Ross Douthat is right to pick apart Dana Stevens’ strange analysis of abortion-politics ala Judd Appatow’s Knocked Up. And while I think his analysis of the film is pretty spot-on, he’s a bit off the mark here:

Stevens is right that a typical young, upwardly-mobile, apparently-secular female professional who gets pregnant from a one-night stand with a loserish guy is a prime candidate to get an abortion, and the Knocked Up scenario is, in that regard, sociologically unlikely.

Replace “upwardly mobile” and “pregnant from a one-nigh stand with a loserish guy” with “poor and struggling” and “victim of a date rape” and I think you have a clearer candidate.

Had Alison not had the steady, well-paying job, and the in-house support system of her sister and brother-in-law, I’m sure the decision to carry the child to term would have been a lot more agonizing.

It truly is the question of the 2008 election, but this graf is absurd:

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani is an “experience” candidate who built his presidential platform around the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Terrorism, he says, is something “that I understand better than anyone who is running for president of the United States.”

I fail to see how a socially liberal Republican former municipal mayor is the candidate of experience not change.

And if surviving the 9/11 attacks is prerequisite enough to be President of the United States then I know a number of downtown New York City hot dog vendors who should be in line for prime appointments at DOJ and Homeland Security.

Michael “Axis of Evil” Gerson brings up a common misconception of the pro-choice, anti-abortion position:

The question naturally arises: Why does Giuliani “hate” abortion? No one feels moral outrage about an appendectomy. Clearly he is implying his support for the Catholic belief that an innocent life is being taken. And here the problems begin.

That’s stupid. There is plenty of stuff that is patently immoral and worthy of hate that falls far short of murder. Polygomy, for instance, which is apparently the worst thing Mitt Romney can even imagine.

For those who do not believe life begins at conception, abortion is not the termination of life, but the termination of pregnancy, a state of womanhood that fosters life. Ending that state can conceivably be seen as morally problematic without amounting to murder.

I have no qualms with those who view abortion as immoral; it is a costly, risky, somewhat gruesome procedure that is, at times, horribly necessary. The world would be a better place without abortion, no doubt, but only in so much as the world would be a better place without unwanted pregnancy.

The termination of a problematic pregnancy is a difficult, morally challenging decision, not because it amounts to murder, but because the termination of a life-fostering state of womanhood comes with a lot of emotional/ethical strings attached, ethics that fall far short of all-out “murder.”

That said, if pregnancy is nothing but a state of womanhood then legislating around that state is a clear violation of due process (no matter what legal gymnastics Antonin Scalia may be capable of).

Matt Yglesias hypes some terrible environmental policy by way of Governor Richardson:

I particularly liked his insistence on the idea that most people underplay the role of transportation and land use policy in the energy puzzle…More fuel efficiency is good, and more renewable energy is also good, but we’re also going to need people to drive less. And that’s going to mean that we’ll need policies that make it realistic for people to do so — mass-transit, but also transit-friendly, high-density constructions.

Trying to jam high-density construction into local policy from a national initiative is a terrible, terrible idea. Communities oppose it, and nobody’s going to be too enthusiastic about drastically changing the American way of life (for the worse) out of fear of environmental collapse.

People moved to the suburbs because the convenience of cars allowed them to live better lives on less money. Nobody’s going to move away from that lifestyle unless that convenience is taken away from them (ie drastically higher gas prices) and doing so artificially will never fly with the electorate.

We’ve got to figure out a way to make money off of environmental innovation, such that American lives become more convenient through technological progress. That means renewable fuel and sustainable power. We don’t need to revert back to an urban American landscape with all the overtaxed school systems, high-crime, and crazy housing costs (for limited space) that entails.

In tonight’s Republican debate, Mitt Romney proposed doubling the number of terror suspects held at Guantanamo Bay. Why the love for Guantanmo?:

“I don’t want them on our soil, I want them in Guantamo where they don’t get the access to lawyers they get when they’re on our soil. I don’t want them in our prisons, I want them there.”

Stupid USA and its Habeas Corpus! F***in’ 4th-8th and 14th amendments! Just get in the way of me lookin’ tough.

As Andrew Sullivan notes:

That is in itself a disqualification for the presidency of the United States. A man who has open contempt for the most basic rules of Western justice has no business being president.

I don’t know what’s scarier, Romney saying this bullshit and actually believing it, or Romney saying this bullshit because he thinks it’s what people want to hear.

UPDATE: Kudos to McCain for telling it like it is (in the same clip) and denouncing torture.

Reverand Al gets classy:

“I am deeply saddened by the passing of Reverend Jerry Falwell. Though he and I debated much and disagreed often, we shared a very cordial and warm friendship…I truly respected his commitment to his beliefs and our mutual belief in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”

Wonkette not so much.

When Slate’s John Dickerson asked readers for input on how to improve the presidential debates, I expected there’d be some good suggestions that could drastically improve the whole sorry process.

Turns out most people would rather see presidential debating turned into some sort of political reality TV show:

Various readers suggested American Idol- or Survivor-type methods for voting candidates off the stage if their answers were no good…

Others suggested a bracket system, with one-on-one contests and winners advancing to subsequent rounds…

A lot of readers seemed to think the candidates cribbed off of one another. They wanted to put all of them in soundproof booths and make them answer the same question.

