sunday's links

ABCNews.com covers a study recently published in The Journal of Political Economy about why it pays to be a whore. If you want to read the study itself, it can be downloaded here. One theory as to why prostitutes, compared to other "unskilled" women (those broads have some skills, don't get me wrong), make a pretty penny, is that they have given up the likelihood that they are ever going to get married (sullied goods) and must be compensated.

Andrew Sullivan writes in The Sunday Times about Bush/Cheney's "personal tolerance" for gay couples and immigrants -- "legal and illegal". Sullivan manages to make the duo seem less like monsters but asks, "Does their personal tolerance make their policies less or more distasteful?" Sullivan answers his own question and I have to agree: " . . . more distasteful, since they know better." (Comes via Sullivan's blog.)

If you want to help Lee Sevilla out and you have a photo you'd like to see turned into a print/postcards, read this article about Sevilla in The Los Angeles Times, a 71-year-old woman who lives in her Dodge Neon with her dog, Sandy.

Read this week's Newsweek cover story about "AIDS at 25". Yeah, it's been 25 years since the first case of AIDS was reported in the media and things have changed: "AIDS itself changed, from a disease that killed gay men and drug addicts to a global scourge that has decimated the African continent, cut a large swath through black America and infected almost as many women as men worldwide." But the article argues that so much more has changed . . .