Blame Harry Reid for DC Gridlock

That's the gist of a Brookings Institution report released this month. Couched in baseball sports terms, the left-leaning think tank found that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (pictured) and his Democratic Senate committee chairmen killed the vast majority of legislation in the 113th Congress. "If the House and Senate were sports teams, their managers would be fired," wrote the authors of the report in a Politico article.

Per the Washington Examiner:

The analysis opens with the observation that the House, contrary to expectation, passed twice as many bills as the Senate in 2013. Why? Because of the Senate committee process.

"When we look at this category, then, we begin to understand where the problem lies: even in the traditionally collegial Senate, 87 percent of bills die in committee," Molly Jackman and Saul Jackman, of Brookings, and Brian Boessenecker write in Politico. "While the filibuster may grab all the headlines, committees are a far deadlier weapon."

That observation undermines the conventional wisdom about Republican opposition to President Obama causing gridlock...

Investor's Business Daily editors were more direct:

The Brookings scholars note that the 113th Congress passed just 56 bills out of the 5,700 introduced, making it the least productive of any since 1947.

What they found, however, was that the Republican-run House actually passed bills at nearly twice the rate as the Senate under Harry Reid's leadership.

"The Senate," the authors wrote, "is not serving its intended function." And that's not because Senate Republicans keep filibustering bills."  [snip]

So if you want to grouse about Washington gridlock, direct your post cards, letters, emails or phone calls to the real cause: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Study: Plan B Pill Useless for Women over 176 Pounds

"In a major blow to birth control proponents, the European equivalent of Plan B - known as the 'morning after pill' - now includes a warning that the contraceptive is not effective for women over 165 pounds and does not work at all for women over 176 pounds," writes Nicole Bailey. "The implications are staggering: according to the Centers for Disease Control, the average weight of an American woman over 20 is 166.2 pounds."

Feminist outlet Jezebel pointed out that the saga began with a 2011 study:

...a 2011 study out of the University of Edinburgh, Scotland that found that "the risk of pregnancy was more than threefold greater for obese women compared with women with normal body mass index, whichever EC [Emergency Contraception] was taken." They also found that the risk of pregnancy was particularly high if that emergency contraception was made of levonorgestrel, the hormone found in many of the major over-the-counter morning after pills sold in the United States, like Plan B One-Step. The study recommended that overweight women use IUDs.

HRA Pharma, the European manufacturer of a drug essentially identical to America's Plan B, has followed up on the findings of that study and concluded that it is time to warn women that "the drug is completely ineffective for women who weigh more than 176 pounds and begins to lose effectiveness in women who weigh more than 165 pounds," reports Mother Jones.