Via the LA Times:

Backed by some of the most powerful members of the Senate, a little-noticed provision in the healthcare overhaul bill would require insurers to consider covering Christian Science prayer treatments as medical expenses.

The provision was inserted by Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) with the support of Democratic Sens. John F. Kerry and the late Edward M. Kennedy, both of Massachusetts, home to the headquarters of the Church of Christ, Scientist.

The measure would put Christian Science prayer treatments -- which substitute for or supplement medical treatments -- on the same footing as clinical medicine. While not mentioning the church by name, it would prohibit discrimination against "religious and spiritual healthcare."

It would have a minor effect on the overall cost of the bill -- Christian Science is a small church, and the prayer treatments can cost as little as $20 a day. But it has nevertheless stirred an intense controversy over the constitutional separation of church and state, and the possibility that other churches might seek reimbursements for so-called spiritual healing..

Frankly, in this context I couldn’t care less about the separation of church and state, but I do care a great deal about the separation of the taxpayer from his money. Senator Hatch should be ashamed of himself.

H/t: Secular Right

too.

Steyn.

There are bishops in the Catholic Church who knows better than to stand for the liberal Democratic bureaucrats in the bishops' conference running the show at such a crucial moment as right now, when the majority party in Washington is looking to ram through a revolutionary government-run health-care scheme, short on details, high on cost, riddled with life and death concerns. I hope some who know the score -- the stakes in this debate and the reality of what the conference is -- are paying attention today, as the Politico is giving the impression the bishops have endorsed Pelosicare. (Possibly because that's the spin that in from the conference legislative office.)

Jim Geraghty offers a cautionary tale for Democrats.

That's the GOP message this morning, as reflected in their radio address from Haley Barbour:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Republicans say Democrats should scrap their ambitious health care legislation in favor of more modest changes.

The House is expected to vote today on Democrats' sweeping overhaul legislation that aims to extend coverage to tens of millions of uninsured Americans while banning some insurance industry practices.

In the GOP's weekly radio and Internet address, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour says the plan should be "withdrawn and reworked," arguing it's too expensive and will "clobber small businesses" and hinder job growth.

He also said Tuesday's elections, in which Democrats lost two governors' races, sent a message that voters care about jobs, not growing the size of government.

He called the elections a "fire alarm" and said they'll get Washington focused on job creation and economic growth.

I've been getting a few e-mails like this one over the last ten hours or so:

Your email from a woman who spent time a Rosalia founding home who gave her baby girl up for adoption through Catholic charities in Pittsburgh brought a tear to my eye this morning.  For I was born in the late 1960's, in Pittsburgh and adopted through Catholic charities, though I am male.  What a different world this would be if those events were more common today.  All the lost treasure and talent. 

visited Fort Hood families last night:

FORT HOOD, Texas (AP) ― Former President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura, visited wounded soldiers and their families near the site of the worst mass shooting on an Army post in the United States.

The Bushes made their private visit to Fort Hood's Darnall Army Medical Center on Friday night. Bush spokesman David Sherzer said in an e-mail that the couple thanked Fort Hood's military leaders and hospital staff for the "amazing care they are providing."

And some arguments that might encourage them may be in our editorial this morning. This is the summation:

There are other ways to reform health care. There are more sensible, market-based, moderate approaches — and, more important, there is no need to pack every reform into one sweeping bill, larded up with special favors and irresponsible spending, that will radically remake the American economy and health-care system. Radicalism may be in fashion in Nancy Pelosi’s district and in the salons in which Barack Obama was educated, but it may be less so in south Texas, rural Ohio, northeastern Pennsylvania, western Colorado, and other places where Democrats will have to face the voters again soon enough. Let us hope that enough of them are willing to show some restraint — and to put the national interest over President Obama’s ambitions — that they are able to put the brakes on this mess before we go any farther down this road.

Read the whole thing. Maybe send it to a friend and member of Congress, too.

