Tim Potter: Wichita's graffiti law stirs up worries. My sister's son, Ram Hull, was in the news Monday, stirring up resistance to a new law likely to be approved next week that would criminalize possession of "spray paint, broad-tipped markers and other potential graffiti tools on or within 100 feet of public property." The photo shows Ram violating this law by sketching in a public park. Schools are public property too, although there may be some kind of exception for art students -- at least as long as the city can afford to keep art in the curriculum.

Seems like a parody of other laws which give the police broad discretion to hassle people they take a dislike to. I haven't talked to Ram about this, but one thing I'm struck by is that he has the perspicacity to imagine being the victim of the law -- that he just doesn't see it as something that will be applied to other people. In doing so, he also shows more respect for law than others have who mostly see it as a club for attacking people they don't like.

PS: For much more on this, including some art, goto www.civilmarkers.org.

Dion Lefler: Goyle pushes bipartisan solutions: Kansas politics has regularly been hitting new lows this year. With elected governor Kathleen Sebelius safely tucked away in Obama's cabinet -- taking her away from an open senate contest she was heavily favored for; after all, as long as Obama's in the white house, who needs electable Democrats running for other offices? -- the current Kansas governor was elected lieutenant governor as a Democrat but was previously chairman of the state Republican party. Still, even he has frustrated the state lege from passing America's most draconian anti-abortion bills, so Sam Brownback is giving up his senate seat to do his duty in Topeka. Meanwhile, two of Kansas's three Republican congressmen are running for Brownback's senate seat, or for a cushy job as a corporate lobbyist, whichever comes last -- see Crowson's cartoon for a glimpse at how that's going. Tanker Todd, who's been my hands-down pick for worst member of congress for 16 straight years now, is pretty certain to lose the vote, and win back his job as a Boeing corporate flunky, no doubt with a big payday -- especially if the tanker deal he's devoted so much of his life to comes through.

That leaves Tiahrt's seat vacant, with a wide open Republican primary between Florida multimillionaire Wink Hartman and Tiahrt crony Mike Pompeo, with a couple of minor candidates way short of money -- Jean Schodorf, one of the saner Republicans around, is likely to finish a distant third. On the Democratic side the probable candidate is Raj Goyle, an impressive (and impressively well funded) campaigner to picked off a pretty safe Republican state senate seat a few years back. One interesting point here is that Goyle seems to have raised more money thus far than any of the Republicans -- Hartman is real close, but that's mostly because he's taking money from one pocket and putting it into the other. Especially interesting, given that Tiahrt typically out-raised his opponents by 10-to-1. On the other hand, Goyle is running his campaign so far to the right that he practically belongs in the same strip as Tiahrt and Moran. Of the two state senators in this election, the one who voted to stave off the latest anti-abortion travesty wasn't Goyle; it was Schodorf.

The link above gives you a quick rundown on Goyle's campaign. (For more on the money, see here.) Goyle is "proud to be a fiscal conservative." He voted against a regressive sales tax hike that was the only way the governor could keep the state government from collapsing. He thinks all it's going to take to get the economy going again is tax cuts and small business loans. His yap on closing tax loopholes that export jobs amounts to nothing. If anyone really wanted to halt the offshoring of jobs, the thing to do would be to balance the trade deficit, not the budget.

Other than the budget balancing, there's little of substance to say about Goyle. He's smart, ambitious, flexible, opportunistic -- someone you can never trust or admire, but may wind up voting for when facing a Republican like Hartman or Pompeo. He may even do something worthwhile, but right now he's running to be the bluest dog in Washington. Right now I'm not sure the aggravation is worth it.

PS: The comments with few exceptions are appalling. Must be the readers are getting into the spirit of the season.

Richard Crowson, in the Wichita Eagle today:

The details have to do with Kansas Republicans -- the aside comment deals with Sam Brownback's run for the governorship, which has been the only restraint the last eight years against the far right's machinations -- but if you didn't live here and didn't know the specific news stories you might think they're about your own Republicans. One thing about the GOP is that they march together -- you can't imagine a 3x3 matrix of donkeys in step, even though Obama is the one they all say wants to be a fascist dictator.

Judy L Thomas: Democrats' offices across U.S. attacked: Wichita's Sedgwick County Democratic Party headquarters was one of many sites attacked in the last couple of days in a wave of vandalism, the right's juvenile response to Congress passing an inadequate and long overdue health care reform act. Mostly bricks thrown to smash windows thus far: one brick in Rochester, NY carried Barry Goldwater's "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice" quote. Obviously, "extremism" is a word that suggests acts more ominous than vandalism. The violence implicit in the right's hysteria has never been far from the surface: Jim Geraghty (approvingly) characterized the whole right as "voting to kill." It's a short step from the sentiment to the act, one that needs no more than a few cracked individuals to turn into serious terrorism.

Of course, you're always going to have cracked individuals -- even if it does seem we have more than our fair share. What makes them such a public menace is the way the Republicans and their media thugs have run their scorched earth campaign against health care reform. First, they have totally misrepresented what is in the bill; moreover, they recast it in starkly emotional terms, and they've posited themselves as the last-gasp defenders of our way of life. Now that they've failed within the law they're practically begging their followers to take the law into their own hands. In fact, they've been cultivating the idea of popular revolt against tyranny ever since they came up with their Tea Party scam. So of course this sort of vandalism is going to happen. And of course far worse is going to happen. The only way to dampen it is to hold the leaders responsible. And by leaders I'm not talking about Mike Vanderboegh; more like Michael Steele, Mitt Romney, and the ghost of Barry Goldwater.

