Bad Omen for the First Day of School

I opened my son's lunchbox this evening to make his lunch for tomorrow and found half of his lunch from the last day of last school year three months ago. Ugh!

Boy Suspended for Drawing a Gun

Is a picture of a gun a threat? According to school officials in one Arizona school district, it is. (Via ifeminists.

School officials suspended a 13-year-old boy for sketching what looked like a gun, saying the action posed a threat to his classmates.
The boy's parents said the drawing was a harmless doodle and school officials overreacted.

"The school made him feel like he committed a crime. They are doing more damage than good," said the boy's mother, Paula Mosteller.

The drawing did not show blood, bullets, injuries or target any human, the parents said. And the East Valley Tribune reported that the boy said he didn't intend for the picture to be a threat.

Administrators of Payne Junior High in nearby Chandler suspended the boy on Monday for five days but later reduced it to three days.

The boy's father, Ben Mosteller, said that when he went to the school to discuss his son's punishment, school officials mentioned the seriousness of the issue and talked about the massacre at Colorado's Columbine High School, where two teenagers shot and killed 12 students, a teacher and themselves in 1999. Mosteller said he was offended by the reference.

Chandler district spokesman Terry Locke said the crude sketch was "absolutely considered a threat," and that threatening words or pictures are punishable.

So now, a picture of a gun is a threat? What about pictures from action games? Is a picture of a sword also a threat? When is a picture not a threat?

Defending Defending Iraq

Michael O'Hanlon offers this rebuttal to the charges from the moonbatosphere (led by our favorite multi-sock puppet Glenn Greenwald) that O'Hanlon is just a useful idiot of the administration.

Unfortunately, much of the blogosphere and other media outlets have emphasized the wrong question, challenging the integrity of anyone who dares to express politically incorrect views about Iraq. Last week, Jonathan Finer criticized on this page [" Green Zone Blinders," Aug. 18] a New York Times essay that Ken Pollack and I wrote, as well as the comments of several senators, for claiming too much insight based on short trips to Iraq. Finer suggested that we did not leave the Green Zone, although we frequently did, on this and other trips, and he ignored how critical Pollack and I have been of administration policy in the past.

Worse, Finer and critics such as Rep. Jack Murtha and Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald have suggested that our analyses are based on a few days of military "dog-and-pony shows." Our assessments are based on our observations as well as on years of study. That experience creates networks of colleagues such as military officers whose off-the-record insights can inform ours and who in the past have often told us when they did not think their strategies were working or could work. While hardly making us infallible, this also led each of us to oppose predictions of a "cakewalk" before the invasion and to join Gen. Eric Shinseki in criticizing invasion plans that had too few troops and too little thought given to the post-invasion mission.

O'Hanlon does a good job of laying out the positives and negatives of our current situation in Iraq. This is precisely the same impression I got of his earlier column: that the situation in Iraq has improved but there's still a lot of work, particularly political work, to be done before we can declare victory.

It seems like absolute nonsense that so many on the Left cling so tightly to the idea of defeat and seem to be so unwilling to even contemplate the idea of success. These self-same critics scream that we shouldn't question their patriotism, even as they display repeatedly their dogged determination to find an empty glass where there might be a half-full one.

This isn't to say that our policies in Iraq do not deserve criticism. They do. But there's a distinct difference between having a jaundiced eye and having a partisan one. Considering that more than a couple of Congressmen have come back from Iraq saying many of the same things O'Hanlon has, it's hard to explain the rigid opposition by certain Lefties. Unless, of course, they really don't want us to win.

Spare Him the 9/11 Conspiracies...But What About Those Conspiracies?

Robert Fisk says he's not a 9/11 truther, but, well, he questions the truth about 9/11.

But don't call him a truther. No.

Captain Ed points out that Fisk is supposed to be a journalist and should know how to do research. But, since he doesn't seem to know how to answer his own questions, Ed does it for him.

You have to wonder about all the people desperate to believe there was some conspiracy concerning 9/11. I realize it's much more exciting to believe in conspiracies than facts, but isn't it just easier to accept truth rather than turning one's mind into a pretzel to grasp some movie plot scenario?

Just Hand Congress Back to Republicans...Please

Tully at Stubborn Facts has a great post on the amusing spectacle of watching the Democrats eat their own.

The nutroots are greatly disappointed that so many of the newly-elected "blue dog Democrats" (also called "Bush dog Democrats") are so red. That is, they are conservative and won't line up and march with San Fran Nan on every issue. So, what do the nutroots propose? Why, threaten 'em!