Al Gore is notoriously keen on imposing new laws in the interests of fighting “climate change,” but to him some laws (or so it seems from this interview with Gore in the Guardian) are more equal than others:

Amid increasing incidents of climate protesters disrupting the operations of fossil-fuel industries and airports in Britain and elsewhere, Gore suggests the scale of the emergency means non-violent lawbreaking is justified. "Civil disobedience has an honourable history, and when the urgency and moral clarity cross a certain threshold, then I think that civil disobedience is quite understandable, and it has a role to play," he says. "And I expect that it will increase, no question about it."

And who defines “urgency,” and who “moral clarity,” Mr. Gore?

 

After all the screeching and whining about the tea-party crowd’s alleged disdain for the usual democratic process, I will look forward to hearing how the White House and its claque respond to what Gore has just said.

FB, natch:

What’s in this bill? The “death panel” provision is in it. Medicare cuts are in it. Coverage of illegal immigrants is in it. And federal funding for abortion is in it. I commend the many Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats who are taking a principled stance to fight this.

I had a message for Speaker Pelosi in a speech I gave last night for the Wisconsin Right to Life – “please, please don’t break the ‘transparency promise’ by prohibiting at least a vote of your colleagues on funding abortion-on-demand.”

Speaker Pelosi has already broken many promises thus far in this “reform” exercise. She promised that this would be a bi-partisan effort, but the bill she’s pushing isn’t bi-partisan. She promised that the final version of the bill would be posted online 72 hours before it comes to a vote so that the American people could clearly see what’s in it and how we will pay for it. But she broke that promise too when she decided to rush the bill to a vote this weekend.

The speaker must be held accountable for her broken promises. Now is the time for Americans who believe in the free market and who believe that we need policies that promote job growth instead of job loss to say once and for all, “Enough!” Stand up and make your voices heard before it’s too late. Call and email your representatives and tell them to vote “no” on Pelosi’s train wreck of a health care bill, or else we will vote “no” to sending them back to Washington when we go to the polls in less than 12 months.

- Sarah Palin

PS: For an idea of the bureaucratic maze that the Pelosi bill would create, take a look at this new chart put out by the Joint Economic Committee.

Keep an eye on "Doctor! Doctor!" today, Bob Costa's on the Hill to find out!

Paul Ryan on Pelosi's "destiny moment" here and the high-cost burden on the shoulders of Blue Dogs here.

From Reuters:

World governments should consider urgently a levy on banks to fund future bailouts, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said on Saturday, departing from London's longstanding resistance to a global tax.

Hah:

Democrats counter that their agenda has kick-started a recovery on Wall Street, even if it hasn't trickled down to the job market yet, and that Republicans are putting what they've begun at risk.

The Nothing-to-see-here media continue to do a grand job. Chris Matthews:

We may never know if religion was a factor at Fort Hood.

That's almost certainly true in your case, Chris.

As for yelling "Allahu akbar" as you open fire, Michael Tomasky, one of the American lefties on the Guardian's payroll, explains it for us know-nothings:

The fact that Hassan reportedly shouted the above is meant, I suppose, to imply that he was an extremist fanatic.

I'm not sure that it does. My understanding is that it's something Arab people often shout before doing something or other. It's used in many different situations. It doesn't mean the guy is an al-Qaida mole any more than my drinking a cup of tea would mean I was a tea partier.

Shouldn't that be "teabagger," as you chaps say? Still, it's good to know if someone shows up shouting "Allahu akbar" it's just a sign he's about to "do something or other." No need to dive under the table.

On the other hand, if you're still invested in Major Hasan's PPTSD (unique case of pre-Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), you may prefer Kate McMillan:

"Allahu akbar." It's the new "cry for help".

P.S. If in doubt, blame English Catholics:

Today is Guy Fawkes Day - the anniversary of a plot by a Catholic dissident to blow up the English Parliament then dominated by Protestants). If the shootings were motivated by some sense of grievance against US foreign/military policy, then the date is surely significant.

Surely.

