• Joe Biden, a pro-choice Catholic, was elected Vice-President of the United States of America.

• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, another pro-choice Catholic (who has expounded unorthodox doctrine supporting her pro-choice politics), was strengthened with an increased majority.

• The Democratic party, with a stronger-than-ever pro-choice Democratic National Committee 2008 platform "Renewing America's Promise" (link) (link), also gained in the Senate, smoothing the way for President Obama's choice of judges.

• John McCain (pro-life with exceptions) and Sarah Palin (about as radical a pro-lifer as Barack Obama is a pro-choicer) were defeated, and the Republican Party was placed in a serious state of disarray and internal conflict.

• In California, Proposition 4, the Abortion Waiting Period and Parental Notification Initiative, was defeated. (link)
• In Colorado, Amendment 48: Definition of Personhood (defining personhood as beginning at conception) was defeated. (link).
• In South Dakota, Initiated Measure 11 (abortion ban) was defeated. (link)

• In Michigan, the Stem Cell Initiative (allowing human embryo experimentation) passed. (link)
• In Washington, the Aid In Dying Initiative, Initiative 1000 (2008) (allowing physician assisted suicide) passed. (link)

Hat tip to Jill Stanek, for Life will not go on (link).

"Obama's election means Roe v. Wade has been taken off the table for the next 20 or 30 years. Throughout his four- to eight-year tenure, Obama will nominate at least two or three young Supreme Court justices to ensure the majority continues to agree with that decision, forcing the continued legality of abortion on all 50 states for decades."

"So the holy grail for many pro-lifers is now gone. Just get used to thinking of pro-life strategy without it."

Elections have consequences. Barack Obama has moved promptly to gratify the hopes of his pro-choice supporters. Ed Morrissey at Hot Air notes that Barack Obama is set on course as a pro-choice absolutist, and predicts outrage by pro-lifers (link).

Not necessarily. That is what Michelle Malkin would recommend (link), and she'd be right. But with no obviously viable endgame left to play for and no doubt about what America has voted for, pro-lifers may simply be shattered.

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In doing this, our moderate left government is only carrying on what was begun by the moderate right Howard government. There is nobody to support, if you believe in unfettered free speech on the Internet. The bipartisan consensus is against it - and with China.

"Groups including the System Administrators Guild of Australia and Electronic Frontiers Australia have attacked the proposal, saying it would unfairly restrict Australians' access to the web, slow internet speeds and raise the price of internet access."

When I was participating in public protests against the Howard government's legislation on censoring the Internet (which was pretty toothless, but which I and others thought would put us on a slippery slope, which it has, obviously), I took every opportunity to talk to fellow protesters, including the systems admin. guys who were so prominent in the cause for obvious reasons, to suggest to them that we shouldn't only be addressing the immediate problem of this piece of legislation, right now; instead we should be for formal, constitutional protection of freedom of speech, such as Americans have in their Bill of Rights. Everybody, without exception, was out of sympathy with that idea. So I gave up. There is no substantial body of people, even driven by self interest, that is interested to fight for free speech in a principled way.

So I guess we'll slide further down the slippery slope.

This conforms to the usual way rights are lost in a "slippery slope" effect. (Here is an article on how gun rights were lost in the United Kingdom that outlines the general model for losing rights: (link).) In particular, when technology changes the way a traditional right can be exercised, as with the Internet now or with the introduction of revolvers in the United Kingdom, it's thrown into doubt as the new possibilities are examined in the light of the worst and most inflammatory possible abuses - mass shootings with deadly multi-shot revolvers, child porn, whatever. Unless you have a zealous and belligerent lobby objecting to even "reasonable" infringements of the right in the light of new technology and making it taboo to support abridgments of the rights, the tendency is for those who enjoy the right to prove they are reasonable people (not "gun nuts", not addicted to child pornography and so on) by agreeing to reasonable restrictions. These grow and grow and grow, and once you have conceded that there is no fundamental, absolute principle at stake on your side, it is very hard to resist them. (Read The Whole Thing.)

One of the reasons I abhor anti-Americanism is, I think that the magnetism of the principled free speech American model is one of the few things that people who strongly believe in a principled approach to certain freedoms have going for us.

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To play the game in this new and more effective way requires mainstream media cover. (At least until taboos on foreign money fade.) Barack Obama has that.

It also requires that the supporters of his own party are willing to go along with the new model. Apparently Barack Obama has that support too.

With those advantages, Barack Obama can afford to aggressively suppress criticism (link). This too appears to be part of the new model.

And, as if Barack Obama didn't already have media cover, fake hate crime victim Republican campaign worker Ashley Todd has made his campaign immune to charges of intimidation. Given her criminal, inflammatory and racist false accusations, Republicans can't say anything credibly on this score - and Democrats aren't excessively troubled by Democrat pressure.

Government funded mass partisan support seems to be part of the new model too. But even if Obama did not have enough media support to cover ACORN - and he seemed to have ample cover - Republican fraud, combined with unsupported accusations of partisan bias against California Secretary of State Bowen, have left Republicans no basis to speak credibly on this issue either.

