Are you keeping a promise if it’s just a symbolic promise-keeping?  Of course not … unless you’re Barack Obama.  Then you can do stuff like this:

WASHINGTON (NYT) — When President Obama arrived at the Mandarin Oriental hotel for a fund-raising reception on Thursday night, the new White House rules of political purity were in order: no lobbyists allowed.

But at the same downtown hotel on Friday morning, registered lobbyists have not only been invited to attend an issues conference with Democratic leaders, but they have also been asked to come with a $5,000 check in hand if they want to stay in good favor with the party’s House and Senate re-election committees.

The practicality of Mr. Obama’s pledge to change the ways of Washington is colliding once more with the reality of how money, influence and governance interact here. He repeatedly declared while campaigning last year that he would “not take a dime” from lobbyists or political action committees.

So to follow through with that promise, Mr. Obama is simply leaving the room.

I just love all this “change you can believe in” hogwash! And so, apparently, does Robert “Gotta Get A Message To You” Gibbs:

The White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, dismissed a suggestion on Thursday that the rules were a sleight of hand. He said no lobbyists would be on hand when Mr. Obama addressed the donors, which is what he promised in the campaign.

“People know where the president stands,” Mr. Gibbs told reporters. Asked whether Mr. Obama would agree with critics who suggested it was hypocritical, he demurred and added, “We’re not taking their money.”

There. Now we know where the president stands. We just don’t know why he bothers standing there.

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n case you’re looking for a reminder of what a fruitcake Ron Paul is, consider this: He is the sole member of the House who voted against a resolution condemning the Iranian government and supporting the Iranian people. The Senate subsequently passed the resolution as well.

The resolution condemns “the ongoing violence” by the Mullahs and Republican Guard, slams Tehran for suppressing the Internet and cell phones, and expresses support for the Iranian peoples’ desire for freedom.

Meanwhile, President Pantywaist said he is very concerned about the “tenor and tone” of comments coming from Tehran’s Religious Whackjob In Chief, and added – in an interview taped with CBS’ Harry Smith – that Iran’s totalitarian government needs to “recognize that the world is watching,” and that “how they approach and deal with people who are, through peaceful means, trying to be heard” will tell the world “what Iran is and is not.”

I’m sure that will make the Mullahs shake in their sandals and re-think their strategy.  We elected a great orator who could inspire the world and we got a great wimp who puts it to sleep.

Obama needs to drop the word “I” from his vocabulary.  Unless his finger is hovering over the launch button or he has a pen in hand and is about to sign away another generation’s future, I could care less what he thinks.

He needs to be talking exclusively about us now when he addresses what’s going on in Iran and North Korea, as in:  America believes in freedom, America stands by those who struggle for freedom, America condemns totalitarianism wherever it is because we believe all are created equal and are endowed with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and most important of all, America still has balls.

It’s not about you, Mr. President, it’s about something bigger … if you can comprehend the concept that there actually is something bigger and more important than you.

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Congress may be full of Democrats, but it’s not full of idiots … well, not complete idiots.  The new emergency war bill, stuffed as it is with $20 billion in non-defense garbage like the $1 billion clunker buy-back abomination, doesn’t contain one penny for the closure of Obama’s Guantanamo closing madness.

Worse for the Prez, it puts restrictions on his recent dark, secretive schemes to transfer jihadists to other nations.  You know, demanding transparency; that sort of thing the candidate loved but the president shuns.

The members of Congress have become aware the folks back home don’t want a bunch of Mohammed Atta wannabees hanging out by their neighborhood Seven-11.  Too bad they haven’t quite grasped that we don’t want to sell the future of the country down the river on socialist schemes, either.

The $106 emergency bill – what’s not an emergency in DC nowadays? – prohibits the prez from releasing any Gitmo detainees into the U.S., prevents them from being transfered here for prosecution without the preparation of something akin to a Jihadist Impact Report, and requires the prez to disclose the deals he cuts with other nations before detainees can be transfered to them and does a risk analysis.

How can they so resolutely slap down this bit of presidential lunacy and still let him speed through transformational measures that  will impact us and future generations with debt and destruction of the free market?

Oh, yeah: Iit’s just their intense interest in self-preservation. It’s easier to face the voters after selling out the economy and constitution than it is to face them after letting out terrorists.