In an encouraging development, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been forced to agree to a vote on fellow Democrat Bart Stupak’s amendment that would prevent the health-care legislation from leading to widespread federal funding of abortion. An excerpt from this LifeNews.com report:

Douglas Johnson, the legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee, told LifeNews.com … that the vote on the Stupak [amendment] could be the most important abortion-related vote cast in Congress since Roe.

"This will be one of the most important roll call votes that U.S. House members ever casts on a pro-life issue," he said. "Any lawmaker who votes against the Stupak-Pitts Amendment is, in effect, voting in favor of establishing a federal government program that will directly fund abortion on demand, with federal funds."

Johnson urged all pro-life advocates to call both the Washington and in-state offices of their representatives in the U.S. House to urge support for the Stupak-Pitts Amendment.

The vote is expected to take place today. Information on how to contact your House member is available here.

Lots of folks have wondered why there weren't more soldiers with guns at Ft. Hood, and I'm one of them. Our younger Marine is home for the weekend from The Basic School at Quantico, and Barbara and I asked him if there were Marines with guns on the base. There are. Lots of them. And they move around all the time, checking places where Marines congregate, from classrooms to outdoor obstacle courses and parade fields and barracks. Apparently it occurred to the base commander some time ago that it was a bad idea to leave his men and women unprotected.

expressed concern to me earlier tonight that the Dems walk out of this marathon leadership session with a faux compromise that fools folks into believing abortion won't be funded. Thankfully, the likes of Doug Johnson, the stalwart factchecker from the National Right to Life Committee, exists to keep things in check. The key question, though: Will the Catholic bishops be stalwart like Doug? That may mean a key bishop or two fighting against the get-along instinct of some of the bureacrats at the bishops' conference.

(Fr. Thomas Williams has a good piece on Catholics and health care, BTW. And you may be interested in Bishop Conley from Denver who says the legislation they are looking at is inadequate, baffling, insulting, and dangerous.)

as Steny Hoyer tries to play down abortion.

says there is no deal, in an exchange with NRO.

Background for the Yuval reference here.

Waxman admits as much.

The Headline of the Day, from the BBC:

Shooting Raises Fears For Muslims In US Army

Really? Right now the body count stands at:

Non-Muslims 13
Muslims 0

I was reading from some of this kind of coverage on the Rush Limbaugh show today. Even if you are concerned that it would be terribly unfair if all Muslims were to be tarred by Major Hasan's brush, it is, to put it at its mildest, the grossest bad taste to default every single time within minutes to the position that what's of most interest about an actual atrocity with real victims is that it may provoke an entirely hypothetical atrocity with entirely hypothetical victims. I refer you yet again to this note-perfect parody:

British Muslims Fear Repercussions Over Tomorrow's Train Bombing

This kind of media coverage is really a form of mental illness far more advanced than whatever Major Hasan's lawyers eventually enter in mitigation, and apparently pandemic, at least among the Western media.

On a related note, from David Horowitz: "Is everybody out of their mind?"

Bonus: "We're the ones who love death -- our own." 

Regarding the ongoing discussion of Islam's role in terrorists' justification of their actions in general and Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan's self-justification in particular, there's a tendency among the government, academics, and the media to engage in religious equivalency and suggest that Islamic extremism is really no different than Jewish and Christian extremism. 

To counter such notions, Raymond Ibrahim's article, "Are Judaism and Christianity as Violent as Islam?," is certainly worth a weekend read.

keep an eye on "The Corner" (for the usual and unusual) & "Doctor! Doctor!" (live reporting from the Hill) & "Critical Condition" (health-care policy analysis) for continuing health-care and other coverage. (And don't forget to read your Saturday Steyn tomorrow!)

Another link for options for pregnant women.

President Obama today in the Rose Garden, speaking about the Muslim mass-murderer who killed many more Americans yesterday than were killed by the Muslim mass-murderers who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993: "We don't know all the answers yet. And I would caution against jumping to conclusions until we have all the facts."

So, at the Investigative Project on Terrorism, Steve Emerson marshals some of the answers that have come in about Nidal Malik Hasan: "Born in Virginia, sent to medical school by the U.S. Army, the psychiatrist was chastised for proselytizing to his patients about Islam. Asked his nationality, he didn't identify himself as an American but as a Palestinian. He appeared pleased by the shooting death of a Little Rock Army recruiter in June and reportedly was heard saying, 'maybe people should strap bombs on themselves and go to Times Square.' In the fateful moment before he opened fire on his unarmed victims, he shouted Allahu Akhbar!'"

President Obama has had no problems jumping to conclusions about everything from the stimulus (it was going to keep unemployment below 8 percent) to Honduras (the administration pronounced it a lawless coup when, as the answers came in, it was shown to be the opposite of that). In fact, based on what it acknowledged was no "specific information," his Homeland Security Department concluded that the country was about to experience a surge of violence from "rightwing extremists." I don't know what further answers the president is going to need here, but it seems some pretty obvious conclusions are in order.

By the way, as Steve points out, CAIR has also weighed in. They say . . . we don't know all the answers yet and we shouldn't jump to conclusions.

My wife Cindy and I got away from politics and parenting last night to attend a wonderful event at the Kennedy Center: the Apollo Ensemble, one of Europe’s leading baroque chamber-music groups. It was an evening hosted by Pro Musica Hebraica, a new organization -- Charles Krauthammer is the chairman and Robyn Krauthammer is the chief executive officer -- dedicated to presenting lost and neglected masterpieces of Jewish classical music in a concert-hall setting. It was a thrilling and uplifting evening, one of the nicest we have attended in quite some time.

It is always a joy to be around things that uplift the human spirit and put human excellence on display. Pro Musica Hebraica does that. Do yourself, and your soul, a favor and find out more about it by going here. You won’t regret it.

Check out Thomas Kenniff's Q&A with Washington Post readers.

An e-mail: 

Bravo on mentioning the once-common institution of adoption. I had an out-of-wedlock child back in the late 1960s, and she was placed for adoption through Catholic Charities in Pittsburgh. I stayed at Rosalia Foundling Home and Maternity Hospital, and those nuns were wonderful to us (in those days there were such places, and they did great work). I've always thought it a bit odd that the only choices anyone has recognized in subsequent years are abortion or single-parenthood. Sure, adoption was hard. It tore my heart out for a while. But you know there are lots of things in life that tear your heart out. I can't imagine that trying to raise a child by yourself as a teen-aged single mother doesn't present you with an endless succession of them, and they go on for years.

In regard to the Foundling -- there are still such places, thank goodness.

An e-mail:

He is correct in his assessment and conclusions. I would however ask that he and everyone else cease using the term Political Correctness. It is in fact Purposeful Disingenuousness and Misleadingness. Time to call it for what it is - there is nothing polite (nor politic) about it.

As an addendum to my last post, since most Muslims do not read, speak, or truly understand Quranic Arabic and so simply interpret or memorize what they are taught the Quran says, it is worth keeping in mind that English renditions of the Quran are not all the same; many are influenced by ideology. San Diego State University's Khaleel Mohammed surveys English translations of the Quran, here, and starkly illustrates how ideology permeates. If, as some news accounts suggest, the shooter handed out Qurans to his neighbors, it would be worth knowing which editions. Likewise, if the shooter studies a Quran, which version?

in Orlando.

An e-mail: 

Here's something else 30 years of railing against abortion has accomplished: The knowledge that you/we have stayed in the fight for 30 years, and the strength that knowledge gives us to continue the fight for another 30 IS an accomplishment.   

Winning hearts and minds takes persistence. 30 years of persistence is an accomplishment when the deck is stacked against you.

New from the New York Post:

Hasan isn’t the sole guilty party. The US Army’s unforgivable political correctness is also to blame for the casualties at Ft. Hood.

Given the myriad warning signs, it’s appalling that no action was taken against a man apparently known to praise suicide bombers and openly damn US policy. But no officer in his chain of command, either at Walter Reed Army Medical Center or at Ft. Hood, had the guts to take meaningful action against a dysfunctional soldier and an incompetent doctor. . . .

