-anonymous top-level White House source who shared top-secret NSA signals intelligence (SIGINT) concerning an even bigger impending al-Qaida attack, perhaps to be visited on the continental United States."

But she didn't write the story. Yet, two months later — on 9/11 — Miller and her editor at the Times, Stephen Engelberg, both remembered and regretted the story they "didn't do."

"You know, sometimes in journalism you regret the stories you do, but most of the time you regret the ones that you didn't do," Miller says.

But some bloggers think Miller's claim doesn't add up. "Once again, it makes little sense," Sploid.com writes. "Miller offers very little to back up her claims and seems -- as usual -- coldly disinterested in the horrible fate of the actual people who were murdered on that day."

And others, like Digby, still see a connection between this revelation and her reporting on Iraq. "But then she not only had the story of an impending major terrorist attack and didn't get it in the paper but she then reported a bunch of manufactured drivel on Iraq's fantasy WMD and managed to help the administration start an unnecessary war. She's a one-woman wrecking crew, that one," Digby writes.

Will Bunch at Attytood also faults Miller for not further investigating the story and blames editors for "electing not to publish it." He points out that Miller acknowledges in the interview that she was in the midst of writing a book.

"There's got to be a better system here," Attytood blogs. "In theory, we think that newspaper reporters writing books is a good thing, certainly for the career of the reporter and usually for the reading public. But must the public's right-to-know be a casualty, time and time again?"

But, wait, is this news anyway? Emptywheel at The Next Hurrah says Richard Clarke said the same exact thing. "Given Judy's and her then editor's description of her source as impeccable, and given that she got this news when hanging around Counter-Terrorism at a time when we know they were on heightened alert, I'm betting that Clarke is Judy's source," he blogs. "So she's telling us what Clarke told us in 2004."

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