Obama has also displayed an impressive ability to make his radical past a non-issue, along with his radical associates. This has already been discussed to death.

So we have a new election-winning model before us, being demonstrated to its best advantage under ideal conditions by - I think it has to be said - a political genius, a man who has seized and used a decisive advantage in the money race, exactly where his side of (left, relatively radical) politics has been so disadvantaged till now that it's been denied a chance to show its worth in government. Key elements of the new model are:

• Overwhelming mainstream media support (including lack of interest in his illegal activities)
• A vast money advantage intentionally boosted to an unknowable but likely large extent by foreign and other illegal donations
• Government funded mass partisan support
• Intimidation and suppression of criticism.

The first two elements are key. The second two elements, despite being perhaps more inflammatory, are peripheral. They merely leverage a great advantage in what one candidate can get away with.

(If "the rules" don't really apply to you, why not take some free kicks, if you're so inclined? And after eight long years of chafing under "selected not elected" George W. Bush, some Democrats, including Barack Obama campaign workers, are so inclined.)

None of this should be taken to imply that the Republican Party doesn't deserve a merciless electoral beating this year.

It's just that the Republicans are being beaten not only by the economy and their own numerous weaknesses and missteps but also by a masterfully implemented new model, one that they not only have no answer to but that they complacently assumed couldn't exist, because the new model is a global model, and the Republican Party hasn't thought globally till now.

The new model is also in at least one aspect of its key elements an illegal model, and while the Republican Party has not historically lacked ardor for both criminal actions and the greatest possible money advantage (see: Richard M. Nixon), it's been thinking small compared to what the global financial / electoral battle-space requires. It's been able to imagine stealing an election, and wanting to. But it's never imagined The Big Steal.

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People commonly kill helpless, un-offending human beings, innocents who have not wronged them in any way, because they can and they gain by it. The gain can be material, as in an uninterrupted university career, or psychic, as in a sense of control of one's life.

In the Australian "baby bonus" case, the gain is clear cut, and so is the lesson. When there are helpless human beings in the power of other human beings, when there is a way to gain from the deaths of those who can't protest or fight back, and when killing is made legal, safe and as far as possible stigma-free, then killing will ensue. Incentives work.

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From the Telegraph story linked above: Human tissue could be taken from the mentally infirm without their consent and used to create embryos for experimentation, under Government proposals added to a controversial bill.

On Wednesday MPs will vote on a bill which would allow the creation of human/animal hybrid embryos to be used for stem cell research, change the conditions for granting IVF, and possibly liberalise the abortion laws.

...

It can now be revealed that a Government amendment, agreed after the main parliamentary debates, would allow tissue to be used from people who lack the "mental capacity" to give consent, children whose parents give permission, and anyone who has previously donated samples to hospitals for medical research but can no longer be traced.

...

"Under the amendment, if a person was deemed unable to give consent their carer would make a decision on their behalf. If the person did not have a carer, researchers would nominate a person to make the judgement. If scientists wanted to use human tissues already donated for research, perhaps during a medical procedure, but were unable to trace the donors because the research had been anonymised or the person had moved house, the samples could also be used."

...

Catherine Elliot, from the Medical Research Council, said such research could provide a "powerful tool" to examine the development and treatment of different diseases. She said research would "rarely" be carried out without consent, because under the amendment, ethics committees must be satisfied the same research could not have been carried out using tissue from patients who had granted permission.

In general, when human beings figure out a way to benefit by doing debatable things to other human beings who can't fight back, whether it's the direct profit of chattel slavery or the benefits of enjoying a freer sex life without having one's career interrupted by childbirth, they go ahead and do it, and revise morality and law as much as is needed to bless profitable practices with acceptability.

If there's anything the progress of the judge-driven legalization of gay marriage should have taught us, it's that slippery slopes are real. When powerful elites in society are determined to have something all the way, as far as they want, and they press for it constantly and often secretively, without regard for past assurances or expectations of moderation (as in this case, where public assurances that consent was fundamental were set aside behind closed doors), then the changes to law and morality that take place can be so radical that anyone forecasting early in the process what would come later would have been mocked; and compromise positions are in reality compromised positions - untenable and swiftly swept away, like the domestic partnership laws that courts are making into mandates for the gay marriage laws that they were supposed to be instead of.

Safeguards in medical decision-making are sufficiently widely honored in the breach that when the case for further liberalization of, e.g. the laws on assisted suicide is pressed, this is a typical argument: doctors are making these decisions, and acting on them, all the time anyway, and it would be better and less hypocritical for the law to accept it. So there is not much reason to think that guardians of the rights of potential involuntary donors appointed by researchers are not going to give researchers what they want.

Clearly, medical researchers now see profit in getting hold of every bit of tissue that might be valuable to them, and alterations to law and morality to let them get at the goodies whenever they really want to - consent or no consent - are now far advanced behind the scenes. There is no reason to think that pressure to alter law and morality in this direction will end with this legislation in the United Kingdom, whether it passes now or is held up, or that similar proposals will not make their way to whichever country you live in.

