Milka-what?

By now, most of you have probably seen the new E*Trade commercial in their talking baby series, “Baby – Girlfriend”.  If not, go watch it now and then keep reading.

I watched the ad when it first came out, and I’ve watched it several times since then, and it makes me laugh every time.  It’s definitely one of the best ads in the series.

Apparently, not everyone thinks so.  The Boston Herald reported today that Lindsay Lohan has filed a $100 million suit against E*Trade, alleging that “a ditzy toddler appearing in [the ad] is modeled after her and improperly invokes her ‘likeness, name, characterization and personality without permission.’”

When asked for comment, the company that produced the ad said they “just used a popular baby name that happened to be the name of someone on the account team.”

Hey, Lindsay: How about we go back ten years or so to when you were cute and lovable, and just pretend that the intervening years of drug and alcohol abuse, humiliating public behavior, promiscuity, and unbelievable narcissism never happened, eh?

I’m hoping that this is all just some sort of misguided publicity stunt.  The alternative, that Lohan actually believes that she has exclusive rights to the use of the name “Lindsay” in entertainment, is just too painful too contemplate.

*sigh*

Credit Card Services
Post Office Box 7092
Bridgeport, CT 06601

Account Number XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX

I am writing to dispute the following charge:

01/29 02/01 85456110031701887007089 MAD HAT INTERNATIONAL COLUMBIA SC 18.45

Before making this purchase, I contacted the merchant and asked specific questions about the product I was considering purchasing, to determine if it would meet my needs. The answers to my questions provided by the merchant were objectively, factually incorrect. If the merchant had answered correctly, I would have known that the product was not suitable for my needs, and I would not have purchased it.

On the day the product arrived, February 2, 2010, I immediately ascertained upon opening it that the merchant had provided me with incorrect information and the product was useless to me. I put it back in its packaging without using it and sent the merchant email complaining about the problem. He did not respond to my email.

I sent another email February 22, and once again, the merchant did not respond.

I sent a third email March 7 which read as follows:

Digging through my email archive more carefully, I see that I did send you a message about this on February 2, and you did not reply. Then I wrote to you about it again on February 21, and again you did not reply. That’s rather surprising, since when I wrote to you before I bought the trick to ask if what I wanted to use it for would work, you responded very quickly.

I tried to be civil about this, but I really don’t appreciate being ignored, so let me lay it out for you: I sent you specific questions about this product. You answered those questions incorrectly. I would not have bought it if you had answered the questions correctly. The product does not do what I need it to do and is therefore useless to me. I expect you to refund my full purchase price, including the cost of shipping to me and return shipping to you, because the only reason the product is sitting in my house right now is because you gave me false information about it. If you ignore this email like you have ignored my two previous ones about this, then I will have no choice but to dispute the charge on my credit card and initiate a charge-back.

The merchant finally responded today, March 8, as follows:

This is the first email I have seen from you since your purchase. I am very busy and I give information to the best of my knowledge. I get over a hundred emails per day and try to reply to all of them personally. My reply below was accurate and gave you the information on how the trick worked. Now I have more important things to deal with than a little boy crying over a $5.00 trick. I am sorry it did not fit your needs, but I described it as accurately as I could. Feel free to send it back in new condition and we will refund it per our return policy.

This response is entirely unacceptable for many reasons, but it is a waste of time to enumerate them , so I will simply reiterate that I paid $18.45 for a product I did not want only because the merchant misled me, and as such, I expect for the full amount of the purchase, including shipping, to be refunded, and for the merchant to pay the cost of return shipping.

JanSport packs have a lifetime warranty.  Following the instructions on the JanSport Web site, I sent the pack in for repair or replacement.  The Web site promised a turnaround time of about two weeks.

About a week and a half later, I got this amusing postcard in the mail:

A couple of days later, about two weeks after I sent it, my backpack arrived, fully repaired, with this card enclosed with it:

It’s a little sad that the quality of customer service in this country has gotten so bad that it is remarkable for a company to have a good warranty and honor it cheerfully and quickly, but there you go.  Thanks, JanSport!

