A few brief links

Slate recommends we make birth-control pills as OTC as condoms.
•Rick Pearlstein looks back at 1962, when the good guys beat the bad guys within the law (in the movie Cape Fear). As a pulp fan, I don’t entirely buy this argument: the pulps were full of characters like the Shadow who operated outside the law (as did Batman in his early years), so it’s not as if there was a long tradition of respect-the-law followed by a breakdown. Still it’s an interesting point, and one I’ve heard made before: There’s an old Andy Griffith episode, for instance, where Opie catches a crook confessing on tape and Andy refuses to violate the crook’s Constitutional rights by using the recording. LGM links to Perlstein and several commenters dismiss his thesis; it’s worth reading (and now I’ll have to watch the movie)>.
•Just because the recently defeated gun law specifically says it won’t implement a gun-owner registry, that doesn’t stop Sen. Ted Cruz insisting that this is the real agenda.
•LGM says it’s time to play tough with corporations that violate US law in the way they treat their employees (this is in reference to the legal violation of the Texas fertilizer manufacturer that exploded)—and these should apply anywhere in the world where a corporation does business. I’m all for that. As someone says in comments, they’re not accidents, the deaths are the inevitable result of companies cutting safety measures)
•WSJ’s James Taranto claims the Gosnell case is the result of pro-choicers gutting state regulations on abortion clinics. LGM (again) shows he’s wrong.
•Apparently Rand Paul is fine with drones going after Americans, so long as it’s a nice, black-and-white case (to his credit, he does oppose treating the Boston bomber as an enemy combatant).
•Depressingly familiar scenario: Dartmouth students protest college rape and sexual harassment policies, so they get rape threats.