Links and Minifeatures 2009 06 08 Monday

Megan McArdle is blogging up a storm with lots of really good points about abortion and the murder of George Tiller.

This debate is not going away. Those who believe abortion is murder are not going to mysteriously vanish, or stop believing thus one special day. The fact that the Supreme Court has short-circuited the political process on this makes it more problematical, not less. Just because you happen to agree with the result does not make the Supreme Court's ruling on Roe v. Wade a good thing. Indeed, those who subvert the political process to shelter Roe v Wade are making things worse - the way that gets done every time a Republican president has nominated a potential justice ever since.

The Supreme Court should not be the final word on this subject. There is nothing in the constitution about the subject of mothers killing babies. Indeed, all of the background legal tradition until the moment Roe v. Wade was handed down supported the other side. Which means we need to deal with this question the hard way - have a national argument discussion, vote and have our elected representatives vote, and come to a compromise that, if perfect for no one, has at least the virtue that everyone has had their input, their chance to convince others, their vote at appropriate spots, and therefore everybody feels they're had their due influence upon an honest political process.

I suspect that the end result would vary from state to state. That is fine and as it should be. It isn't the end of the world for fourteen year olds to need parental permission for an abortion or even for eighteen year olds to have to hop a bus to another state. And if a legal adult wants to make the decision, as a parent as well as the person carrying the child, that abortion is the best thing to do, I do not believe the state is justified in using the brute force of the law to prevent it. However, neither do I believe that the decision to abort should be easy or convenient. In fact, it should be both difficult and inconvenient so long as these obstacles do not rise to effective prohibition. Abortion is murdering babies, at least once they have passed the point of viability. Even before that point, you are killing a living thing that will be human one day if not killed. When you consider that, it's a pretty massive bad deal to put any current or future human being through with no input from them, and a certain number and height of obstacles are pretty much obligatory to balance that out. Compared to what happens to that baby, I think temporary inconvenience or embarrassment to the mother is pretty much a nonstarter as an argument. I think that abortion should remain legal with obstacles, the strength of which should increase as the pregnancy advances, but that is the result of a long drawn out careful consideration and considering both sides of the question with their advantages and drawbacks. Furthermore, my position has evolved over time, and may evolve some more in the future.

I do not find those who disagree with me to be evil, especially the ones who acknowledge the strengths of the other side's arguments as well as the weaknesses of their own; I do find those on both sides who insist it's a simple question on which no moral person could possibly disagree with them to be incredibly dishonest as well as moral monsters who should never be allowed any sort of control over another human being (or potential human being). I don't insist that the final decision mirror my own conclusions; only that the ordinary voters have a voice and that their elected representatives be forced to take a stand for what they believe is the right course. Let the elected representatives lead for once; that is the responsibility they campaigned so hard for, spent so much of their contributor's money for. Let them convince us they have the right of it - that is what we elected them for. And if some of them lose elections because their stance disagrees with the vast majority of their constituency whom they fail to convince, that is right and proper and as things should be. The Supreme Court should not be used to allow elected representatives to duck responsibility; that is not its intended function.

Nor does the action of a single lunatic, or a group of lunatics, on either side of the question alter my judgment on the base matter, which is the morality of abortion. It merely earns my contempt for their attempted distortions of the political process, taking the law into their own hands, and killing human beings. My attitude on these twits is the same whichever side of the question they are on.

Actually, I would claim that it is not reasonable: It's Not Fair To Casually Call People Racist

Sen. Feinstein is right as far she went. She avoided one undeniable fact though. If a white male nominee had been discovered to have said something similar -- that he was better situated to judge due to his background and life experiences than a Latina woman -- he would be cashiered so fast as to induce whiplash. Those are the unwritten rules that Limbaugh and Gingrich are attempting, one suspects, to expose for their one-sidedness. Nevertheless, the instant labeling of the woman, based on one unwise remark, is hardly fair. If Democrats are learning this now, that's excellent news. One hopes they will remember this discovery when the wheel turns and a Republican nominee is before the Senate. Certainly they didn't seem to get it as recently as 2002, when President Bush nominated Judge Charles Pickering to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

The article uses Judge Pickering's media lynching as an example of Democratic tactics. Democrats have been using the racism brush to tar any Republican judicial nominee they could for at least two decades. They've been trying on the flimsiest of evidence even when it wasn't applicable, simply because they didn't want people on the bench with philosophies they didn't agree with - especially highly competent, highly articulate ones. Now we see how the Democrats react when that same exact standard is applied to one of their own nominees. Calling someone racist has developed into one of their favorite forms of blackmail, far more often than not, to the point where the accusation should no longer have power over anyone.

I think we should apply exactly the same standard to Sotomayor as was used on Pickering, Gonzales, Alito, Bork, etcetera. And then in the aftermath, before Obama tries another nomination, maybe the leading senators of both parties can come to some mutual understanding on what does and does not constitute grounds for denying a judicial nomination, an understanding that's going to outlast the current occupant of the White House. The current circus atmosphere for judicial appointments is only one undesirable consequence of using the courts as a shield so the legislature doesn't have to do its job.