Now 12 soldiers and a security guard lie dead. 31 soldiers were wounded, 28 of them seriously. If heads don’t roll in this maggot’s chain of command, the Army will have shamed itself beyond moral redemption.

There’s another important issue, too. How could the Army allow an obviously incompetent and dysfunctional psychiatrist to treat our troubled soldiers returning from war? An Islamist whacko is counseled for arguing with veterans who’ve been assigned to his care? And he’s not removed from duty? What planet does the Army live on?

For the first time since I joined the Army in 1976, I’m ashamed of its dereliction of duty. The chain of command protected a budding terrorist who was waving one red flag after another. Because it was safer for careers than doing something about him.

Over at The Weekly Standard, Mike Goldfarb castigates President Obama for obsessing about root causes without considering the poisonous influence of a radical Islamist ideology. The problem, unfortunately, is not limited to the Obama administration but is rather broader: Not all terrorism is motivated by religion, but much of it is. The problem is that the issue of religious motivation for terrorism has become a forbidden subject in government policy analysis. Remember the Pentagon's sacking of Stephen Coughlin toward the tail end of the Bush administration? From the Washington Times:

Stephen Coughlin, the Pentagon specialist on Islamic law and Islamist extremism, has been fired from his position on the military's Joint Staff. The action followed a report in this space last week revealing opposition to his work for the military by pro-Muslim officials within the office of Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England.

Sometimes political correctness kills. Since I've left the Pentagon, I have sat through about 100 lectures on Islam to U.S. military audiences, many at Fort Hood. Too often, government officials limit discussion of Islam to "true Islam" defined by whatever theological trends promote tolerance, moderation, and compassion. For policy, law-enforcement, and military purposes, it would be wise to leave the debate about what "true Islam" is to the academic community and instead focus on religion and religious ideology in terms of what any religion's practitioners believe it to be. Rather than, for example, explain to troops in tedious lectures that Islam forbids suicide, it might provide more insight and understanding if specialists would instruct policy and military practitioners what exegesis extremists use to justify suicide terrorism or other manifestations of extremism.

For what it's worth, on the rare occassions when I lecture on the topic of how extremists use Islam to justify terrorism (including sometimes at Ft. Hood), I often draw from these Middle East Quarterly articles:

"Contrasting Secular and Religious Terrorism"

"Peace of Jihad: Abrogation in Islam"

"The Religious Foundations of Suicide Bombings"

"Beheading in the Name of Islam"

Moderate Democrats in Congress have been having a bad week, with the bad election news. My advice: If you're going to vote against Pelosi on health care, announce it now. Pelosi, Hoyer, et al have so many congressmen to arm-twist that they won't have time to yell at you. You won't be at the top of their arm-twisting list, either, since you'll have an announced position.

BigGovernment.com reports:

ACORN’s New Orleans Office Raided by Louisiana Attorney General’s Office

It has achieved some legal improvement and contributed to a decline in the abortion rate. If you care about such things, that's not nothing. In fact, it's lifesaving.

Kathryn Jean Lopez responds to Maureen Dowd’s comment that nuns are second-class citizens in today's episode of Off the Page.

Stephen Hayford, a reader and a friend, proposes a new term: "The Dede Effect":

FYI, our best bet up here is that SSM may come to a vote Tuesday, but will not pass.

I am encouraged by the NYT story in which Malcolm Smith admits that NY Republicans may be becoming even warier of voting for SSM because of what just happened to Dede Scozzafava up north. See here.

With this in mind, I hereby coin a new phrase: "The Dede Effect." The Dede Effect is the conservative backlash that "moderate" Republicans in New York can expect to face in their next reelection bids if they vote to redefine the institution of marriage. (Yea, Conservative Party! Yea, NOM!  Yea, Doug Hoffman!!) I think this is a very real thing, and I think it's something we should talk about whenever we get the chance. I just did a radio interview with Citizen Link/Family News in Focus and talked about the Dede Effect; hopefully they will air that part of the interview.

