Wahoo!

Five days until the Tribe’s season opener!

Good sense.

Bonnie Erbe says that abortion is not a tragedy. In fact, it is a positive good.

The Associated Press ran a story on March 25 that read as follows: “The pregnant woman showed up at the medical centre in flip-flops and in tears, after walking there to save bus fare. Her boyfriend had lost his job, she told her doctor in Oakland, Calif., and now — fearing harder times for her family — she wanted to abort what would have been her fourth child. ‘This was a desired pregnancy – she’d been getting prenatal care — but they re-evaluated expenses and decided not to continue,’ said Dr. Pratima Gupta. ‘When I was doing the options counseling, she interrupted me halfway through, crying, and said, “Dr. Gupta, I just walked here for an hour. I’m sure of my decision.”

Yes, it’s sad that this unwed, pregnant mother of three had no money for bus fare. It’s terrible that her boyfriend lost his job. It is heart-wrenching that she fell to tears in the doctor’s office. But in the long run, can we agree that this unwed couple’s decision not to bring a fourth child into the world when they are having trouble feeding themselves and three children is no tragedy? It’s actually a fact-based, rational decision that in the end benefits the three children they already have and society as well.

Feeding and raising children is expensive. Tuition may be free at public schools but there are still books, transportation, food, clothes, medical care and activities that add up — way up. One may assume this family of five is struggling just to maintain its basics: housing and food. Add one more child and those costs rise as income drops. It’s no tragedy: it’s a good decision. The decision benefits society in two ways. It allows the couple to focus more time, energy and resources on their three children, giving each child a better life and a better chance of growing up to become a contributor to society. It also reduces the chance the family will have to rely on scarce public resources to raise their children.

Ms. Erbe does not claim that the unborn child is anything other than a, well, child. Indeed, she refers to the unborn baby as the couple’s “fourth child” and argues that the couple’s (other) “three children” will benefit from the abortion.

Sooooo, under Ms. Erbe’s “fact-based, rational” standard, would she approve if the couple decided to bring the unborn child to term and, um, terminated their oldest child? After all, if they keep the oldest child, then the couple’s “costs [would] go up as income drops.” Presumably, they already have baby clothes, whereas they would have to buy new clothes for their growing fourth child. And, the baby wouldn’t eat as much as his older sibling. Finally, of course, society would benefit because the couple could focus more time, energy, and resources on their three remaining children, and would not have to rely on the public. Would Ms. Erbe claim – as she did when the issue is abortion – that this course of action is “not always tragic and lots of times, it actually makes good sense”?

h/t – K-Lo

Government-backed warranties.

h/t - Glenn Reynolds

Liberals and Taxes.

Victor Davis Hanson explains what we should take away from all of the “unintended” tax mistakes made by Democrats:

[T]he lesson is that all these nominees belong to precisely the class that we’ve heard over the last two years “made out like bandits,” and should “spread the wealth,” and need to “level the playing field,” and “were the beneficiaries of the Bush tax cuts” and should be “patriotic” in paying “their fair share.”

So there is a real ethical crisis among the liberal elite who, we are learning for the nth time, suffer the additional wage of hypocrisy, by calling for higher taxes on the upper-middle-class (often punctuated by self-serving qualifiers that they themselves are willing to pay more in taxes), only to scheme to find ways to cut down their tax liability contrary to the law.

The tragedy is that moralists like Daschle, Geithner, Solis, etc. have far more access to tax lawyers and are far less likely to pay the consequences when caught than the putative “rich” that the liberal left, for the last year, has so cavalierly trashed.

Of course, that Daschle et al. had access to, and relied on, tax lawyers demonstrates how unlikely it is that the failure to pay taxes was “unintentional.”

In any event, the larger question is – Why do rich liberals use tax lawyers in the first place? That is, why do wealthy liberals seek to reduce their taxable income? Why do they claim any deductions? Why – if the rich should pay more - don’t rich liberals simply calculate their gross income and pay the prevailing tax rate? After all, since they are “rich,” they obviously don’t need a tax break.

What we’ve been reduced to.

President Obama: “the United States government has no interest in running GM.”

As the Washinton Post reports, the president has an interesting way of not running GM:

The Obama administration will play a key role in reshaping General Motors’ board of directors over the next six months, potentially giving it even greater control in the management of the storied American manufacturer.

The president’s auto task force plans to consult with the company as it replaces a majority of its board, a White House official said. 

How generous of the government to “consult with” a private company before overhauling its board of directors. (Of course, GM did take money from the government and could not have been ignorant of the risks of doing so. Nonetheless, the extent of government intrusion here is not a good precedent.)

The other day, Rush Limbaugh recalled a prediction he made: “Folks, I apologize ‘cause I really do get tired of saying, ‘I told you.’… But I said when the Obama administration takes this over, they’re going to reject whatever these companies come up with ‘cause Obama wants to run them and give them to the unions, essentially, and that’s just exactly what has happened here.”

Ridiculous, right? Well, maybe not. From the same Washington Post report:

Under the government’s proposed reorganization for General Motors, the union health plan and the company’s bondholders would give up much or most of those claims in exchange for an equity stake in the reformed GM.

Given the magnitude of the swap, many analysts think those two entities could wind up with a majority of company stock.

So, the US government will turn the company over to the unions. But don’t worry – the US government has no interest in running GM. And besides, Obama has assured us that he is not a socialist!

The end of politics in the Justice Department…

“Justice Department lawyers concluded in an unpublished opinion earlier this year that the historic D.C. voting rights bill pending in Congress is unconstitutional, according to sources briefed on the issue. But Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who supports the measure, ordered up a second opinion from other lawyers in his department and determined that the legislation would pass muster.”