McClatchy has the story Missouri’s Rep. Akin: Pregnancy rare after ‘legitimate rape’.

 U.S. Senate candidate Todd Akin of Missouri ignited a firestorm of criticism Sunday when he said in a television interview that rape victims have a biological ability to ward off pregnancy.

“If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down,” the Republican said in the interview broadcast on KTVI-TV in St. Louis.

Is this the Republican brand of sex education?

Later Sunday, Akin’s campaign said the congressman had erred.

Erred?  In high school or even junior high, such a person would be laughed out of the school yard for his ignorance about sex.

On the other hand, if this were true, Rep. Akin could receive a Nobel prize for inventing a new kind of birth control.

This medical theory of Akin’s is much like the economic theory of the Republicans. You throw around a few technical terms (like secretions and hormones in Akin’s case) to come up with a theory that might sound plausible to a lay person. You ignore the idea that just because it sounds plausible to the uneducated, it doesn’t make it true. To find out if it is true, you actually have to look at the facts of how your theory works out in real life. If it turns out that real life shows that though your theory sounded plausible to you it does not correspond to real life, then you have to admit that there is a flaw in your theory. For something as important as life and death decisions for women or the economy, you don’t risk making policy decisions based on plausibility. With the resources that national politicians on the House Science Committee have (like Akin), you’d think they could find out the truth before they spout off. It doesn’t look like Akin even understands what science is. So how does he get to be on the Science Committee?

The Republicans on the various economics related committee don’t seem to show any more knowledge about economics than Akin seems to show about science.