Justin Elliott: Tiller Stalker: Ex-AG's Crusade Against Kansas Abortion Doctor Revealed in New Complaint: Ex-AG is Phill Kline, who merited a minor profile in Thomas Frank's What's the Matter With Kansas? even before he became a one-term attorney general. (He was defeated running for re-election by former Republican Johnson County district attorney Paul Morrison, who switched parties to run against him. Morrison then resigned in some sort of mistress-money scandal, by which time Kline had maneuvered his way into Morrison's old job -- the county Republican party was able to appoint the replacement without letting the county vote. Kline soon lost that job too.) Nothing here is really news: it was obvious at the time that Kline was obsessed with Dr. Tiller, and that his main preoccupation was using his office to harass Tiller. Still, if you're not familiar with the details, read the piece.

Probably just a coincidence that Kline is back in the news the same week jury selection has started for the trial of Scott Roeder for murdering Tiller. Roeder's defense attorneys kicked off the trial by trying to use it to subpoena Tiller's business records -- even the man's murder becomes an excuse for a fishing expedition. The attorneys also argued that Roeder's defense will be what they called "imperfect self-defense": that he drove 200 miles to shoot an unarmed Tiller in his church to defend unidentifiable fetuses from their imminent slaughter by Tiller. It will be embarrassing if the jury buys that logic.

No one has established a connection between Kline and Roeder yet, but you have to wonder if they even looked. Both legendary anti-abortion activists hail from the same Johnson County, along with their most notorious competitor, Senator Sam Brownback. It seems unlikely that Kline and Roeder never crossed paths: even though their methods differ, they share a common contempt for the law. Brownback, by the way, is giving up a safe Senate seat to run for governor. It's hard to think of any reason why he should do so other than his desire to use the executive power of the state to advance his holy war against abortion. It will be sad and painful if that happens, but it seems inevitable, if for no other reason than that the Democrats have yet to find a substantial candidate to stand up against this fanaticism.

Two things from the Wichita Eagle worth pointing out. The first is Richard Crowson's editorial cartoon:

Crowson was retired last year when the Eagle decided they didn't need original editorial cartoons, then finally brought back on a very infrequent basis. For more, see Crowson's blog.

Also:

Bill Roy: Health care rationed based on ability to pay: One of the best opinion pieces I've seen on the health care town halls. Lynn Jenkins defeated Democrat Nancy Boyda in the 2008 election, running as a "moderate" Republican (versus a rather uninspiring one-term Blue Dog Democrat), but since she got in her record has been indistinguishable from the other Kansas Republicans: conservative Jerry Moran and rabid fascist Todd Tiahrt (both running for Sam Brownback's senate seat). Roy is a retired MD who served two terms in the House, then lost two very narrow statewide Senate races against Bob Dole. I'm tempted to quote the entire piece, but here's just the start:

I attended a death panel in Holton last week. Rep. Lynn Jenkins, R-Topeka, was the convener and presided.

I don't think anyone went there expecting to participate in a death panel, and even afterward, most don't realize they did. But any group that meets with the specific purpose of denying other people necessary medical care fully qualifies as a death panel. By its action, people die.

Small-town people should have a good idea that people without insurance or money often -- not always -- can't get care. If for no other reason, they should remember the bake sales they have had to raise money to help a neighbor get care for a family member who would die without it.

On the other hand, no one would expect them to have read the 2004 report by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences that estimated 18,000 uninsured people die each year because they don't get timely medical care.

Americans ration health care on ability to pay. If people did not know that before the congresswoman's meeting, they should have when they left, because a neighbor told them how it happens.

A local businessman said he has 15 employees, and only one has health insurance. He cannot afford to buy health insurance for his employees, who earn $12 to $15 an hour, and they cannot afford to buy their own health insurance.

The consequence: "One of our workers died of cancer last year, because he didn't see the doctor until it was too late." There was a short pause. Then those in the crowd, which was heavy with Medicare recipients, went back to expressing fears about what would happen to them if other people had health insurance, too.

Read the whole thing.

By the way, I've started Arnold S. Relman's A Second Opinion: Rescuing America's Health Care. Thus far, it is one of the best books I've seen on the subject. More on that later.

Two letters in The Wichita Eagle this morning. One, from Scott E. Blades, insists "George Tiller was no different from his killer." The chances that Blades knows anything about Tiller beyond what he's sucked up from the papers and talk radio are nil. The other letter is from a physician, Gayle Stephens, who knew Tiller and has something to say worth repeating:

The best part of my life was lived in Kansas, especially Wichita, and I still think of myself as a Kansan. I knew George Tiller well and his father, Jack, even better.

As a physician, I feel profound disappointment that a family physician can be assassinated in Wichita and local physicians can be silent and largely absent from public discourse. If a firefighter or police officer were murdered in the line of duty, their colleagues would rise in anger and protest, call for justice, and attend a public funeral in uniform. They would vow to seek justice and pledge support for the victim's family.

Tiller was a legitimate family physician who practiced medicine as well as performing abortions. He was not a butcher, profiteer, opportunist or fraud. His murder diminishes us all, and nobody is safer or better off because he is dead.

Kansas has a rich history of family doctors, and history will be kinder to Tiller than to the forces that destroyed him or those who stood by silently. His friends, colleagues and beneficiaries cannot allow his memory to be characterized by those who despised him and what he stood for. They must report a fuller public narrative of his life.

Tiller could have used more testimonies like this while he was alive, but modesty, respect for his privacy, and a general reluctance to grapple with assholes are reasons why they weren't much in evidence. Plus most people, starting with his accusers, weren't inclined to look, or consider. In some ways, that is typical of the abortion conflict. The anti-choice side seeks to impose absolute rules on everyone regardless of context; for the pro-choice side context is everything. Absolute certainty regardless of context or consequences is impossible to argue with, as it doesn't allow any grounds for compromise. We should be smart enough to reject any such irrational propositions, but the persistence of the anti-choice movement shows that we aren't.

