Ann Althouse: Bangs and Nipple

Ann Althouse has scanned some pictures of herself from the 1970s. The second one caught my eye, not just for Ann's beautiful hair and bangs, but also for her left nipple straining to poke through her chemise:

Ann's in her late '50s, so she's about 25 years-old according to the date of the picture (1976). I was just entering high school about that time, and I'm trying to remember how women presented their sexier sides back then. Nowadays on campus (circa 2006-2009), it seems deep-cleavage bustier-types of tops are de rigeur. I think young women today who normally wouldn't be pumping themselves up as "totally hot" nevertheless dress in a tone that is more expressly sexy than the girls I dated as an adolescent young man.

That said, although "tube tops" or some variation were popular back in the seventies, I think Ann captures the more wholesomely-hot look of Farrah Fawcett's 1976 superstar "red swimsuit" poster.

Anyway, Ann's one of the very best bloggers out there, and I meant to do something about the really dumb attack on her last week at Media Matters (Ann's not at all dogmatically conservative as her detracters allege), but never got around to it.

Oh yeah ... commenters will please save the sexist slurs against me and this post. Althouse is a well-known breast-blogging specialist herself, and I'm sure she can understand the aesthetic blogginess of my current entry into the genre.

Sweet Nothings of Civility at Ordinary Gentlemen

The phrase "effete snobs of the Democratic Party" popped into my head recently when reading Freddie de Boer's rambling twaddle over at the Ordinary Gentlemen. Not that such drivel is unexpected from the denizens of the nihilist left, but with a new chief executive snob in town, there's a special obnoxiousness to Freddie's long-winded puffery. Freddie's the kind of Democrat who takes Obamessianism to a whole new level of intolerant bombast foisted off as intelligently uplifting progressivism.

Anyway, I've previously smacked down Freddie on his ignorant gay marriage absolutism. Today I'm interested in this little tussle between Freddie and Robert Stacy McCain, and the follow-up incoherencies served up by Scott Payne in his extraordinary post.

First note Freddie's update to his post excoriating McCain's alleged fealty to "Bushite dead-enderism" and the sounds of "bat-shit talk radio" conservatism:

Helen Rittelmeyer, I’m sorry to say, chimes in with a “Hear, hear” for McCain in his comments. This, I take it, is a function of Helen’s lamentable opinion that it’s more important to stick up for your side than to value intelligence, principle, democracy, morals or logic. I’m afraid that the McCains of the world are the inconvenient hole in Helen’s philosophy of loyalty; some people, and their opinions, do not deserve your loyalty, no matter how much they tell you they are on your side. That Robert Stacy McCain is a tedious nothing will come as no surprise to those of us with a Web browser and the ability to read. Stranger still, Helen likes precisely the kind of faggy thinkers and writers– you know, those guys who care about, like, good arguments, and stuff – who McCain would consider a part of the damnable pretentious elite. But Helen’s philosophy, I think, doesn’t permit her to give anyone who is ostensibly on her side the heave hoe. Her position on party and loyalty threatens to leave her like the person who, out of loyalty, refuses to take the keys from her drunk friend, right before he drives her off of a cliff.

Folks can see what I mean by obnoxious snobbery, and in fact, I'm not the first to notice. Sonny Bunch takes issue with Freddie's "low-level snark," and then as noted Scott Payne takes to the keyboard to put in his two cents:

... I think that Bunch is absolutely correct about this kind of aggressive and ultimately pointless communication permeating the Internet by my lights. It frankly shocks me how often I run into someone commenting on a post who thinks that the only thing he or she is required to do in order to further a conversation is rhetorically pistol whip whomever they happen to disagree with. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that American culture ... but the sheer lack of civility that informs so much of our online discussion is disheartening for someone who wants to believe that things like blogs and online magazines can act as a means of truly forwarding discourse in meaningful ways. It’s hard to hold out hope for that belief when much of the effort you witness on sites is peoples’ creative means of calling each other fucking morons (pardon the language).

Gosh, that's simply wonderful. I don't know what to say at this lost promise of online sweet nothings, except it's rather interesting that Payne spends more time calling out the rude witless hacks of the blogging chat boards than his own extraordinarily hare-brained co-blogger.

That's not surprising, either, as it turns out, since the whole enterprise so far over at Ordinary Gentlemen is a ramshackle edifice of erstwhile libertarians and neoconservatives who have succumbed to the pull of Obamessianism. (True though, Freddie's apparently a "movement" progressive who's sipped a little too deeply at the well of Democratic victory. Maybe he'll anchor this Edsel's progressive creds, as that's where things there are headed anyway.)

In any case, I've written already about the very issue at base of this whole dust-up, so I'll save the heavy intellectual firepower for later. It's not like I'll be needing to dig too deeply into the stockpiles, in any case, especially given Mark Thompson's intellectual impotence demonstrated during previous go-rounds in a preview outing as one extraordinary cohort of the League.

More later, then ...

Republicans Are the New Punks

From the comments at Helen Rittelmeyer's post, "'Conservatism for Punks' for Punks":

Punk Rock is not conservative. True conservative movements (and not just those calling themselves such ...) have a core of stability and continuity. This stability and continuity is not characterized by the characteristics of the movement, but by the the stability and continuity of the characteristics.

Well, speaking of punk rock, stability, and continuity, Doug TenNapel argues "Republican is the New Punk (prefaced by a photo of Johnny Ramone):

The rebellious spirit of rock is dead. No better evidenced than by its formal endorsement of President Obama. Never before has rock been so central to the inauguration of a president. Bono is an ambassador in sunglasses who still knows how to pull a string and get an audience of thousands to put their fist in the air.

But rock cannot be both establishment and anti-establishment. It can’t be a rebellious underdog while endorsing and distributing the status quo. And yes, President Obama is the status quo of unlimited spending and government expansion he supposedly opposed during the election … then again, he also said he would fight to reduce abortion but couldn’t wait three days in office before throwing the pro-life useful idiots who voted for him under the bus. No change there. If this is what he meant by “reducing abortions” I can’t we to see what he meant by “reducing taxes.”

This is the mainstreaming of the bad boy, complete with rat-pack suit and cigarette in hand. A snappy skin spread over the boring, failed, liberal Democrats of the sixties. Hope and Change was nothing more than a repackaging of policies that have no right to be associated with hope or change.

Lefty politics are no longer the fringe and no matter if the voters knew it or not they carved lefty politics into stone. Bill Ayers became the system he once fought against. Sure, they still wear the earring and say “fuck” a lot to maintain street-cred among the academics, but now rock has taken sides — it is for the establishment. Same with journalism, the university and pop-culture. The left has become a cliché. They’re not “Arrested Development” they’re “Golden Girls” with a soul patch. Snore.