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t seems like only yesterday we were looking at nominee #3 for this year’s C-SM “Most Ridiculous” award (actually, it was Tuesday), and here we are again so soon with #4 – a second nominated article from the nearly always ridiculous Gary Kamiya of Salon.

Kamiya easily checks off all the requirements for consideration for this august (if ridiculous) honor:  He is a serious writer, writing about a serious subject in all seriousness, yet he goes far beyond the sublime, settling heavily into the imbecilic.

His piece, Night of the Living Neocons, The shameless fools whose Iraq folly empowered Iran’s hard-liners are back, smearing Obama as an appeaser, is typical Kamiya: Blind to all the Left’s faults, while accusing the right of exactly those faults … oh, and being utterly unable to forgive or forget George W. Bush, who he sees as the primordial presidential ooze from which all things evil evolved.

Let’s start with a rundown of the derrogatory words he uses for neocons:  Rasputin-like, unhinged, disgraced, braying, raving, unreconstructed, lunatic, Visigothic, idiotic, ludicrous, paper-pushing pundits ensconced in comfy right-wing think tanks, supposedly “idealistic,” and cavalier.  A little later on he belittles neocons for belittling Obama.  The pot is allowed to call the kettle black, but the kettle gets no such rights in Kamiyaland.

As the piece’s title hints, Kamiya believes it’s Bush who created Iran’s hard-line regime, and that Obama is right to appease use carefully considered words, because just three words – axis of evil – are behind all that’s wrong in Iran.

That these neoconservative pundits have the gall to talk about Iran at all, let alone pose as defenders of the Iranian people, would be stunning if it were not so familiar. For it was their own policies that were largely responsible for the rise of the hard-liners in Iran. … And of those U.S. actions, none was more consequential than the very “axis of evil” statement that the neocons are now tumbling over each other to glorify.

Kamiya quotes Islamic affairs scholar Malise Ruthvin:

“The build-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq provided them with strong public support. In the local council elections of February 2003 — one month before the invasion — conservatives regained nearly all the seats they had lost in 1999 at the peak of the reformist movement. This was not a rigged poll: for unlike the parliamentary and presidential races, candidates for municipal elections are not vetted for ‘Islamic suitability.’ The right-wing victory was sealed two years later with Ahmadinejad’s election as president.”

It’s simplistic to blame the results of elections in Iran on the actions of America. Economic issues at home and tribal alliances and conflicts also matter greatly, and whatever America does or does not do is grossly distorted by the state-controlled Iranian media – which didn’t cover Obama’s Cairo speech and reported his recent milquetoast comments as if they were incendiary. Be that as it may, haven’t events borne out the fact that Iran is indeed evil? It has ruthlessly repressed its people, called for the destruction of free, Democratic Israel, tried to strip Lebanon of democracy, killed our soldiers, and thumbed its nose at the world.

Oh, and we need not mention Jimmy Carter’s contribution to the mess in Iran, or Bill Clinton’s.  We need not mention that Democratic presidents have had their visions for progress in the Middle East destroyed by Islamists just as much as Republican ones have.  Kamiya just won’t talk about that – he just is interest in the failure of Republicans.

Kamiya than attacks the Iraq war, familiar ground for him indeed:

And, of course, the entire Iraq war greatly empowered Iran by removing its greatest enemy, Saddam Hussein, and shifting power to Iran’s coreligionist Shiites.

He ignores the fact that the war also created a functioning (for better or worse) Muslim democracy next door, something the Tehraniacs have fought tooth and nail since the neocons first started working towards bringing it about. We didn’t remove Hussein and leave a vacuum; we did it and left a form of government that threatens Tehran to its core. How many of the demonstrates on the Iranian streets are there because they saw fair elections happen next door, and they want them now, too? Most of them!

At this point, Kamiya must have stopped writing and fired up a big, fat doobie because what follows appears to be some kind of drug-induced hallucination:

One of the things the neocons would like the rest of us to forget is that they were the most ardent proponents of invading the very country whose people they now piously claim to support. Back in the heady “Mission Accomplished” days, the neocon slogan was “Wimps go to Baghdad — real men go to Tehran.” Leaving aside the fact that the neocons were a bunch of paper-pushing pundits ensconced in comfy right-wing think tanks who never “went” anywhere that didn’t have room service, the point is that they have been burning to attack Iran for years — an attack that would inevitably result in the slaughter of tens or hundreds of thousands of Iranians. Yes, some of them claimed that invading Iran would be a cakewalk, that the long-suffering Iranian people would welcome Americans as liberators, and so on. (Some of them even managed to keep a straight face while saying this.) And if you believe them, there’s a bridge in Fallujah I’d like to sell you.

Have any of you ever heard any of us call for any sort of ground attack on Iran that would slaughter hundreds of thousands of Iranians? I sure haven’t, although I’ve heard plenty of calls for limited attacks on Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Have any of you heard that “Real men go to Tehran” slogan? I sure haven’t. Have any of you heard anyone idiotic to say attacking Iran would be a cakewalk? To the contrary, I’ve heard neocons explain that Iraq was selected as a target because a war with Iran would be exponentially more difficult. Look at all the straw dogs barking at the neocons!

As if you haven’t guessed by now, the next target of Kamiya’s angst is Israel:

Beneath their talk of spreading freedom and democracy, the neocons have always hated and feared Iran. There are several reasons for this, including the state of enmity between Iran and America spurred by the Khomeini revolution and the 1979 hostage crisis, but the main one is that Iran is Israel’s most dangerous enemy. Removing Iran as a threat to Israel is the main strategic goal of the neoconservatives, and that goal is far more important to them than “liberating” the Iranian people.

That’s it. Really. There’s no mention of holocaust denial or pledges to wipe Israel off the map. There’s no mention that Israel is a democracy. And there is certainly no mention of the regional destabilization a nuclear Iran would present, or the threat to America posed by Iran providing terrorists with nuclear weapons or materials for dirty bombs. It’s just that we have this curious strategic goal to protect Israel.

The most tragic and pathetic statement by Kamiya follows.

For the truth is that the neocons’ supposed “idealism” was and is in fact a fig leaf covering utter, cavalier indifference to the massive death and destruction their reckless — but so “principled” — policies caused.

He apparently has avoided any contact with information about what happened in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos after his side won and we ended all that neocon silliness about domino theories in Southeast Asia. Millions died, were tortured or forced into state-sanctioned slavery, and that’s all just hunky dory with Kamiya – just don’t ask him to consider how hundreds of thousands were executed by Hussein, but that doesn’t happen any more … well, it happens in Iran, but not Iraq.

And what of Obama’s position in all this?  Why, it’s just brilliant, of course!

The situation in Iran is a tricky moving target, but so far, Obama has played it exactly right on. He has expressed deep concern about the election and the regime’s violent response to peaceful demonstrators, but added that “it is not productive, given the history of US-Iranian relations to be seen as meddling — the U.S. president, meddling in Iranian elections.”

Since when is calling for fair elections “meddling?”  Since when is sympathizing with freedom-loving people “meddling.”  I know meddling when I see it:  Owning 60 percent of GM or canning its CEO; that’s meddling. But Kamiya is convinced in a meddle-free foreign policy:

It should be amply clear by now that America’s ability to influence events in the Middle East is severely limited. Indeed, as the Bush years showed, U.S. actions in the region tend to result in the exact opposite of their intended consequences.

He then turns around and says:

The success of the March 14 Alliance in Lebanon, a major victory for the U.S., is widely attributed to the “Obama effect.”

Which is it? Is he saying the Cairo speech led to the riots in Iran as the exact opposite of its intended consequences?  Or is he saying that Obama should speak very strongly in favor of democracy in Iran because there’s an “Obama effect” that can really make things happen?  I am so confused.  But that’s something that happens frequently when I consider the ridiculous things said by Liberals.

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he prophet Muhammed would be tickled piggy-pink with this, as will the millions of subhuman terrorist swine who proudly carry his name, although the rest of the world will recoil in horror:

A Pakistani Federal Minister Monday said that militants were using kidnapped children as suicide bombers across the country.

Federal Interior Minister Rehman Malik talking to newsmen here said that the militants were buying innocent children for few hundred thousand rupees and using them to carry out suicide attacks. (Kuwait News via ROP)

By way of contrast, the Son of God taught us:

Then he put a little child among them. Taking the child in his arms, he said to them, “Anyone who welcomes a little child like this on my behalf welcomes me, and anyone who welcomes me welcomes my Father who sent me.” (Mark 9:36-37)

I’ve read that scripture a whole bunch of times, and I just can’t find anything there about blowing the child up.

Hat-tip: Infidels Are Cool

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The headline quotes Mariah Carey’s hubby, rapper Nick Cannon, as he was cutting a promo spot on the White House lawn for NBC’s “Amerca’s Got Talent.” And it’s true: The most powerful man in the world is just crazed about his own talent. He just can’t get enough.

There are far too many recent examples to rattle off without prompting, so let’s rely on Politico:

Obama did a recent promo for “The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien” during the host’s first week on the job. He participated in a skit via video on Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report.” NBC was taking pre-orders for its “Inside the Obama White House” DVD ($19.99) the day after the two-part special aired. Now ABC is promoting its special Obama access June 24: shooting “Good Morning America” from the North Lawn – including exclusive interviews with the president and the first lady – holding a primetime health care Q&A with Obama in the East Room, and anchoring “Nightline” from the Blue Room in the executive mansion. [See "Update" below.]

And it’s not like he was quiet up to this point. No, he’s shoved his way into prime time, late night and morning broadcasts alike, so we all could sit awe-struck in our E-Z Boys, dazzled by his poise, intelligence and oh, so telegenic face.  Even the once Obama-crazed Bill Hahar has had enough:

“I don’t want my president to be a TV star,” Maher said on his HBO television show.

“You don’t have to be on television every minute of every day—you’re the president, not a rerun of ‘Law & Order,’ ” he continued. “TV stars are too worried about being popular and too concerned about being renewed.”

Too concerned about being popular and too concerned about being renewed? Ouch!

Update:  Bookworm’s onto something.  Join her in boycotting ABC.

Art: Okie on the Lam

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armers and agricultural organizations have submitted more than 400 comments, totalling 25,000 pages, to the Senate Ag Committee regarding the pending Waxman-Markey carbon cap and trade legislation – and they’re not supportive of the “let’s destroy the economy and say we’re saving the planet” bill.

Even the American Farmers Union, a haven for ag’s left-wingers, called for ag offsets and exclusions – in other words, stick the other folks with it if you must, but leave us out of it.

Here’s some decidedly negative comments from the Dairy Farmers of America, who have need to be particularly concerned because Waxman, Markey and the rest of the loons are fixated on cow farts as a heinous planet-destroyer.

“At this time, Dairy Farmers of America, Inc. (DFA) is reluctant to embrace any type of climate change legislation without a better understanding of its impact on the entire U.S. economy and specifically, the dairy industry. Should the U.S. enter into a system where it effectively reduces its greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions in the aggregate, it must also work to ensure that other industrialized nations agree to similar terms and developing nations adopt equally significant reductions. The U.S. needs to ensure that the costs of any climate change legislation do not exceed the benefits, that new regulations are based on sound science and that the global burden is fairly distributed.

“We are especially cautious of mandatory GHG measures without a more complete and thorough understanding by all the major affected U.S. parties as to what these changes would mean for their incomes, businesses, livelihoods and ways of life. This is especially the case given the depths and extent of the nation’s current economic crisis whose negative effects are all too immediate and from which we have yet to see an end…

“DFA is also concerned about the ramifications of a cap-and-trade system on the entire, currently fragile U.S. economy, even though a carbon offset program might offer some incentives for dairy farmers to continue to pursue innovations and gain the market benefits as a result.”

Waxman and Markey will have none of that! Cost-benefit analyses? Consider the sorry state of the economy? Acknowledge China and India? What are those yahoos from dairyland thinking?! 

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nlike some folks I know of the other political persuasion, I revel in reading the other side’s point of view, so this morning I read Why I Plan to Emulate Dr. George Tiller by med student Rozalyn Farmer Love on AlterNet.  I really don’t want to put the story into nomination for the Most Ridiculous Story of 2009 because Love has, on the surface at least, tried so earnestly to bridge an all but unbridgeable gap.

That’s worth kudos and shouldn’t lead to catcalls of “Ridiculous!”  Had the author been honest in her examples, I might have been citing this article as a must read instead of including it in this year’s running.

Let’s get the formalities taken care of:  To be considered, a piece must be written by a serious writer about a serious subject in all seriousness, yet go far beyond the sublime, settling heavily into the imbecilic.  By those criteria, I suppose that Love will be an also-ran come December 31 (especially given the stories in the hopper thus far by a couple Rulers of the Ridiculous, Gary Kamiya and Glenn Greenwald), but let’s see how this stacks up.

The author starts by seeking affinity, which may seem odd given that the piece is on the decidedly left-wing AlterNet, but don’t give her demerits for that; it was originally published in the Atlanta daily.  Here’s her pitch:

I’m a third-year medical student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. I plan to become an obstetrician-gynecologist. I dream of delivering healthy babies, working with families and supporting midwifery. But as part of my practice, I also envision providing abortions to women who need them.

The road I took to get here isn’t your stereotypical one. My parents are conservative Christians who believe abortion is wrong. Growing up, I naturally shared their view. But I’ve also wanted to be a doctor since I was 4 years old, and in high school, I began to feel drawn to issues of women’s health. In college, I designed my own major to broaden my understanding of women’s health by including psychology, sociology and women’s studies.

OK, so she’s from a conservative, church-going background, she’s focused and driven, and she’s gone out of her way to pursue her life-long dream.  Kudos, we can all relate.  But why, then, does she start the column with this intro:

If I’d passed her on the street, I probably wouldn’t have known her. Her gait is a bit stiff and her left eye somehow different from her right. She’s not famous, exactly, but some people might know her name: Emily Lyons. She’s the nurse who survived the 1998 bombing of an abortion clinic in Birmingham at the hands of Eric Rudolph.

It’s a bit curious to me that someone who works in an abortion clinic should get heroic status, but Love tells us:

Watching her walk slowly into our fund-raiser on her husband’s arm — a woman who’d endured more than 18 operations — I thought of all she’d been through and knew that I’d come to the right decision in my support of reproductive rights.

Everyone in their right mind has to feel sorry for the tragedy that was interjected into Emily Lyons’ life.  It should never have happened.  Of course, had she chosen a more morally acceptable field of medicine to practice in, she would have lived a different life.  Providing abortions is hardly a high-risk occupation, with a mortality rate of, what, one a decade or so?  But Lyons’ career choice ended up costing her a lot, because of the evil and irrational reaction it created in Eric Rudolph’s mind.

Next we learn of another moment of inspiration to Love, related in her usual inclusive, mellowing style:

I agree that ending an unwanted pregnancy is a tragedy. When I advocate for reproductive rights, for choice, I don’t claim that abortion is morally acceptable. I think that it’s a very private, intensely personal decision. But I was stunned when one of my professors, a pathologist and a Planned Parenthood supporter, told me that decades ago, entire wings of the university’s hospital were filled with women dying from infections caused by botched abortions.

Really?  Entire wings?!  Let’s assume conservatively that it was just two wings of the university’s hospital and they had, oh, 20 beds in each wing. That means 40 beds filled with women dying from infections from botched abortions at any one time.  Let’s assume, again conservatively, that it took them two weeks to die.  That means we would have been cycling through 40 deaths 26 times a year, or 1,040 botched abortion deaths per year in one hospital.

According to wiki.answers.com, there were 7,569 hospitals in America in 2005, so let’s say, conservatively again, there were 5,000 “decades ago.”  If all these women were in fact dying in all these hospital wings as Love has so gullibly believed from such a credible source as a Planned Parenthood leader, why, we would have been racking up 5.2 million botched abortion deaths a year in this country!

Why didn’t Planned Parenthood do a better job of letting us know this back then?

Any deaths from a botched abortion is horrible, and it presents a morally credible argument for abortion, whether you accept it or not.  Judging the relative value of one human being over another is at its heart a moral issue, and the case can be made that the value of protecting grown women from painful deaths justifies the taking of a pre-born life.  But it is immoral to present your moral arguments with wildly skewed, incorrect evidence.

Another driver for Love was this:

At the same time [she was studying women's health issues], I found myself shocked at how little many of my friends — women who were studying biology and planning to become doctors — knew about their own sexual health. They didn’t know about or couldn’t get the reproductive health care they needed because of barriers put up by their culture, their religion and their parents. (emphasis added)

This is a third-year med student, so we are talking here about women who are currently in their 20s and 30s.  Why are federal, state and local governments giving millions of dollars a year to Planned Parenthood and various sex education/health clinic programs if smart women who are in pre-med can’t get the care they need?  Didn’t the SCOTUS rule that anti-abortion demonstrators can’t block clinics?  Do you need your pastor’s permission to get an abortion?