It’s not terribly surprising that St. Elizabeth’s lied to Tufts and the DPH just like they lied to us.  After all, once they made the decision to evade and lie rather than admitting to having made mistakes, they had to be consistent about it.  What’s surprising is that they weren’t consistent about it — the story they told to Tufts, the DPH and me have different elements and are in some cases contradictory.  Some interesting tidbits:

• According to Tufts, “Dr. London’s answering service informed [the ER physician] that Dr. London was not on call that day.”  There are three problems with this claim: (1) Dr. London doesn’t have an answering service; (2) she’s the only doctor in her practice and is therefore always on call, except when she’s on vacation; and (3) she wasn’t on vacation and has confirmed to my wife that she was available.
• According to the DPH, “Attempts were made to call, fax, and email the lab results to Dr. London…. the email address was unavailable.”  However, the letter St. Elizabeth’s sent to us said nothing about attempts to email Dr. London, and she has since confirmed that her correct, valid email address is available in the hospital’s records.
• Just as the letter St. Elizabeth’s sent us offered no explanation for why Dr. London’s staff was unable to obtain my wife’s test results through repeated calls to the hospital, they also made no effort to explain this to either Tufts or the DPH.  This is funny, since this is in fact the crux of our complaint.
  According to Dr. London, doctors at hospitals fail to follow up with primary care physicians all the time at most hospitals, so although it’s incredibly annoying, there’s no point in making a fuss about it.  Similarly, it’s also common for ERs to fail to send lab results to PCPs.  What is not normal is that Dr. London’s office wasn’t able to get the results by calling the hospital, and yet that is the only problem the hospital has made no effort to explain.

The hospital may be telling the truth when they claim that the ER tried and failed to contact Dr. London (however, as noted in my previous postings, they clearly did not try hard enough).  The hospital may even be telling the truth when they claim that the ER tried and failed to fax the test results to Dr. London’s office because they had the wrong fax number.  However, where the hospital’s story breaks down is in their failure to explain why the test results were not provided to Dr. London’s office when they called.  There is no possible explanation for this which doesn’t involve the hospital doing something wrong, and this, presumably, is why they’ve avoided trying to explain it at all.

Here’s what I think happened…. The test results were, indeed, sent to the ER and “available at the lab at St. Elizabeth’s on Monday, January 18″ as the hospital claimed in the letter they sent us.  But notice that extremely careful wording: the test results were available at the lab.  In other words, they were available on paper at the lab but were not entered into my wife’s electronic medical record immediately, as they clearly they should have been and as hospital policy no doubt requires.  This is why Dr. London couldn’t see them even though she has access to the St. Elizabeth’s medical record network.  This is why the hospital couldn’t provide the results to Dr. London’s office when they called.  Somebody in the lab didn’t do their job.

So, how should the hospital have responded to my complaint?  They should have apologized for not trying hard enough to contact Dr. London, and they should have apologized for not entering my wife’s test results into her medical record immediately.  That’s it.  If they’d done those two simple things, my wife and I would have been satisfied, and that would have been the end of it.

I have written back to both Tufts and the DPH and asked them to reopen their investigations, starting with speaking with Dr. London about her version of what transpired, which is clearly rather different from the hospital’s.  We’ll see what comes of it.

Janet Davis
Patient Relations Coordinator
St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center
736 Cambridge Street
Brighton, MA 02135-2907

Dear Ms. Davis,

My wife received your response, dated February 12, to my January 26 letter to John Holiver. When coupled with the problems which prompted our letter, your appalling response is enough to convince us to never again entrust our family’s care to St. Elizabeth’s.

I will respond point-by-point to the claims made in your letter.

“… the physician and secretary made several attempts to contact Dr. London and were unable to speak with her directly due to timing and her voice mailbox not accepting messages because it was full. We have alerted Dr. London’s office to this issue.”

At our request, Dr. London checked her records at the hospital and confirmed that her correct cell number is listed for first contact. There is no record on her cell of the hospital ever calling. Furthermore, you have her home number, office number, correct fax number, and a working email address, and there is no indication that anyone attempted to contact her using any of these.

Dr. London also says that her office has not been notified by anyone at St. Elizabeth’s of any problem with her voice-mail system.

Dr. London has been my wife’s and our children’s physician for almost a decade, during which we have called her many times. While we have occasionally encountered a full voice-mail box on weekends, we have never been unable to reach her on her emergency extension, and we have never during office hours been unable to reach the front desk or leave a message which was returned promptly.

Even if it were true that one of Dr. London’s voice-mail boxes was full and you had an incorrect fax number as you assert later in your letter, you had three other working methods for contacting her, so there is simply no excuse for your failure to contact her in a timely fashion about my wife’s treatment.