And so, you may have noticed a lot of chatter about 'Bush Dog' Democrats over the past few days. That's not an accident. We've been working to identify the group of conservative Democrats in the House who are holding back progressives from being able to effectively govern. These are concentrated in two main caucuses, the Blue Dog Caucus and the New Democrat caucuses. Blue Dogs consider themselves heirs to the Southern conservative wing of the party, and tend to vote for socially restrictive policies and a hawkish foreign policy. The New Democrats tend to be more partisan, but often are key to passing important pieces of right-wing legislation, such as the Bankruptcy Bill. In the last few years, these two caucuses have expanded their numbers, and the Blue Dogs have become the swing vote in the House allowing for effective conservative control of the Congress. We want to put a stop to the embrace of conservative values among House Democrats, and make sure that when Democrats are elected, they act like Democrats.

What does a Democrat act like? Like the KOS Kids, of course! Be just as whacked out to the left as possible and the KOSsacks will love ya. Of course, you won't have a snowball's chance in hell of being re-elected, since your constituents are generally conservative, but don't let that bit of logic stop the moonbats. No, they demand absolute fealty to the far Left of the Democratic Party. And if threats don't work, just work hard to get the Bush dogs defeated and pray that the person who wins the election is farther to the Left. Not that that's likely to happen in conservative districts.

One of the difficulties of being in the majority is trying to garner enough votes for any given issue while preserving your majority. In the old days, Democrats came in all stripes from yellow dog to blueblood. You had the Ted Kennedys and the Phil Gramms, and they disagreed about a lot but worked together on other things. But after Ronald Reagan's victory, politics in Congress changed. Liberal Democrats became more hard-lined against their conservative brethren and many of the conservatives (like Gramm) jumped ship and became Republicans.

Then Republicans had the same situation. There were conservative Republicans and some Republicans In Name Only. We've seen what happened when we abandoned even the RINOs.

If the KOS supporters think threatening or ousting their conservative politicians is going to be good for the Democrats, they aren't paying any attention to history or politics. The far Left needs the Bush dog Democrats to retain their majority and control the legislative agenda. But to do that is going to mean acknowledging that the country is more conservative than San Francisco and that, as deliciously tempting as the red meat of immediate troop withdrawal may be, it's both impractical and illogical. But if the nutroots want to destroy the Democratic majority, I won't stop 'em.

Why People Don't Read

During the craze leading up to the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I wrote about the book critic who complained that too many people read Harry Potter and not enough people read the good stuff.

Now, we have a survey that shows the average American reads just four books a year. (Via Ann Althouse).

One in four adults read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday. Of those who did read, women and older people were most avid, and religious works and popular fiction were the top choices.

The survey reveals a nation whose book readers, on the whole, can hardly be called ravenous. The typical person claimed to have read four books in the last year — half read more and half read fewer. Excluding those who hadn't read any, the usual number read was seven.

I've noticed I read different numbers of books depending on the phase of my life I'm in. For example, when I was in college, I might have read four to six books a year (besides required reading), but once I graduated from college, I read voraciously for about a year or two (I probably read four to six books a month). Then when I was busy having babies, I don't think I read nearly as many books (although my husband always points out that I read Constitutional Law while breastfeeding my son...I wonder if he learned anything?).

For the last year or two, I've been back into a reading phase and read probably two books a month, which is really good for me (I'm a slow reader). But what of the quality of books I read? Typically, I don't read "important" works or things I "should" read. I read what strikes my fancy, which means a murder mystery, an autobiography about a guy who joins the circus (I love the circus), or a book on gypsies. This summer, I've read:

All seven Harry Potter books

Four Richard Jury mystery novels

The Law of Dreams

Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide

Freedomnomics

I count that as 14 books this summer, but the Harry Potter books were easy, quick reads. In any event, I don't expect to read so much so quickly again for a while. Life has a way of interfering in one's reading for entertainment, especially when the kids go back to school and you have to help them with their reading.

Spinning Like a Top with Media Matters

Media Matters spends an enormous amount of time spinning news stories and putting out propaganda to support their leftwing viewpoints. There's not really anything wrong with doing that--it's a free country still, after all--but it's amazing how the moonbats at MM and their willing sycophants on the left will come unglued over journalistic slights if those slights don't uphold their leftwing viewpoints.

