Month: December 2008

by Chris Bodenner
Thomas Frank, lone liberal of the WSJ op-ed page, writes:

[Surrogate motherhood for pay] is a class-and-gender minefield. … It threatens to commodify not only babies, but women as well, putting their biological functions up for sale like so many Jimmy Choos. If surrogacy ever becomes a widely practiced market transaction, it will probably make pregnancy into just another dirty task for the working class, with wages driven down and wealthy couples hiring the work out because it’s such a hassle to be pregnant.

He then proceeds to pummel Alex Kuczynski, the NYT writer/billionaire socialite who featured herself in the controversial cover story about her paid surrogacy.  Frank’s cynicism toward her and a future she represents (an economy of careerists and breeders) is cutting and entertaining.

But his above paragraph intrigued me more because it brought into focus an interesting irony regarding liberals and women’s choice.  According to pro-life conservatives, women should not have control over their bodies once pregnancy begins.  For pro-choice liberals, they should.  But for liberals such as Frank, women shouldn’t have full control over their bodies when it comes to surrogacy.  Even if two grown women agree, under no coercion, to enter into a surrogate contract, many pro-choicers would seek to restrict that choice.

Though I tend to favor freedom on both fronts, abortion and surrogacy, I’m sure there must be some limits on pay-for-pregnancy.  But as technological advances reach new heights (like breeding humans out-utero, Matrix-style), those limits will only get more contentious.  (Or perhaps offer a win-win: What if pro-life women became surrogates for pro-choicers with unwanted pregnancies?)

by Chris Bodenner
Ta-Nehisi on the Kindle: "The thing just doesn’t give the same sense of accomplishment and closure [as a book]. It’s like running a marathon–but on a treadmill."  My analogy: guest-blogging on The Dish.  Or, perhaps, a cat running up a slide:

By Patrick Appel

Ted Carpenter:

… the U.S. military must not become the enemy of Afghan farmers whose livelihood depends on opium-poppy cultivation. True, some of the funds from the drug trade will find their way into the coffers of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. That is an inevitable side effect of a global prohibitionist policy that creates such an enormous profit from illegal drugs. But alienating pro-Western Afghan factions in an effort to disrupt the flow of revenue to the Islamic radicals is too high a price to pay. General Jones should reconsider his views.

My thoughts here.

By Patrick Appel

Jon Stewart isn’t a great interviewer, but he got the better of Mike Huckabee last night:

by Chris Bodenner
Responding a scandal in NC where a Jewish mother’s complaint about the Christ-like overtones of "Rudolf The Red-Nose Reindeer" got the song pulled from the kindergarten show, our resident Talmudic scholar reveals:

Of course, the song…was written by a Jewish-American songwriter, Johnny Marks. He also wrote "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day." Also written by Jews: "I’ll be Home for Christmas," "It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year," "The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire)," and of course, the mother of all Jewish-written Christmas songs, "White Christmas," by Irving Berlin.  Why, you could almost say there’s a conspiracy by Jews to dominate the Christmas-jingle-writing industry!

By Patrick Appel

Joe Klein reports on Afghanistan:

…the first step toward resolving the war in Afghanistan is to lay down the law in both Islamabad and Kabul. The message should be the same in both cases: The unsupervised splurge of American aid is over. The Pakistanis will have to stop giving tacit support and protection to terrorists, especially the Afghan Taliban. The Karzai government will have to end its corruption and close down the drug trade. There are plenty of other reforms necessary — the international humanitarian effort is a shabby, self-righteous mess; some of our NATO allies aren’t carrying their share of the military burden — but the war will remain a bloody stalemate at best as long as jihadis come across the border from Pakistan and the drug trade flourishes.

To sum up: tell Pakistan to stop supporting terrorists; tell Afghanistan to stop growing opium; win war.

How do you stop the drug trade in Afghanistan without destroying its economy? Opium accounts for half of the country’s licit GDP. And why are we likely to be any more successful in curtailing drug trafficking in Afghanistan than we have been in Latin America? The WaPo reported in September that: "Across the Andean region, the size of the coca crop has increased 18 percent in the past five years, a period during which the United States has spent $4 billion on anti-drug programs." We don’t have the same sort of military presence in Bolivia that we have in Afghanistan, but I’m unconvinced that we can stop enough drug growing in Afghanistan to hinder terrorism. And even if we were able to destroy every opium plant in Afghanistan, that would likely mean more poverty and therefore more instability.

As for Pakistan, I’m all for cracking down on terrorist elements, but Pakistan is dangerously unstable and nearly bankrupted as a nation; the instability brought about by rooting out malfeasance could very well push it over the brink.

by Chris Bodenner
A censorship scandal at a Westchester high school taught me a new word:

Pages from the middle of the book [Girl, Interrupted] have been torn out by the school district after having been deemed "inappropriate" by school officials due to sexual content and strong language. … "[But] since the book has other redeeming features, we took the liberty of bowdlerizing," [said the English Dept. chair].

"Bowdlerizing is a particularly disturbing form of censorship since it not only suppresses specific content deemed ‘objectionable,’ but also does violence to the work by removing material that the author thought integral," said Joan Bertin, Executive Director of the National Coalition Against Censorship. "It is a kind of literary fraud perpetrated on an unsuspecting audience."

(Hat tip: Crooks And Liars)

A three-month-old giant panda plays in its pen at the Bifengxia base of China Giant Panda Protection and Research Center on December 11, 2008 in Yaan of Sichuan Province, China.Thirteen panda cubs have been born at the Bifengxia base since the May 12 earthquake hit the province of Sichuan, which destroyed many critical panda habitats. By China Photos/Getty.

by Chris Bodenner
Xeni Jardin reports on the impact Obama’s victory had on a remote, mountainous village in Guatemala:

That sudden jolt of aspiration felt around the world? It struck here. Hard. … It meant a renewed belief in change, for a people who have survived natural disasters, racism, and 36 years of civil war that many describe as the Mayan genocide. If a black man can enter the Casa Blanca, they are saying, maybe a Mayan person can one day become president of Guatemala.

Don Victoriano, the local leader of an international nonprofit, wrote:

I heard the acceptance speech of Obama, at four in the morning when I turned on the little battery-powered radio I have here. … And we give a triumphant hug to each other as if we were norteamericanos, because it made us so happy in our hearts. Next Thursday we’re going to have a Mayan ceremony, with the mamas and the niños, to give thanks to the Creator for this triumph, and for his spouse and two children. … Only Ajaw could have made this possible. May the creator bless him, and guide his decisions so that he makes good ones.