The Act does not compel physicians to apprise women of the risks inherent in abortion, inform the women of available alternatives, and facilitate access to additional information if the women wish to review it before making their decisions; existing Texas law already compels such speech by physicians… Instead, the Act compels physicians to advance an ideological agenda with which they may not agree, regardless of any medical necessity, and irrespective of whether the pregnant women wish to listen.
Category: Politics
Many readers were enraged that I could support taxation in any form. It was as if I had proposed this mad scheme of confiscation for the first time in history. Several cited my framing of the question — “how much wealth can one person be allowed to keep?” — as especially sinister, as though I had asked, “how many of his internal organs can one person be allowed to keep?”
In analyzing these polls in the United States, I see clearly that voters feel ever more estranged from government — and that they associate Democrats with government. If Democrats are going to be encumbered by that link, they need to change voters’ feelings about government. They can recite their good plans as a mantra and raise their voices as if they had not been heard, but voters will not listen to them if government is disreputable.
People have no idea about how this affects the government at lower levels. The culture of delay is almost as crippling as the corruption we fight across the world. Our corruption is delay. No one’s willing to make decisions. That hurts us.
You can be on the side of angels without having to be cautious, indecisive, and paranoid all the time. The angels actually want you to be scrappy and assertive.
The last thing that I would suggest is that her witchcraft or masturbation stance should be what we should be thinking about or focusing on, and I think that’s an enormous mistake that the Democrats will make. We like to sit around the office and we have a little game called ‘How will the Democrats blow it?’ And that’s the way they’ll do it. They’ll think somehow that that will resonate with voters, that 20 years ago Christine O’Donnell on MTV said ‘Masturbation is a sin.’ And they’ll play it, and they’ll ridicule it, and the voters will be like, ‘Yeah, I don’t have a job.’ That’s how they’ll blow it.
It’s like Patrick Henry famously said, “I support the idea that I should have liberty, so much so that I might prefer death, but that’s not really my choice to make and I understand not everyone will agree with me on that.”
An excellent illustration of how the procedural complexities of Congress make it hard for non‐wonks to understand what the hell is going on. Even if government were 100% transparent, we’d still need people familiar with parliamentary procedure to “translate” for us.
Mr. McDonnell may be compounding the damage by insisting that nonviolent former felons — people convicted of shoplifting and other property crimes, for instance — must do more than just apply to the state if they wish to vote, a process that until now has been time‐consuming but generally successful for those who stick with it. Mr. McDonnell would have them submit a letter making the case that they have contributed to society since their release — an utterly arbitrary standard. What’s more, they are asked to explain why they think they should get their rights back. As we see it, the correct answer is: Because they are rights. Period.
Bus Route of Tears
Misspelled protest signs have become a strange, hilarious art form over the past year. Terrence Nowicki reminds us that we only laugh at them to hide our own tears.
February 20, 2010
