Buy American and to hell with the WTO

So the stimulus bill (jobs bill!) in congress has a "buy American" clause which requires all "manufactured goods" procured in the bill to be of domestic origin. This is an excellent idea from an economic perspective. The only problem is that the EU has threatened to sue the U.S. over it at the WTO. So why aren't Republicans incensed at the thought of another country sueing us over none-of-europe's-business? When it is the UN trying to tell us what to do, they are indignant.

I've always sympathized with Republicans and conservatives (not the same animal!) who regard the UN with, shall we say, distrust and impoliteness. The stated reason is that we surrender a degree of sovereignty when we submit ourselves, via treaty, to the international organization's resolutions. This is certainly a fact, and it is not hard to see why this might be a bad thing.

But the rub is that you never hear these same UN-haters make similar arguments concerning the WTO, which is for all practical purposes claiming at least as large a chunk of our sovereignty - probably more. The WTO ties our hands in trade and macro-economic policy, and Republicans just go along with it.

We should just get out of the WTO. They need us more than we need them, that's obvious from the shape of our trade gap. The trade gap is literally wealth leaving the country's borders, and parking itself in those countries with positive trade balances.

Botched abortion

This is grotesque, and it'll be interesting to read the public comments by pro-abortion organizations on the matter (if they don't completely ignore it, which is likely). While it might seem easy to condemn such callous and inhuman behaviour, supporters of abortion rights have to tread carefully.

The reason being that this infant had no right to live, in their view. After all, they were there to destroy him/her and it is only by chance that the baby came out before they could kill it. So we're going to hear that this is "horrible", because the doc got the order of operations wrong; not because the baby's' dead. Because, after all, that's what was supposed to happen in the first place. All's well that ends well, right girls?

And don't forget that President Obama voted against a bill in Illinois which explicitly criminalizes these acts, leaving no room for a sympathetic judge to allow infanticide to fall under Roe v. Wade's umbrella.

Giuliani's trickle-down crap

Former mayor Rudy Giuliani urged President Obama and others to go slow on cracking down on Wall Street bonuses because they help boost New York City coffers. "If you somehow take that bonus out of the economy, it really will create unemployment," the former two-term mayor said Friday. "It means less spending in restaurants, less spending in department stores, so everything has an impact."

How fucking dumb. They can't afford to eat at restaurants or shop at stores without $18 billion in bonuses? Does he really think that these creeps are going to spend $18 billion in restaurants and department stores? If they do, they should be shot.

And if Giuliani's worried about NYC's "coffers", he should propose the Treasury take it back, then reimburse NYC the 2 to 3 percent the city could expect to absorb in taxes. He knows this though, he's not so much an idiot as he is a liar and an asshole.

Pay discrimination act revision

I wrote about this issue a while back, rebutting complaints about the ruling, which is still apparently misunderstood. My point was that the justices were simply interpreting the law as it was writing, even in all its inadequacy. The court does not have the authority to invalidate a law because it is bad policy; yet that's what the more liberal court-watchers seem to think should happen. Here is the New York Times recap of what happened:

Now 70, Ms. Ledbetter discovered when she was nearing retirement that her male colleagues were earning much more than she was. A jury found her employer, the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company plant in Gadsden, Ala., guilty of pay discrimination. But in a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court threw out the case, ruling that she should have filed her suit within 180 days of the date that Goodyear first paid her less than her peers. (emphasis added)

To be accurate, the reporter should have written "But in a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court threw out the case, pointing out that the law required her to file suit within 180 days of the date that Goodyear first paid her less than her peers." This would have made it clear that the issue was a poorly considered provision in the bill, which the court had no choice but to simply honor as the law. Instead, the reporter presents the view that the court's 5 conservatives were just being big meanies.

Blatant contradiction

I add this post because I ran into a pro-choice blog post which clearly shows the essential contradiction of the opposition to the Mexico City Policy. I note the following two items:

1. According to this ABC News article, the Mexico City Policy allows funding only to NGOs which "neither perform nor actively promote abortion as a method of family planning" (emphasis added).
2. NARAL's press release which states "Reversing this Bush-era policy means that the world's poorest women may now have access to vital health services, from prenatal care to contraception" (emphasis added).

We see here from (1) that the policy only impacts abortions. The NGOs' ability to provide "vital health services, from prenatal care to contraception" are untouched by the policy, so long as they forswear the promotion of abortion "as a method of family planning" - that is, medically unnecessary abortions. It therefore follows that the Bush-era policy that Obama has thus trashed could not have had any negative effect on "vital health services" if the abortion groups didn't value elective abortion more highly than those health services.

They lie and deceive because they know if they came right out and said what they believed - that abortion is a public good, to be provided and paid for by the taxpayer, and protected as a fundamental right as sacred as free speech or the vote - most Americans would be repulsed.

