News Herald

by Jesse Taylor

But, pro-lifers, there may be something wrong with your movement when you have to send out press releases making clear that you don’t actually condone cold-blooded murder.

As Ezra and Ann Friedman point out, it is part and parcel of the activist anti-choice movement to proactively interfere with and intimidate people who are in the process of providing or seeking a medical procedure which is protected by law. 

The question I’ve heard over and over again is whether or not the pro-life movement bears responsibility for the murder of George Tiller.  It does.  There is no other “mainstream” political movement in this country which keeps as a part of its bag of tricks the intent to frighten those in the midst of a legally protected activity.

Pro-gun control liberals don’t show up at gun shows and hector attendees.  (And if your response is, “Damn right they don’t, because they’d get shot,” you’re proving my point.) Fundamentalists don’t have to worry about fleets of bike-riding hippies showing up at the entrance to their church every Sunday, telling them that their God is false.  Religious “family planning” clinics don’t live in constant fear of a Molotov cocktail flying through their plate glass window, don’t have to train their employees on how to handle bomb threats, don’t need to worry about their clients’ safety on the way from their car to the front door.  But if you provide abortion services - even if you’re not actually providing an abortion to the person coming in the door, even though it has been repeatedly declared legal - you live in fear. 

This culture of fear was borne and is bred by the way the pro-life movement conducts itself.  They certainly have every right to protest - and I mean that, and I truly believe that.  But freedom of speech and freedom of assembly does not create freedom from responsibility for your conduct.  A movement whose primary focus is intimidation through immediate and overwhelming physical proximity, coupled with hugely dishonest and inflammatory rhetoric cannot escape responsibility when it is embraced by an actor or actors who take that rhetoric to a logical, if extreme, end.  By declaring that “abortion is murder” and premising a movement on preventing that “murder” in increasingly radical and ostentatious ways (while oftentimes failing to propose or advocate for the more logical and responsible methods of preventing the alleged “murders"), the pro-life movement has built up over decades an angry base stewing in its own feelings of oppression and righteousness.  It’s the perfect environment to breed radicalism and violence.

This also puts into context the recent uproar over Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination.  She has made a mission of bringing to light racial injustice, particularly as it relates to Hispanics.  Her efforts are not designed to hold down white people, or designed to invalidate their experiences, but instead to bring to light the full range of experiences available in America.  She is not a radical, she is not a racist, yet the same movement that is rushing out to make clear that they don’t want people to murder just because it might seem like they want people to murder is trying to tar her some sort of Latina conquistador, rampaging through our suburbs in order to take away our Constitutional right to white dudes in power.  This same sort of decontextualized radical rhetoric is being used over and over again to stir up hatred and resentment so that Tony Blankley and Rush Limbaugh and Grover Norquist and the rest of their ilk can make millions off of this razor’s edge.  People must be angry - angry enough to act, but not angry enough to lash out; hopeful for a “better” future, but unwilling to accept anything but the total domination of their enemies as a victory. 

Lacking that, you’ll be able to make a pretty penny off of teaching every abortion provider in this country how to set up their speed dial for the bomb squad.  Never let it be said that terrorism doesn’t stimulate the economy.

This is a breaking story about which I'll have more to say in a column next week, but today the National Governors' Association announced that 46 states and the District of Columbia have joined a coalition in favor of common academic standards. Only South Carolina, Alaska, Missouri, and Texas have held back. From the NGA press release:

By signing on to the common core state standards initiative, governors and state commissioners of education across the country are committing to joining a state-led process to develop a common core of state standards in English language arts and mathematics for grades K-12. These standards will be research and evidence-based, internationally benchmarked, aligned with college and work expectations and include rigorous content and skills.

The caveat here is that once the coalition develops the standards, each state will be able to choose whether or not it will actually adhere to them. Unless the federal government provides some sticks and carrots, there will be little incentive for politicians from low-performing states, like Mississippi, to enact the standards. After all, doing so would reveal just how little those states' school children are actually learning, and to what a pitifully low standard they've been held.

But this is still big news. It wasn't that long ago that proponents of common standards believed the best they could hope for were regional standards. In other words, instead of our current system of 50 different state curricula, groups of states would band together and agree to share one system. But in recent months, the political calculus has shifted considerably, with national standards emerging as education reform common ground between teachers' unions and some of their opponents within the Democratic coalition -- those who broadly support teacher merit pay, an expansion of charter schools and vouchers, and alternative-certification programs for teachers. All of these folks can agree, seemingly, that the system would benefit from some regularization.

Of course, anti-testing advocates are likely to be quite skeptical of this move, which has the potential to lead to national assessments. At this early stage, though, it is totally unclear whether common assessments would even be an outgrowth of common standards.

--Dana Goldstein

Slate's Dahlia Lithwick had a very interesting column this weekend cautioning her fellow liberals against smearing Justice Clarence Thomas as they mount their defense of Judge Sonia Sotomayor:

The temptation to smack back and argue that we deserve to seat Sotomayor because Thomas was a lousy affirmative-action pick who turned into a third-rate justice is hard to resist. But it's flat wrong. Liberals achieve nothing by suggesting that Thomas' elevation to the high court was preposterous on its face or that his tenure there has been a disgrace....

Claims that Thomas is too stupid to ask questions and in constant peril of embarrassing himself at the court are just not that different than claims that Sotomayor is mediocre. Nobody who has followed Thomas' 18-year career at the Supreme Court believes him to be a dunce or a Scalia clone. Whether you accept Jan Crawford Greenburg's claim that Thomas' constitutional theories are so forceful that they have shaped Scalia's or you believe the more common view that Thomas has a deeply reasoned and consistent judicial philosophy that differs dramatically from those of the court's other conservatives, accusations that he's been a dim bulb are just false. They also reveal that the name-calling that originates now, during the confirmation process, engenders a mythology that can never be erased.

It's nice to see Lithwick make this point (even if she has done a little name-calling of her own). Whether you agree with his opinions or not, Thomas has quite obviously proven himself on the Court. Yet the ridiculous idea that he's less capable than his fellow justices still persists, even among people that ought to know better.

Say you're a Harvard professor and you decide to dabble a bit in politics. You decide to move back to Canada in hopes of becoming prime minister. Shouldn't be that hard. Before you go, you tell the school paper that if things don't work out, you'll probably return to Boston and pick up where you left off.

That would appear to have been Michael Ignatieff's plan, but things might not work out the way he was hoping. Harvard is going through some tough times. According to Boston magazine, its endowment, onces a porcine $37 billion, is down about $11 billion due to some unfortunate investment setbacks. And since it's not making any money, Harvard has to withdraw about $1.4 billion from capital to cover its operating costs, which would normally have been paid for out of profits. Which leaves a relatively paltry $24 billion left in the fund.

Not bad by most standards, but Harvard is used to big-time spending, without worrying much about where the money comes from. (Hey, that reminds me of a federal political party here in Canada. No wonder Ignatieff felt at home with the Liberals!)  It has big expenses, and $24 bil isn't going to cover them. In fact, says the magazine:

 While Harvard officials are doing their public-face best to downplay the problem, the numbers don't lie, and this economic crunch will leave the school a profoundly changed place. Harvard will have to become smaller and academically more modest, and as it does it will chafe at having grand plans without the resources to fund them. For the first time in decades, it will worry about merely paying its bills. The university will have to decide: If it is no longer so rich that it doesn't have to make choices, what does it really value? What are its priorities? It won't be a comfortable debate.

"We are in trouble," says one Crimson professor. In the aftermath of deep and damaging cuts, "there is a real chance that Harvard will no longer be considered the best there is."

Uh-oh. If things take a wrong turn in Ottawa, the Liberal leader might have to reconsider Plan B. It's just possible the old school won't be waiting with open arms, or without an open chequebook anyway. Maybe he'll have to stick around Ottawa longer. Maybe he'll have to teach at a Canadian university. Oh, the shame. Hey, maybe that's why he's so eager to make it easier to collect EI.

Kelly McParland
National Post