Now that the art nerds and punks just became the football jocks and prom queens, a new rebel is emerging from the wilderness. They are the new anti-establishment. One minority force bands together against every other branch of government swallowed by the Democrat octopus. The last evidence of a check or balance against the popular people are now the Conservative Republicans.

As a longstanding skate-punk, I find most of this amusing. When I was really punk, punk was anti-culture, seek-and-destroy against the establishment. As Johnny Rotten sung famously:

Dont know what I want but
I know how to get it
I wanna destroy the passer by cos i
I wanna be anarchy!

Or in Darby Crash's gutteral screams:

I'll get silver guns to drip old blood
Let's give this established
Joke a shove
We're gonna wreak havoc
On the rancid mill
I'm searchin' for something
Even if I'm killed...

Helen Rittelmeyer and her visitors can wax around poetically about what it's like to be punk or conservative, but some of the greatest punk rockers back in the day are now nihilist mouthpieces for the new age establishment currently proceeding to tear down the wisdom of the ages.

In any case, I miss Joe Strummer.

The Secret Life of ABC's Family Network

The Los Angeles Times reports that Disney's ABC Family cable channel is offering sexually mature material to a core audience that includes a third of viewers who are 12 to 17 years-old.

Is it just me, or is something terribly wrong with that picture? According to the article:

"The best way to resonate with your audience is to be authentic," said Anne Sweeney, president of Disney-ABC Television Group. "And you're only authentic if you are holding up a mirror to your audience and saying, 'I see you.'"

Being "authentic" apparently includes programs featuring "sex, underage drinking, absentee parents and the challenges of growing up today."

A look at the article suggest that American family life is so disfunctional that the premiere network for "wholesome" kids' programming is now and outlet for the hits-and-misses of 15 year-old home pregnancy testing. Here's more:

I'd love for these shows to be 'Little House on the Prairie,' but that isn't going to happen. Family programming is all about bringing families together to watch shows so that they can dialogue about these sensitive topics," said Pat Gentile, a top ad buyer for P&G and co-chairman of the Alliance for Family Entertainment, a coalition of major advertisers that advocates for family programming.

I was just finishing up my undergraduate training in 1992 when Vice President Dan Quayle attacked the portrayal of Murphy Brown, of the comedy series starring Candace Bergen, as "a character who supposedly epitomizes today's intelligent, highly paid, professional woman - mocking the importance of a father, by bearing a child alone and calling it just another 'lifestyle choice'."

Quayle is often said to be one of history's worst vice presidents, but few in high public office have been as clear and morally right on the heaviest social questions facing the country. And that was almost 20 years ago. It's even worse today. Where perhaps then society had accepted that women's independence, including single-parenting by successful career women, was a natural outgrowth of civil-rights advances and sociodemographic change at the family level, it can't be that we've moved to a social equilibria in which kids who cannot legally drive a car are getting knocked-up and mainstream family channels on cable television portray this as "credible" programming for today's children's television markets.

It makes all-too-much sense though, unfortunately, in today's upside-down world where "progressive" values include the glorification of teenagers chugging-back cold ones like Friday afternoon construction workers on payday.

As I noted the other day in the "Deceptions of Democratic Family Planning," the Democratic-left wants us to think that the "family planning" provisions in the Obama administration's gargantuan spending spree are about expanding Medicaid coverage to more families. Perhaps. But a close look at the expansion of eligibility shows that family planning coverage will extend to unpregnant minors receiving services without the knowledge of their parents. The bill, in other words, not only accepts teenage behavior that in the past would have been seen not only as socially inappropriate, but destructive to the life chances of teenage girls and facilitative to the whimsical evisceration of traditional parental model of moral teaching of children.

If there's a bright lining to the Times piece is that some parents are outraged at the Family Channel's fare:

"I thought it was going to be more like Disney Channel, a little more grown-up but less provocative," said Mary Alden, a Pasadena mother of 14-year-old twins. She became alarmed when she heard dialogue from characters in "Secret Life" who were discussing whether one of them should end her pregnancy. "I didn't think that would be on a Disney channel," she said.

Michele MacNeal, a mother of three who lives in La Crescenta and heads a local branch of the powerful watchdog group Parents Television Council, agreed.

"It's kind of a misnomer to call ABC Family a family channel," she said. "When you call something 'family,' it gives the impression that it's safe for all members of the family, even young children."

Another possible upside to all of this is President Barack Obama's presidency. The president's daughters, Malia and Sasha are 10 and 7, respectively. If President Obama really doesn't want his daugthers "punished" with an unexpected pregnancy, then perhaps he might use the tremendous power of the presidential bully pulpit to help restore a little more sanity to the direction of social norms by lobbying Hollywood for the same kind of appropriate social behavior that he'd expect from his own kids.

Of course, considering that Hollywood is one of the Democratic Party's main financial benefactors, I'm not holding my breath.

Former Insurgents Stumping for Candidates in Iraq Vote

Blackfive offers a nice roundup of today's historic parliamentary elections in Iraq:

Fifteen million Iraqis are voting today. Because of the strong turnout, the voting time was extended. And I saw a stat on one of the cable channels that there are over 400 women running for office in this election.

Historic.

It's not just the women. One of the most interesting things in the news today is that former Sunni insurgents joined the political campaign, stumping for candidates and competing for votes. The Los Angeles Times reports:

Abu Mujahid brags that he bombed a U.S. Army Humvee and wounded two American soldiers just last month. Now he's stumping for Sunni candidates and talking matter-of-factly about the importance of safety as Iraqis head to the polls today.

"This is something like a truce so the elections will be implemented in a secure environment," said Abu Mujahid, an active member of the 1920 Revolution Brigades, an armed Sunni Arab group. "We want to allow people to vote and let them decide without pressure from any groups."

With one foot in the political process and the other firmly rooted in violence, fighters such as Abu Mujahid offer a glimpse of the Sunni community's evolution over the last five years: from waging guerrilla war against Iraq's ascendant Shiite Muslim majority and its U.S. backers, to tentatively embracing electoral politics.

The Times reports that this shift to ballots, not bullets, is fragile, but just a couple of years ago antiwar creeps like Cernig at Newshoggers were saying we'd never see success in Iraq. Even today, after the obligatory highlighting of violence, Cernig is forced to conclude his post by conceding that yes, indeed, there's progress, but supporters of the war shouldn't gloat:

These elections are a good thing, but they're not a universal panacea. Still, the American Right wants to have its cake and eat it. They want to pretend that provincial elections mean "victory" while getting ready to blame only Obama if Iraqi social fractures ignored by Bush for so long lead to more violence later.