(See previous entry)

Show us the money

The government will do health care cheaper and better, the president said.

OK, show us the money.

Let our president show the American people that the federal government can save money by saving money in the Medicare and Medicaid programs.

He's got Medicaid and Medicare backwards, but otherwise he's right on the money.

The best and brightest?

Imagine you had to pick someone to shepherd a gigantic multinational corporation through a bankruptcy in order to salvage it. Would you look for someone with extensive experience in the firm's industry, or would you prefer someone with demonstrated savvy on Wall Street in turning around troubled firms? If the firm made cars, perhaps you could think of it as a choice between a Lee Iacocca or a Mitt Romney.

Or, maybe, you'd just pick someone from the mail room, as Barack Obama apparently has in the GM bankruptcy:

A 31 year old law student whose entire resume is in campaign work. Does that sound like the ideal candidate to steer GM out of bankruptcy in a healthy direction? Or does it sound more like he was picked for backing the right horse politically?

Thomas Sowell

Looked at in the context of Judge Sotomayor's voting to dismiss the appeal of white firefighters who were denied the promotions they had earned by passing an exam, because not enough minorities passed that exam to create "diversity," her words in Berkeley seem to match her actions on the judicial bench in the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals all too well.

The Supreme Court of the United States thought that case was important enough to hear it, even though the three-judge panel on which Judge Sotomayor served gave it short shrift in less than a page. Apparently the famous "empathy" that President Obama says a judge should have does not apply to white males in Judge Sotomayor's court.

Without this decision, I would be a lot more charitably inclined towards her racist remarks. People can say whatever they like. But a judge's job is to apply the law equally to everyone, and considering the way she and most of her panel tried to sweep this decision under the rug judicially is also troubling. They were acting as if they were ashamed of it, and for good reason. Suppose the firefighters in question had all been minority instead of white, and their promotions had been pulled because no whites came in the top 18. Is there any question in your mind the decision would have been different? The issue almost certainly would never have come up, as New Haven would not have failed to promote the top 18 candidates just because none of them were white.

This is one standard applying to one group, and a different, more difficult standard applying to another group because of nothing they did, but rather the way they were born. Wasn't ending that what the Civil Rights movement was all about? I seem to remember someone very revered asking the American people to judge people not by the color of their skin, but by the contents of their character.

I don't like what Ms. Sotomayor's actions say about the content of her character.

Defining oneself shouldn't define court decisions

Sotomayor's claim that ''a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life'' wasn't some blundering parenthetical reference. It was part of a full-scale repudiation of the idea that the law, or the judges who interpret it, should be color-blind. It even questions whether judicial objectivity is a desirable goal.

The more I discover about Ms. Sotomayor, the less I like the thought of someone with those views and with a history of undertaking those actions sitting upon the Supreme Court, likely for thirty years or more.

Victor Davis Hanson: The Diversity Mess

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has scolded Americans for being "cowards" and not talking more about race. Now, Holder is getting that "dialogue" with the recent controversy surrounding President Obama's Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor.

Most of the furor surrounds statements on race by Sotomayor herself: "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

Sotomayor was clear enough. In a broad discussion about sex/race discrimination cases and their history, she stated that judges' ethnicity and gender make them better or worse at what they do.

Disgusting: Banks trying for taxpayer ok and guarantees on sub-prime loans (video)

(more video) Bush and Obama's "Help for Homeowners" plan: $500 million for precisely fifty-one loans - fifty of which are under investigation for fraud My that $500 million worked so well, the Obama administration decided to throw tens of billions at the same program!

I seem to recall predicting this mess on both occasions. All it took was elementary economics and an unwillingness to lie to myself.

(The second video also has some Timothy Geithner schadenfreude, although HVCC is primarily Andrew Cuomo's fault)

People like this give you an understanding of how much further you can go: Oldest serving cop in US dies at age 84

The oldest active duty police officer in the United States, who battled the Nazis on the beaches of Normandy and the chaos which ravaged New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, has died at the age of 84.

1 day shy of the 65th anniversary of him going ashore on D-Day at Omaha Beach. May flocks of angels guide thee to thy rest, sir.

A more honest headline would be "Obama reassures World Tyrants They Have Nothing To Fear From US": Obama proclaims an end to Bush's regime-change doctrine

His message? America recognizes a universal yearning for the right to self-government, but regime change in democracy's name is over.

"No system of government can or should be imposed by one nation on any other," Mr. Obama said

Democracy is not a panacea, much less the appearance or outward form of democracy. Germany in 1933 was a democracy. Many of the world's worst hellholes are democracies or republics in name, even today. North Korea, Iran, China, Yemen, Zimbabwe, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela - the list goes on and on. Nor did President Bush impose democracy upon Afghanistan or Iraq - the governments there found sufficient native support to begin with. All he did was remove the tyrants who prevented democracy from having a chance, and both regimes had given us more than enough in the way of reason in terms of US interests. Also, Bush helped persuade Musharraf to leave power in Pakistan without civil war or even invasion.

