Tessa Berenson

When candidates are headed for defeat, they put out some desperate ads

There’s a certain type of campaign ad that candidates hope they’ll never have to run. It typically airs in the final days before the election, when the polls aren’t looking good and they decide to try for a Hail Mary pass to shake things up.

With the midterm elections just days away, these ads are surfacing now. Here’s a look at four long balls thrown by despairing candidates.

As the Texas gubernatorial race has slipped through her fingers, Democrat Wendy Davis reached for a new attack against Republican Greg Abbott. In a move that caused voters and pundits alike to shake their heads, she decided to criticize Abbott — who has used a wheelchair since a 1984 accident left him paralyzed — for not supporting the disabled.

Tom Corbett, the Republican governor of Pennsylvania, has long been the most likely incumbent to go down to defeat on Tuesday. So with the sense of a man with nothing to lose, he released an ad attacking Democrat Tom Wolf for supporting a hike in the income tax. That’s a pretty standard hit, but the visuals — chainsaws, demonic twins and evil clowns — are anything but routine.

In Virginia, Republican Ed Gillespie may have taken the Hail Mary metaphor literally. In a recent ad, he linked Democratic Sen. Mark Warner to a recent push to force the Washington Redskins football team to change its name. The real chutzpah of the ad, though, comes when Gillespie argues that the fight, which Warner has mostly sat out, is a distraction from the real issues.

Not every Hail Mary ad is thrown by a candidate. In the Colorado Senate race between Democratic Sen. Mark Udall and Republican Cory Gardner, NARAL Pro-Choice America tried a last-minute turnaround by arguing that a Gardner win would lead to the outlawing of birth control and a run on condoms.

And then there’s whatever the opposite of a Hail Mary pass is. (A screen pass?) Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell is clearly feeling like he’s going to defeat Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes on Tuesday or he wouldn’t have spent valuable ad money and time on a goofy ad where he giggles and plays with puppies.

A Girl Scouts Research Institute study reveals that 37% of girls want to become a politician, but they need mentors

Teenage girls are interested in politics, according to a recent study, but the negative stereotypes of female politicians make them reluctant to pursue political careers.

According to the Girls and Politics Pulse Poll released this month by the Girl Scout Research Institute, 67% of American girls between the ages of 11 and 17 are interested in politics. But only 32% believe society encourages women to be politicians, and, perhaps most dismaying, 74% believe that if they were to go into politics, they would have to work harder than a man to be taken seriously.

With women currently holding only 18.5% of the seats in Congress, these results unfortunately aren’t entirely surprising.

“Girls can’t be what they can’t see,” Girl Scouts chief executive Anna Maria Chávez told the Washington Post.

But the girls who responded to the survey had some suggestions for how to change the perception of politics as a man’s world–they want more support from teachers, mentors and the media. A majority of girls said mentoring by current female politicians, after school programs focused on civic engagement and more positive media coverage of women in politics would encourage them to pursue a career politics.

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Republicans are using scare tactics before Halloween

The 2014 campaign of fear just crowned a new champion. The Republican National Committee released a new ad Monday that ties together ISIS, “terrorists committing mass murder,” Ebola and Guantanamo Bay, blaming each on Barack Obama’s policies, which are “on the ballot,” as the President has said.

And just in time for Halloween, the clip debuts a scary party slogan – “Vote to keep terrorists off U.S. soil. Vote Republican.”

That line is technically a reference to Obama’s long-stated desire to close Guantanamo Bay and move the suspected terrorists to U.S. prisons. But taken in isolation, it suggests, of course, that a vote for Democrats is a vote for allowing a terrorist invasion.

The RNC will run the ad on pre-roll in eight states with competitive Senate races: Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Louisiana and Virginia.

Democratic National Committee Press Secretary Michael Czin responded to the ad in an email to TIME, “Seriously? Did they have Saturday Night Live produce this ad, because it’s a joke. The Republican party has become a caricature of itself, and this ridiculous ad is the latest example.”

Good luck to the fact checkers, who will now have to score the ad as deceptive or not. (The correct answer: It is both deceptive, and not deceptive.)

It's all about sex-ed that moves outside the classroom

Planned Parenthood is touting a new study that found its middle school sex education program successfully delays sex for both boys and girls by the end of 8th grade by encouraging more talk about the subject between students and their parents outside the classroom.

The study, conducted by the Wellesley Centers for Women in partnership with Planned Parenthood, evaluated the Get Real program in 24 schools in the Boston area over the course of three years. The curriculum spans sixth through eighth grade and has students pair lessons in school with take-home assignments designed to start dialogues between them and their parents or caregivers. Of the 24 schools in the study, half used Get Real and half used their usual sexual education curriculum; 16% fewer boys and 15% fewer girls had sex in the schools using the Get Real curriculum. The study was published in the Journal of School Health.