“You visited Dr. London on Tuesday, January 19, 2010.”

That is simply incorrect. As I told you in my last letter, my wife did not see Dr. London until January 26, because Dr. London told her there was no point in her coming into the office until Dr. London had the test results. Of course, if we had known that would take nine days, my wife would certainly have gone in earlier, because Dr. London could have repeated the same tests and gotten the results back days before the results from your ER were made available to her!

Dr. London has spoken to the ER doctor who treated my wife. He said he had no reason to believe my wife saw Dr. London on January 19, nor is such an appointment listed in my wife’s records. Neither we nor Dr. London has any idea why you think my wife saw Dr. London on January 19. This obvious, verifiable, factual error is indicative of the shoddy quality of your entire handling of this incident.

“St. Elizabeth’s physicians made several attempts to contact Dr. London’s office with the results. Unfortunately, the fax number we had for Dr. London was incorrect – something we have since corrected; and Dr. London’s voice mailbox would not allow us to leave a message, or verify the fax number.”

As noted above, Dr. London is unaware of any problem with her voice-mail system that would have prevented the hospital staff from reaching her or her staff. Also as noted above, even if it were true that you had the wrong fax number and were unable to reach her office by phone, there were three other ways you could have reached her that no one from St. Elizabeth’s ever attempted.

“The lab results were available at the lab at St. Elizabeth’s on Monday, January 18, 2010.”

Dr. London reiterated to my wife that it was nine days before her staff was able to obtain my wife’s test results, and that at no point did anyone from St. Elizabeth’s initiate contact with Dr. London’s office or return any of her staff’s calls. Every single contact with the hospital was initiated by Dr. London’s staff. Dr. London overheard one of the calls placed by her office to the hospital, and her staff’s utter frustration over the issue was verbalized to her repeatedly over many days.

Your letter ignores the repeated attempts by Dr. London’s office to obtain my wife’s results and offers no explanation for why you were unable to provide them when asked. Do you mean to imply that Dr. London and her staff are lying about having tried repeatedly to obtain the results? Or do you consider it so entirely unremarkable as to be unworthy of comment for a patient’s primary care physician to be unable to obtain test results despite repeated attempts over many days? Or perhaps you would like to reconsider your claim that my wife’s results were available in your lab from January 18?

As I mentioned above, Dr. London has spoken to the ER doctor who treated my wife. He informed her that he wrongly assumed that she was still on active duty at St. Elizabeth’s and would therefore be notified automatically of my wife’s discharge from the ER. According to him, he didn’t even try calling her until several days later when he found out that he was wrong about her status at the hospital. Furthermore, he said he knew nothing about claims to the contrary made in your letter. To be blunt, if you’re going to perpetuate a lie to cover up your hospital’s misconduct, you ought to do a better job of making sure the involved parties on your staff know about the lie so they can play their parts properly.

Speaking of transparent lies… I called you on Friday, February 12 to ask why my we had received no response to my letter. You called me back on Monday, February 15 and claimed that a letter to my wife “went out last Friday.” This is odd, because although the letter to my wife was indeed dated February 12, the postmark on its envelope was dated February 17, and we didn’t receive it until February 19. Perhaps the five-day delay was needed for your legal department to review your response to confirm that you hadn’t done anything foolish like actually admitting to having done anything wrong?

“It has been determined that the care rendered based on your hospital presentation was appropriate…”

In fact it was not, and we are not the only ones to think so. Dr. London has informed us that as a result of this incident and how you responded to my complaint about it, she will now strongly recommend to her patients against using your emergency room. This is especially damning given that Dr. London has admitting privileges at your hospital and teaches there.

Furthermore, after hearing my story, a physician friend who did part of her residency at your hospital remarked, “From what I saw at St. Elizabeth’s, I’m really not surprised. If you’re ever in an accident and the EMTs want to take you to St. Elizabeth’s, get out of the ambulance!”

“…and the billing will be processed for your care.”

Aha! Now we come to the essence of your view of this incident. Of course you can’t admit to having done anything wrong, because that might compromise your ability to collect from the insurance company for my wife’s treatment! That’s truly appalling.

