Cbs News

The Dish was all over yesterday's big story - the assassination of George Tiller by a crazed Christianist. We traced O'Reilly's troubling rhetoric here, here, and here, and readers checked my reaction here. We chronicled the disturbing role of Operation Rescue here, here, and here, and commentary from the far right here, here, here.  A noteworthy voice on the far-right was Robert P. George, who struck the perfect chord. We also aired personal accounts of abortion here and here.

A traumatic Sunday, to say the least. For the right approach to religion, listen to Bob Wright.

Just last week, Denver Post and Reason.com columnist David Harsanyi asked, "Is The Abortion Debate Changing?" Based on a recent Gallup Poll, which found that a majority of Americans considered themselves "pro-life" for the first time since the question started being asked in 1995, Harsanyi suggested "that Americans are getting past the politics and into the morality of the issue" after decades of legalized abortion. And, he argued, the morality of abortion is a lot more complicated than most pro- or anti-abortion slogans let on.

Earlier today, in response to killing of Kansas abortion doctor George Tiller, Jacob Sullum asked why anti-abortion activists rushed to condemn the death of a man who by their own accounts was slaughtering innocents. Jacob understands why the activists might say that, but argues that it's really a tactical response: That they need to distance themselves from murderous extremists.

So what do Reason readers think? Will the killing of George Tiller push more Americans to identify as pro-life? Or will it push voters in the other direction? Does it matter that Tiller was known for doing late-term abortions, which are statistically rare but gruesome?

You go back to that Gallup Poll and one thing sticks out on the basic question of whether abortion should be legal under some circumstances: Since 1976, the percentage answering yes has been around 50 percent or higher (there are a few years where it dipped into the high 40s). That is, it's been pretty stable at or around a majority number.

And the percentage of people saying abortion should be illegal under all circumstances has rarely cracked the 20 percent figure (though it has again in recent years). Similarly, the percentage saying abortion should be legal under all circumstances, which peaked at 34 percent in the early 1990s, has always been a minority position (which currently stands at 22 percent and has been dropping lately).

I suspect that as abortion becomes rarer (as Reason's Ron Bailey pointed out in 2006, abortion has been getting rarer since the 1990s and also occurs earlier in pregnancies than before), it's quite possible that the either/or positions might change, but that their movement will have little effect on the middle position of abortion staying legal under some circumstances. Even those, such as Harsanyi, who is plainly troubled by the logic of abortion, generally concede that prohibition would cause more problems than it would fix ("I also believe a government ban on abortion would only criminalize the procedure and do little to mitigate the number of abortions.").

Back in 2003, on the occasion of Roe v. Wade's 30th anniversary, I argued that regarding abortion the country had reached a consensus that

has little to do with morality per se, much less with enforcing a single standard of morality. It's about a workable, pragmatic compromise that allows people to live their lives on their own terms and peaceably argue for their point of view....

This isn't to say that the debate about abortion is "over"-or that laws governing the specifics of abortion won't continue to change over time in ways that bother ardent pro-lifers and pro-choicers alike. But taking a longer view, it does seem as if the extremes of the abortion debate - extremes that included incendiary language (including calls for the murder of abortion providers) - have largely subsided in the wake of a widely accepted consensus. Part of this is surely due to the massive increases in reproduction technologies that allow women far more control over all aspects of their bodies (even as some of those technologies challenge conventional definitions of human life).

That isn't an outcome that is particularly satisfying to activists on either side of the issue or to people who want something approaching rational analysis in public policy. But it's still where we're at and it's unlikely the Tiller case will do much to move things one way or the other. The one thing that would likely change it would be if there was a massive shift toward later-term abortions, which seems unlikely based on long-term trendlines and technological innovations.

How Canadian can you get?

The Finance Minister understates the deficit by $16 billion. Do we get mad?

Nah. The guy's doing his best. Let's give him another chance.

Canadian Press:

OTTAWA - Canadians appear to be willing to cut Finance Minister Jim Flaherty a little slack over his deficit shocker.

A Canadian Press Harris-Decima poll shows few Canadians think the
finance minister should resign just because he made a $16-billion
mistake on his deficit projection.

The survey of 1,000 people finds only 28 per cent who want Flaherty to
step down, while 59 per cent think he should stay on the job.

Even among Liberal supporters, 54 per cent don't think he should lose
his position because the budget deficit has ballooned to more than $50
billion - not the $34 billion predicted in the budget four months ago.

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 Mark Silva

President Barack Obama will face a tough audience when he delivers his long-promised address to the Muslim world on Thursday from Cairo University.

