When confronted on this, after a few days of both liberals and conservatives decrying her, Bachmann did not really apologize or correct the record. Instead, she said it's OK for her to say things like that because she never told anyone she's a doctor. As long as you don't lie about a doctor, you can claim anything you like about medical matters, on TV, and it's OK! (I'm not a doctor but I heard that if you make your baby wear a onesie with a "funny" slogan on it your baby will die.)

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

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She accused Perry of only supporting the policy for money:

What I’m saying is that it’s wrong for a drug company, because the governor’s former chief of staff was the chief lobbyist for this drug company. The drug company gave thousands of dollars in political donations to the governor, and this is just flat-out wrong. The question is, is it about life, or was it about millions of dollars and potentially billions for a drug company?

She got worse after the debate, on Fox and the "Today" show, when she said an unnamed mother told her that her daughter became "retarded" after receiving the vaccine.

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Now for the bad news: At some point the Huffington Post's gloriously deranged "Living" section was replaced by "Aol Health Living." It still has Deepak Chopra, but there seems, upon a cursory perusal, to be a lot less "integrative medicine" and all-natural holistic cure-alls peddled by Hollywood quacks. It looks like anti-vaccine nut Jenny McCarthy last contributed to the HuffPo way back in January.

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But, the way I saw it, the layoffs changed everything. I was no longer part-time, and flexible hours were out of the question. The deal was off: My only option now was to work week after week of overtime. And so, as I began to plan an important magazine cover shoot for a feature article about 10 overachieving teens, I was determined to effect a change. This shoot was an opportunity not only to prove myself to new colleagues but also to escape from the control of my manipulative creative director, and I hoped to make the most of it.

As it happened, my husband was going away on business that week, leaving me as a single parent for five days leading up to the photo shoot. Even though he traveled frequently, our household could never adjust to his absence. Any upset in my son's routine would result in behavioral problems: He'd cling to me, he'd become cranky and he'd sometimes wet his bed on nights his dad was away.

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By casting a wider net and looking closely at mainstream children, the researchers expected to find a higher rate of autism characteristics. But they were surprised at how high the rate was. They don't think South Korea has more children with autism than the United States, but instead that autism often goes undiagnosed in many nations. U.S. estimates are based on education and medical records, not the more time-consuming survey conducted in South Korea.

Two-thirds of the children with autism traits in the study were in the mainstream school population, hadn't been diagnosed before and weren't getting any special services. Many of those undiagnosed children likely have mild social impairments, rather than more severe autism.

"It doesn't mean all of a sudden there are more new children with (autism spectrum disorders)," said co-author Dr. Young-Shin Kim of the Yale Child Study Center. "They have been there all along, but were not counted in previous prevalence studies."

It's not clear whether the children need special services or not, other experts said.

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Contrast that public square with another one, half a world away. This one is in Manhattan. Between April 11 and 28, 2011, a jumbotron in Times Square is flashing the following announcement every hour:

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No one wants to be the first person to label your child. We begged to get "cerebral palsy, ataxia" to describe Jake's odd way of hipping and hopping and stumbling around. No one worried about anything behavioral at that point, mostly because the check box for MR (which is the nice way of saying mentally retarded) had already been checked. But just a plain old MR won't get you much. It's better to add a little HI (hearing impairment), or better yet there's No. 5, which is vision impairment. We don't have checks in those boxes, but we do have most of the other ones: developmental delay, speech/language impairment, multiple disabilities. Truthfully, the best one I've found so far is OI, orthopedic impairment. If you get that box checked, the money comes out of some other pocket called the "low incidence fund," and people stop caring how much your child's little switches and talking buttons cost because the school district doesn't pay for them directly; it comes out at a different level in the budget. When we started this game with his first Individualized Education Program in 2003, the box for autism wasn't even listed as an option yet.

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When I see another family with a special needs child, I always try to smile -- at the child, or the parent, hopefully both, to show that, even though I don't have a stamp on my forehead or my son in tow, I understand a little bit about their life. There are days when I just hope we can get through one single transaction without a struggle, and knowing there is a compassionate stranger nearby can make all the difference for me. But she wouldn't make eye contact with me, or anyone else for that matter, except her son.

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"Which kid?" I said.

"You know which kid," said Doc. "Your mentally retarded kid, Mike."

"Yeah?" I said.

"And I think," Doc went on, "there should be a fence. Right here. Along here. You should build it. Because I just can't do it anymore."

"What kind of fence?" I said.

"I don't care," said Doc. "You just need to get it done! Chain-link. Picket. I don't care! Just a fence. That will stop him."

I thought about it for a few beats. I had just completed a 6-foot picket fence around my backyard. I thought this would contain my 11-year-old son, who has been diagnosed with what they call "severe and profound" mental retardation and autism. Mike was happy in the fenced-in backyard. For about a week. But then he began to search for ways to escape. And he found them. Through the house, through the garage and out. Simple enough. To actually contain him, we would need to watch him closely every minute of every day and night.

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The piece was co-published with Rolling Stone magazine -- they fact-checked it and published it in print; we posted it online. In the days after running "Deadly Immunity," we amended the story with five corrections (which can still be found logged here) that went far in undermining Kennedy's exposé. At the time, we felt that correcting the piece -- and keeping it on the site, in the spirit of transparency -- was the best way to operate. But subsequent critics, including most recently, Seth Mnookin in his book "The Panic Virus," further eroded any faith we had in the story's value. We've grown to believe the best reader service is to delete the piece entirely.