I’m not sure that’s what we should be aiming for.

Matt Yglesias raises a good point in response to Charles Krauthammer’s column today, in which Chuck asserts that overturning Roe v. Wade and determining abortion law legislatively would somehow “settle” the issue. It’s a bit of a looney idea:

Tax policy in the United States, for example, is entirely out of the hands of the courts. Nevertheless, the issue of tax rates hasn’t been “settled democratically.” Rather, it’s the subject of constant legislative and electoral dispute.

Abortion will remain politically contentious no matter what happens to Roe. As Matt points out, abortion is a “controversial issue anywhere you have large religious communities who strongly believe that fetuses have the moral standing of human persons.” That political reality certainly won’t change once Roe goes out the window.

What will change, however, is the scope of the abortion debate in the country, which will inevitably be pushed to the left.

Having legalized abortion rest solely on judicial decision—decisions legislators have no control over—naturally increases the number of staunchly pro-life politicians in public office. It’s Pascal’s Wager of culture-war politics: it’s best to pose as rabidly pro-life than naively pro-choice, as any pro-life candidate will be able to please their religious base (to whom opposition to abortion is the number one litmus test), while simultaneously avoiding to offend the pro-choice majority, who recognize that Senator JoeSchmo Christian has little to no bearing on abortion rights in this country, so long as Roe is in good standing.

Once Roe v. Wade is overturned, however, legislators will actually be held accountable for their abortion views and votes, an accountability that will result in a leftward shift in the political discourse on abortion, as the elected masses alter their views to be more in line with the American public.

George Will apparently doesn’t see much use in the World Bank, arguing in his column today that the Bank’s poverty-fighting mission is largely outdated, at least for a state-driven organiztion.

Will is quite right to point out that “the prerequisite for growth is free markets allocating private capital to efficient uses.” But that doesn’t mean an obtrusive government institution such as the World Bank is without merit.

As Will says:

Much of what recipient countries save by receiving the bank’s subsidized loans they pay in the costs of “technical assistance,” the euphemism for being required to adopt the social agendas of the rich nations’ governments that fund the bank. Those agendas focus on intrusive government actions on behalf of fashionable causes—the empowerment of women, labor, environmentalism, indigenous peoples, etc.

This isn’t a criticism of the bank, it’s the rationale for the bank. Making the loan process dependent on “the empowerment of women, labor, environmentalism, indigenous peoples, etc.” ties economic development to socio-political progress. That’s why we have these standards, and that’s why the bank works. Why would we ever want to develop and institute an economic system that rewards the oppression of women, over-exploitation of the natural environment, or tyranny over a country’s native people?

More importantly, when did George Will turn in to the third-world populist Dinesh Dsouza?

Jonathan Chait has a great profile up on TNR of the Republican tough-guy mystique, the popularity contest that appears to be propelling Rudy Giuliani to the front of the ‘08 Republican field:

Giuliani isn’t really saying he has the most expertise fighting terrorism. (After all, he has never held office beyond the municipal level.) Rather, he’s trying to conjure the glow that Bush himself had in the days after September 11. Bush, his adoring fans used to say, “got it.” To “get it” meant you had some metaphysical understanding of the war that transcended—indeed, was largely incompatible with—any actual knowledge.

…

So, while Giuliani’s boast may be absurd by my standards—he thinks he understands the war on terrorism better than, say, Joe Biden?—by Republican standards, it’s simply obvious. Giuliani may not have any expertise as a war leader, but he excels at acting like one.

Ditto for Fred Thompson, whose large appeal over the Republican base stems not from his record as a mediocre one-and-a-third term Senator, as Bob Novak recently pointed out, but from his reputation as a tough talking, take-no-shit prosecutor, a role he is currently playing on television.

The prospects of a Rudy Giuliani nomination, something that once seemed so far fetched, is now feasible enough to be fundamentally depressing. Up until Rudy’s rise I’ve been able to console myself with the understanding that, no matter who wins in ‘08, at least the following four years will be better than the previous eight. Then comes the shit-kicking juggernaught of Rudy Giuliani, a man every bit as corrupt, uncurious and blindly hyper-masculine as the current disaster inhabiting the oval office.

Who could have ever thought the current presidential castrophe could be prolonged another four years?

Kind of brings you back to this again:

This strikes me as a somewhat reasonable explanation of the scary “I don’t believe in evolution” hand raising at the Republican debate the other night:

“I believe that the Creation has a creator. I believe there is a God. And I believe God put this whole creative process in motion. How he did it and the time frame in which he did it, I honestly don’t know. Nor do I think it’s relevant to being president of the United States…I’m going to leave the scientists to debate the intricacies of how it happened and when it happened because I simply don’t know. But I believe that rather than all this being just some accident that happened, there was a design, and a designer in the design.”

I’d feel comfortable with a creationist as president (don’t we have one now?) so long as his creationism remained separate from his public policy, particularly in education. I have a hunch Huckabee’s opposition to a nationalized school curriculum would preclude him from advancing Intelligent Design into our biology classrooms.

3 of the 10 Republicans running for president in 2008 do not believe in evolution.

Kind of makes you feel this way: