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Obama reverses abortion-funding policy

WASHINGTON (CNN) — President Obama signed an executive order Friday striking down a rule prohibiting U.S. money from funding international family planning groups that promote abortion or provide information, counseling or referrals about abortion services.

The order comes the day after the 36th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion in the United States.

It reverses the “Mexico City policy,” initiated by President Reagan in 1984, canceled by President Clinton and reinstated by President George W. Bush in 2001.

Obama signs order to close Guantanamo Bay facility

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Promising to return America to the “moral high ground” in the war on terrorism, President Obama issued three executive orders Thursday to demonstrate a clean break from the Bush administration, including one requiring that the Guantanamo Bay detention facility be closed within a year.

During a signing ceremony at the White House, Obama reaffirmed his inauguration pledge that the United States does not have “to continue with a false choice between our safety and our ideals.”

US Senate passes wage discrimination bill

WASHINGTON (AP) — A wage discrimination bill that heralds the pro-labor policies of the Democratic-controlled Congress and White House cleared the Senate Thursday and could be on President Barack Obama’s desk within days.

The legislation reverses a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that narrowly defines the time period during which a worker can file a claim of wage discrimination, even if the worker is unaware for months or years that he or she is getting less than colleagues doing the same job. It has been a priority for women’s groups seeking to narrow the wage gap between men and women.

The House is expected to act quickly to again approve the measure, sending it to Obama for his signature. The House passed a nearly identical version two weeks ago but then combined it with another bill that the Senate didn’t consider.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid predicted that “the first bill that President Obama will sign will be this piece of legislation.” He said the bill would send an important message because “this administration stands for equality and fairness.”

Obama strongly backs the measure and invited Lilly Ledbetter, the retired Alabama tire company worker whose lawsuit inspired the legislation, to accompany him on the train trip bringing him to Washington for the inauguration.

This is Slate’s series of articles, structured as back-and-forth letters between a group of conservative “thinkers,” that began the day after Election Day and ran through the following Friday. I found it rather fascinating, in the sense that giant, close-up pictures of bugs fascinate me.

Just in case you haven’t read it, and don’t have time to wade through all fourteen full-length pages of it, I have summarized the meat of each entry below:

Jim Manzi, chairman of an applied artificial-intelligence software company and contributing editor of National Review: It’s finally happened. The middle class has figured out that voting Republican is voting against their own economic interests. The Reagan mantra appears to be losing its hypnotic effect. We must find a new chant to bamboozle them with. Hey, I know–let’s resegregate public schools, start shooting illegal immigrants on sight and concentrate on recruiting the whitest foreign nationals we can find to fill our immigration quotas instead!

Douglas Kmiec, a professor of constitutional law at Pepperdine University: Barack Obama is Ronald Reagan reborn. Also, could we stop obsessing about abortion?

Ross Douthat, author of Grand New Party and a blogger for the Atlantic: No.

Christine Todd Whitman, former governor of New Jersey and author of It’s My Party, Too: I refuse to believe that the middle class figured that out. Issues, schmissues– to all those people the election was just a popularity contest! and Barack Obama, unfortunately, is much hotter than Bush. All we have to do is make sure they don’t associate Bush with us from now on.

Tucker Carlson, author and commentator for MSNBC and The Daily Beast: I agree that it’s all a popularity contest, Christine–it’s not enough to dissociate ourselves from him, though, we need to find somebody even cooler than Obama to be our frontman. Also, we need to give the middle class a new strawman to hate–that was so effective during the Cold War. Our efforts to replace “Communists” with “Islamofascists” appears to have lost a lot of its oomph.

Ross Douthat: ABORTION, hello? Abortion!

Douglas Kmiec: Reagan was a god. I really think that Obama is his second coming.

Jim Manzi: You’re probably right, Christine; and Douglas, if you think a single damn one of us is going to do anything other than flatly oppose every last line of Obama’s liberal pinko agenda with our dying breaths, you’re quite mistaken.

Kathleen Parker, author and syndicated columnist who also blogs for the Washington Post: I agree with Christine too and I’ll go even further and say that the deciding popularity factor wasn’t even Bush’s lack of cool or Obama’s abundance of it, but McCain’s horrid, stupid, winking, redneck of a MILF vice-presidential candidate. And no, it’s not elitist of me to say so!

Douglas Kmiec: Ross, Obama is my hero. And I’m pro-choice. Here, let me kiss your ass vigorously to make it up to you in the most passive-aggressive way possible.

Tucker Carlson: Doug, you sound like a woman, and there is no worse insult I could possibly lob at you than that.

Ross Douthat: Well, I loved Sarah Palin because she at least was willing to call out abortion for the baby-murdering slut-enabling conspiracy that it is. But I agree with Tucker that we need to find a man who can compete with Obama for sheer coolness, though I must say that I personally thought Bill Clinton was cooler. McCain? L-O-S-E-R!

Christine Todd Whitman: Maybe if I address this post to everybody, Ross won’t realize I’m speaking directly to him?–look, the abortion bullshit is no longer a winning strategy. The only people who can’t get over it are the Jesus freaks, and clearly, they’re not a majority voting bloc, so screw them. Back to the important topic here–how do we repackage Reaganomics so that the middle class will buy it all over again? Honestly, I’m just praying that the Democrats screw up so badly that every last one of the middle class ends up completely bankrupt. They’ll come running back to us then!

Douglas Kmiec: God, I miss Reagan. Have I said that already?

“Geronimo,” or “Something people say when they jump out of airplanes.”

It’s funny because I think if I wasn’t actually of Native American ancestry, I’d write more about them–as it stands, though, I suppose I feel like there is much less excuse for my lack of real in-depth knowledge about the history and culture–I’ve always had an odd reluctance to study more, as well. One reason for that sounds very strange to me (and it’s my reason! so it shouldn’t, but it does anyway): I’m afraid to get even more upset about it than I am from my basis of general historical knowledge only. After all, a full quarter of my relatives from my paternal grandfather on backwards, that is who they were–an exponential climb every generation–yet I have never met personally anyone who is a full-blooded Apache. Not once. The only person I have ever known who was even half was my father.

And mostly, people don’t care. They are either entirely ignorant or they think all Native Americans live on reservations and operate casinos. And they don’t even know what “reservations” really are, other than that’s where Native Americans can be found. Why not?

Probably in part because there are so few of them left. Of the approximately 300 million US citizen currently floating around, only about 3 million of those self-identify as Native Americans, or about 1%. According to Wikipedia, eight out of ten people of Native American ancestry today (including Yours Truly) are of mixed blood, and that number is expected to rise to nine out of ten by 2100.

The other part, of course, is that the government as a whole has been quite dedicated to wiping them out, either literally or culturally, for a very long time now, and that hasn’t really changed, either. As recently as 2000, the Washington State Republican Party adopted a resolution of termination for tribal governments–it’s even hard to believe they’d want to bother, given the statistics in the previous paragraph, but clearly for some, the desire for complete destruction is still quite strong. The Jim Crow laws with their “one-drop” policy of racial classification are thankfully gone–however, the “blood quantum” laws for Native Americans, which to my knowledge very few people are even aware of, still exist and are even in use both intertribally and on the Federal level today. (A cute anecdote–when I was about a year and a half old, a woman from the Bureau of Indian Affairs came out to visit my mother to get the paperwork started on my “blood quantum” legal status–apparently she knocked on our apartment door and my mother, me slung over her hip, answered. The woman took one look at the tall, white-skinned, blond-haired, blue-eyed woman with the little white-skinned, blond-haired, blue-eyed baby girl in her arms, muttered something about “sorry, wrong address” and just turned around and left.)

Something pretty cool happened back in May, though–

The Crow Nation welcomed Sen. Barack Obama Monday afternoon before thousands of people, marking the presidential candidate’s first campaign visit to a U.S. reservation.