In summary, it is indisputable that mistakes were made in my wife’s care. I brought these mistakes to your attention with the expectation that you would acknowledge them, apologize, and use them as an opportunity for improvement. Instead, you evaded, lied, and falsely (and libelously) laid the blame on others. Because of this, my wife and I will never again willingly seek treatment for our family at your hospital; we will strongly discourage all of our friends and neighbors from doing so; and we will continue to aggressively pursue any and all third-party avenues of complaint that are open to us.

American Honda Motor Company, Incorporated
Honda Automobile Customer Service
Fax: (310) 783-3023

To whom it may concern:

I sent you the attached letter via fax on November 17. You did not give me the courtesy of a reply, but at least the spam directed at my wife’s email address seems to have stopped.

Unfortunately, now Honda Village is spamming MY email address, jik@kamens.brookline.ma.us, instead of my wife’s.

Honda Village obtained my email address when I sent them a message through their Web site on October 15, 2009. Here is the exact content of that message:

(Do not add my email address to any bulk email lists as a result of this submission. I am providing you with my email address only so that you can respond to this request. NO OTHER USE OF MY EMAIL ADDRESS IS AUTHORIZED.)

(Do not add my postal mailing address to any direct-marketing lists as a result of this submission. I am providing you with my postal address only so that you can remove me from your direct-marketing list as described below. NO OTHER USE OF MY POSTAL ADDRESS IS AUTHORIZED.)

For months now, you have been sending me junk mail in envelopes that you have intentionally designed to deceive recipients. You’ve made them look like some sort of official certified or registered mail, and you’ve intentionally left your company name and return address off of the envelopes. These envelopes are clearly designed to get people to open them, when they would just throw them in the trash if it was obvious they were from you.

This kind of deceptive direct-mail advertising is exceedingly slimy. It is distressing to me that I purchased a vehicle from a company that employs such slimy tactics. You have proven to me, unfortunately not for the first time, that my initial impression, that you were different from all the other slimy car dealers out there, was wrong.

Whatever mailing list I am on to be sent these slimy mailings — please get me off of it. Right now. And leave me off of it. Permanently.

As you can see, I clearly and unequivocally told Honda Village NOT TO PUT ME ON ANY SPAM LISTS, and yet that is exactly what they have done. Here’s what has transpired since then:

• October 17, 2009 – I received a “Did you get my info” form sales email from Alex Stoyanov, which I ignored since it was obviously irrelevant to what I had written to Honda Village about.
• October 18, 2009 – I received a “The best use of your time” form sales email from Alex Stoyanov, which I (again) ignored since was (again) obviously irrelevant to what I had written to Honda Village about.
• January 3, 2010 – I received a “Your Honda Service Reminder” email from honda@reminder.honda.com, i.e., the same spam that you had previously been sending to my wife’s address as outlined in my previous letter. I immediately unsubscribed by clicking on the link in the email.
• January 4, 2010 – I received a “Valuable Honda Service Offers” email from homda@reminder.honda.com. When I clicked on the link to unsubscribe, it informed me that I was already unsubscribed! Isn’t it remarkable that Honda can continue to send me email messages from which I’ve supposedly already unsubscribed?
• February 22, 2010 – I received another “Valuable Honda Service Offers” email. Once again, when I clicked on the link to unsubscribe, it informed me that I already was.

In short, Honda Village started spamming me when I clearly and unequivocally told them not to, and they are continuing to spam me over a month and a half after I told their automated system to unsubscribe me and their system confirmed that I was, in fact, unsubscribed.

All of this spamming my wife and me against our will is a direct violation of the federal CAN-SPAM Act.

You forced me to waste an hour of my time writing my last letter to get you to stop spamming my wife, and now you’ve forced me to waste another hour of my time writing this letter to get you to stop spamming me.

To be blunt, what is WRONG with you people?!

MAKE THE SPAM STOP. NOW. AND MAKE SURE IT NEVER STARTS UP AGAIN. EVER.

CC: E. Peter Mullane, Esq.

In a nutshell, Dropbox smartly and automatically synchronizes a hierarchy of folders among any number of Windows PCs, Macs, Linux PCs and iPhones.  All of the synchronized changes are automatically backed up on Dropbox’s servers, and you can go back into the past to retrieve previous versions or deleted files.