Readers should recall Newshoggers has outwardly applauded the deaths of U.S. military personnel on the ground, so acknowledging success today must be like swallowing a barrel of Tabasco. Moreover, on issue after issue, as I've shown in recent posts, Cernig's been spectacularly wrong on trends in the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy. And hey, don't even get me going about Juan Cole, who highlights a few violent tragedies in today's voting to cast aspersion on the whole showcase of democratic emergence.

These people truly are dead-enders.

Claire McCaskill's Idiots

Who are the "idiots" Senator Claire McCaskill's denouncing in her Senate floor lecture attacking executive compensation? Wall Street's? Or Capitol Hill's?

Perhaps McCaskill's on to something, as the Wall Street Journal reports (here or here):

Wall Street's pay system isn't dead yet. But it is in trouble.

President Obama's rhetorical assault on "shameful" bonuses reverberated across trading floors, investment-banking desks and executive suites Friday. Officials at several securities firms acknowledged that compensation, already down sharply because of evaporating profits, could shrink even more in the next few months as Wall Street scrambles to avert a government crackdown that some fear could be even more painful.

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D., Mo.) introduced legislation Friday that would limit the salary, bonuses and stock options of executives at financial companies getting federal bailout aid to no more than what the U.S. president earns: $400,000 a year, excluding benefits. In 2007, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein earned that much in about two days.

The editorial page at WSJ weighs in, "Idiots Indeed":

In our experience, political nuance has never been the strong suit of Wall Street executives ... Yet the hard truth remains that whether on Wall Street or across the American business landscape, compensation levels are a business judgment made under the pressure of competition. The "idiots" notwithstanding, Wall Street has lots of highly talented financial minds and mobility among firms based on compensation is routine.

If Congress is going to start setting legal limits on salaries and bonuses in the U.S., it is going to drive talent out of Bank of America and these other banks and into institutions without such limits, perhaps abroad ... The danger of targeting what capitalists we have left for abuse or prosecution is that they will stay on strike, as they did in the 1930s. It won't be pretty this time either.

Hat Tip: Memeorandum.

See also, Allahpundit, "McCaskill on capping pay of CEOs who take TARP money: “These people are idiots”.

Bush Hatred and Obamessianism

Peter Berkowitz, at the Wall Street Journal, makes the case that Bush hatred and Obamessianism (i.e., Obama euphoria) are one and the same:

Now that George W. Bush has left the harsh glare of the White House and Barack Obama has settled into the highest office in the land, it might be reasonable to suppose that Bush hatred and Obama euphoria will begin to subside. Unfortunately, there is good reason to doubt that the common sources that have nourished these dangerous political passions will soon lose their potency.

At first glance, Bush hatred and Obama euphoria could not be more different. Hatred of Mr. Bush went well beyond the partisan broadsides typical of democratic politics. For years it disfigured its victims with open, indeed proud, loathing for the very manner in which Mr. Bush walked and talked. It compelled them to denounce the president and his policies as not merely foolish or wrong or contrary to the national interest, but as anathema to everything that made America great.

In contrast, the euphoria surrounding Mr. Obama's run for president conferred upon the candidate immunity from criticism despite his newness to national politics and lack of executive experience, and regardless of how empty his calls for change. At the same time, it inspired those in its grips, repeatedly bringing them tears of joy throughout the long election season. With Mr. Obama's victory in November and his inauguration last week, it suffused them with a sense that not only had the promise of America at last been redeemed but that the world could now be transfigured.

In fact, Bush hatred and Obama euphoria - which tend to reveal more about those who feel them than the men at which they are directed - are opposite sides of the same coin. Both represent the triumph of passion over reason. Both are intolerant of dissent. Those wallowing in Bush hatred and those reveling in Obama euphoria frequently regard those who do not share their passion as contemptible and beyond the reach of civilized discussion. Bush hatred and Obama euphoria typically coexist in the same soul. And it is disproportionately members of the intellectual and political class in whose souls they flourish.

More at the link.

"Passion over reason" certainly explains these folks, although it's not just "members of the intellectual and political" class (see this blogger for example).

I noted previously how I became creeped out a bit when one of my own political science classes started chanting "na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, hey, hey, eh ... good bye..." during lectures. And when I drive down the road and see wide-eyd 50-ish women captaining Toyota Prius' plastered with "Change We Can Believe In" stickers and with mugs of "O'Biden" poking out from every corner of the vehicle, I can only shake my head at the success of Obama's mesmerizing political campaign of pop-culture sheeples indoctrination.

The sad part is this has just begun.

Life in the poltical wilderness I can handle, but not a few Americans worry about an Obama gulag for those not swallowing the Democratic ideological kool-aid of "The One."

Berkowitz suggests that all of this "hatred and euphoria" may weaken, and it wouldn't come a moment too soon.

Conservative Decline? Pajamas Media Goes Belly Up

Well, I just read through every post at Memeorandum in response to Jeff Goldstein's layoff notice from Pajamas Media.

Long story short is that Roger Simon has pissed away his venture capital on hand and new revenue has dried up as the recession has sapped online advertising. It looks like Pajamas is going to focus on its television programming venture, and the main Pajamas portal will stay up and continue publishing conservative commentary. Those big blogs that signed exclusive advertising arrangements are now out of the remuneration stream. Goldstein's feeling the rejection: "I am officially out of work. So save going to a pay model, this site will likely have to shut down."

I have some personal interest in all of this, as I started publishing at Pajamas last year and I was interviewed by Bill Whittle for a PJTV episode last October. In my case, of course, I've never had any illusions that I was going to make a lot of money blogging. Folks have asked why I don't run ads on the sidebar, while others have ribbed me for my prodigious output. My response is that American Power is a labor of love, and my goal all along has been to make a name for myself as a public intellectual in the blogospheric commentariat. Keep in mind that the Blogger platform is free, so the only cost I incur is time, and lots of it. And since the blogging enterprise has a steep start-up curve for new entries, it's not likely that lower-level 9th-tier bloggers are going to overtake Hot Air anytime soon. The networked structure of the blogosphere prohibits easy entry to the top of the hierarchy of opinion, so newcomers will need to worry about finding both a niche and an outside means of support more lucrative than Google's Adsense. In my case, I have a day job.

There's a lot of sour grapes and I-told-you-sos over the news, but this comment at Tools of Renewal is worth pondering:

I used to see the PJ fiasco as the result of greed, treachery, foolishness, and dishonesty. These days I see it more as the evidence of a curse. The US is declining very quickly. We’re not going to be the world’s leading nation any more. The economy may have a dead-cat bounce left in it, but we’re going into a recession which will never end. We’re going to settle permanently at a lower level of prosperity and power, and we may experience a near-depression on the way to that level. The self-destruction of conservatism is probably just one of the tools that will be used to work this judgment on America ....