Some more links relating to Dr. George Tiller's assassination. Most reiterate themes also in my long post yesterday, missing two key points I made: the first is that the fact that there even is a divide over abortion shows how illogical and immature our politics really is; the second is that this heinous act of violence is only thinkable because we live in a society where violence is sanctioned both by popular culture and by our most exalted politicians. (I do not exempt Obama from that statement, although he comes along after others set the example.)

Let me reiterate the first point more schematically: politics is about conflicting interests; where there are no conflicting interests, there should be no political differences. The right to decide when and whether to have children is a private right, which is to say that it's no one else's business. The option of abortion is necessary to realize this right; take it away and you undermine the right. We live in a political system where (for the most part) we recognize that the only reason to limit a private right is when it conflicts with the rights of other individuals (theft and assault are classic examples) or when there is some public interest that circumscribes private rights (the integrity of the commercial system would be a good example here, although there are others, and some are contentious). The only public effect that abortions have is that they reduce the birth rate somewhat. We live in a world where public interests generally favor lower and more selective birth rates with major commitment by responsible parents to raise their children. In other words both public interest and private rights favor the right to abortion, so there should be no political debate.

The political division over abortion is outside and contrary to our basic political system. It is the case of one group of people demanding that the state take rights and freedom away from others. The arguments for doing so are not rational, backed by selective and demagogic reference to a religion that, too, the anti-abortionists wish to impose on others. Do you really want to indulge a thuggish mob who wants to do that?

Oleeb: Who Killed Dr. Tiller? Well, the hate speech exuded by the anti-abortion movement, for starters.

Michelle Goldberg: The Pro-Life Insurrection: Suggests that the Tiller murder isn't an isolated incident; rather, it is part of a growing trend of fringe activity in the anti-abortion movement.

Ann Friedman: Why Clinic Violence is Obama's Problem. One reason is that law enforcement to protect clinics has been lax lately. It's worth adding that the recent vandalism of Dr. Tiller's clinic wasn't referred to the FBI until after Tiller was killed.

Christina Page: The Murder of Dr. Tiller, a Foreshadowing: Contrasts the amount of "pro-life" violence under Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations. E.g.: "In the last year of the Bush administration there were 396 harassing calls to abortion clinics. In just the first four months of the Obama administration that number has jumped to 1401." By the way, it's worth noting that under Bush's restrictive policies, the number of abortions went up. The same numbers had dramatically declined under pro-choice President Clinton.

Jeffrey Feldman: The Politics of "Murder": My point again: "so long as the right-wing anti-abortion movement continues to fold dissent into an ever-expanding definition of "murder," then the right-wing will continue to give rise to activists who kill doctors."

M. LeBlanc: Abortion Is Murder: Why the Right Is Responsible for Domestic Terrorism. Same basic point, developed a bit more. Posted on the Bitch PhD. blog, which is worth trolling through, not least for attitude.

Matt Yglesias: A Kind of Terrorism that Works: In general, the downside of terrorism is the backlash it produces. But if you can control the backlash, as the anti-abortion movement has thus far been able to do, and focus your impact exactly where it most matters: "Every time you murder a doctor, you create a disincentive for other medical professionals to provide these services. What's more, you create a need for additional security at facilities around the country. In addition, the anti-abortion protestors who frequently gather near clinics are made to seem much more intimidating by the fact that the occurrence of these sorts of acts of violence."

Kate Harding: Where will women go now? Good question. Last I heard the number of women's health care clinics performing late-term abortions across the entire country was three. Patients come to Wichita from all over the country, for lack of any real alternatives. This goes over some of the stories. By the way, the main reason for second- and third-trimester abortions isn't procrastination or indifference. It's a serious health problem that has developed in the course of a desired pregnancy.

Michelle Goldberg: The Compassion of Dr. Tiller. Another good review of Tiller's caseload.

The Progress Report: Right-Wing Hate Rears Its Ugly Head: This is really on Sotomayor, written and bookmarked before right-wing hate got really ugly with the Tiller murder. But it's all of a piece, as unhinged and deadly as possible.

Dr. George Tiller was assassinated in his church in Wichita, KS today. He was a doctor who ran a clinic, Women's Health Care Services, that has repeatedly been targeted by Randall Terry's Operation Rescue and other anti-abortion rights activists ever since 1991. Many of those activists attempted to harrass and intimidate patients and personnel of the clinic. Some of those activists resorted to more extreme acts of violence, as in 1993 when one shot Tiller, or when someone bombed Tiller's clinic, or more recently when the clinic's room was chopped open and flooded. One activist, a demagogue named Phill Kline, was elected Attorney General of Kansas, and spent his term using his office to harrass and prosecute Tiller. This eventually resulted in a ridiculous case where Tiller was charged with multiple misdemeanors in violation of a recent Kansas law meant to complicate the lives of abortion providers. (Tiller was quickly acquitted on all charges.)

Laura was asked to write a brief statement for the director of the Wichita Peace Center to deliver at a vigil for Tiller tonight. She wrote:

The peace center mourns the loss of Dr. Tiller, a brave man who stood up for women when others lacked the courage and decency to do so. His support for women in the most dire circumstances will never be forgotten. Heroes like Dr. Tiller are few and far between and we are devastated at his loss.

I didn't really disagree with any of this, but felt that the Peace Center -- which has steadfastly refused to take any position on the abortion rights issue -- would be better served by taking a different tack. I wrote:

The Peace Center mourns the assassination of Dr. George Tiller. As people who have dedicated our lives to resolving social and political problems without resort to violence or intimidation, we condemn anyone who, for any reason or political persuasion, no matter how fervently held, would take the law into their own hands to harm, much less kill, someone who disagrees with them. As much as we are devastated by the loss of Dr. Tiller, we are fearful for a country where elected politicians calmly order and delight in the execution of their enemies. Ever since 1991 ad hoc groups, including former Attorney General Phill Kline, have sought to vilify and harrass Dr. Tiller, proclaiming him their enemy, characterizing him as a murderer. Even those not responsible for pulling the trigger should reflect tonight on their incivility and how much their hatred has contributed to this tragic crime.

This covers about one-quarter of what I actually have to say on the subject. The first thing is that I don't consider abortion rights to be an issue on which there can be any fundamental debate. One side favors reason, personal rights and freedom, the public interest, mutual respect, and civility. The other is stuck in a mire of unreason, emotion, phobia, ignorance, intemperance, and fanaticism. Most political issues represent different interests, which can therefore be compromised. This one does not. Those who oppose abortion rights aren't asserting their own rights; they are claiming rights for a hypothetical group, the unborn, which they have taken such an emotional bond to that they consider abortion to be murder. Once they've made that conceptual leap, compromise becomes unthinkable. They may offer modest-sounding legal proposals, but they will never stop until they have put an end to the murder.

Those who argue that abortion should be prohibited both oppress the most fundamental of personal rights and undermine the broader interests of society. Civilization is based on our ability to understand our environment and manage our lives. The decision whether or not to have a child is one of the most essential and far reaching a woman can make. Decisions depend on choice, and that choice depends on the option to abort an undesired pregnancy. Take that choice away and you deny women the most basic control over their lives. That's as plain and simple an attack on freedom as there is. It's especially an attack on privacy, both because the decision is a personal one and because it has little or no effect on anyone else.

Prohibiting abortion also hurts society because the decisions it spoils keep women from making responsible choices. We depend on parents to guide and provide for their children. That's a tall order, and not one that anyone should enter into lightly. Before someone has a child, we want that person to consciously agree to all that parenthood requires. That act of responsibility is only possible if it's based on a free choice, and that in turn means that there must be an alternative -- which is what the option to abort provides. In this regard, we should not only permit abortion; we should make clear that it is an option, and that deciding not to take it commits one to responsible parenthood.

The fact that there is any debate on abortion rights at all depends on not understanding or caring about these basic points. The social aspect is mostly a matter of ignorance, although it is logically odd that the same conservativism that harps most on the need for individual responsibility should seek to deny women such a basic choice. (One could make the same point about freedom, but conservatives are so hypocritical about freedom it hardly seems worth the trouble.) The personal aspect is more a matter of malice: it says women don't deserve the right to control their own lives.

But then nobody argues rationally against abortion rights. The opponents appeal to emotion, ranging from maternal instinct to fear and disgust with sex and the sense that religious faith and order are decaying, but what gives them traction is their insistence that abortion is baby killing. Once you get people to believe that all reason goes out the window. In that light Tiller is transformed from a doctor who helps his patients get control of their lives to a mass murderer. Once people believe that compromise becomes inconceivable: anything short of jail lets doctors continue the killing, and when the government is unable or unwilling to put a halt to it, some self-righteous martyr is bound to emerge from the crowd and settle things.

The inexorability of this logic is why I think the leaders of the anti-abortion juggernaut should be held responsible for the crime of murdering Tiller. It's hard to write off the repeated threats and acts of violence against Tiller as the work of random miscreants: too many people have gone down that road. This adds up not just because the movement identifies abortion as murder, but because the goal of the movement is to strip people (mostly women) of their rights, and to use force (preferably the force of the state) to do it. Moreover, anti-abortion politics usually is tightly clustered with other agendas which glorify violence, such as support for wars abroad and for capital punishment here. It may seem odd that a movement that calls itself "pro-life" is so rife with violent instincts -- and there are no doubt honest exceptions to this rule -- but the fact is true.

It's worth noting that the Republicans weren't always bound to the anti-abortion movement. Into the 1970s, abortion was often seen as a way to limit the numbers of poor people who would be welfare burdens and in many cases resort to crime. At the time, it was more likely the left who opposed, seeing abortion as a threat to their political base (especially in the third world). The rich could very easily have kept that position, recognizing that finite resources would be unable to support or appease an ever-growing multitude of poor and desperate people. Instead, they figured out a political angle: if Republicans could pick up a sizable chunk of white catholics and baptists they could climb to a majority party, and if all that cost was a plank against abortion and a few sops to racism, patriotism, and religiosity, there was a lot of money to be gained. Besides, as Thomas Frank emphasized in What's the Matter With Kansas?, it's not like they actually had to give up abortion rights, at least not for well-heeled Republicans. So the Republicans put this cluster of political beliefs together and bankrolled it, and the anti-abortion leaders went crazy with it. Now they are stuck with a base of fanatics who seek to destroy much of what we know as civilization.

Various anti-abortion groups issued the usual denunciations and denials in response to the killing of Tiller, although Randall Terry's response included, "George Tiller was a mass murderer. . . . Abortion is still murder. And we still must call abortion by its proper name; murder. Those men and women who slaughter the unborn are murderers according to the Law of God." Terry was the leader of Operation Rescue, which originally targeted Tiller's clinic. If any anti-abortion groups are sincere about their regrets, they should make amends by backing away from describing abortion as murder. That simple claim is pure hate speech. I don't favor passing laws to prohibit hate speech, but I do believe we should be vigilant when it occurs. The claim that abortion is murder implies that doctors who perform abortions are murderers, and that women to seek abortions are responsible for murder, and that politicians and citizens who support abortion rights aid and abet murder; it attempts to conflate multiple abortions into genocide. Such rhetoric inevitably encourages believers to commit violence.

The history of the anti-abortion movement is rife with violent acts. As Gloria Feldt writes: "The murders were only the tip of the iceberg, among over 6000 cases of violence, vandalism, stalking, bombings, arson, invasions and other serious harassment." I would go on to include everyday harrassment and cultural innuendo that is meant to make women feel guilty about considering abortion and to make doctors and clinicians shy away from the subject. It is, for instance, virtually impossible to find a TV show or movie that doesn't sheepishly skit around the issue. There are various laws to make abortion more difficult and more shameful -- the latest one being pushed in Kansas would require that women look at ultrasound images of the fetus before an abortion can be performed. There are billboards and advertisements hectoring the subject, often pushing adoption as an alternative -- evidently there's a sizable market for babies that would otherwise have been aborted. (Combined with the anti-abortion movement's opposition to contraception, this whole aspect reeks of human trafficking.)

Of course, the everyday harrassment just sets people's nerves on end for the real acts of terrorism that have murdered doctors and clinic workers, damaged and destroyed clinics, and served as threats to scare women's health care providers away from even offering an option that is the legal right of all women everywhere in America. The effect of this terrorism isn't just to kill and maim people and destroy property. The real effect is to deny women their rights by intimidating anyone who might normally offer abortion services. The everyday harrassment of health care businesses has driven abortion services from hospitals and general purpose clinics to specialty clinics, much more convenient for the groups and the occsaional fanatic to target. The whole state of Mississippi, for instance, has no abortion services available, despite the fact that abortion is legal. Late term abortions have been so harrassed that there is no more than a handful of clinics in the entire nation willing to consider them -- Tiller's clinic is one of them, a major reason why anti-abortionist groups have attacked Tiller so vehemently (and repeatedly so violently). The assassination of George Tiller isn't personal, limited in scope to him and his clinic. It serves notice to everyone providing even remotely similar services.

There are so many important issues in politics these days that the last thing in the world I want to get into is abortion rights. On the one hand, it is, as I said above, a clearcut issue, not something where there is any fundamental grounds for disagreement. On the other hand, it isn't something that anyone feels any real attachment to. It is something that only rarely comes into play, as a last resort when contraception didn't suffice. One consequence is that you have to be able to think ahead to recognize that there is a need to make sure abortion is an available option. Opponents, however, can obsess freely on the matter. The result is that they are much louder and much more fervent and strident than those who support abortion rights can ever be. They make up in volume what they lack in numbers, making them appear more formidable than they should be in a democracy.

The problem is that democracy in America is lazy. Most people have little or no understanding of more than a tiny handful of issues that most directly affect them. Many figure nothing they can do will have any effect anyway, so they just drop out. In this framework, a well supported fringe position can fool the majority -- the decision to start the 2003 war in Iraq remains a good example, as do the various anti-missile systems which going back to Nixon have never made a lick of sense. Lots of political scams get worked out in closed meeting rooms in DC and never get a public airing at all. Abortion opponents have had some success in prying the levers of power but they haven't gotten very far, mostly because they've remained a small but vocal minority. Typical in this regard is South Dakota, where opponents have gotten measures to outlaw abortion through the state legislature only to be voted down in referendums.

Still, the abortion issue has had a chilling and debilitating effect on public discourse. It's hard to count all the ways that this has happened. You can start with the ultimate reductio ad Madison Avenue: pro-life vs. free choice. The latter at least has something to do with the issue, even if it trivializes it, while the former doesn't even make sense. (I mean, slime mold is life; is that what you're advocating? Reverse those categories and the same holds: "no choice" remains accurate albeit schematic, while "anti-life" is just as nonsensical.) But the larger problem is how the opponents approach political issues. They depend on emotion. They eschew reason. They pump up the volume. They invoke religion, and deprecate the religion of others, vilifying those they oppose. They show no respect for individual rights and they have no concept of how what they want affects public interests. They broker no compromises. They harbor absolutist and totalitarian ideals, even when they cloak them in modest proposals. Their goal is to destroy their enemies, and why not, since they are convinced that their enemies are evil. They fight this issue on all levels, using all sorts of methods -- including civil disobedience and acts of terrorism.

Every aspect of this undermines fair and rational political discourse -- not surprising given that there is no rational basis for prohibiting abortion. So they run with religion, and a major impact of the abortion issue has been the extent to which small sects of politically conservative Christians have tried to impose their religious beliefs on others. They get away with this partly because the religious are able to intimidate the indifferent in American politics -- you see this every election when presidential candidates are scrambling to establish their religious bona fides, even though a great many voters could care less. But also because Americans seem to have a reflex that is willing to criminalize anything that they find disagreeable. This seems odd in a nation that prides itself on freedom and diversity, but through much of that history freedom and diversity were rarely tested by people who seemed to yearn for a middle-of-the-road conformism. The 1960s are often best remembered for repeated shocks to accepted American norms -- the civil rights movement, sexual liberation, widespread dissent against the American empire. The right's response to those shocks has been hysterical and often vicious, a retreat from reality that invokes an imagined past to support a fantastical future. The right has been far more successful politically than it has socially, mostly because politics is seen by so many as irrelevant to their lives. Meanwhile, the social forces that produced those shocks in the 1960s have continued unabated, in many cases becoming so firmly embedded in our society and culture we never give them a second thought.

While conservatives still rant about the 1960s, the feature of the decade that remains most terrifying was the resort to violence. The assassinations of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King are still remembered almost canonically, but there were more, especially directed against the civil rights movement. Long before a tiny fraction of the antiwar movement splitt off to "go underground" the state had harrassed and abused dissenters, both through the courts and more haphazardly. But the key point here is that settling political scores with violence is almost exclusively the province of the right. Nor was this just the occasional crazies who responded to the hate messengers of the day. The 1960s was in fact the heyday of the CIA's assassination policy, with Patrice Lumumba (Congo), Rafael Trujillo (Dominican Republi), and Ngo Dinh Diem (Vietnam) among its victims, Fidel Castro (Cuba) notoriously the one who got away, and Salvador Allende (Chile) one more in the early 1970s as Nixon struggled to keep the worst of the 1960s going.

In response to Watergate, Congress took the CIA out of the assassination business, which more or less held until Bush "took the shackles off" after 9/11. Since then politicians of both parties have been beside themselves with enthusiasm for going out and killing whoever crosses us. While assassination was off the table as national policy domestic terrorism also decreased: the main blip was in the early 1990s, when right-wing hate radio was taking off with its savage attacks on Clinton. It was then that half a dozen abortion providers were gunned down, a spree capped by the Oklahoma City bombing. That the violence lulled may be simply because the right-wing came to power in Congress in 1995 and took over the White House in 2001. Terrorism is usually a policy of weak and desperate fanatics, and from 1995 to 2009 the right was anything but weak. With the Democrats congressional victory in 2006 and Obama's election in 2008, that power equation is changing.

One thing that is clear is that the right hasn't taken defeat in stride. The hate radio jocks are as vicious as ever. Rank and file Republicans have turned into hardcore obstructionists, and their pundits are as disingenuous as ever. It isn't clear yet how many of the people who, in Jim Geraghty's memorable phrase, were "voting to kill" under Bush will decide to, now that their votes are no longer effective, take matters into their own hands, but the assassination of Tiller puts the first mark on the scorecard. It seems likely that there will be more, if only because the right's romance with violence and loathing of other people is so intense.

If so, the assassination of Dr. Tiller will be one of those historical events that punctuate our lives, like the assassinations of King and the Kennedys, and the attacks on 9/11. The chances of this killing turning into a spree would go down significantly if conservatives were sincere in stopping it. To do so they'd have to go beyond the usual denials, and beyond the disciplining of their firebrands. They'd have to admit that their goals, demands, and beliefs are negotiable. They'd have to start respecting those who disagree with them. They'd have to stop characterizing abortion as murder. And they'd have to back down from their conviction that force is a good way to settle disputes. This seems unlikely because it would mean backing down from their deepest beliefs. But as we've seen repeatedly, bad ideas beget bad policies, something that has been proven time and again as right-wing regimes from the aristocracies of the 18th century to George W. Bush have fell in ruins.

Obama could help as well by backing away from his current policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan where he seeks to slay the big Al Qaeda fish that got away from Bush while producing all sorts of collateral damage. Doing so endorses the right's conviction that we can solve our problems by going out and killing out enemies. That is a message that will, as it did in the 1960s, eat away at the very foundation of our democracy and our society, which is our ability to live in peace with people we disagree with. Take that away and the whole nation collapses into chaos.

One last thing. For years of living here in Wichita, I've been bombarded by news about Tiller, invariably repeating his role as a late-term abortionist, along with a steady set of innuendo meant to undermine the man -- one common thing is to try to shame any politician unfortunate enough to receive a contribution from him. Something new has happened since his death: people who worked with him, his friends and colleagues, and his patients have come out to give us a fuller picture of the man, especially his dedication to his patients. It's worth reflecting that this never was just a political issue. It was also a matter of personal service and professional dedication. It's clear now that Tiller warmly touched the lives of many people close to him, even as strangers who never knew or understood him stewed in their rage.

Lead front page article in The Wichita Eagle today is titled "Prison cuts hurt El Dorado." Joe Rodriguez writes:

The closing of the minimum-security unit at th El Dorado Correctional Facility will mean the loss of thousands of hours of inmate labor in the community, officials say.

Officials from El Dorado State Park, the cty of El Dorado and Butler County say they are uncertain how they will make up for the lost labor, which they depend on for jobs such as park maintenance, construction, and landfill maintenance.

Just an idea, but they might consider hiring people in the free labor market. But even in the midst of a depression where unemployment is surging, the costs are troubling:

It may be felt most at El Dorado State Park, where about 16 to 20 inmates work each day, according to park manager Doug Lauxman.

At the park, inmates do jobs such as mowing, weeding, welding and repairing equipment. They are paid $1.05 a day.

Prisons have long been a source of cheap labor in America -- a fact that is little recognized, especially of late since the world's largest gulag has become a voracious sink for government funds. In the post-Reconstruction deep south prison labor was exploited so shamelessly you had to figure it was social revenge for the Union's ending the "peculiar institution" of slavery. At their worst, those prisons had morality rates rivalling Soviet and Nazi slave labor camps. The El Dorado deal sounds relatively benign, but the idea that you can strip people of their rights and force them to work for virtually nothing isn't much different.

The bottom-right corner of the front page also has a McClatchy article: "$96.7 billion war funding bill easily clears House." A big chunk of the article has to do with $50 million allocated to close a much larger and more notorious prison at Guantanamo Bay. Evidently several states have passed laws or resolutions against transferring those "dangerous" prisoners -- not convicted, not even formally charged -- to their states. Still, I'd bet that if if those so-called terrorists were willing to do yardwork and a little welding for $1.05 per day, they'd be welcome at El Dorado State Park.

Conspicuously missing from the article, and most likely from the House deliberations, was any mention of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Page 3 of The Wichita Eagle leads off with an Associated Press article titled "Pope, Israeli PM discuss Iran." The eleven paragraph article barely alluded to the Pope's criticism of Israel's occupation:

The two men [Pope Benedict XVI and Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu] met a day after the pope made a powerful call for Palestinian statehood, a concept that Netanyahu has refused to endorse. They held 15 minutes of face-to-face talks, which the Vatican said "centered on how the peace process can be advanced."

But in televised remarks following the talks, Netanyahu did not mention the Palestinian issue, focusing instead on Iran. [ . . . ]

He [Netanyahu] said Benedict said "he condemns all such things, anti-Semitism, hate," adding: "I think we found in him an attentive ear."

The pope not only called for a renewed peace process and a Palestinian state; he visited a Palestinian refugee camp to make his point. As Paul Woodward points out:

But then comes the image that should overshadow all others: the Pope in a fully operational open-air prison camp. No need to get lost in a debate about whose memories he is giving sufficient attention to -- the visible reality of incarceration is inescapable. The Pope's vaguely Reaganesque moment when he said that walls "can be taken down" not only evoked the fall of the Berlin Wall, but intentionally or not, called attention to the differences between the two barriers. East Berliners were deprived of all sorts of liberties, yet even they enjoyed far greater freedom than Palestinians. The emancipation of those oppressed by authoritarian communist rule was a popular cause among freedom-loving Americans. The emancipation of Palestinians from Israeli oppression . . . oh, that's something we're not even interested in thinking about.