Case in point: This Media Matters diatribe about a pro-life quote that appeared unchallenged in several news articles.

"Let's face it, they're in the business to kill babies for profit," (Colorado Right to Life vice president Leslie Hanks) said. "First and foremost, they get young girls hooked on their birth control pills, which don't work," Hanks said.

Right to Life followers are among the regular protesters -- Hanks calls them "rescuers" -- at Planned Parenthood's current locations, she said.

MM took issue with the "don't work" language of Hanks' statement and goes to great pains to debunk it.

In fact, according to the medical reference book Contraceptive Technology: Nineteenth Revised Edition (Ardent Media, 2007), oral contraceptives work with 92 percent efficacy for the first year of "[t]ypical [u]se" and are 99.7 percent effective with "[p]erfect [u]se."

"Perfect use"? Does that mean people who take the pill every single day at the exact same minute and never have any pregnancies? And does the MM story include information about the reduced efficacy rates for oral contraceptives when using antibiotics?

Compared to other contraceptive methods, the Pill is more effective, even for women who don't use them correctly. Of course, the health risks from oral contraceptives are more severe, as well. But don't expect Media Matters to spend time researching the increased risks of heart attack and stroke associated with oral contraceptives. They're way too busy complaining about a quote from an obviously biased actor in a news story.

Interestingly, Media Matters glossed over the part of Hanks' statement concerning Planned Parenthood's financial incentives for killing babies. Maybe that's because they just couldn't spin these numbers. But don't worry. The useful idiots will ignore the inconvenient truth, as well.

The Truth about Bill Clinton and 9/11

Captain Ed says Bill Cllinton may have "exaggerated" his record when discussing the vigor with which his presidency pursued Osama bin Laden. Morrissey is referring to this Newsweek article in which the authors discuss what Clinton says he did and what he actually did.

In September 2006, during a famous encounter with Fox News anchor Wallace, Clinton erupted in anger and waived his finger when asked about whether his administration had done enough to get bin Laden. “What did I do? What did I do?” Clinton said at one point. “I worked hard to try to kill him. I authorized a finding for the CIA to kill him. We contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since.”

Clinton appeared to have been referring to a December 1999 Memorandum of Notification (MON) he signed that authorized the CIA to use lethal force to capture, not kill, bin Laden. But the inspector general’s report made it clear that the agency never viewed the order as a license to “kill” bin Laden—one reason it never mounted more effective operations against him. “The restrictions in the authorities given the CIA with respect to bin Laden, while arguably, although ambiguously, relaxed for a period of time in late 1998 and early 1999, limited the range of permissible operations,” the report stated. (Scheuer agreed with the inspector general’s findings on this issue, but said if anything the report was overly diplomatic. “There was never any ambiguity,” he said. “None of those authorities ever allowed us to kill anyone. At least that’s what the CIA lawyers told us.” A spokesman for the former president had no immediate comment.)

Is it any surprise Clinton doesn't have a comment when faced with the truth? Maybe he'll pipe up and tell us "It depends on what the meaning of 'is' is."

Like Ed, I see no point in trying to blame either the Clinton presidency or the Bush one for 9/11. Such finger-pointing is partisan in nature and designed to exonerate whichever side one agrees with, not illuminate anything. What is important is what the intelligence failures were and fixing those to prevent new attacks. It's difficult to stay focused on that when you have a former president lying about his own role.

Health Care Blues and the Free Market

I've been having some health care issues over the last couple of months. I finally went to see my doctor, who ordered a test. I guess the test was inconclusive and he ordered another one.

Today, I received a call from the insurance person at the hospital who told me my co-pay would be $700. I was driving at the time and nearly drove off the road!

"700 bucks?!" I yelled.

There was dead silence on the other end of the phone.

"Hello? How am I supposed to come up with $700 by tomorrow morning?" I asked.

The woman told me there's a "bank" affiliated with the hospital which could underwrite a loan for me, predicated on me passing whatever credit check they require. Our credit isn't the best, so I know that such a loan would require usurious rates.

"So, are you planning to keep the appointment?" the woman asked.

"I don't know," I responded. But, in fact, I did know. We don't have $700 lying around to pay for a test that I can't be completely sure is necessary for my treatment and not simply designed to protect the doctor. "I need to figure out which arm I use least so I can cut it off in hopes of getting $700."

More silence on the other end of the telephone.

I genuinely felt sorry for this woman. For people with good insurance, they pay 25 bucks and have the test done. For the poor, they go to the county hospital and pay whatever the administration decides they can afford.

