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• Lindsey Graham's protestations aside, it seems clear that there's neither the will nor the numbers to filibuster the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. I'm sure that won't stop Newt and Rush from alienating the rest of the country from the GOP, however.
  


• The president sent a letter to Max Baucus and Edward Kennedy reiterating his support for a public option for what feels like the inevitable health care reform bill that's slowly working its way through Congress. Meanwhile, Ezra Klein helpfully explains the relevance of MedPAC and why it might finally get some teeth, and Greg Sargent documents the Canadian influence.


• It's hard to disagree with the thesis of this Politico piece, that Obama is deliberately poaching GOP moderates for his administration in order to reduce the Republican party down to its core base of Southern supporters.
  


• The right has predictably been freaking out over a New York Times piece that asserts President Obama believes the United States could be "one of the largest Muslim countries in the world." As usual, it helps to read the official transcript in these situations. The jury's still out on whether this is sillier than the latest mutterings coming from Michael Goldfarb.


• Mark Levin, last seen screaming at and berating a woman on the air, has a list of "The World's Most Deranged Bloggers." You'd think it would be a roll call of the Left's most pugnacious but actually it's four conservative pundits who tend to point out that people like Levin are nuts. It's odd to think that Levin, author of a book called "Liberty and Tyranny," apparently knows nothing about either subject, but we'll just call this Jonah Goldberg Syndrome from now on.


• Remainders: Tim Pawlenty suggests he'll do what the Minnesota Supreme Court tells him to do; Dave Weigel watches PajamasTV so you don't have to; and Stephen Colbert edits Newsweek?

--Mori Dinauer

McClatchy's Mike Doyle digs up Farrell v. Burke, a case from 2006 involving a sex offender who had violated his parole by purchasing porn. The salacious details, including Sotomayor reading excerpts from Scum: True Homosexual Experiences, are here. (Unfortunately for the culture warriors, she ultimately sided with the state.) Doyle also highlights this classic exchange between the sex offender's attorney and parole officer:

MR. NATHANSON: Are you saying, for example, that that condition of parole would prohibit Mr. Farrell from possessing, say, Playboy magazine?

P.O. BURKE: Yes.

MR. NATHANSON: Are you saying that that condition of parole would prohibit Mr. Farrell from possessing a photograph of Michelangelo['s] David?

P.O. BURKE: What is that?

MR. NATHANSON: Are you familiar with that sculpture?

P.O. BURKE: No.

MR. NATHANSON: If I tell you it's a large sculpture of a nude youth with his genitals exposed and visible, does that help to refresh your memory of what that is?

P.O. BURKE: If he possessed that, yes, he would be locked up for that.

Edge interviews Jonah Lehrer:

The paradox of modern neuroscience is that the one reality you can't describe as it is presently conceived is the only reality we'll ever know, which is the subjective first person view of things. Even if you can find the circuit of cells that gives rise to that, and you can construct a good causal demonstration that you knock out these circuit of cells, and you create a zombie; even if you do that... and I know Dennett could dismantle this argument very, very quickly ... there's still a mystery that persists, and this is the old mind-body problem, but it?"s an old problem for a reason: we don't simply feel like three pounds of meat.

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.

A reader writes:

My wife and I are/were staunch choice advocates; we'd both done our

share of marching on Washington for the cause. Actually enduring the

process gave us a much more nuanced opinion about abortion.

For us, it was Trisomy 21 -- Down Syndrome. The test came after my

wife awoke one night in a pool of blood screaming and thinking she'd

suffered a miscarriage. After she ran to the toilet, it fell upon me

to call her doctor and then scoop out the remains--that actually

turned out to be huge clots--and take them to the doctor the next day.

The geneticist said that because of all the bleeding and other

complications there was almost no chance the fetus would make it to 20

weeks let alone full term.

My wife says one of my finest moments as

her husband came when I somehow made her laugh while she awaited the

abortion. My wife doesn't talk about her feelings of the abortion and

the "failed" pregnancy. But we've been together for more than a decade

and I know she will always be crushed by it. I know we made the right

decision for us but it still hurts badly. This was the son we would

never have.

Last night at about 8 p.m., the Associated Press’s Roxama Hegeman became an early purveyor of the myth that abortion clinic-related violence has been a frequent and consistent occurrence during the past two decades when she wrote the following about the murder of Kansas abortionist George Tiller (saved here at host for future reference; bold is mine):

There was no immediate word of the motive (of) Tiller’s assailant. But the doctor’s violent death was the latest in a string of shootings and bombings over two decades directed against abortion clinics, doctors and staff.

A look at the actual history of such violence accumulated by a pro-abortion group demonstrates that Tiller’s murder is correctly seen as a horrible, isolated incident following a long, sustained, and not-reversed period of decline.

Here is the “History of Violence” accumulated by the National Abortion Federation (NAF), broken down into five categories:

• Murder and shootings — There were none since 1998 until Tiller was murdered on Sunday. From 1993-1998, seven abortion doctors or abortion clinic employees were killed, and 12 others were injured, many very seriously. One cowardly killing after 11 murder-free and shooting-free years following a period of seven in six years does not signal a trend by any reasonable definition.


• Arsons and bombings — Starting in 1976, NAF lists 13 such crimes during the remainder of that decade, over 75 during the 1980s, over 100 during the 1990s, and 16 since the turn of the century. Only six arsons took place from 2004-2008. The last arson listed at NAF’s site occurred in December 2007. It should also be noted that arsons set by business owners in general to collect insurance money are not all that infrequent.