The right used to be blessed. Until maybe 2003, our star was rising. Maybe that’s because we were more closely attuned to God. Now we think we have to dump God in order to attract voters. We keep hearing that the problem with the right is that the religious nuts hijacked it. But the right was stronger back when religious people had more power. And it will weaken more and more, as we get more desperate and distance ourselves from God. And if we give up our support of Israel, things will get even worse. In many ways, we already have.

I normally blow off such prattle about America's inevitable decline. It's nonsense. The U.S. is already taking the rest of the world down with it to deep-recession levels, and there's no other current competitor ready to replace the U.S. as the king of the hill (least of all China). Most importantly, there's no other nation-state on the face of the planet possessing the intellectual-demographic dynamism that will form the bases of the next boom of entreprenuerial-scientific market renewal (see Bill Whittle for more on America's sure return to the towering heights of prosperity).

The second part of Renewal's comment is worth further consideration. We've seen all of this debate about the GOP's path back to power, and one of the biggest meme's is that the sooner we dump cultural conservatism the better. Hogwash. I've said it before and I'll say it again: The "GOP Must Stay True to Core Values." We're riding the downside of the political cycle, but religious expression is hardly in decline, and in fact Christianity is the most dynamic religion in the world today. If America indeed drops off the top ranks of hierarchy in international relations, the cause will be the godless progressivism now stripping this country from its founding roots and the bases of its historical strength.

As for future of conservative media like Pajamas? Well, Andrew Breitbart just started Big Hollywood, and I was intrigued reading over there the other day that Breitbart was offering $100,000 to Matt Damon to debate neoconservative warhawk Bill Kristol on Iraq. I have no clue as to Breitbart's funding model, but $100,000 a good chunk of change, and Big Hollywood's off to a good start.

So, keep plugging away right-bloggers! There's gold in them thar hills!

Multilateralism and the Globalization of Abortion

Many readers of this blog are likely not up on some of the hottest trends in international relations theory.

World politics, and the academic study of it, evinces a central tension between power and cooperation in international affairs. Since World War II, the great hope of international idealists has been to create institutions that would promote peace and facilitate cooperation among nations. As time has passed, real world events have shown the false benigity of such hopes, for example, in the emergence of the United Nations General Assembly as a Third World power shop seeking to shift global resources and influence away from the industrialized nations of the global north. Key manifestations are found in the demands for a "New International Economic Order" in the 1970s and ongoing U.N.-sponsored "Conferences Against Racism," with the next installment scheduled for April in Geneva. For an idea of the anti-Western agenda at the upcoming "Durban II" meeting, see U.N. Watch, which includes this photo:

I've been thinking more and more about academic international relations theory and "real world" events this last few weeks, especially since Foreign Policy announced its new website and stable of bloggers. In particular, the blogging debut of Harvard's Stephen Walt has been something of an eye-opener. My academic relationship to Walt is discussed here. I am now about halfway through Walt's book, The Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy, which I find disturbing, but readers can get a feel for Walt's views at his blog. Walt's a "neorealist" who specializes in alliance formation and the balance of world power (it's interesting how the "amoralism" of realism is deployed so effectively by Walt to delegitimize the moral existentialism of the Israeli state).

My point in this essay, however, is to take a look at trends on the "neoliberal institutionalist" side of international theory, starting with Robert Keohane, Stephen Macedo, and Andrew Moravcsik's new essay at International Organization, "Democracy-Enhancing Multilateralism." The abstract of the article is at the link, but the basic gist of the piece is an attempt to secure some middle ground between critics of "global goverance" and "universal sovereignty," and those who favor the use of global mutlilateralism to advance "pragmatic" international change, cooperation, and democratic deliberation.

These passages from the conclusion are worth citing:

Our discussion has shown that multilateral institutions can empower diffuse minorities against special-interest factions, protect vulnerable individuals and minorities, and enhance the epistemic quality of democratic decision making in well-established democratic states. Moving some forms of governance up to a higher level, insisting on elaborate mechanisms for public debate and criticism, and making use of impartial and expert decisionmaking bodies can improve democracy ....

Democracy requires that governments control factions, protect minority interests, and maintain the epistemic quality of deliberation. Multilateral constraints, like other constitutional constraints, can enhance the ability of publics to govern themselves and enact their deliberate preferences over the long term ....

Yet we are not apologists. We emphatically do not claim that multilateralism always enhances domestic democracy. To the contrary, the standards we have articulated for defending multilateral institutions on democratic grounds equally enable criticism of democracy-inhibiting multilateralism, should international institutions promote special interests, violate rights of minorities, diminish the quality of collective deliberation, or seriously degrade the ability of people to participate in governance without compensating democratic advantages. There are good reasons to be concerned that multilateralism can sometimes empower unaccountable elites—a tendency against which it is necessary to guard.

I offer this review of multilateral theory mainly because it's the cutting edge of the discipline. Keohane, Macedo, and Moravcsik demonstrate the kind of academic detachment inherent to the scholarly enterprise, although the implications of some closely-related research in the field - and the ideological agenda of many adherents to multilateralism - leave much to be desired.

For a quick sample (albeit journalistic), let me leave readers with an example of the multilaterization of an emerging regime promoting abortion as a human right under international law. Michelle Goldberg has a piece on this at Slate, "Abortion Rights Go Global." Here's a chilling excerpt:

In the last four years ... women and their lawyers have brought abortion actions before the U.N. Human Rights Committee and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which investigates human rights violations in the Western hemisphere. Several times, women who've been denied abortions have won both compensation and an acknowledgment that their rights were violated. For feminists worldwide, this represents a great victory, since it elevates women's rights and safety above the often-sacrosanct principle of national sovereignty ....

Yet as abortion rights go international, so does the anti-abortion backlash. The globalization of the abortion wars creates some of the same tensions—between universal human rights and community mores, between majority rule and the protection of individual liberty—as Roe v. Wade, on a larger scale. All over the world, in countries including Kenya, Poland, and Nicaragua, local anti-abortion movements (often working with American allies) rail against the meddling of powerful outsiders. In Poland, traditionalists who oppose abortion bemoan the loss of their country's Catholic values as it integrates into secular Europe. They speak about international human rights and the courts that enforce them with something of the frustrated anger that American conservatives sometimes direct at the federal government. "Abortion proponents cannot win elections on these issues, so they have to go through the least democratic bodies in the world, the United Nations, for instance, and the courts," says Austin Ruse, the president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, a pro-life organization active at the United Nations.