But I wonder about people like us. We aren't poor by any means, but we don't have company-sponsored insurance. It's curious to think that it is the upper middle class that could be so squeezed by insurance.

The odd part is that I've been reading John Lott's Freedomnomics, which does a fairly good job defending capitalism against its many detractors, including the authors of Freakonomics.

The book is interesting and an easy read at under 200 pages. Lott tackles a wide range of examples from gasoline prices (why do they spike before hurricanes?) to drug prices (should we use price controls?) to taxes and illegal immigration.

After my discussion with the insurance person today, I wondered what Lott had to say about the insurance industry. The answer is, he didn't. Lott doesn't discuss insurance at all, which makes me wonder what his opinion would be of our two-tiered system.

Another Liberal Radio Network Bites the Dust

When will liberals learn? They don't "get" talk radio.

Most recent case: Jane Fonda's (liberal) women's radio network has gone belly up.

The "feminist" radio company whose founders include Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem failed to attract an audience and it signed off the air for good on Friday.

When the talk-radio network, called GreenStone, officially launched in September 2006, NewsMax reported that it was a "new left-wing radio network that plans to appeal to women listeners and counter the dominance of conservative talk radio."

GreenStone claimed it would deliver "de-politicized, de-polarized talk radio by women hosts for female listeners,” and Steinem said it would offer an alternative to current radio talk, which she described as "very argumentative, quite hostile, and very much male-dominated."

She also said radio was "overbalanced toward the ultra-right." But "Greenstone Media’s brand of tepid liberalism didn’t appeal to women,” Carrie Lukas, author of "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex and Feminism," writes in the New York Post.

Greenstone offered interviews with such liberals as Ralph Nader, as well as segments on parenting and relationships.

But its programming was picked up by only eight affiliates in small to mid-sized markets, and its backers have now pulled the plug.

GreenStone’s CEO Susan Ness deplored the end of GreenStone as a loss for women. But Lukas observes: "Perhaps Ness should use her time off to tune in to other stations. She’ll find there are many prominent women on the airwaves – they’re just not saying what she thinks they should."

Lukas pointed to Laura Ingraham, who is heard on 340 stations and has an audience of more than 5 million, and Dr. Laura Schlessinger, with some 7.75 million listeners.

To attract large numbers of female listeners, "it will take more than having ‘all-female’ programming from an ‘all-female’ network," Lukas opines.

Liberals are boring. That's why their radio shows tank. It's hard to take seriously shows that constantly berate average Americans as stupid or rail against Christians and conservatives as more dangerous than Al Qaeda.

I get particularly insulted when people like Fonda and Steinem want to define "what women want." These are the same women who showed such enormous contempt for the defining characteristics of Western society and sneered constantly at the actual things women are interested in, from family to politics to entertainment. These clowns are every bit as bad as the pseudo-pornography of Cosmopolitan or the liberal whinging of Ms. Magazine. It's as bad as watching too much Lifetime--Television for Women or Women's Entertainment.

Maybe liberal women just can't come up with interesting programming that appeals to all women. But if conservatives like Laura Ingraham can do it, you'd think Hanoi Jane could find one interesting woman talk show host.

Ruining 24

I only discovered 24 about two years ago, but immediately fell in love with the grittiness of Jack Bauer and the unpredictable plot turns in every episode.

I probably started watching the show at the peak of its popularity. Let's face it: how many bad days can one guy have? How many people can get blown away by this group of thugs or that one (one season, I kept a running tally of how many people died in that single 24-hour period and it was over 300)?

As brilliant a premise as 24 has been, it's hardly a sustainable concept. Unlike Gunsmoke, there are only so many bad guys Jack Bauer can off before the ick factor kicks in.

The last season was a disappointing one for Jack and company. Maybe killing off Tony and Michelle and sending daughter Kim off to the same Never-Never Land where Richie Cunningham's brother Chuck went had a detrimental affect on the show's ratings. After all, you kill off the most interesting characters and replace them with characters we just don't care about and you are bound to see a slippage in viewership.

But I can't imagine what makes the producers of 24 think any remaining fans want to watch Janeanne Garofolo spout leftwing politics at Jack for another season. We get enough moonbat bullshit on television as it is. Why spoil one show where--Gosh!--they actually showed Muslim terrorists trying to kill Americans for being Americans. Sounds like it may be time to pull the plug on 24.

When Numbers Lie...