What did these women need, anyway? Late term abortions on the pew of a church?  I can’t imagine what they couldn’t get.  Honestly, you’d think Love was talking about tribal women in north Africa, not American women in the late 20th and early 21st century.

So Love, who tells us she still goes to church and is considered “a good person” by her old Christian friends, has gradually abandoned the morality of her youth, and accepted the morality of the abortionists.  But late-term abortion?  Letting a baby drop into the birth canal and sticking a gizmo into its brain and scrambling it? Cutting it apart to get it out?  Well, that took her a while:

As I continue my education, my views on abortion are still evolving. Take late-term abortions. When I first heard about them, I was horrified.

It wasn’t until I spent time in ultrasound rooms in graduate school that I began to see late-trimester abortions in a very different light. In one case, the patient’s baby had just been diagnosed with a lethal congenital anomaly. The high likelihood was that it wouldn’t survive after birth for more than a few minutes. As long as the baby remained in her mother’s womb, however, she would live. I asked the physician what this woman’s options were. The answer was, not many. She could choose to continue the pregnancy, but then she might be waiting for almost 20 more weeks to give birth to a baby that would never take more than a few breaths on its own. She was past the point where she could legally terminate the pregnancy in Alabama. If she could get an appointment in Atlanta within the next week, she might be able to have the procedure there. Beyond that, there were only a few physicians in the nation who would perform an abortion in such a case.

I could hardly wrap my mind around the agony that this woman and her husband must have been facing. They needed a caring physician to help them through this dark moment, and if they chose not to continue the pregnancy, they also needed a physician who was both skilled enough and brave enough to provide them with the care they needed. They needed Dr. Tiller.

Again, Love cites a morally defensible position, whether you agree with it or not.  Is a two-breath life a life worth living?  But how many partial birth abortions are like the tragedy she presented as her motivator?  Such stats are all over the board, as you can imagine, so let’s go to the abortionists’ mouth and see what they have to say:

Kansas requires physicians to report reasons for performing PBAs. Of the 240 PBAs [Partial Birth Abortions] reported in Kansas in 1998 and 1999, there were none where the mother’s life was at risk; in every case the attending physician certified “that continuing the pregnancy will constitute a substantial and irreversible impairment of the patient’s mental function” [i.e., she didn't want a baby] and that there was not a substantial physical risk to the mother from the pregnancy.[29] No PBAs have been reported since 1999 in Kansas, but other abortions performed at 22 weeks gestation or later must similarly be reported. For these as well, few if any are cited as involving risk to the mother’s life; typically, risk to the mother of “substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function” is cited.[29]

Physicians who perform large numbers of PBAs have stated that many are performed for elective reasons. In an interview with American Medical News, M. Haskell stated that about 80% of the PBAs he performed were purely elective, with the remainder performed for genetic reasons.[30] In testimony to Congress, J. McMahon reported that for about 2,000-2,100 PBAs he had performed, 1,183 (56%) were for fetal “flaws” or “indicators”, 175 (9%) were for maternal “indicators” [see next paragraph], and the remainder (about 700, or 35%) were elective.[31] McMahon further indicated that elective abortions comprised 20% of those he performed after 21 weeks gestation, and none of those he performed after 26 weeks.[32]

McMahon’s 1995 testimony to the House Judiciary Committee gave more detailed statistics, which have been analyzed by physicians P. Smith and K. Dowling. Among maternal indicators, the single most frequent was maternal depression (39, or 1.9% of total), with 28 attributed to maternal health conditions “consistent with the birth of a normal child (e.g. sickle cell trait, prolapsed uterus, small pelvis)” (1.3% of total) and the remainder (5% of total) for other maternal factors ranging from maternal health risk to “spousal drug exposure” and “substance abuse”. Those performed for fetal indicators included some for lesser conditions such as 9 (0.4% of total) for cleft lip-palate, 24 (1.1% of total) for cystic hydroma, and other for conditions either surgically correctable or involving lesser degrees of neurologic/mental impairment.[32, 33] (emphasis added, Johnston Archive)

Love picked the easy way out, the minority case she could justify. What will she do when a woman comes into her clinic and says, “I know I’m in my last weeks, but my junkie boyfriend just left me for a stripper and I’d rather not deal with a kid, at least until I’m off parole.  Could you just kill the little f***er for me?” Where’s the nobility of purpose in that? What is the moral justification?