“Awkward as this might be for some, Get Real makes it a little less awkward and easier to have these conversations,” said Lisa Grace, a parent in a Massachusetts school district using Get Real.

Along with highlighting parents as the primary sexual educators for their children, Get Real also focuses on relationship skills as an avenue for sexual health.

“If kids are able to negotiate relationships, they will be better able to negotiate sexual relationships,” said Jennifer Slonaker, a vice president of education and training for the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts.

Get Real is currently taught in 150 schools in Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island and Texas. Planned Parenthood representatives hope the program’s success can be replicated on a larger national scale, even in more conservative states.

“The curriculum does not espouse values,” said Grace, the mother in Massachusetts. “It makes it very clear that the parents should continue to be the primary sexual educators for their kids. So that reassured a lot of folks.”

“This is a program for older elementary and early middle school students that helps young people to delay having sex,” said Leslie Kantor, a vice president for education at Planned Parenthood. “So even states that stress abstinence… might be very interested in this type of program since it actually gets to these abstinence kind of outcomes.”

One professor of Christian ethics finds it “rather disturbing”

It’s that time of year again. Those last few weeks in October when everyone frantically tries to come up with a winning Halloween costume—some magical combination of topical yet funny, sexy but not desperate, and clever without being opaque. A costume that promises to be a conversation starter at any party, making you impossibly alluring by displaying both your charming wit and your physical attractiveness.

So what is the must-have getup this season, along with Elsa from Frozen and the superhero mainstays?

Ebola.

As in, Ebola doctors, Ebola patients and Ebola zombies. The New York Post’s Oct. 15 cover declared Ebola disease suits the “hot” costume this year, begging the question of what a “sexy” Ebola doc might look like. And then begging the question of if we even want to know the answer.

The prospect of this costume going viral, shall we say, has some people crying ‘too soon.’ “Normally I think that irony and humor is funny, but this thing with the costumes, is it really that funny?” Maria Mckenna, a physician’s assistant in Philadelphia, asked the Associated Press. “I mean, Ebola’s not even under control yet.”

On the other hand, Jonathan Weeks, chief executive of BrandsOnSale, which is selling a full Ebola containment suit costume for $79.99, told the Associated Press that he doesn’t want to “stray away from anything that’s current or controversial.” That, after all, is what generates buzz. The Ebola suit was the most shared item on his site.

So how do you navigate the treacherous waters of the Ebola Halloween costume? (Or, rather, the treacherous contagious bodily fluids?) Is dressing up like this tacky, tasteless, too soon – offensive to the thousands who have died from the disease and the thousands more who stand to? Is it ethical?

Or instead is it actually the perfect costume? A seamless mixture of contemporary, provocative, sexy (if you decide to go that route) and genuinely terrifying in a way that the usual cast of Halloween ghosts and witches can never hope to be?

I decided to ask an expert to weigh in.

Kathryn Getek Soltis, Director of the Center for Peace and Justice Education and Assistant Professor of Christian Ethics at Villanova University, said she finds the Ebola costumes “rather disturbing.”

“It allows people to stay far from the situation and not to imagine the human suffering that’s actually occurring,” she said. “The issue isn’t that you’re a bad person because you have an insensitive costume, it’s that actually you’re closing yourself and the people around you off from trying to understand how you might be able to participate in this issue in a way that affects people’s lives.”

She clarified, “I don’t want folks to think being ethical means you can’t be fun. I think there are lots of things to laugh about. But… this isn’t funny.”

With the resounding ‘no’ of the expert ethical opinion in hand, I took to the Twittersphere to look for reactions on the other side.

Good points, all.

Weeks, of BrandsOnSale, recently told the Atlantic, “You can go on any website for a zombie mask for an eight-year-old with cuts and scars all over their face. It’s Halloween, it’s one day, if people are that serious about it, they don’t know what Halloween is about.”

But Soltis thinks this commercialized spookiness is part of the issue. “I always am nervous of ways that we use ghoulishness and horror as a way to distance ourselves from humanity,” she said. “And certainly the images we see from the Ebola crisis look like something out of this world, otherworldly, when you see some of the protective gear people are wearing. But that’s exactly the problem. It’s just about creating more barriers from being able to empathize.”

So here we’ve reached an impasse. Of course wearing an Ebola protective suit on Halloween is in some sense trivializing the work of the real Ebola doctors, cheapening their life-saving uniform to a kitschy costume. But on the other hand, to say this trivialization is truly damaging in a moral sense may be giving too much weight to a frivolous, self-consciously provocative holiday. In the end, of course, it’s up to you to decide whether it’s worth the potential backlash to dance to Monster Mash in your Hazmat suit on October 31^st.

But I will say this: if all these passions are ignited by the thought of dressing as an Ebola health worker, maybe think twice about being a sexy Ebola zombie. There’s a line here somewhere, and I’m pretty sure it’s around “dead” and “slutty.”

Writing that last sentence made me very happy that Halloween only comes once a year.