The New York Times is running a story saying the Bush economy sucks.

Well, it doesn't do it quite that eloquently. What it does say is that Americans are making less money in 2005 than they did in 2000.

The combined income of all Americans in 2005 was slightly larger than it was in 2000, but because more people were dividing up the national income pie, the average remained smaller. Total adjusted gross income in 2005 was $7.43 trillion, up 3.1 percent from 2000 and 5.8 percent from 2004.

I'm always leery when journalists toss around "average" numbers. There's a big difference between "average" and "median" where economics are concerned, and the fact that the NYT is looking at "average" should throw up a big red flag.

Tom Blumer at Newsbusters.org dissects the numbers and discovers that they don't look exactly the way the NYT says they do.

What I found most interesting about the story was the political slant involved. First of all, George W. Bush didn't become president until 2001. His economic policies had nothing to do with whatever was going on in 2000. So, why include 2000 in the data set? It would be more accurate to start in 2001, after the dot.com bubble had burst and that sector of the market was starting to tank.

Second, the story doesn't even mention the single largest blow to our economy since the Great Depression: the terrorist attack of 9/11. Given what that event did to our economy, throwing thousands of people out of work and preventing thousands of others from finding gainful employment for a longer period of time, why wouldn't the NYT mention it?

It seems to me that the point of the NYT story is to cast the Bush economy in the worst light possible. There's no doubt that employment today doesn't look like it did at the height of the dot.com bubble. There are far more $10 per hour jobs than there are $15 or $20. But there are multiple reasons for that, and many don't have anything to do with Bush administration economic policy. Mostly, it has to do with globalization, which has pushed more people into lower-paying service industry jobs. That's a problem that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans can fix without even more devastating effects on American labor.

It's not surprising that the NYT would work so diligently to show the Bush administration in a bad light. I just wish they were a bit more honest and inclusive in their data.

State Interference and Religious Freedom

After boxing Jeromy Brown's ears about homosexual marriage, I had planned to let that subject go for a while. But then I read about the New Jersey Civil Rights division trying to declare a Methodist boardwalk a "place of public accommodation."

The Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association of the United Methodist Church filed a federal lawsuit Saturday against New Jersey officials. The New Jersey Division on Civil Rights has threatened to prosecute the Camp Meeting Association for adhering to its deeply held religious beliefs. State officials launched an investigation after the Christian organization refused to allow a same-sex civil union ceremony at one of its worship facilities.

"Religious groups have the right to make their own decisions without government interference. The government can’t force a private Christian organization to use its property in a way that would violate its own religious beliefs," said Brian Raum, senior legal counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund, which is representing the Camp Meeting Association. "This action by the state of New Jersey is a gross violation of the First Amendment."

Civil union ceremonies are specifically prohibited by the doctrines and beliefs of the United Methodist Church. The lawsuit claims that the state prosecution violates the Camp Meeting Association’s First Amendment rights to free speech, freedom of expressive association, and free exercise of religion.

The initial action taken by the state of New Jersey involves a worship facility known as the Boardwalk Pavilion. This building and others on the same site have hosted church and worship services for more than 100 years. It is currently used for Sunday worship services, a weekday middle-school and high-school Bible program, a weekly summer band program, evening association meetings, and two to three Gospel music ministry programs each day during the summer season.

Despite this historic use and the Camp Meeting Association’s ownership of the property since 1869, the state has indicated it may declare the facility a place of public accommodation simply because it is located on a boardwalk. The boardwalk and the beach are also owned by the Camp Meeting Association.

It will be interesting to see how this attempted abridgement of a First Amendment right is handled by the New Jersey courts.

The Arrogant Paternalism of the Mainstream Press

It's always amusing watching the MSM look down on the blogosphere.

Let's be honest. Traditional journalists hate the blogosphere. Why? Because bloggers aren't held to the "same standard" as newspaper journalists. Anyone can blog, they say. Not everyone can be a reporter!

Well, I hate to bust that MSM bubble, but just about anybody blogging could be a reporter, because being able to write in an engaging style is a large part of being a reporter. Yes, it's important to get all the facts right and the quotes correctly. But if you can't write in a way that captivates an audience, it doesn't really matter whether you are covering a school board meeting or a national political convention.

What brought this to mind was reading yet another self-serving piece by a MSM-type about the importance of the "real" press versus the blogosphere.