I don't put much stock in the pope as an effective advocate for peace or human rights, but he's eminent enough that even Netanyahu is compelled to put on a show and dance to ignore him.

Joanna Ramondetta: The Blank Page gallery in Delano plans a festive evening Friday. Some sort of event here in Wichita tonight, hooked into "Final Friday," a once-monthly art gallery chaining event. Coincides with the first release of a publication, Blank Page, which my nephew Ram Lama Hull has been stealthily working on. Don't know much more. (I'm out of the proverbial loop on this one.) Newspaper actually printed one of Ram's drawings, but it didn't make the transition to cyberspace. Reportedly, the publication will be online, but I don't know where, and neither does Google.

PS: Online version of Blank Page magazine is here. Image printed in newspaper has been added above -- reportedly a sketch of the principals behind the magazine. (Ram Lama is second from right, not counting dog.)

We had a pretty quiet primary in Kansas yesterday. A couple of things are worth reporting. In particular, Johnson County Republicans spared themselves the embarrassment of nominating Phill Kline for District Attorney. Kline had used his one term as Kansas Attorney General obsessively to harass abortion services throughout the state. He was so monomaniacal about this that Johnson County's Republican District Attorney Paul Morrison switiched parties to run against Kline, winning 58%-41% in 2006. Kline, in one of the great chutzpah moves on Republican political history, revenged himself by moving into Johnson County, wrangling an appointment to fill the remainder of Morrison's term, fired virtually all of Morrison's staff, and spent the last two years conducting his holy war from Morrison's old office.

Because Morrison was elected District Attorney as a Republican, his successor was nominated by a caucus of the county GOP -- fewer than 500 Republicans in a suburban Kansas City county with more than 500,000 people, who gave Kline a margin of 35 votes. Kline lost his bid for a legitimate nomination by a 60%-40% margin.

In the other Republican primary race of note, former US Rep. Jim Ryun lost his bid to run against Nancy Boyda, the Democrat who had defeated him in 2006. Before he was first elected to the House in 1996, Ryun was best known as a legendary Wichita track star, the first high school runner to break the 4-minute mile. Since then, he's become known more as a religious nut case -- his son has a featured role in Michelle Goldberg's report on the Christian right, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism. Ryun lost to the more moderate and more respectable State Treasurer Lynn Jenkins.

So the Republican Party managed to dodge a couple of big time embarrassments. But there are plenty more left on the ballot, including presumably safe Sen. Pat Roberts, sitting on $4 million in payola, and Rep. "Tanker Todd" Tiahrt, with at least $2 million. Both are poster boys for Washington's sleazy corruption, and Tiahrt is another religious nut job, although not quite as unhinged as Ryun. It would be a public service to get rid of both, if only the Democrats are up to fighting the system their complaisance has made possible.

TPM published the following item titled "Like cats to water":

The House last night voted to create an outside panel to review ethics complaints. Let's just say that it passed over very strenuous objections from some quarters.

We've put together some of the best quotes from the debate.

My favorite, from Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-KS): "If you have a single ounce of self-preservation, you'll vote no."

Tiahrt was an actual employee of Boeing before he got elected to the House. No doubt he'll be back on the payroll, with a substantial raise, when we finally get rid of him. Meanwhile, he's been so far up Boeing's corporate ass even Bush has taken to calling him Tanker Todd. He's also been deep into Tom DeLay, who gave him an Appropriations Committee seat. In turn, Tiahrt kicked some of his Boeing money into DeLay's slush fund. I've never gotten the impression that Tiahrt's fingers are particularly sticky, but clearly he knows how money works in Washington. He's a hardcore ideologist, but he doesn't assume that God looks out for him. He's done a lot of practical and expedient things to keep getting re-elected in what isn't a sure Republican district. The one thing he takes more seriously than any principle is self-preservation.

PS: Salon's War Room also singled out Tiahrt's quote.

Michael D Shear and Matthew Mosk: McCain staff tied to Airbus lobbying. The Kansas political world, which is totally in Boeing's hip pocket, is livid over the Air Force awarding its $35 billion tanker boondoggle to Airbus (technically, Northrop Grumman) over Boeing. Caught in the crossfire is John McCain, one of whose few good deeds was working to derail Boeing's previous scandalous one-bid tanker contract in 2004. McCain still cites his role there as preventing $6 billion in fraud. Several Boeing execs wound up in jail as a result, and the whole thing got restarted, with Airbus lobbying hard to get in on the graft. Looks like they won the contract at least partly on merit, but it no doubt helped that they've made major strides in playing Boeing's political game. And while I believe McCain when he says that he never personally lobbied on the issue, it turns out that he's close enough to plenty of lobbyists that it isn't hard to connect dots.

McCain has spoken out for years against the influence of special interests in Washington, but his campaign includes a number of prominent Washington lobbyists, including campaign manager Rick Davis, who founded a lobbying firm.

McCain finance chairman Tom Loeffler and Susan Nelson, who left Loeffler's lobbying firm to be McCain's finance director, both began lobbying for the parent company of Airbus in 2007, Senate records show. William Ball, a former secretary of the Navy and frequent McCain surrogate on the trail, also lobbied for Airbus, as did John Green, who recently took a leave from Ogilvy Public Relations to serve as McCain's legislative liaison.

The conspicuous presence of lobbyists in McCain's campaign has been noted elsewhere, but hasn't really sunken into the public mind, which has conveniently forgotten that McCain only started wearing his scruples on his sleeve after getting caught up in the savings and loan scandal as one of the notorious Keating 5. Given how much play this is getting in Kansas, where Boeing's congressional flunkies are all Republicans, you can imagine how it'll play in Washington, where Democrats predominate -- both support Boeing slavishly, but the exporting jobs issue plays to their base instincts, and they have no reason to cut McCain any slack.