For all her considerable efforts to connect with us so we understand her position, Love leaves us with an argument about as compelling as a Planned Parenthood position paper arguing against letting pregnant women see sonograms.  She has picked her cases very carefully, presented them unrealistically, and created a perfect world for justifying abortions.

Give her credit for bravery and points for trying, but to use a fantasy world to argue a real-world position is just ridiculous.

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s an odd and spirit-rebuilding counterpoint to the violence and totalitarianism going on in Iran, you can’t beat this: A handful of Gazan surfers loosely tied to their Israeli counterparts whom they’ve never seen, surfing for peace.

The story starts with Mohammed Abu Jayyab, 35, and Ahmed Abu Hasiera, 29, Gazan lifeguards who saw surfing on TV and managed to bring in a cheap surfboard from Israel during a lax moment in tensions. The Times (UK) picks up the story:

The two men shared their single beaten-up board for years as the siege tightened and Israel launched deadly raids into Gaza, fighting Hamas and other militant groups firing rockets into southern Israel. Then, two years ago, their story was picked up by an American newspaper and was spotted by an elderly American who had introduced surfing to Israel half a century ago.

Don Paskowitz, a surfer from California, moved to Tel Aviv in 1956 and introduced what was then the eight-year-old Jewish state to the art of riding the waves.

In 2007, aged 86, he was inspired to repeat his mission in the besieged, war-torn slums of Gaza. He took a dozen surfboards down to the huge checkpoint in the fence surrounding the tiny enclave. After a certain amount of haggling, he was allowed to hand over the boards to Mohammed and Ahmed, who had gone to the other side to meet him.

From that moment, a loose organisation called Surfing 4 Peace grew, although because of the strict travel restrictions in and out of Gaza, neither Ahmed or Mohammed has ever been able to meet any of the Israeli surfers involved.

A few years ago, there were only two surfers in Gaza. Now there are at least 20, bobbing out at sea as bemused Gazans look on, some of them sitting in deckchairs by the water’s edge, smoking waterpipes.

“In sports, there is no war,” says Ahmed. “Hamas guys do surf.” So did Fatah guys before they were ousted.

So they surf the fetid, sewage-rich waves off Gaza, hopeful that someday they’ll be able to compare notes with Israeli surfers, and maybe even see some of those California girls we wish they all could be – you know, the ones that go to the beach in bikinis, not burkhas.

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Peeling away the layers of Bermuda’s onion, the Independent’s Bill Zuill may have found the spoonful of sugar that’s helping the British protectorate islands stomach the unpalatable taste of Uighurs a la Obama.  Before we get to that, let’s allow Zuill to vent a bit, shall we?

Many locals are struggling to understand why Bermuda has joined Palau and Albania as the only countries in the world to accept ex-Guantanamo inmates. “What’s it got to do with us?” they chorus.

The US Attorney General’s statement that transferring the detainees will make America safer has also raised hackles. If America is safer, Bermudans are asking themselves, doesn’t that mean Bermuda, by extension, is less safe?

There is also irritation among the large expatriate community, many of whom are British. Bermuda has one of the strictest immigration policies in the world so expats are none too pleased that while they have no chance of getting a permanent visa, the four Uighurs are set to spend the rest of their days under the Bermudan sun.

The extreme secrecy surrounding their transfer only adds to the intrigue. Most cabinet ministers and the majority of MPs were out of the loop. The British Governor said he didn’t know anything until after the Uighurs had actually landed on Bermudan soil.

For all the criticism Obama heaped on Bush for his perceived weakness in diplomacy, he’s really stepped into it with his handling of the Uigher/Bahama/Britain matter.  Talk about your textbook lesson in whatever the diplomatic equivalent of a malopropism is!

So why did the Bahamans offer instant citizenship to a group of al-Qaeda-trained misfits from the steppes of Western China?  Who knows if we’ll ever know for sure, but Zuill has a theory that resonates:

… [T]here is a bill wending its way through the US Congress that would curtail the thriving insurance and reinsurance sector, which is estimated to hold $440bn worth of assets in the off-shore financial territory. Although no promises have been forthcoming, White House help on that legislation would be greatly appreciated.

So what if Obama promised to end all off-shore tax dodges (no matter what impact on the economy)? It’s just an Obama promise, and as we’re learning, Obama promises are are like lofty words, all air, no substance.

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