In some of the Arab nations and territory in the region, most notably his host country of Egypt, public views about the "job performance of the leadership of the United States'' have improved remarkably from one president to the next - from the view that Arabs held of former President George W. Bush's leadership last summer, to the views they voiced of Obama's leadership in March.

Yet even in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the two nations where Obama will begin his journey this week, a positive view of U.S. leadership is still shared by about one in four of those surveyed: Up from 12 percent last summer to 29 percent in Saudi Arabia, according to survey results released today by the Gallup Poll on the eve of the president's trip, and up from just 6 percent to 25 percent in Egypt.

"These upsurges, which ranged from 11 percentage points in Syria to 23 points in Tunisia, may reflect positive reception to Obama and his administration's public outreach to the Muslim world,'' Gallup reports today. "Obama will deliver his message Thursday with an arguably stronger basis of support than his predecessor ever had in many Arab countries. Nonetheless, approval remains low and underscores the work that remains as Obama seeks to pave a new, more positive way forward.''

In nearly all of the 11 nations and territories where the public was surveyed, public opinion of the U.S. leadership has improved from last year - up 23 percent in Tunisia, from 14 to 37, up 22 points in Algergia from 25 to 47, up 14 points in Qatar, from 8 to 22 percent, up 13 in Kuwait, from 20 ro 33, up 11 in Syria, from 4 to 15 percentage point approval.

In two palaces, however, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, the view of U.S. leadership is no brighter today than it was last summer: 22 percent approval registered in Lebanon, down from 25 points last summer, 7 percent in the Palestinian territories, down from 13 points in June.

Nate Silver has an exhaustive and exhausting post on how Republicans could win the White House while losing further slices of the Latino vote. It's doable, but extremely hard. They have to hope for a double-dip recession and a divisive appeal to white voters. That's the kind of short-term idea that leads to long-term defeat (i.e. Karl Rove might love it). I didn't realize this:

In 2008, the Latino vote made the difference in

the outcome of three states: New Mexico, where about 2 in 5 voters

identify as Hispanic, as well as -- somewhat surprisingly -- Indiana

and North Carolina -- where Obama lost nonhispanic voters by a tiny

margin and was put over the top by Hispanic votes. It probably also

made the difference, believe it or not, in the 2nd Congressional

District of Nebraska -- Omaha actually has a decent-sized Hispanic

minority -- although the exit polls aren't detailed enough to let us

know for sure.

Nate's bottom line:

This is the sort of electoral future the GOP might

have to contemplate if they start losing the Hispanic vote by margins

of 3:1, 4:1 or more. Giving up on New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado is a

feasible, and perhaps even wise, strategy. But if they don't thread the

needle just perfectly, and they make it difficult for themselves to win

back Florida, while putting Arizona and perhaps even Texas increasingly

into play, their task will become nearly impossible.

Steve Herzfeld managed an admirably inventive end-run around high healthcare costs for his Parkinson's- and Alzheimer's-afflicted parents. After in-home care was no longer possible, he priced American nursing homes, but found that the cheapest acceptable option was still $6,000. So he sent them to India. Quality elderly care in Puducherry cost less than his father's fixed income. According to the Guardian:

[In India, Herzfeld] could give his parents a much higher standard of care than would have been possible in the US for his father's income of $2,000 (£1,200) a month. In India that paid for their rent, a team of carers—a cook, a valet for his father, nurses to be with his mother 12 hours a day, six days a week, a physiotherapist and a masseuse—and drugs (costing a fifth of US prices), and also allowed them to put some money away...."In India, they really like older people," says Herzfeld, describing how the staff seemed to regard his parents as their own family.

Of course, the care was inexpensive because a couple thousand bucks goes further in Puducherry than it might in, say, Fort Lauderdale. Herzfeld, though, apparently believes that it was cheap because elderly care in America is greedily overpriced by providers. He vents about about healthcare and the profit motive: 

[Herzfeld] believes that India could teach the US and UK a lot about care of the elderly. "In America, healthcare is done for profit, so that skews the whole thing and makes it very inhuman in its values," he says.

I try not to begrudge a man his fantasies, but the idea that the nurses, valets, and masseuses of Puducherry were doing it all out of the goodness of their hearts—rather than the goodness of their paychecks—is condescending. It was simple outsourcing, not subcontinental altruism, that saved Steve Herzfeld so much money.

In Reason's May 2009 print edition, Ronald Bailey wrote about the outsourcing of hip replacement.