The "politicization" of abortion?

President Obama laments the politicization of abortion, so he says. I cannot think of a more inherently political question. The question of who and what deserves the protection of the law is inherently political, so long as politics (rather than kings) determines law.

At least for once the New York Times has the headline right. "Obama Reverses Rules on U.S. Abortion Aid" indeed. It is not merely aid to "family planning" or pap smears; in fact it was never any of that. The only funding that was banned under the Mexico City Policy was abortion money. Money for abortions, abortion counseling, abortion referrals, and abortion lobbying. And thus, that is the only money that Obama has unleashed.

The abortion lobby pretends that the Mexico City Policy harms women and results in increased levels of unintended pregnancies, which means more abortions (never mind that an unintended pregnancy never need end in abortion). They don't seem to consider that all such concerns would be null and void if the NGOs who want U.S. tax payers' money would simply clean their organization of abortion. They could continue to do all the supposedly wonderful things that they would be doing otherwise, and use our money for it, with or without the "gag" rule.

Under the policy, the NGOs face a choice: give up the abortion game (except in case of rape, incest, or life threatening conditions) altogether, or lose your funding. Most of them chose to lose the money, and cut services across the board. But in doing so they reveal their hand: they'd rather undermine "efforts to promote safe and effective voluntary family planning in developing countries" than give up providing and promoting abortion.

One last thing. In Obama's written statement issued along with the official memoranda declares that "the provisions of the Mexico City Policy are unnecessarily broad and unwarranted under current law" and he should therefore eliminate the law entirely. If they are only "unnecessarily broad" why not just narrow the provisions to those "necessary"? And what exactly is unnecessary about it? He doesn't share the goals of the policy, and therefore none of it could be viewed as "necessary" by him. It is just a poor attempt to sound reasonable.

Against conscience clauses, still

I'm currently on the lookout for what's going on with the new Obama Administration with the abortion issue. He has appeared to backpedal this issue, which makes sense politically since there are probably 1,001 other issues that are ranked of higher importance, even to those who are pro-choice, than making abortion easier, cheaper, and more accessible (and therefore more common).

I note first that the White House's agenda page does not mention the FOCA bill or any pro-active efforts to expand abortion rights. It looks more like he's just sandbagging against further "erosion of reproductive rights".

But the feminists are making some noises and appear hopeful. On Salon, we have this revealing gem. I will quote only the following:

Oklahoma passed "the most anti-choice legislation in 2008," which allows "certain individuals and entities to refuse to perform abortion services, requires that a woman view ultrasound images before she may have an abortion even if not medically necessary for patient care, and prohibits certain qualified health care professionals from performing abortion services"

I have pointed this out before, but it is always there and always ought to be pointed out. The pro-choice crown stands firmly against merely allowing "certain individuals and entities to refuse to perform abortion services". It logically follows that they support forcing certain individuals and entities to perform abortion services.

In addition, they consider it an offense to require a mother-to-be to see a sonogram before she requests an abortion. It is certainly odd that the sonogram is considered a form of pro-life propaganda. Either that, or they do not believe that additional medical information is helpful. Either that, or they are not truly "pro-choice", but pro-abortion, as they are opposed to measures which may reduce abortion without pressuring or obstructing access to abortions. I fear it is the latter.

California Prop 8

So Jerry Brown is going to ask the California Supreme Court to invalidate the popularly enacted Proposition 8, which re-instituted marriage as a heterosexual institution. This was, mind you, a reaction to a prior court decision which instituted gay marriage over the heads of the people which have, to date, voted to crush gay marriage twice in six years.

It's really hard to express how ridiculous these claims have gotten. This is an argument among the people about the essential meaning of a key social and cultural institution. If there was ever a question to be resolved democratically it is this. Yet, the gay side of this argument insists that their approach is the only valid approach under our constitution and form of government.

Here's the rub that I think the Prop 8 defenders are missing and need to pursue. A statutory marriage is a contract with Three (3) parties; the state - society's agent - is a party to every legal marriage contract. Society agrees, upon issuance of the license, to provide the privileges and immunities that attach to the institution of marriage. We've heard about all the innumerable benefits that our government(s) confer upon married couples that no other kind of couple can receive. These are society's responsiblities. In exchange, the couple agree to care for one another, and agree to and provide for and raise responsibly any and all offspring that spring forth. This bears repeating, because it is the nexus of the problem of gay marriage. Society publicly recognizes and protects marriages for the benefit of the couple's inevitable offspring. Thus, an incredible (impossible) burden is lifted from the state and carefully placed on the shoulders of parents. It is a small thing for society to privilege the heterosexual marriage relationship (via the issuance of a license) in light of this extraordinary responsibility.