That last quotation from Austin Ruse brings us back to the theoretical foundations and benefits of multilateralism.

Will creating an international human rights regime for abortions advance the interests in individual nation-states of the international system? My feeling is that folks like Michelle Goldberg don't care, and the Democratic-left's accession to power in the U.S. with the advent of the Barack Obama administration will certainly put the push for a global abortion regime into hyperdrive. Obama's move to overturn the Reagan-era "Mexico City Policy" is a sign of the times for the power of the mulitlateralists to advance an agenda that is not only anti-democratic in its hubristic assumptions, but radical in its anti-life aspirations.

Obama's Change Reckoning is Here

The first ten days of the new administration have really put into stark relief the conservative warnings of Barack Obama during the second half of 2008. Even some of the most extreme ideological attacks on Obama are now ringing true as we see the beginnings of a new era of American politics that's nothing short of a wholesale statist makeover of American life. As Charles Hurt says of the adminstration's $819 spending boondoggle, and the law's provision to roll back two decades of welfare reform:

Ever since his election, many Americans have wondered which Barack Obama would show up at the White House: the most liberal member of the Senate or the post-partisan bearer of change we could all believe in.

One thing is clear: His "stimulus" bill is not change we can believe in. It's a return to big-government welfare that we will choke on.

What's especially troubling is that the Democrats are going to ram down "change" on the country by reign of deception and non-debate. I noted this morning that the left's "family planning" agenda is backed by lies, and as Kimberley Strassel points out today, we're moving toward socialism by stealth in the nationalization of health care:

With the nation occupied with the financial crisis, and with that crisis providing cover, Democrats have been passing provision after provision to nationalize health care.

If Democrats learned anything from the HillaryCare defeat, it was the danger of admitting to their wish to federalize the health market. Since returning to power, they've pursued a new strategy: to stealthily and incrementally expand government control.

It's worth reading Strassel in full.

Deceptions of Democratic Family Planning

If you are following the controversy over the family planning appropriations that were dropped from the Obama administration's economic recovery act, you'll see that no one on the left is willing to discuss taxpayer support for abortions, which will be a natural consequence of the program.

Steve Benen has a post up this morning applauding efforts to get "family planning back on track." He cites Amy Sullivan to claim that the family planning legislation is explicitly not about abortion:

The provision would have allowed states to cover family planning services - but not abortion - that they already cover for low-income women who don't otherwise qualify for Medicaid, just without first requiring states to obtain a waiver from the federal government. That's it.

As always, I'm tempted to call these people befuddled idiots, but the fact is these folks know exactly what they're doing, and thus their scheming is devious and dangerous.

The fact is that the Obama administration's family planning appropiations will funnel money to Planned Parenthood, which is the nation's largest abortion provider. Historically, the organization's main funding sources are the $50 million-plus grants awarded through the federal Title X program, as well as roughly $50 million sent to Planned Parenthood in annual appropriations through Medicaid funding. Planned Parenthood's own website - in a call to supporters - boasts that it receives millions of dollars annually from the federal Title X family planning appropriations.

Moreover, LifeNews reported this week that Congressional Democrats indeed sought funding for abortions in the stimulus bill, with the plan including "a measure to send more public funds to the Planned Parenthood abortion business to fund contraception and birth control." In addition, the National Abortion Federation has sent an e-mail to supporters urging lobbying action "to demand that President Barack Obama restore hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for contraception and abortion."

It's simply a lie to suggest that Democratic family planning funds will not reach providers of abortion services.

But that's not all.

Section 5004 of the Democratic stimulus package is the "State Eligibility Option for Family Planning Services." According to the Heritage Foundation, this item would "make Medicaid into a virtual money-machine for family planning clinics."

As part of that money-machine, the Democratic proposal will provide taxpayer money for family planning services to unpregnant minors. That's right. Under current law, "women of child-bearing age (15-44) are not eligible for Medicaid coverage until after they become pregnant," but the proposed legislation would provide a loophole to extend coverage to these kids. And let me stress that: Girls 15 to 17 years-old are children, not "adult women," so under the bill "a child would be able to receive benefits through a 'presumptive eligibility period' and beyond without parental knowledge that he or she applied for Medicaid."

Further, the availability of services is loosely defined as a "state option" to include "medical diagnosis and treatment services that are provided in conjunction with a family planning service in a family planning setting," and therefore by definition in-term pregnancy termination services. Also, the presumptive eligibility provisions of the law will "give the power to private clinics to provide easy access to so-called 'emergency contraceptives' and be reimbursed with taxpayer dollars."

As we can see, the Democrats are foisting family planning deceptions at multiple levels. By denying that abortion services are included in the Obama recovery plan, we see not only blatant rhetorical evasions by activists and bloggers to delegitimize conservative opposition to family planning, but there's a larger smokescreen of deception to the Democratic social agenda: The left wants to empower children with access to contraceptives and abortion services. Just seeing the definition of "women of child-bearing age" dropped down to 15 years-old is an indication of the repudiation of family prerogatives and conservative values in "progressive" family planning schemes.

The Republican minority in Congress deserves praise, not ridicule, for its unified opposition to the Obama economic "porkulus" package. The Democratic-left, on the other hand, deserves nothing but condemnation for its reign of spineless deceit and its agenda of promotion of social decay.

Los Angeles Times to Kill "California" Section

I cut my political teeth on the Los Angeles Times, so the fate of the newspaper is personal to me. Thus the news that the Times will eliminate its "California" section, which is the "Section B" local news pullout, is not good. Perhaps things are nearing an end for the paper, which was established in 1881.

L.A. Observed as the report:

Publisher Eddy Hartenstein has ordered the California section killed, leaving the L.A. Times without a separate local news front for the first time since the paper's early decades. The publisher decided to fold local news inside the front section — which will be reconfigured to downplay national and foreign news — despite what an official of the paper confirmed for me was the unanimous and vocal objections of senior editors. Advertisers were informed on Wednesday, and word began to leak on Thursday. Hartenstein reportedly planned to delay an announcement until the close of business on Friday, fearing it will play as another black eye for the Times. He's right about that. I'm told that in contentious discussions in recent weeks, the editors failed to persuade Hartenstein that if a section had to go, the more palatable cut would be to move the less-read Business pages.

The backdrop, of course, is the economy and the Times' continued free-fall in ad revenue. By getting rid of California, the Times can print the more profitable Calendar section at night and eliminate the expense of a second, earlier daily press run. (Times presses can only handle four sections per run, as this post from last Friday discussed. Note, too, that pressmen are the Times' only unionized workers.)