Sometimes argument -- a word that elevates blogosphere comment to a level it seldom attains on its own -- gains from old-fashioned gumshoe reporting. Compelling examples abound. On the same day I read of the Daily Kos convention in Chicago, I finished "The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle and the Awakening of a Nation," winner this year of the Pulitzer Prize for history. No one looms larger in the book by Gene Roberts Jr. and Hank Klibanoff than Claude Sitton, whose reporting in the New York Times in the 1960s would become legendary.

Mainstream journalism has had some incredible moments when it covered very important events. They covered World War II and actually supported the U.S. (something one doesn't see anymore). They wrote about and supported the Civil Rights Movement. But, unfortunately, their shameless sanctimony against Ronald Reagan (the "amiable dunce"), the constant drumbeat against conservatives, the mischaracterization of Southerners as racists and ignoramuses, the grossly inaccurate depictions of Christians as hypocrites and pro-lifers as misogynists all work against the supposedly wonderful work of the past.

Now, the MSM is most threatened by the blogosphere because bloggers are doing many of the functions newspapers and television have performed for decades. More refreshingly, bloggers do not feel the necessity to slip on the facade of objectivity and pretend they have no opinion. While the MSM will pretend it is neutral in the argument over abortion--even as they insult pro-lifers by constantly referring to them as "anti-abortion" and using the worst quotes available--bloggers feel no compulsion to pretend. If you go to a stick a fork in the baby's head until birth site, you are going to get discussions and argumentations that mirror that opinion. And, conversely, if you go to a pro-life site, you are going to get pro-life news.

Much as I disagree with moonbats on most things, I will admit to agreeing with Jill of Feministe when she says bloggers don't want to take journalists' jobs. They want journalists to do their jobs. I feel that way completely, although I'm sure it's about different issues.

I'd like, for instance, for journalists to keep their opinions to themselves and not voice them in their news stories. I'd like reporters to report facts, not their colorized versions of facts. I'd like reporters to question Democrats as ruthlessly as they do Republicans.

Mostly, I'd like reporters to do their jobs. You know, the one they supposedly spent all that time in j-school to do. Not the stylized job they may want.

The Ugly Face of Abortion Supporters, A Woman's Right to Choose, Part 6

A Woman's Right to Choose is a semi-regular feature of Gold-Plated Witch on Wheels.

The mask slips off to reveal the ugly face of the pro-abortion set when you read articles like this review of Girls on the Stand: How Courts Fail Pregnant Minors.

Author Scott Lemieux starts with this "explanation" of the popularity of parental notification and/or consent laws.

All things being equal, it is not illogical to assume that parental involvement will be beneficial to young women making the extremely difficult decision about whether to continue a pregnancy. The objection to such regulations, however, is equally obvious: Young women in loving families are likely to discuss the decision with a parent without state intervention, while getting the state involved may create serious risks for women in abusive or potentially abusive families.

This paragraph caught my attention because it assumes a level of openness in "good" families and implies that if a daughter didn't want to tell her parents she was pregnant, then the family must be "bad," the parents not worthy of notice about a highly important decision on the part of their daughter.

This is a favorite ploy of the pro-abortion movement, specifically where teenagers are concerned. The premise is that girls who don't wish to discuss pregnancy and abortion with their parents shouldn't be forced to. Why? Because the right for a teenage girl--who can't get her ears pierced or a tattoo without parental permission--to kill her baby is sacrosanct.

Yet anyone who has a teenager (or who remembers being a teenager) knows that adolescents dislike talking to their parents about a variety of issues ranging from car wrecks to curfew violations, and yet the law doesn't allow minors to avoid parental involvement in those issues. And anyone who thinks a teenager will feel comfortable talking about sex, pregnancy, and abortion with her parents is either a complete moonbat or hasn't been around teenagers.

Admittedly, Lemieux doesn't come out and say that parents must be "bad" if their teenage daughter doesn't want to talk to them about having an abortion, or that laws restricting minor access to abortion are overly restrictive. But it is the only logical conclusion one can come to from this:

Such a compromise, on its face, is not unreasonable. The state has a greater interest in intervening on behalf of minors, which makes the paternalism of such laws less transparently odious than similar regulations applied to adult women.

The link goes to an article about last term's Gonzales v. Carhart decision which upheld Congress's right to regulate abortion. If Lemieux genuinely thinks banning one late-term abortion procedure is paternalism, it's not difficult to see why he (and other pro-aborts) would consider parental notification laws to be paternalism.

I agree with the Partial Birth Abortion Act personally, and I agree with the reasoning of the SCOTUS that Congress can regulate abortion as part of its legislative power. But parental notification and consent laws strike at an entirely different issue. The right of parents to raise and educate their children is considered a fundamental one, and passing legislation which supports this is far different from banning any abortion procedure.

But as anyone who has read Echidne's site knows, many pro-abortion supporters think abortion should be legal and unregulated right up until birth. To logically argue that parents are responsible for their minor children and should be involved in decisions those children make doesn't compute with such people. To them, if a child is old enough to menstruate, parents can be responsible for every other area of a child's body, including immunizations, check-ups, and treatments, but the same parent responsible for getting medical treatment for a botched abortion should not play any part in the decision to get the abortion in the first place.

I'm not sure what sort of parent wouldn't want to be involved in his/her daughter's decision to have an abortion. The assumption that all adolescents would logically discuss abortion with their parents if the relationship is a "good" one is naive in the extreme. Basing government policy on this fantasy is even worse.

Liberal Bloggers in the Echo Chamber

You really have to hand it to Jeromy Brown. It takes a true dumb ass to take defeat in this comment thread and declare victory.

I finally closed comments in the thread after more than 270 comments where Jeromy said nothing more intelligent than "you're an idiot." But the worst was his utter contempt for democracy, the Constitution, and our legal system. Such stupidity didn't deserve a platform, so I took that away from him.

I suppose this was to be expected from someone who thinks lying about other people's opinions is good argumentation. And, in fact, I stated repeatedly throughout the comment thread in question that states are more than welcome to sanction gay marriage if they so desire, but that this is a legislative issue, not a judicial one. I also pointed out repeatedly that the Constitution contains a process through which gay marriage supporters could legalize homosexual unions: the amendment process.

But like so many moonbats, Jeromy thinks the Constitution's provisions for amendment are too cumbersome. That's for other folks, like black people and women. Better to get five judges to find a new right under chewing gum on the 14th Amendment than actually convince folks that homosexual marriage should be recognized.

Read A Book

"Read a Book, Read a Book, Read a MotherF****** Book"

Those are some of the lyrics of a public service announcement that's been running on Black Entertainment Television, according to The Conservative Voice. (I found out about this via Patriot Post.)

The video is above (I'm still new at this YouTube posting stuff).

It's bitingly funny, but, like Mike at Think 2wice, I'm not sure if it's satire or racism. Maybe rapper Bomani "d-Mite" Armah thinks this is an innovative way to teach children lessons in education and health. It's at least more entertaining than those boring health films we had in school.

Evaluating the Court

Law.com has the transcript to an interesting panel discussion by Legal Times reporter Tony Mauro evaluating the past Supreme Court term.

The discussions can get arcane, particularly when it comes to business or criminal defense issues, but the entire discussion is insightful.

Ever Gartner, the attorney who argued the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act was unconstitutional, seemed the most bitter and angry. And who can blame her? She lost a crucial vote that pro-abortionists feel entitled to. And how many times can she call partial birth abortion "so-called" in a single statement? Let's see:

The Court decided two of the three challenges that had been filed challenging a statute that Congress passed in 2003, the federal ban on so-called partial-birth abortion. All three of the cases that were filed were successful in all of the six lower courts in having the law enjoined and found unconstitutional. This was in large part because the statute that Congress passed is virtually identical to a statute that the Court had struck down only seven years ago in 2000 in a case called Stenberg v. Carhart.

In that case, which at this point we are calling Carhart I, the Court, by a 5-4 vote with Justice O'Connor at that time in the majority, found the Nebraska ban on so-called partial-birth abortion unconstitutional for two reasons. One, because the statute lacked a health exception [for the mother] and two, because the law was found to be so broad as to ban virtually any second-trimester, pre-viability abortion method.

The federal law that Congress passed in 2003 suffered from the identical constitutional flaws that the Court found in the Nebraska law, and, in fact, Congress passed the law very pointedly to create a vehicle for the Court to reconsider its Carhart I decision. So the abortion case, in addition to all the other ways that it presented very interesting constitutional issues for the new Roberts Court, it presented really a kind of test case to see how this Court was going to treat its own recent precedent ...

The Court, as we know, came out the other way, saying, "Yes, Congress can ban so-called partial-birth abortions, even without a health exception." So this shows us where the Court .... that at least in this particular context, the Court completely disregarded its precedent.