Back to Jerry Brown and California. The argument here seems to be that society has no right to restrict ("arbitrarily") who can enter into a marriage under the state (society's agent, right?). "Fundamental rights in the state Constitution, including the right to marry that the state's high court has recognized, 'become a dead letter if they can just be amended' by popular vote, Brown said." (SFGate Article).

The fundamental right to marry? Restricting marriage to monogamous heterosexual couples is far from arbitrary. The great illusion that the gays have here is that their definition of marriage is somehow more principled and rigorous than that of the rest of society and deserves to be privileged as the only available option under the constitution. Regardless of which definition of marriage is more or less arbitrary, the people's reasons are theirs.

I would say that the concept of marriage and family relations is far more "fundamental" to a society than the "right to marry" is to individual liberty. This is autonomy theory gone wild.

Common Arguments I

One of the principle strategies of the pro-abortion lobby is to "frame" the issue as a health care issue: abortion is just another medical procedure, and we're protecting your right to have it if you are in medical need of it. Of course, when less than 20% of abortions - all of which are defended by the pro-abortion lobby - have anything to do with health concerns (either the mother's or the child's), this rings totally hollow.

One major prong of this strategy is the claim that "back alley abortions" will be resorted to in the even of criminalization, and women will therefore die as a result of it. There is significant reason to believe this is a complete fabrication:

Dr. Bernard Nathanson, co-founder of the National Abortion Rights Action League, admits his group lied about the number of women who died from legal abortions when testifying before the Supreme Court in 1972. "We spoke of 5,000 - 10,000 deaths a year.... I confess that I knew the figures were totally false ... it was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it with honest statistics?"

That claim of thousands of maternal deaths due to illegal abortion doesn't measure up when compared with other statistics. About 50,000 women of child-bearing age die each year -- from all causes combined. To suggest that 10,000 of these deaths were from illegal abortion would make that the cause of one out of every five deaths, or twenty percent. This would have made illegal abortion the leading cause of death among women in that age group. What, then, did cause abortion-related deaths due to illegal abortions? According to data from the National Center for Health Statistics, the legalization of abortion was not responsible for reducing abortion-related deaths. This discovery of antibiotics in the 1940's did that by providing effective treatment for infections.

The National Center for Health Statistics reveals that before 1941, there were over 1,400 abortion-related deaths. Yet after penicillin became available to control infections, the number of deaths was reduced in the 1950's to approximately 250 per year. By 1966, with abortion still illegal in all states, the number of deaths had dropped steadily to 120. The reason? New and better antibiotics, better surgery and the establishment of intensive care units in hospitals. This was in the face of a rising population.

Between 1967 and 1970, sixteen states legalized abortion. In most it was limited, only for rape, incest and severe fetal handicaps or deformities, and when the pregnancy jeopardized the life of the mother (all of which constitute only 5% of the abortion cases today). There were two notable exceptions - California in 1967 and New York in 1970 legalized abortion on demand. Legalizing abortion should have eliminated some deaths related to illegal abortions. That is not the case. In the years from 1963-1969, there were an average of approximately 55 deaths per year due to illegal abortions. In 1970, after this initial wave of laws legalizing abortions, there were 109. Deaths from illegal abortions increased.

By the year before the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision allowing legal abortion on demand in all fifty states, the death rate for illegal abortions had fallen to 24 in 1972 (with 25 additional deaths as a result of legal abortions). Now abortion was legal in all fifty states and back alley abortions eliminated with their alleged total of maternal deaths. In 1973 there should have been a sharp drop in abortion-related deaths if abortion advocates were right that legalizing abortion would make abortion safe.

Yet abortion-related deaths increased again with 25 deaths resulting from legal abortion in 1973, 26 in 1974 and 29 in 1975. Some have claimed that the number of illegal abortion-related deaths were not reported accurately or underreported.

Yet, when a woman was seriously injured by an abortion, she went to another doctor for care. The abortion practitioner was rarely involved at that point. The new doctor in many cases had to attempt to save the mother's life. In cases of maternal death, this new doctor was required to report, and falsification of the death certificate was a felony. Therefore, prior to legalization of abortion, it's safe to say deaths from illegal abortions were rarely covered up.

Yet, even if the case can be made that deaths resulting from illegal abortions were underreported, it is equally safe to say that deaths resulting from legal abortions are underreported. In Maryland in 1991, there were four women who died from legal abortions that year. None of the four were reported to the Federal Centers for Disease Control for its statistics. Whereas prior to the legalization of abortion a second doctor, with little or no reason to cover up a death for which he or she was not responsible, was involved in an attempt to save the mother's life; with legalized abortion the abortion practitioner is usually the one attempting to save the mother's life when the abortion threatens her life. Other specific instances help us see how reporting for the number of deaths related to legal abortions may be low: In 1977 an Ohio doctor noted that while the official statistics showed no abortion-related deaths in Ohio that year, he personally knew of two. If one doctor knew of two cases, how many were there really?