Here’s how it works:

1. Sign up for a Dropbox account, which comes with 2GB of storage for free (you can pay small monthly fees for more storage).
2. Install and configure (i.e., enter your email address and password) the Dropbox client on two or more computers or iPhones.
3. The client creates a Dropbox folder whose contents you can manipulate like any other folder on your computer.
4. Any changes you make to the folder on any of the clients are automatically propagated to all of the other computers linked to your account.
5. The clients are bandwidth-sensitive (e.g., you can install Dropbox on your laptop and it won’t take up all of your 3G bandwidth when you’re tethered to your phone) and supposedly even know how to synchronize between clients on the same LAN.
6. The files you put into Dropbox are also accessible through their Web site, and you can share links to specific Dropbox folders to friends or colleagues.

As noted above, you can get 2GB of storage for free.  Furthermore, you can easily get a 250MB bonus just by spending a few minutes using the service (for details, click on “Getting Started” from the Web site home page after logging in).  You can also get a 250MB bonus by signing up through another user’s referral link (in case you haven’t noticed, all of the links to the service I’ve posted in this blog posting are referral links for my account ) and additional bonuses for referring other people.

There are other services like this one, e.g., SugarSync, but this is the best one I’ve seen, and the fact that it has Linux support is totally sweet.  My only complaint is that it doesn’t (yet) have a BlackBerry client.

It is worth noting that E. Peter Mullane’s chief claim to fame is that he is one of the lawyers who defended John J. Connolly Jr., the former FBI agent who was convicted in federal court of racketeering, obstruction of justice, murder and conspiracy to commit murder and will be spending the rest of his life in prison.  Nice!

I am not going to publish Mullane’s letter here, because there are all kinds of legal issues with that, and… well… Mullane is a lawyer, y’know?  I will, however, publish the response I just sent him, from which you can get a pretty good idea of the claims he made in his letter.  Enjoy!

E. Peter Mullane, Esq.
6 Bennett Street
Cambridge, MA 02138-5708

Dear Mr. Mullane,

I received your letter today concerning Village Automotive Group. Not Honda Village, because the deceptive practices about which I wrote are being used by multiple VAG dealerships, and because Honda Village is not a registered corporation but rather is part of Village Automotive Group, Inc. As such, any class action undertaken in response to these practices will name VAG as the defendant.

While agree with your characterization of the advertising industry as “primarily and unapologetically based upon the premises and goal of the advertisers trying to get people to buy things they perhaps do not really need, or to use products that have less value than is being represented and touted by the manufacturer,” the law views these objectives differently from intentional deception, i.e., knowingly misleading consumers into believing something that is completely and objectively false.

Concerning your example, “the pharmaceutical companies who spend billions of dollars advertising prescription drugs that commonly do not perform as advertised, and in fact in many cases have undisclosed side-effects that are actually harmful to the consumer,” in fact, drug companies are prohibited from knowingly making false claims and are required to disclose side effects. There have been several high-profile cases recently when drug companies have been fined and prosecuted for failures in this regard.

As for your other example, “companies advertising the social benefits of alcohol and tobacco use, while promoting the fiction and deception that the use of those products is the key to the road to happiness and having a fun time,” advertisements are permitted to employ exaggeration and hyperbole which a reasonable man would recognize as such, and the alcohol and tobacco advertisements to which you refer clearly fall into this category, and the law does not regard them as “deception.”

As for your assertion that the advertising industry is protected by the First Amendment, that is true to a large extent, but again, that protection does not apply to intentional, knowing deception. If that were not so, then the deceptive advertising elements of Chapter 93a would have been ruled unconstitutional long ago. For example, an oriental rug store may not repeatedly advertise fake “Going out of business!” sales to dupe customers into thinking that they are getting a good deal when they are not.

The envelopes which Village Automotive Group is using to mail its advertisements to consumers are designed to intentionally, knowingly deceive the recipients into thinking that their content is different and more important than it actually is. This is true for at least three different reasons:

1. The sender of the mailings is not identified on the outside of the envelopes.
2. The envelopes bear markings designed to make them falsely appear to be Certified Mail™, thus making the contents of the envelopes appear to be more important than they actually are.
3. The other markings on the envelopes, e.g., the printed year and the font used for the return address, are designed to mimic those of mailings sent by the federal government (most notably, the IRS and/or Social Security Administration), thus, once again, making it appear that the contents of the envelopes are far more personal and important than they actually are.

Unlike an alcohol or tobacco advertisement, a reasonable man would not recognize the deception being promulgated by one of these envelopes until he had already opened it. Indeed, the strategies employed by these envelopes are designed and intended to deceive a reasonable man.