I count three in just that simple statement, which doesn't include the rest of Gartner's snit. My point, btw, is that Gartner could have referred to partial-birth abortion as "this procedure" or "the act." By constantly using the "so-called" flag, she is trying to cast doubt as to whether partial birth abortion is, in fact, partial birth abortion.

But Gartner goes on in her ideological way.

For the first time, the Court identifies two interests it has never used before to justify a restriction on a safe pre-viability abortion method. It says the ban can be justified because of the Court's moral and ethical concerns about the use of this procedure.

Unless Ms. Gartner knows something the rest of us don't, partial birth abortion isn't performed on babies pre-viability. It's performed on babies that are developed enough to survive birth (even if they were to die later). That's hardly pre-viability.

The rest of the transcript contains more interesting--and less emotionally charged--discussions about the tip of the Court to the right, who is in charge (Kennedy, by far), and where the Court may go from here. Read the whole thing to find out more.

Women Don't Ask, Or Men Are Evil

Back in this post, I discussed an interesting hypothesis being bandied about concerning the wage gap: women don't ask.

The premise is that men tend to ask for things they want and negotiate far more than women do. Why women hate negotiating and avoid it when possible is the subject of Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever's book Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide.

It's a powerful statement backed up by an equally powerful book. Though Women Don't Ask is only 200 pages, Babcock and Laschever pack those pages with statistics, psychology, anecdotes from women, and tons of information concerning not only how not negotiating affects wages, but how not asking for what they want affects every area of a woman's life.

Because women don't like to ask directly for things like raises and promotions, or negotiate their initial salaries the way men do, women typically start out making less than men. That initial 4% difference snowballs throughout a woman's career, leaving her much poorer than her male counterpart. "By not negotiating a first salary, an individual stands to lose more than $500,000 by age 60—and men are more than four times as likely as women to negotiate a first salary." And because women are less likely to ask for promotions (but tend to expect their good work to gain them advancement), they don't get as far up the company ladder as men do.

According to Babcock's and Laschever's research, it's not just in the workplace that women dislike negotiating. They will pay far more for a car, for instance, if they don't have to negotiate. They will settle for whatever they are offered in order to avoid the negotiation process.

Worse still, when women are assertive, confident and persistent, they are often labeled as "unfeminine" or "bitchy." Women executives can wind up at Bully Broads, a program designed to make these managers less aggressive--and therefore less threatening--to their male colleagues and subordinates.

Executive coach Jean Hollands, author of “Same Game, Different Rules,” makes her living training “bully broads,” executive women who don’t know how to make nice. Hollands has convinced her clients that leadership comes only to women smart enough curb their confrontational tactics and boost their sensitivity to subordinates. Men don’t need to worry about these things, but, as Hollands says, women must "fake it until they make it."

Obviously, such women aren't afraid to ask, but the price they pay for success may be quite steep.

But why don't women ask? That complex question is at the heart of Women Don't Ask. The authors contend that women don't ask for a lot of reasons, including that women tend to be less competitive than men and that women are conditioned to be less confrontational than men are.

It is this last premise--that women are taught early to be "other-oriented" and that demanding more is selfish--plays a large part in Babcock's and Laschever's book. When I took a course in law school called Women and the Law, I used to call this philosophy the "Men are evil" approach to life.

The theory plays up the historical subjugation of women to men. Filled with anecdotes from middle-aged women who remember being told that women aren't good at math and girls shouldn't do science, Women Don't Ask drums the Men Are Evil mantra into your head and you'll never forget it.

I'm not trying to dismiss historical prejudice against women. As I've pointed out to friends, in Texas, married women were treated like the mentally disabled and children. But whenever I read a book that says parents reinforce gender stereotypes by letting boys play with trains and girls play with dolls, my eyes glaze over. With two girls and a boy, I can tell you that not all girls want to play with dolls, but I don't want to discourage any of my children from being concerned about others. And I'm not sure how big a difference it makes who drives the car and who pays the bills.

While Women Don't Ask is filled with statistics and stories of discrimination, it is short on solutions. How do we prevent children from developing these stereotypical gender schemas? What part does personal choice play in which roles women and men adopt in society? And when (and should) the government enforce some sort of non-discrimination plan? And what would such a plan look like?

I agree with the authors that more women need to learn the importance of negotiation in achieving one's life goals. Because society expects women to behave in a less abrasive manner than men, most women are unwilling to ignore complaints or punishment to get a fairer share both in the workplace and at home. I'm just not sure what the authors expect the rest of us to do with their information.