Abortion was legalized in California in 1967. According to an article in the Los Angeles Times in 1972, official records showed four legal abortion-related deaths in the entire country from 1967 to 1972. Yet a reporter for that paper uncovered three deaths only in Los Angeles in just one month in 1972. A reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times uncovered 12 legal abortion-related deaths in that city in 1978. The government statistics show only 16 deaths for the entire country in that year.

Another important point is that many of the abortion practitioners performing abortions after Roe v. Wade were the same people performing illegal abortions. In the July 1960 edition of the American Journal of Public Health, an article by Dr. Mary Calderon, then medical director of Planned Parenthood, which stated:

"90% of illegal abortions are being done by physicians. Call them what you will, abortionists, or anything else, they are still physicians, trained as such; ... They must do a pretty good job if the death rate is as low as it is... Abortion, whether therapeutic or illegal, is in the main no longer dangerous, because it is being done well by physicians."

Here is a candid admission that not only are illegal abortions not being done by quack doctors but that the death rate from illegal abortions was "low." This flies in the face of claims of several thousand women losing their lives to illegal abortions and the claim that illegal abortions were performed by quack doctors and not by physicians.

As we can see, "Never again" never was. There were not several thousand women losing their lives due to illegal abortions performed by quack doctors. Effective medical treatments helped reduce abortion related deaths and the legalization of abortion never played a significant role (and never will) in affecting the numbers of women who died from legal or illegal abortion-related deaths. That women continue to die from so-called "safe, legal" abortions (perhaps in greater numbers than we know) is a clear indication that abortion is unsafe and hurts women - legal or otherwise.

Sources: National Center for Health Statistics. Health, United States, 1994. Hyattsville, Maryland: Public Health Service, 1995. Abortion Surveillance 1985, Center for Disease Control, Table #18. Induced Abortion: World Review 1983, by Christopher Tietze, The Population Council, p 103 Maternal Mortality Surveillance 1979-1986, Centers for Disease Control, M&M Weekly report July 1991, Vol. 40, No. SS-1.

Arguing against gay marriage "without religion or morals"

Now here is something rather pathetic. Using Biology, Not Religion, to Argue Against Same-Sex Marriage, in the NYTimes today. I suppose it comes as news to most of the reporters and editors at the New York Times that the structure of marriage has something to do with reproduction and children.

I guess the first problem I see here is the juxtaposition of religously-informed argument(s) and scientifically-informed arguments, the former being presented as illegitimate, the later sound. "The Galloways represent one side of a debate that is often charged by undercurrents of bigotry and religious belief." This sentence itself surly betrays an undercurrent of bigotry against religion, lumping religious belief in with bigotry. It is telling that the editors either didn't notice, or thought it perfectly reasonable.

This is what is meant when it is said that the New York Times and other elite "liberal" shining lights have a tendency to piss on the vulgar religious beliefs of the masses, and to denigrate religion as some sort of intellectual vice.

Let me riff on one thing here. It's clear that arguments from religious beliefs or "morality" are verboten and not worthy of critical analysis, according to the Times. But morality? Really?? Has the Times editorial board never presented a policy argument on moral grounds? The Iraq war comes to mind, not to mention the death penalty ("immoral"), turning illegal immigrants away at hospitals ("immoral" again), and (ludicrously) doctors who refuse to refer a pregnant woman to an abortionist are characterized as acting immorally. Morality is part of their vocabulary, as it is a part of everyone's faculties for reasoning about justice and injustice, right and wrong. We use words like "should" which implies an obligation that is ultimately moral in nature. Health care should be a right, not a privilege, they say. The state should not be empowered to take a prisoner's life. These are moral arguments, and they merit careful public consideration.

The bottom line here is that social liberals are comfortable using moral arguments and the vocabulary of morality to stump for those policies they favor. When confronted with a moral argument against on of their sacred cows, morality is suddenly out-of-bounds.

A free people can legislate "morality" all day long, it is perfectly legit, presents no danger to the "separation of church and state" or religious freedom. The only thing stopping us is pragmatism imposed by our pluralism. In fact, it is necessary that a free people legislate via moral reasoning, as it is the only source of knowledge we have about justice - and what is the law if not the pursuit of justice in our collective affairs? We cannot have a workable body of law without some notion of justice, and we cannot hope to know what justice is without a moral code to stand on. The law, therefore, needs morality, or else it is owed no assent (think civil disobediance, Letter from a Birmingham Jail):

... one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."

And yet here we have the New York Times telling us to keep our notions of morality - our means of distinguishing just from unjust - at home when we participate in our politics.