The move will apparently be spun as an enhancement in local coverage, but Times officials are bracing for howls of protest from print readers who already have been canceling subscriptions over the paper becoming thinner and less well edited. Some LAT officials fear this might be a tipping point. "We can't keep alienating our core readers," a senior person told me. Papers that have tried doing away with just their Business sections have been stunned by the backlash; the Orange County Register reversed its decision to mollify readers.

There's more at the link.

The Times is expected to makes an announcement at the paper's website this afternoon.

For me, the most important thing here is that "national and foreign news" will be cut. By shifting local coverage to the front pages, and by juggling the press runs to accomodate the Calendar section (the logistical motivations for which vary), the paper will lose whatever reputation it had earned as one of the nation's most important outlets for original reporting and analysis on Washington politics and international affairs. The Times will look like a "company town" paper to the Hollywood entertainment community, and since most media observers suggest local news will be the future of the print media industry, at least the Los Angeles Times will have perhaps the most glamourous local market with which cover for an expected worldwide audience.

What's Up With the "Bipartisan Brand"?

If I were a Republican member of Congress, a no-vote on the House stimulus package would have been a no-brainer. No matter how deep this economy's fallen, no serious analyst can credibly claim the proposed legislation was about reviving the economy (folks on the right called the bill a "crap sandwich," but this is a family blog and I normally don't use that descriptive language myself).

So I've been thinking about the political spin on both left and right today. Jon Henke, at The Next Right, quotes Ben Smith (who suggests Obama's got the "bipartisan brand") and argues:

The only way to beat the hand Obama is playing is to take the initiative, to change the subject, with new policies and arguments that put Democrats off their game. And even that will take quite some time.

I don't see much evidence that Republicans are able to do that right now. There's just no larger, unifying framework for a transformative policy agenda, and no apparent policy innovation being done. Without the unifying agenda and policy innovation, Obama will continue to set the agenda, and Republicans will lose ground at every step.

While certainly the GOP needs to seize the initiative, it's a bit hard when the economy continues its free-fall, for example, with new housing foreclosure numbers this week that were nothing short of mindboggling. And with the continued shake out of major retailers, it's trite, frankly, to suggest getting the Dems off their game's going to "take some time."

Not only that, it's pretty much a joke to argue Obama's all about "bipartisanship." In his presidential leadership of Congress this week, "it was clear that his efforts so far had not delivered the post-partisan era that he called for in his inauguration address, when he proclaimed an end to the 'petty grievances' and 'worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.'"

On the left, Nate Silver, the numerical wonderboy of election projections, says the GOP played a bad hand:

The House Republicans are opposing popular legislation from a very popular President, and doing so in ways that stick a needle in the eye of the popular (if quixotic) concept of bipartisanship. They would seem to have little chance of actually blocking this legislation, since they are far short of a majority, and since the Senate Republicans, who can filibuster, have thus far shown little inclination to go along with them - with moderates like Susan Collins of Maine and Judd Gregg of New Hampshire voting routinely with the Administration ....

If the stimulus bill proves to be unpopular - and it might well - a House Republican can tout the fact that he voted against the package. But with the unanimous vote - as well as the near-unanimity on measures like the Ledbetter Act and Digital TV - the Republicans remove the emphasis from their individual judgment to that of their party. It is not clear why they would want this: the Republican brand, even under the best of circumstances, is not likely to be significantly rehabilitated by 2010, especially when the Republicans do not have agenda-setting powers.

Thus the Republicans, arguably, are in something of a death spiral. The more conservative, partisan, and strident their message becomes, the more they alienate non-base Republicans. But the more they alienate non-base Republicans, the fewer of them are left to worry about appeasing. Thus, their message becomes continually more appealing to the base - but more conservative, partisan, and strident to the rest of us. And the process loops back upon itself.

For being touted as last year's big breakout analyst, Silver's pretty sloppy. The bailout bill is not wildly "popular." Gallup finds a "slim majority" backing the package, and Rasmussen indicates that public support for the plan has slipped over the last few days (to 42 percent). For a president whose public approval is in near-stratospheric levels, these stimulus numbers are hardly impressive. (Related: "After Less Than a Week in Office, Barack Obama's Approval Rating Plunges 15 Points.")

Further, this notion that the Republican brand is in a death spiral is hardly a novel insight. More than a year before the 2008 primaries wrapped up journalists were bemoaning the GOP's evisceration and the dearth of Reaganesque heirs-apparent. The party's in for a long-term period of rebuilding and revitalization, and any construction project begins with the foundation. Rush Limbaugh's not getting all the attention from the president on down for nothing. And Sarah Palin's aggressive moves to consolidate her front-runner status are being facilitated by a media establishment ginning for some star power.

Finally, for all the talk of a dramatic Democratic electoral landslide, and the teary-eyed emotionalism of this month's inauguration, the U.S. has not sustained a partisan realignment. This fact means the upcoming elections at the national level will be close, and while no one on the right should get their hopes up for 2010, President Obama will have to run on his record in 2012, not the GOP's. Cries of "Republican obstructionism" might make good talking points for Democratic partisans today, but with foreclosures and long-term unemployment on your watch, blame-shifting's not going to help.

The Republicans are doing just fine in voicing a vigorous opposition. The "bipartisan brand" is radically overrated. President Martin Van Buren was known as an advocate for vigorous partisanship. He argued that the party in power needs a loyal opposition to represent other parts of society that it could not. The point's certainly not lost on this week's GOP.

Blagojevich Swept From Office in 59-0 Vote

Illinois Governor Rod Blogojevich has been removed from office by an impeachment vote of 59-0 in the state legislature. The Chicago Tribune has the story:

The Illinois Senate voted to remove Gov. Rod Blagojevich from office Thursday, marking the first time in the state's long history of political corruption that a chief executive has been impeached and convicted.

The 59-0 vote followed several hours of public deliberation in which senator after senator stood up to blast Blagojevich, whose tenure lasted six years. And it came after a four-day impeachment trial on allegations that Blagojevich abused his power and sold his office for personal and political benefit.

The conviction on a sweeping article of impeachment means the governor was immediately removed from office. The Senate also unanimously voted to impose the "political death penalty" on Blagojevich, banning him from ever again holding office in Illinois.

Lt. Gov. Patrick Quinn, Blagojevich's two-time running mate, has become the state's 41st governor.

Of course, there was never any doubt Blogojevich would be booted. When I saw him making the rounds this last week on the talk shows, especially his schmoozing on "The View," I thought, "Well, here we go with the grooming for this guy's own television gig." Joy Behar's all over the guy at 7:30 minutes:

More news at Memeorandum.

NBC Rejects Pro-Life Super Bowl Ad

Via Gateway Pundit and LifeSiteNews:

NBC has rejected an uplifting and positive pro-life ad submitted for its Super Bowl broadcast this Sunday. After several days of negotiations, an NBC representative in Chicago told CatholicVote.org late yesterday that NBC and the NFL are not interested in advertisements involving ‘political advocacy or issues.’

Brian Burch, President of CatholicVote.org said, “There is nothing objectionable in this positive, life-affirming advertisement. We show a beautiful ultrasound, something NBC’s parent company GE has done for years. We congratulate Barack Obama on becoming the first African-American President. And we simply ask people to imagine the potential of every human life.”

“NBC told CatholicVote.org that they do not allow political or issue advocacy advertisements. But that’s not what they told PETA,” said Burch. “There’s no doubt that PETA is an advocacy group. NBC rejected PETA’s ad for another reason altogether.”

According to an email posted on PETA.org, Victoria Morgan, Vice President of Advertising Standards for Universal, said: “The PETA spot submitted to Advertising Standards depicts a level of sexuality exceeding our standards.” Morgan even detailed “edits that need to be made” in order for the spot to run during the Super Bowl. The PETA ad depicts lingerie clad women in highly sexually suggestive poses.

“NBC claims it doesn’t allow advocacy ads, but that’s not true. They were willing to air an ad by PETA if they would simply tone down the sexual suggestiveness. Our ad is far less provocative, and hardly controversial by comparison,” said Burch.

“The purpose of our new ad is to spread a message of hope about the potential of every human life, including the life of Barack Obama,” said Burch. “We are now looking at alternative venues to run the ad over the next several weeks.”

Recall CatholicVote ran the "Vote Life" advertisement during the campaign, which turned out to be most watched political commercial on the web last year. Watch it here.

*********

UPDATE: Watch the PETA ad here. "Sexual suggestiveness" is putting it mildly.

Obama Signs Ledbetter Legislation

President Barack Obama has signed his first piece of legislation of the new Democratic era, "The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009." The Washington Post has the story.

But let me direct readers to the Wall Street Journal's review of the Democratic majority's labor agenda, "Trial Lawyer Bonanza":

The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act is an effort to overturn a 2007 Supreme Court decision, Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber. Lilly Ledbetter had worked for Goodyear for almost 20 years before retiring. Only in 1998, after she took her pension, did she sue and allege wage discrimination stretching back to the early 1980s. The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 against her, noting the statute clearly said claims must be filed within 180 days, or sometimes 300 days, of the discrimination.

That ruling put to rest Ms. Ledbetter's creative theory that decisions made decades ago by a former boss affected her pay all the way to retirement, so that each paycheck was a new discriminatory act and thus fell within the statute of limitations. Yet that is exactly the theory Congress would now revive with the Ledbetter bill. There would no longer be time limits on such discrimination claims. They could be brought long after evidence had disappeared or witnesses had died -- as was the case with Ms. Ledbetter's former boss.

For the tort bar, this is pure gold. It would create a new legal business in digging up ancient workplace grievances. This would also be made easier by the bill's new definition of discrimination. Companies could be sued not merely for outright discrimination but for unintentional acts that result in pay disparities.

Since these supposed wrongs could be compounded over decades, the potential awards would be huge. Most companies would feel compelled to settle such claims rather than endure the expense and difficulty of defending allegations about long-ago behavior. The recipe here is file a suit, get a payday. And the losers would be current and future employees, whose raises would be smaller as companies allocate more earnings to settle claims that might pop up years after litigating employees had departed.

The Democratic majority is also resurrecting the concept of "comparable worth" with the Paycheck Fairness Act. This idea holds that only discrimination can explain why female-dominated professions (teachers, secretaries) tend to command lower wages than male-dominated professions (plumbers, truck drivers). Yet most of these pay disparities are explained by relative experience, schooling or job characteristics. Teachers do tend to earn less than truck drivers, despite more education. Then again, truck drivers work long, hard, often unpredictable hours. The market -- not some secret patriarchy - places different values on different jobs. And in the case of teachers, the main salary setter is the government.

The paycheck fairness legislation would nonetheless require labor officials to use comparable worth in creating "voluntary" wage guidelines for industries. Voluntary or not, these guidelines would become the basis for more litigation against companies that didn't follow them. Meanwhile, the bill strips companies of certain defenses against claims of sex-based pay discrimination. It also makes it easier to bring class actions, and it allows plaintiffs to claim unlimited punitive damages even in cases of unintentional discrimination.

The Democratic War on Babies

It never ceases to amaze me, but here it goes again: Katha Pollitt, at the Nation, argues that funding family planning is an economic stimulus, and since funding for birth control would logically include money for abortion services, Pollitt's case is essentially to kill more babies in the diabolically-harebrained expectation that this will "create" more jobs:

The production, prescribing, buying and selling of birth control is an economic activity - funding more of it means more clinics, more clinic workers, more patients,more customers, more people making the products. Moreoever, the provision removed from the stimulus bill would spend money now- about 550 million, over ten years, a drop in the bucket - to save the government much more money later, as the Congressional Budget Office estimates would happen within a few years ....

More important, what about the economics of actually existing women and families? This is no time to be saddling people with babies they don't want and can't provide for, who will further reduce the resources available for the kids they already have and further limit parents' ability to get an education or a job. In a Depression, birth rates go down for a reason. People.Have.No. Money. Furthermore, when people lose their jobs they lose their health insurance. A year's supply of pills is around $600 retail. That's a significant amount of money to low-income women.

The idea that family planning contributes to economic growth was discredited over a century ago, with the historical repudiation of Thomas Malthus' claim that overpopulation would cause a lower standard of living (Nancy's nihilists are not up on literature, apparently).

The Democrats want a war on babies. I cringe at the thought of just being around people like Katha Pollitt, and for my readers with infants and young children, hold your loved ones close - you might have one too many for the state-planning mandarins of the Obama-Pelosi new age.

Hat Tip: Memeorandum.

House Democrats Pass $819 Billion "Porkulus" Bill

In one of the most amazingly corrupt feats of political gamesmanship ever, the Democratic House majority rammed through an $819 billion economic recovery plan yesterday without a single Republican vote, COMBINED with the defection of 11 Democratic representatives. A bipartisan opposition! Now that's what I'm talking about!

Robert Stacy McCain quips:

Man, if all it took to get Republicans to vote conservative was to elect a Democratic president, this is a change I can believe in.

And don't miss Rush Limbaugh at the Wall Street Journal:

There's a serious debate in this country as to how best to end the recession. The average recession will last five to 11 months; the average recovery will last six years. Recessions will end on their own if they're left alone. What can make the recession worse is the wrong kind of government intervention.