Meanwhile, Wichita Eagle editorial cartoonist Richard Crowson has been groping with the question of why Boeing's having such a hard time competing with Airbus. An earlier cartoon suggested several reasons, like the old saw about government subsidies. (You think Boeing is unsubsidized? Aside from all the cost-plus, reuse-the-technology Defense deals, Kansas has financed Boeing with billions of dollars in state-backed bonds, and every city, state, and country Boeing builds or contracts in has had to pony up for the privilege.) But today Crowson settled on health care costs, and picked an appropriate way to represent them. The little dog in the lower left corner says: "Didn't I see you in Detroit?"

I'm not sure that really explains it in Boeing's case, but then I know some folks Boeing laid off for being diabetic, so I figure they're pretty much on top of their costs there, as they are elsewhere. (Boeing is self-insured, so they have a lot of incentive to grind those costs down.) Still, Crowson is right in general, and it's good to see the point made.

The Eagle also published a letter today from a Merlin C. Hussey, under the title "Boeing is not without blame." It's worth quoting in its entirety:

Some media and politicians argue that awarding the tanker contract to Northrop Grumman and the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Co. would compromise our national security and American jobs. This may be true, but what has Boeing done to negate either of those factors? Twenty percent or more of the 767, including the wing box, is built by Japanese companies in Japan.

In a 2005 paper, authors David Pritchard and Alan MacPherson demonstrated the loss of jobs and transfer of aircraft development technology to Japan by Boeing. They contended this was a result of Boeing's contracts with Japanese airlines and Boeing's low level of research and development and capital investment compared with Airbus.

Example: In 2003, Airbus allocated 9.5 percent of its total revenues toward research and development, compared with 3.5 percent for Boeing. In the same year, Boeing allocated only 0.97 percent of its total revenues to capital investment, compared with 9.1 percent for Airbus. In addition, a minimum of 35 percent of the 787, possibly up to 70 percent, will be built in Japan.

Adding to our selective reasoning is the focus on France and the rest of the European Union while still ignoring the impact of China on U.S. jobs and national security. In 2007, imports from China exceeded exports from the United States by a whopping $256 billion. In 2007, our trade deficit with the entire EU was only $107 billion.

Shouldn't we be asking if the tanker issue is real, or whether we are trying to compensate for our federal government's foreign trade and economic policy failures?

One thing I haven't seen pointed out at all here is that Airbus is working at an enormous disadvantage given how badly the dollar has fallen vs. the euro -- as I recall, the euro has gone from about $0.90 to $1.50 since Bush took office. That in itself makes European labor more than 60% more expensive that it already was, which it already was given that Europe has more effective unions. Boeing is in a constant state of whine about how they have to get their costs down to compete, but it never shows up in the prices of their products, least of all when the US government is buying. Rather, Boeing's entire "competitive advantage" has hitherto been their superior ability to grease political palms. They built this game, and now that they've lost a hand it's hard to see anyone else to blame -- not that they haven't been trying nonstop since the contract dropped, pulling out every stop, even the very real problem of exporting manufacturing jobs, which is something else they've pioneered.

Of course, at this point I hope they do manage to scuttle the Airbus deal. The last thing we need is more tankers able to project American power to the far corners of the earth, imbrogling us in more disastrous wars.

Big local news yesterday was that the Barton Solvents plant in Valley Center, KS -- about 9-10 miles north-northwest of where we live -- exploded around 9AM and burned the rest of the day, spewing toxic fumes, mostly blowing north away from Wichita. Valley Center had to be evacuated. The plant had 36 large tanks of chemicals -- mostly degreasers and paint strippers -- and all 36 burned. The soot was noted as particularly corrosive. The company has played down the long-term risks of the chemicals, some known to be carcinogenic. This is the second major industrial accident turned ecological disaster in Kansas in the last few weeks, following a flood at a Coffeyville oil refinery that spread thousands of gallons of oil and chemicals throughout the town.

This isn't enough data to generalize into any assertions about how the right's pursuit of deregulation and underming of labor, job safety, and environmental regulations may be kicking back at us. But it is clear that whenever anything like this happens, everyone -- industry included -- looks to government to clean up the mess. Whether the Bush administration has stacked the deck to make such accidents more likely is something to look into, but it's certainly the case that Bush has made it harder to respond appropriately to such events.

On the world news, these events were overshadowed by a nuclear power plant in Japan, which leaked radiation due to damage from an earthquake. That's one of those things that critics of nuclear power have warned against for decades now. Offhand, the damage appears to be far less than one could imagine, but the costs to clean it up will no doubt be enormous. The earthquake was rated at 6.8, which is substantial but far from the top of the scale. Japan is very prone to earthquakes, but supposedly also skilled at building around them.

Nuclear power plants, oil refineries, solvent factories -- these have become necessary hazards of everyday life. Under the best of circumstances it is hard to evaluate the real risks they pose. Having them run by private companies in states dominated by crony capitalism makes it all the more difficult. The usual methods of risk assessment, like insurance costs, seem to be falling apart. One wonders whether anyone knows the real risks and potential liabilities of disasters anymore.

I'll be posting a quote from Tony Judt's Postwar on Chernobyl and the ecological disasters in the Soviet Union, which were far worse than anything listed above. Those cases were deeply rooted in the Soviet system, but that doesn't guarantee they can't happen here. Bush capitalism strikes me as converging on some of the worst aspects of the Soviet system: economic command systems outside of public scrutiny and regulation, protected by a cult of secrecy; the belief all problems are political, even to the extent that ideology trumps science; a cynical dependence on propaganda; a cavalier acceptance of corruption. It seems to matter least whether the polluters are private owners or state apparatchiks.