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Yet despite numerous studies, a definitive correlation between vaccination and autism has never been proven. And this week, Dr. Andrew Wakefield's controversial, already largely discredited study that kicked off the whole debate  back in 1998 was branded an "elaborate fraud" by the British Medical Journal (BMJ). BMJ further noted that "not one of the 12 cases reported in the 1998 Lancet paper was free of misrepresentation or undisclosed alteration, and that in no single case could the medical records be fully reconciled with the descriptions, diagnoses, or histories published in the journal." Wakefield's medical license was revoked last year for "serious professional misconduct."

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The conclusions of the 1998 paper by Andrew Wakefield and colleagues was renounced by 10 of its 13 authors and later retracted by the medical journal Lancet, where it was published. Still, the suggestion the MMR shot was connected to autism spooked parents worldwide and immunization rates for measles, mumps and rubella have never fully recovered.

A new examination found, by comparing the reported diagnoses in the paper to hospital records, that Wakefield and colleagues altered facts about patients in their study.

The analysis, by British journalist Brian Deer, found that despite the claim in Wakefield's paper that the 12 children studied were normal until they had the MMR shot, five had previously documented developmental problems. Deer also found that all the cases were somehow misrepresented when he compared data from medical records and the children's parents.

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In the mixed decision filed in Los Angeles Superior Court last week, Judge Robert H. O'Brien said the state Department of Managed Health Care erred in issuing the memo, but it has a right to want licensed practitioners to provide treatment to autistic children.

The Dec. 30 ruling came as a result of a lawsuit brought by Consumer Watchdog. The consumer advocacy group claimed the state was allowing insurers to delay coverage for Applied Behavioral Analysis, an intensive form of treatment that can cost $70,000 a year.

The lawsuit alleged that insurers lobbied the Schwarzenegger administration to get out of obligations to parents of autistic children by sending a memo calling for treatment providers to be licensed and referring complaints to the department instead of independent mediators.

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My son Max has always been interested in the computer and likes to watch over my shoulder while I answer work e-mail or read the news. E-mail is boring to a 3-year-old, though, so sometimes I'd type in the name of an animal in the Flickr search bar and pull up a slide show of, say, tigers. Or giraffes, or elephants, or wolves, or whatever. Usually he asked for tigers, though.

My husband and I spent many hours debating the acceptability of this practice. He said it was like letting our kid watch TV, which we have scrupulously avoided so far. We don't own a TV and only occasionally stream a movie on the laptop after the kids are asleep. Since they rarely sleep, our own screen time is very limited. But we agree that TV for a 3-year-old, as a replacement for adult interaction, is probably a Bad Idea. I argued that it was more like looking at a book about animals, since I'm sitting there with him and we're talking about the pictures together -- just as I'd do if we were turning the pages of a book.

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Published in 2007, "The Vaccine Book" has sold nearly 180,000 copies and been an Amazon top seller in the parenting section since its debut. Its timing was perfect: For nearly a decade, a small but highly visible army of anti-vaccinationists waged an all-out war to persuade parents that vaccines cause autism -- resulting not only in anxiety but also, thanks to vaccine refusal, the re-emergence of virtually extinct diseases like whooping cough and measles. Amid the polarizing debate, Sears appeared to offer a middle ground. The book's centerpiece is "Dr. Bob's Alternative Schedule,” a vaccine regimen for parents nervous about the traditional timetable to give kids their shots. The schedule departs radically from the one vetted by the CDC and used by physicians, spacing out vaccines over 21 visits, as opposed to the standard 13.

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I thought I understood my Little Dude. That assumption changed recently, when he suddenly began explaining to me how his brain works. I do not know what prompted him to share this display of cognitive awareness, except that since he started preschool -- in the Preschool Program for Children With Disabilities at our local elementary school -- he seems more aware of the fact that he's a little different.

Until recently, he's been shielded from that. Protected within the nest of family and close friends, Little Dude has always been considered charming, if shy; intensely bright, if overly focused. Our fourth child and our only son, my husband and I chalked up much of his quirky behavior to "boyishness." His interests, though surprising in their intensity, seemed typical in subject: "Thomas the Tank Engine," "Go Diego Go." The fact that he knew, at age 4, the name of every character in all six "Star Wars" movies evidenced to us an excellent attention span, a tremendous capacity for detail, and a budding interest in science. We did not think it signaled a disorder.

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Sharron Angle: It’s going really well. If you’re interested in just the Internet part of that -- and of course I’ve been criticized for saying that I like to be friends with the [press] -- but here’s the deal: when I get a friendly press outlet -- not so much the guy that’s interviewing me -- it’s their audience that I’m trying to reach. So, if I can get on Rush Limbaugh, and I can say, "Harry Reid needs $25 million. I need a million people to send twenty five dollars to SharronAngle.com.” The day I was able to say that [even], he made $236,000 dollars. That’s why it’s so important. Somebody ... I’m going on Bill O’Reilly the 16th. They say, "Bill O’Reilly, you better watch out for that guy, he’s not necessarily a friendly" ... Doesn’t matter, his audience is friendly, and if I can get an opportunity to say that at least once on his show -- when I said it on Sean Hannity’s television show we made $40,000 before we even got out of the studio in New York.

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