But President Obama is telling those dictators that no matter what they do, the United States will do nothing to make them accountable to their people. Not necessarily that he'll directly help the regime hold the people down (although how do you think China has kept the lid on this long? Our leaders of the last fifteen to twenty years are as guilty in the repression of the Chinese people as any accomplice of a crime) but that he won't do anything active to bring them down. If I were named Kim Jong Il or Bashar Al-Assad (not to mention Khameini), I'd be feeling a lot happier right now. Especially as the Obama Administration has already shown itself very amenable to actions that indirectly help tyrants hold their people in thrall.

We can't go practicing regime change everywhere, of course. But reserving the ability to cut a particularly bad example out of the herd furnishes a marvelous incentive for these tyrants not to be that particularly bad example. Witness the behavior of of Qaddafi in Libya since the Iraqi invasion.

Of course, with Obama he's quite likely to do something else entirely than what he talks about. In this case, however, that would only exacerbate the feelings of betrayal of any Arabs who believed him today.

Death by Deficit

Not only does continued, increased government borrowing ever more sap our economy but also, as the baby boomers retire, we will move from the recent statistic of four workers for each retiree to two workers for each retiree. That means a weaker economy, as this smaller work force will not produce enough to support all of government's costs -- even with massive and persistent tax increases. And if, as seems possible, sometime in the next decade the world resists lending our government sufficient money (because our economy will be too small to produce enough to pay the ever-growing interest on the debt), then we finally will be forced to make choices of what to buy and what to forgo

I think it's much later than Mr. Blankley evidently believes. What happens when the interest rates we need to pay to borrow start rising? The answer is that we need to borrow even more, resulting in still higher interest rates, etcetera. This is what engineers call a positive feedback effect - the more out of balance things are, the greater the forces that make it worse will get.

I don't often agree with Bill Reilly, but he's got it right here: LEFT EXPLOITS DOC'S SLAY TO SILENCE FOES LIKE ME (sic)

But the bigger picture here is the glorification of Tiller.

The uber-liberal New York Times led the way, editorializing: "For his principled devotion to women's health and constitutionally protected rights, Dr. Tiller was the target of protests at his clinic, his house and his church."

The Times made Tiller out to be a hero. The paper's editorial never mentioned that he aborted fetuses after 21 weeks, when they could live outside the mother's womb.

The Times opinion also did not mention that Tiller became a millionaire doing this, or that only three late-term abortion clinics exist in the entire country. Nor did the editorial writer put forth that 36 states restrict late-term abortions without violating the Constitution.

As usual, The New York Times editorial page failed to tell its readers the whole story.

I also agree with "No matter what you think about abortion, it is a sad day for the country when vigilantism takes a life."

Nobody deserves to be murdered. But that doesn't make Tiller a saint. He was, in fact, apparently quite the opposite. And using his death to hijack the discussion and make it appear as if nobody opposed to abortion can have a valid point because one supporter agreed with his cause would be precisely the same logic as saying that environmentalism is evil and/or indefensible because Adolf Hitler was an environmentalist. Neither of these arguments is valid, but if one is, they both are, because they both use precisely the same argument of contagion. Identical logic cannot be valid in one case and not valid in another. Adolf Hitler was an environmentalist, but that doesn't taint environmentalism. Neither does the murder of an abortionist by an anti-abortion activist taint the cause of working against abortion.

If Obama Had Carter's Courage

That fortitude is exactly what's missing today, as it was missing from Mr. Obama's statement on Monday, which attributed GM's failure to sins by everyone but Washington.

We're still waiting for the brave, original thinking that we were told Mr. Obama represented. Like Washington circa 1978, he has landed for once in a situation where something more than symbolism is required of him. He has finally glided into the land of the real, where the key measurable outcome is no longer whether an audience is glowing with self-approval when he leaves the room.

I'm no admirer of Mr. Carter in general, but this is one of those things he demonstrably got very right. Obama is failing a similar test badly.

(begin sarcasm)

Boy it's a good thing we passed that "stimulus" Obama wanted

(end sarcasm)

Reporters with pom-poms

Banks retreating from partnership with Obama administration

Not that the banks had much choice on the TARP funds anyway, as Judicial Watch has already reported. Hank Paulson threatened them with regulatory action if the banks didn't willingly take government money and along with it further government control. However, as the Post explains, the government doesn't have the regulatory power to compel them into the public/private partnership on toxic assets (at least not directly), and therefore they have chosen not to willingly yoke themselves yet again to Treasury and the Obama administration. In fact, many of them are trying to find ways to give back the TARP funds to end the forced partnerships they already endure