Obama was invited to visit the tribe’s homeland after leaders of the Crow, or Apsaalooke, decided to endorse the Illinois senator last week.

Obama’s visit to the Crow Reservation marks an unusual presidential campaign foray into tribal lands. Bobby Kennedy is arguably the last known presidential candidate to do so, campaigning on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation in 1968.

That’s pretty different. And not only is it different, the vast majority of American voters couldn’t really care less–so clearly it wasn’t done to impress anybody important, was it?

And apparently on his website, Obama promises to “appoint a National American Indian Policy Advisor to serve as a member of his White House staff and create the National American Indian Advisory Council.” Far as I know, that’s a complete first in terms of presidential candidates period.

Gives lie to the title of this post. I’m humbled, and heartened.

Note: I haven’t posted any stats here about Native Americans and their truly hideous, as far as I know the very worst among any group classified as a “minority” in America, numbers on, say, violence and alcoholism and failure to graduate even high school and living below the poverty line, etc. etc.–if there’s an interest, let me know and I’ll throw up some links.

My childhood and adolescence were perhaps unfortunate from both a socioeconomic perspective and from a family dysfunctionality perspective. I tend to not go into much more detail than that and when I do, it is usually both very sparsely presented and moved on from as quickly as possible, for various reasons. However, for the purposes of this post, I will choke out a little more information than usual, because it’s relevant.

Warning: Somewhat graphic descriptions of child abuse below.

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I think it’s worthwhile to take a moment and look at the definition of partisan:

partisan[1,noun]

Main Entry:
1par·ti·san
Variant(s):
also par·ti·zan \ˈpär-tə-zən, -sən, -ˌzan, chiefly British ˌpär-tə-ˈzan\
Function:
noun
Etymology:
Middle French partisan, from north Italian dialect partiźan, from part part, party, from Latin part-, pars part
Date:
1555

1: a firm adherent to a party, faction, cause, or person; especially : one exhibiting blind, prejudiced, and unreasoning allegiance

In a post I put up earlier this week, I was rather snarkily harrassed for displaying the second half of the definition above…and fascinatingly enough, I was harrassed again today in a different post, for failing to display it. Now, clearly I’m either partisan or I’m not…there isn’t any gray area in terms of blind, prejudiced unreason. I am happy to report that in fact, not only do I not fit the second half of the definition, I don’t even fit the first. (Which I would have thought would have been a much more logical conclusion–the hypothesis that I must then be neither, rather than that I must be both! but hey. Diff’rent strokes for diff’rent folks.)

Now, don’t get me wrong; I’m a registered Democrat, have been since the age of 20 and am reasonably content with it. However, I have no emotional investment in the fact. If I felt sufficiently motivated, I’d go register as a Republican, or a Green, or as nothing at all. I do not feel any particular loyalty toward or love for the Democratic party as an entity. In the same way, I feel no hatred toward the Republican party as an entity. Basically, I see them as two “clubs,” and really the only games in town if you actually want to do something that has any real effect in the great game that is American politics–if that is what you want, you have to “belong” to one of the clubs. So I picked the one that has as its stated goals…I’d prefer to say achieved or even vigorously pursued but I think I must stick to the much more accurate stated…ideals that are closest to the ones I want to be ascendant in the world in which I must live.

Because I fail at blind, prejudiced and unreasoning allegiance to the one club (and therefore blind, prejudiced and unreasoning rejection of the other) I am capable of two great (I may be injecting a little sarcasm into that adjective) feats. One, I do not fail to see the flaws, hypocrisies, inconsistencies and artificialities displayed by any individual(s) representing my chosen club; and two, I am able to perceive it when a member or four of the other club has something worthwhile, important, true or valid to say. Even more delicately, I am able to successfully interpret slanting of information by both sides, even regardless of the direction of the slant.

I find rational thought a relief. Don’t you?

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I am leery of the death penalty for two reasons, one philosophical, one brutally concrete.