I believe the wrong kind is precisely what President Barack Obama has proposed. I don't believe his is a "stimulus plan" at all - I don't think it stimulates anything but the Democratic Party. This "porkulus" bill is designed to repair the Democratic Party's power losses from the 1990s forward, and to cement the party's majority power for decades.

Lesbians Can Be Expelled From Private Religious Schools

California's 4th District Court of Appeal in San Diego has upheld the right of a private Lutheran school to limit the enrollment of students whose conduct is inconsistent with the religious beliefs of the institution. The case represents the assertion of judicial protection of freedom of association.

Note this from the Los Angeles Times story:

In ruling in favor of the school, the appeals court cited a 1998 California Supreme Court decision that said the Boy Scouts of America was a social organization, not a business establishment, and therefore did not have to comply with the Unruh Civil Rights Act. That case also involved a discrimination complaint based on sexual orientation.

"The school's religious message is inextricably intertwined with its secular functions," wrote Justice Betty A. Richli for the appeals court. "The whole purpose of sending one's child to a religious school is to ensure that he or she learns even secular subjects within a religious framework."

On its face, the case seems a straightforward confirmation of the bedrock First Amendment guarantees. As U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Brennan wrote for the majority in the precedent-setting Roberts v. United States Jaycees:

... the Court has concluded that choices to enter into and maintain certain intimate human relationships must be secured against undue intrusion by the State because of the role of such relationships in safeguarding the individual freedom that is central to our constitutional scheme. In this respect, freedom of association receives protection as a fundamental element of personal liberty ... The Constitution guarantees freedom of association of this kind as an indispensable means of preserving other individual liberties.

Despite such basic principles of human freedom, the response to the 4th District's ruling on the left has been entirely predictable. Freddie de Boer of the Extraordinary Bloggers has this:

Hey, why would someone like me be more invested in building a legal defense of gay marriage specifically and a larger lattice of rights to defend gay people generally? Why, maybe because of things like girls getting kicked out of their private high schools because the administration of said high school believes them to be lesbians.

This is why I am concerned with legality, rights and government first. Because right now, today, gay people are the subject of explicit, systematic discrimination. As we have said several times, these are of course connected phenomena, and I want to change both law and culture.

Notice the ultimate totalitarianism here, where Freddie wants to control both law and culture.

It's okay, though, right? That's expected of the International ANSWER-sponsored progressive gay-rights steamroller. It's what's been going on all along since November 5th and the No on H8 Stalinism that has attacked, boycotted, and excoriated regular folks who expressed a legitimate policy preference at the polls, peaceably. The progressive nihilists want their culture war - and they want it now!, even if there's little substantive connection on the issues other than excessive emotion and juvenility.

Notice how Freddie's discussion at the post is all about "discrimation" and "rights," but the rights discussed only favor the two lesbians who were expelled for behavior inappropiate to the norms and values inherent to a private sectarian educational establishment. Just forget the First Amendment rights of those "Christianists," naturally, those torture-loving bigots.

What's especially interesting is Freddie's spurious extrapolation to gay marriage. Gays do not face discrimination on questions of marriage. Same-sex marriage is not a civil right, and has yet to be considered one in U.S. constitutional jurisprudence. Homosexuals are free to marry, in any case, as is everyone else. They cannot, however, simply strongarm their way to a same-sex right that society does not recognize nor want, for fear of cultural destabilization and anti-social licentiousnesss. Moreover, the plight of the two girls can hardly be taken as representing a larger social climate of intolerance toward gays. Poll after poll finds phenomenal support for equal treatment under the law, as Newsweek recently found:

Seventy-four percent back inheritance rights for gay domestic partners (compared to 60 percent in 2004), 73 percent approve of extending health insurance and other employee benefits to them (compared to 60 percent in 2004), 67 percent favor granting them Social Security benefits (compared to 55 percent in 2004) and 86 percent support hospital visitation rights (a question that wasn't asked four years ago). In other areas, too, respondents appeared increasingly tolerant. Fifty-three percent favor gay adoption rights (8 points more than in 2004), and 66 percent believe gays should be able to serve openly in the military (6 points more than in 2004).

The same poll found that just 31 percent "support FULL marriage rights for same-sex couples," to quote from the language from the questionnaire.

To gain said rights, secular progressives demand that the great majority of Americans capitulate to their coercion and hostility. And if they don't - as we've seen - marriage traditionalists involuntarily subject themselves to Soviet-style show trials and aggressive boycotts designed to stifle freedom of speech and association, which are exactly the same issues that the District court protected by ruling in favor of the Lutheran school.

As a red herring, the plaintiffs alleged that the school master sat too close to the girls during their questioning, "intimidating" the students in an "prurient fashion," although the court rejected such claims outright. Pam Spaulding's playing this "abuse" angle in a classic leftist victimology shake-down grab. As for the Extraordinary Brotherhood of Traveling Bloggers, Freddie's post is one in a series labeled "Same Sex Marriage and Nomenclature," so no doubt we'll be seeing more jackbooted opposition to the traditional majority dripping like death from their page.

I'll have more on the august work from this extraordinary bunch, with special attention to the extra-extraordinary blog-master Mark Thompson, who was once considered a freedom-loving libertarian, but who now cheers the rationality of Hamas rocket attacks on Israeli citizens, and who has now apparently joined forces with a some ultra-orthodox gay-marriage ayatollahs who want to ram down cultural change on the rest of us.

Majority Backs Tax Cuts Over Increased Spending

Well, this is the perfect follow-up to my previous entry (hammering Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman), "Democrats to Milk Economic Crisis for Trillions."

It turns out that Rasmussen's new survey finds 53 percent of Americans favoring tax cuts over jacked-up spending (via Memeorandum):

Paul Krugman, last year's winner of the Nobel Prize for economics and a regular columnist for the New York Times, recently wrote that you should “write off anyone who asserts that it’s always better to cut taxes than to increase government spending because taxpayers, not bureaucrats, are the best judges of how to spend their money.”

If you follow that advice, you’ll be writing off a majority of Americans. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 53% say that it’s always better to cut taxes. Only 24% share Krugman’s views.

Krugman was recently named the most influential liberal in the media. In making that selection, Forbes.com noted that Krugman’s “prose is as pungent as his academic credentials are impeccable. Last year's Nobel in economics was widely seen as a vindication of his politics.”

Clearly, his New York Times column was based on his convictions rather than his sense of public opinion, and his purpose in writing is to persuade, not report. The survey data simply highlights how much persuading he has ahead of him.

Republicans overwhelmingly say it’s always better to cut taxes, and so do 50% of those not affiliated with either major party. Twenty-three percent (23%) of unaffiliateds take the opposite view and agree with Krugman.

Democrats are evenly divided—38% say tax cuts are always better while 34% disagree.