According to Duclersaint v. Federal National Mortgage Association, 427 Mass. 809, 696 NE2d 536 (1998) “A practice may be deceptive if it reasonably could be found to have caused the plaintiff to act differently than he otherwise would have acted.” That is clearly the case here, as the entire purpose of these deceptive envelopes is to cause their recipients to open them rather than throwing them in the trash as they would have if they had recognized their real origin and purpose.

On the subject of damages, Chapter 93a does not limit itself to actual damages, but rather permits redress for incidental damages as well. Indeed, according to Leardi v. Brown, 394 Mass. 151 (1985). Chapter 93A can be used to redress any injury, defined as “invasion of a legally protected interest.” and “plaintiffs are entitled to nominal damages even where no actual damages are shown.”

For example, if a consumer sees a “Going out of business!” banner in the window of a rug store, enters the store thinking he is going to get a bargain on a rug, and discovers that in fact the rugs being sold are of poor quality and not worth even the supposedly “bargain” prices being asked for them, he may file a claim against the store under Chapter 93a even if he did not purchase a rug, citing as damages the lost of time spent determining that the store’s advertisement was deceptive.

I assert time damages resulting from lost time spent opening your client’s deceptive advertisements before realizing their deceptive nature, as well lost time spent attempting to get your client to stop sending me these advertisements. I further assert damages resulting from emotional distress: since purchasing a vehicle from your client, I have become disgusted by their deceptive and dishonest practices and intensely ashamed that I ever did business with them, and I am forced to relive these painful emotions every time I receive another advertisement from your client. I further assert damages from invasion of privacy resulting from your client’s failure to stop sending me the advertisements when I asked them to do so. By the way, thank you for confirming that your client received that request, thereby making it impossible claim that they did not, should this matter go to trial.

Even if you are correct that my request was passed on to a vendor who failed to act on it, that does not diminish your client’s liability. The vendor was acting as a paid agent of your client, and it was incumbent upon your client to ensure that the vendor had proper procedures in place to ensure that requests such as mine were properly handled. Furthermore, concerning the nature of the advertisements, your client obviously worked with the vendor to design them and is thus liable for the intentional deception. Nevertheless, you can be sure that if a class action is initiated against your client for employing these deceptive practices, the advertising vendor through which the mailings were sent will be named as an additional defendant.

I have now demonstrated that the actions of your client were both unlawful and injurious under Chapter 93a. I include here by reference, without modification, the demands I enumerated in my last letter. I look forward to your prompt reply.

To the editor:

Jonah Goldberg’s recent suggestion that severe winter weather disproves global warning shows an alarming ignorance of basic science. In particular:

• When the air is warmer, more water evaporates into it.
• When there is more water in the air, it snows more.
• Once you get below freezing, colder temperatures actually decrease snowfall.

In short, the simple truth is that global warming causes more snow, not less.

Of course, ideologues like Goldberg rarely let something as inconvenient as the truth stand in the way of their agenda.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kamens
Brighton

Not only did the Herald not print my letter or any other letter or opinion piece making a similar point, they have run at least two idiotic editorial cartoons mocking the idea that more snow supports global warming theories.  Here’s one of them (I couldn’t find on-line the other one I know about; maybe Holbert decided it wasn’t his best work and took it down):

It’s so nice to see the Herald pandering to the segment of the American public that is too stupid to think through the basic science enough to realize that this argument is bunk.

Perhaps the reason why the Herald’s editorial staff continues to promulgate this theory is because they fall into that segment of the American public themselves.

Interestingly, the very same day Jonah Goldberg’s column was printed in the Herald, Time magazine ran an article explaining in detail, with quotes and citations from experts in the field, exactly what I explained in my letter to the editor.

To the editor:

I enjoyed Joe Fitzgerald’s recent satire of the pro-life movement. I laughed so hard coffee came out my nose when I read that “the only choice [the pro-choice movement] will tolerate is its own.” It was obvious that he was joking, since it’s so patently absurd to suggest that people protecting a woman’s right to choose are trying to deny her a choice.

Wait, what’s that? He was serious? Are you sure? Oh, in that case, never mind.

Fitzgerald is right that pro-choice extremists sometimes say stupid things, but I’ll take them over the extremists on the other side who think it’s God’s work to assassinate doctors performing legal medical procedures.

Jonathan Kamens, Brighton