There's no conflict. If you want to assume humans have no reason and can't be encouraged to exercise sexual discipline for the sake of self-respect, if nothing else -- which I do not -- there is another a word that avoids the "abort or be a single-mother" distraction equation: adoption.

That's not always an easy solution. But it actually is one that avoids ending a human life. 

On the day that the unemployment rate officially tops 10 percent, the White House claim about “jobs created or saved” takes another hit. From the Sacramento Bee:

Up to one-fourth of the 110,000 jobs reported as saved by federal stimulus money in California probably never were in danger, a Bee review has found. California State University officials reported late last week that they saved more jobs with stimulus money than the number of jobs saved in Texas – and in 44 other states. In a required state report to the federal government, the university system said the $268.5 million it received in stimulus funding through October allowed it to retain 26,156 employees.  That total represents more than half of CSU's statewide work force. However, university officials confirmed Thursday that half their workers were not going to be laid off without the stimulus dollars.

 And here is the money quote:

"This is not really a real number of people," CSU spokeswoman Clara Potes-Fellow said. "It's like a budget number."

— John J. Pitney Jr. is the Roy P. Crocker professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. With James Ceaser and Andrew Busch, he is co-author of Epic Journey: The 2008 Elections and American Politics.

Those dissecting the White House claim that the $200 billion spent on the stimulus has created or saved 650,000 jobs have focused on the arithmetical errors in counting the hirings. They are ignoring a much more fundamental issue. Before Congress could inject $200 billion into the economy, they had to borrow $200 billion out of the economy. So the more central question is thus: If injecting $200 billion into the economy supported 650,000 jobs, then how many jobs were lost by first borrowing that $200 billion out of the economy?

The White House says zero. Their job numbers assume all $200 billion is “new” and supports jobs that would not otherwise exist.

This is absolutely implausible. How can adding $200 billion to one part of the economy support 650,000 jobs, but removing $200 billion from another part of the economy not cost a single job anywhere?

Some assert that this $200 billion is new spending because it was borrowed from savers. But that assumes the people who lent Washington the money would have otherwise saved exactly 100 percent of it. Even if one conservatively assumes they’d have saved half of it, then (by their Keynesian theory) only $100 billion would be “new” spending supporting new jobs. The other half merely replaced private spending/jobs with government spending/jobs. So cut the jobs created/saved figure in half.

But wait, there’s more. Even the money borrowed from savers isn’t “new money.” Savings do not fall out of the economy. They are invested or deposited in banks -- which then lend them out to others to spend. Even when recession-weary banks hesitate to loan money, they invest it in Treasury bills instead. They don’t hoard customer deposits in massive basement vaults. Consequently, one person’s savings quickly finances another person’s spending. (And even foreign borrowing is financed by an increased trade deficit, negating the effect.) So borrowing from savers doesn’t add new spending, either.

Thus, it is possible that all $200 billion in government spending (and jobs) merely displaced private spending (and jobs) dollar-for-dollar and job-for-job. And this is why the unemployment rate is not dropping.

The White House is telling us that adding $200 billion to one part of the economy created/saved 650,000 jobs, but removing $200 billion from another part of the economy has not cost a single job. They need to be taken to task for such implausible economics.

— Brian Riedl is Grover M. Hermann fellow in Federal Budgetary Affairs at the Heritage Foundation.

One of the biggest upsets at the local level in Tuesday's election was the defeat of liberal Democrat Andrew Spano by Republican Rob Astorino in deep-blue Westchester County, N.Y. How did this happen? Walter Olson spills the beans.

The federally brokered ["affordable housing"] settlement is itself of interest far beyond Westchester, if only as the occasion of a truly remarkable rhetorical flourish from an Obama Administration official, HUD deputy secretary Ron Sims: "It's time to remove zip codes as a factor in the quality of life in America."