• Butyric acid attacks — Butyric acid is a clear, colorless liquid with an unpleasant, rancid, vomit-like odor. According to NAF, this clinic attack method was used “about 100″ times from 1991-1998, and has not been employed since.


• NAF lists over 650 antrax attacks and fake anthrax attacks from 1998-2002, and none since then. Over 550 of these occurred in 2001.

Overall, an “Extreme Violence” page at NAF listing activity from 1997-2007 lists the following number of incidents per year:

As you can see, Rebecca Hegeman’s “string” has been broken twice in the past three years.

Abortion clinic violence and violence against abortionists has generally been on such a steep decline during the past decade that MSNBC stopped updating a web page dedicated to the topic in the late 1990s.

Without recounting already-known details, the unique specifics of Tiller’s situation also supports the idea that his murder, which should of course be and I’m sure will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, will more than likely not be a part of a new “string” of similar ones throughout the country.

Not that the establishment media types like the AP’s Hegemen, the ever-opportunistic Obama administration, or far-left blogs will particularly care about these facts.

There’s one more thing Ms. Hegemen forgot to note: The pre-born babies that George Tiller murdered were not available for comment.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.

I arrived in Aarhus, Denmark, two weeks ago with the strange feeling that I had really not left Toronto. Tamil demonstrators, waving Tiger flags, banging drums and chanting incomprehensibly, blocked traffic in front of the railway station. A few days later in Copenhagen, their leader dead, their resistance in Sri Lanka at an end, Tamils were chanting "U. S. A., U. S. A." in front of the American embassy. Polyglot Denmark is not, but multiculturalism is present everywhere in the cities.

Most of it is benign and hopeful. There are mixed race children playing happily together in both Aarhus and Copenhagen, teenagers moving in packs and black and white couples walking with small children. There are women in chadors and Muslim men with beards, halal meat shops and kebabs for sale everywhere. But after the controversy over the Muhammad cartoons, there is substantial unease among many Danes. When the cartoons were published in 2006, they were frightened by the rage directed against them in the Muslim world--and the hints of violence they detected from the 4% of the Danish population who are Muslim.

And they worried about the threat to freedom of speech posed by the controversy. More recently, they bitterly resented Muslim Turkey's attempt, in response to the cartoon controversy, to block the Danish Prime Minister from becoming secretary-general of NATO. Only in the face of Danish resistance will Turkey now make it into membership in the European community.

Many Danes look to Canada as a model of multiculturalism -- a country that they believe got it right. But even if almost everyone speaks English, few know much about Canada, and certainly they know nothing about this nation's problems in integrating immigrants or the difficulties with our refugee system. Still, when compared to racial and religious tensions in Britain, France, the Netherlands and Denmark, Canada's multiculturalism looks like a great success.

What does seem clear is that the European community has been good to Denmark, even if the Danes have thus far refused to adopt the Euro as their currency. The tiny nation's GDP per capita in 2008 was $66,760 (well above Canada's at $48,427), and welfare benefits are generous, so much so that most Danes label their welfare state as their country's defining characteristic. Many cynics might declare that Denmark's taxes --"the highest anywhere," I was repeatedly told -- are the true defining fact (and this tax burden is largely responsible for complaints about the costs of trying to integrate immigrants). But the Danish medical care system is good, the emergency room lineups relatively short and cancer operations in first-class hospitals, for example, can be scheduled and performed quickly and well. (Nonetheless, private hospitals advertise their up-to-date facilities at pleasant locations on the coast.) Even more extraordinarily, university students who make it to higher education after tough competition for places get free tuition and a stipend.

Graduate students get the same, and their stipend is enough to live on, no matter their subject of study.

The only drawback in this halcyon paradise? Everything is ridiculously expensive -- notably clothing (though women are nonetheless stylishly dressed), restaurant meals and alcohol. Copenhagen has a number of two-star Michelin restaurants, but there seems a large gulf between the hot young chefs and most of the rest. The food here is good but simple, though fresh fish seems available everywhere and Danish pork, proudly labelled as such, appears on almost every menu. The pastries are good, the breads wonderful.

Unfortunately, a half-pint of Carlsberg costs around 30 kroner ($6.50) and a glass of Italian plonk will run about $12. With gasoline selling for almost 10 kroner a litre, taxi meters in Aarhus start at 30 kronor and even a short trip will hit $25.

On the other hand, the public transit system is first rate, with bus networks and subways operating in Copenhagen and an efficient rail network reaching into the country. If they're not riding their bicycles around town, people will commute a hundred kilometres to get to work and do so without a qualm. Likewise, Swedes take the train from Malmo, just a bridge away from Copenhagen, to work. Danes, in return, go to Malmo to buy houses and apartments, which are much cheaper there than in Copenhagen.

Occupied without a fight by the Nazis in 1940, Denmark drew the appropriate lessons and joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as a founding member. It despatched troops to Iraq, and has some 700 soldiers in Afghanistan's difficult Helmand Province. The Danish casualty rate is comparable to Canada's, and people I spoke too worried that the Afghan mission's aims were hopelessly muddled. Others noted that Denmark, proud of its peacekeeping record, had trouble dealing with combat and its costs.

In other words, Denmark is much like Canada on the important issues. Politicians brag about Denmark punching above its weight, but ordinary Danes worry about the economy and the strains posed to the polity by immigration and wonder if their taxes can possibly go any higher.

But it's a sweet life for now, everyone sitting outside at cafes in the sun or lying stretched out in Copenhagen's superb parks. There really is nothing rotten in the state of Denmark.

Historian J. L. Granatstein writes for the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute.

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