The philosophical reason is that I object to the State, that amorphous and unaccountable collection of legislation, having the absolute power of life and death over any individual. The State already has a fair amount of control over our daily lives, sometimes with our explicit consent, sometimes only with the implied consent of I’m still choosing to live here so I guess I have to..? And I swallow a lot of things that fall short of taking an individual’s life, as non-mortal injuries carry with them the chance (in varying degrees of course) of recovery and restoration–however, your life is the one thing you can’t ever recover from losing. There is no recompense for that. When one individual takes another’s life, he or she has a set of consequences to face for having done so, and I am not just referring to legal ones–it is right that there should be a price exacted from anyone who does the ultimate, unrecoverable injury to another. In the case of the State, no recompense can ever be exacted; no one can be held guilty; no price can ever be paid–society did it! Whatever that means, and it can mean anything and everything and boils down every time to mean precisely whatever the person using the word wants it to mean. (Other words that have become so soggy and fluid are “government” and “culture” and “values.” It amazes me sometimes that those words are still in the dictionary. The way they are most commonly used robs them of any objective meaning at all.)

The brutally concrete reason is the complete imbalance in whom it is applied to in terms of race and gender. Even if it were something we were all philosophically prepared to accept, obviously that it is used disproportionately against a specific flavor of citizen is completely unacceptable.

However, you may have noticed, I do not object to the death penalty on any moral grounds–I don’t claim I think it’s wrong always, for any reason whatsoever, for one individual to kill another. There are instances of individuals killing other individuals that do not deeply disturb me, though I’m always saddened that any situation ever deteriorates to the point where that’s a viable or even the most viable solution. It IS sad.

Is it because I am consumed with “bloodlust?” Is it because I don’t “respect human life equally?”

Um, definitely not the first one. As a matter of fact, I am far more immune to bloodlust than most Americans I know. I do not watch reality TV, nor do I watch any sport that is centered around one person pounding on another while froth-spitting crowds roar them on–in short, watching real people inflict pain and humiliation of any degree upon each other not only does not attract me, it actively repulses me. That is “bloodlust,” my friends. I agree that it may be a significant part of our society, but it isn’t any part of me.

As for the second–that’s both true and not true. I do not respect all human life equally, but it has nothing to do with my feelings on the death penalty. I do not hold every speck of life that happens to have Homo sapiens DNA in its cell nucleus as being of equal worth, which is why I support reproductive choice, living wills, physician-assisted suicide and the concept of “brain-dead.” My philosophy here holds, though, that what I personally value the lives of others at is completely meaningless; my “valuing” of them should have no impact upon their continued existence whatsoever. The only “valuation” that should have that impact is their own. The only individual who gets to set a value on any individual’s human life is that individual. Period. In the cases where the human life in question is not capable of setting value upon its own life because it lacks the cognitive ability to do so, such as pre-viable fetuses and anyone at any stage of development who does not have a functioning brain, the person who is most affected by the continued existence or lack thereof of that individual gets to set the value on that life. Period.

In terms of a child rapist and his eight-year-old victim, say, I would consider both of them able to set their own value on their own lives and those values are the only ones that should ever count.

So, I am unhappy enough about the death penalty to consistently oppose it, regardless of the “worth” I feel any other individual has. However, if someone I personally find to have little to no value drops dead, I don’t even pretend to be upset about it or attempt to work up any feelings of “oh but we’re all EQUALLY valuable as human lives!” It’d be a lie. Even there, I make an automatic distinction between the method of death and the fact that the death results in the absence of that person from Earth–I am always repelled by and opposed to any deliberate and avoidable infliction of pain upon one human being by another and do not ever find any moral excuse for that. (Back to why I don’t watch all that sadistic crap on TV and how deeply horrible I find the practice of torture.) However, in regards to the bare fact of the sudden absence of certain human lives? I don’t care and in some cases, I think the world is an improved environment from when that person was alive. No doubt cold, but quite true.

Next: The Joys (or lack thereof) of Partisanship