If you think "health-care reform" is the most inflammatory phrase in the political lexicon, wait till "affordable housing" gets up to speed. It's been a sleeper up to now -- I wrote about it seven years ago -- but with characters like Ron Sims in charge, this one will really catch fire.

If you care about your neighborhood -- or even just your zip code -- get ready to fight for it.

Sheesh, Mark, I was only opening the thing for discussion.

And where, exactly, was my failure to apprehend the unempirical nature of the Left? Half Sigma, the blogger I quoted, isn't even on the Left. Among his last 20-odd posts I note:

Nov. 4:  "The elites who control the Democratic Party strongly support gay marriage even though it’s not uniformly supported among Democratic voters …"

Nov. 3:  "Good news for people who hate liberals and Democrats …"

Nov. 3:  "All of the other institutions which tell people how to think, such as Hollywood, the mainstream media, colleges and universities, the public education bureaucracy, the Norwegian Nobel Committee, etc., are all controlled by liberals …"

Nov. 2:  "The fact that Scozzafava has endorsed the Democrat, Bill Owens, shows us that she was no good. No real Republican would ever endorse a Democrat …"

Oct. 29:  "The NY Times Magazine preview demonstrates that the MSM still loves the Obamas …"

Some Leftie. As to your assertion that:

The notion that abortion is pro-family because it reduces single motherhood is hard to reconcile with the fact that demographic groups with the highest rates of abortion — such as, say, the African-American community — also have the highest rates of single-parent households …

It seems to me rather easy to reconcile. A high-abortion-rate community with high rates of single-family households, would presumably have even more such households but for abortion. There's your reconciliation right there. Was it really so hard?

The guy is pointing up a conflict between two conservative values: the pro-family one, and the anti-abortion one. He thinks the pro-family one should have more weight. People who think abortion is a profound wrong will of course disagree, duh, but they might still acknowledge the conflict. And other conservatives might, like Half Sigma come down on the other side, for pragmatic reasons, there being at least some possibility of progress there. Thirty years of railing against abortion hasn't accomplished much, has it?

In today's episode of Off the Page, Jay Nordlinger comments on Charles Krauthammer, whom he profiled for the Nov. 23, 2009, issue of National Review.

Conservative Protestant Christians in the market for a study Bible should consider the new Lutheran Study Bible just released by Concordia Publishing House, which uses the formal-equivalent English Standard Version translation. It’s impressively produced, with easily readable type for a work of its size and density; its notes are copious but not quite as overwhelming as those in the excellent ESV Study Bible published last year. (N.B.: Please do not confuse this new Lutheran version from Concordia with the one published under the same title by Augsburg Fortress earlier this year. The Augsburg Fortress edition is very skimpy in the help it gives the reader; and it uses the New Revised Standard Version translation, which, while it is generally accurate and at least somewhat formal-equivalent in its philosophy, sometimes engages in purposeful and clunky mistranslations in order to conform to canons of political correctness.)

On Wednesday, I wrote about the surtax of 5.4 percent on individuals making $500,000 and couples making more than $1 million that the House bill has in mind to pay for the high cost of the health-care reform. Among other things, I said that this surtax, which wouldn't be indexed to inflation, reminded me of the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT). It seems that I am not alone (here and here and here)

The Tax Policy Center has some numbers on the inflation creep that will inevitably occur if this tax is adopted:

TCP figures that just 400,000 taxpayers will pay that increase in 2011, less than three-tenths of one percent of all taxpayers. However, because the millionaire’s surtax is not adjusted for inflation (at least not yet), within a decade many more are scheduled to fall victim to the tax hike. By 2019, TPC figures nearly 800,000 would be in the bulls-eye, although that is still fewer than 1 percent of all taxpayers. Over the decade, the surtax is projected to raise nearly a half-trillion dollars. But because income subject to the surtax does not increase with inflation, annual tax revenues would grow from about $30 billion in 2011 to $70 billion in 2019.

Watch Reagan Library discussions today here.

George Weigel, Peter Robinson, Michael Rubin, Dinesh D'Souza, and more react to President Obama's decision not to go to Berlin here.