This seems like a new Kelo: a warrant for the powerful to take from the powerless what they have, as long as there is some plan, with no binding requirement that the plan be carried out or its benefits be real. Only in this new case the property taken is human tissue, not real estate.

There was a substantial political and legal reaction to Kelo, though it's doubtful if the reaction has been enough to remedy the damage to property rights it did.

What should the political and legal reaction be to proposals to remove consent requirements when researchers want to take human tissue?

Given that compromise solutions often prove to be untenable and slippery slope accelerators for elites who want law and morality altered, and given that medical research is a worthwhile cause (which it certainly is) what worthwhile and acceptable reactions can there be?

Or, is it better to depoliticize such alterations in the balance of property rights, and entrust the alteration of these rights, as far as possible, to back-room committees and institutions such as the courts, that don't have to fear much interference from naysayers and neo-luddites?

Update: the bill passed overwhelmingly, 355 to 129 (link)

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A charge repeated by conservative pundits is that Sarah Palin represents continuity with George W. Bush in scorning ideas - not just some ideas, while she likes others (perhaps the wrong ones), but all ideas, entirely. Sarah Palin represents mere party, and is against thought as such.

David Brooks: Bill Buckley "He thought it was important to have people on the conservative side who celebrated ideas, who celebrated learning. And his whole life was based on that, and that was also true for a lot of the other conservatives in the Reagan era. Reagan had an immense faith in the power of ideas. But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I'm afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices."

Peggy Noonan: "I gather this week from conservative publications that those whose thoughts lead them to criticism in this area are to be shunned, and accused of the lowest motives. In one now-famous case, Christopher Buckley was shooed from the great magazine his father invented. In all this, the conservative intelligentsia are doing what they have done for five years. They bitterly attacked those who came to stand against the Bush administration. This was destructive. If they had stood for conservative principle and the full expression of views, instead of attempting to silence those who opposed mere party, their movement, and the party, would be in a better, and healthier, position."

One one side: persecution, prejudice, party conformism and hatred of ideas and thought; and on the other side: true conservatism, independence, courageous speech, and ... the wonderfulness of Barack Obama.

Again, David Brooks can speak for many, including Chris Buckley: "Obama has the great intellect. I was interviewing Obama a couple years ago, and I'm getting nowhere with the interview, it's late in the night, he's on the phone, walking off the Senate floor, he's cranky. Out of the blue I say, 'Ever read a guy named Reinhold Niebuhr?' And he says, 'Yeah.' So i say, 'What did Niebuhr mean to you?' For the next 20 minutes, he gave me a perfect description of Reinhold Niebuhr's thought, which is a very subtle thought process based on the idea that you have to use power while it corrupts you. And I was dazzled, I felt the tingle up my knee as Chris Matthews would say."

To put it mildly, floods of critical emails from more partisan Republicans are not an answer to this. As Peggy Noonan boldly and correctly said in the article linked: "At any rate, come and get me, copper."

But, it's hard to work out what's going on here.

The simple answer that Sarah Palin is every bit as bad as her conservative critics say, and so they're telling the truth as they always do, doesn't seem to cover everything that needs to be explained.

First, conservative pundits haven't been noted in the past for going this hard and early to drive Republican candidates from the ticket, not even in Dan Quayle's case.

Maybe Sarah Palin is just worse, though I think that view has to rest on a lot of amnesia about Dan.

Or maybe Republican pundits are just a lot less partisan than they used to be. But that doesn't seem likely. Partisanship seems to be increasing, in general. The Left is eagerly making an example of any hick from the sticks who dares speak a word out of place. (Just ask "Joe the plumber".) That's partisanship.

Second, Sarah Palin does seem to have ideas that are not universally and credibly held in the Republican Party. Here she is, expressing her pro-life views with clarity, in "one of the most red-meat social con speeches you’ll ever read": (link)

(This is not pandering, which is what Republicans often do, and which need not involve really holding any ideas at all. "Pandering" is what some Republicans are doing when they oppose gay marriage, but only in even-numbered years. Actual opinions on the topic at hand don't enter into that kind of behavior. What Sarah Palin is doing in this clip is completely different: someone who both talks the talk and walks the walk is explaining exactly where they stand and why.)

For the kind of people that feel a more natural sympathy for Rudi Giuliani, who like Sarah Palin has expressed his family values both in speeches and his own family life, these naturally would be hateful ideas, but they are ideas, and very definite ones.

(And in any case, Rudi Giuliani was never loved by conservatives mostly for his social views, gun-grabbing etc., rather it was his role as "America's mayor" that was his main draw, so "what we really want is Rudi Giulini but the rubes in the Republican primaries wouldn't give him to us" is probably not the right explanation for conservative pundits' novel reaction to the party ticket.)

George W. Bush has loved ideas too. I think he's wrong about which ideas to love, but the man is a steady reader of books, and he does not lack ideological convictions.

So this scorn for ideas as such seems like an odd criticism, unless these conservative pundits are saying that ideas they don't like are not ideas at all. And they can't mean that, because they admire Barack Obama, whose ideas they express disapproval of.

Third, Kathleen Parker's recommendation that Sarah Parker leave the Republican ticket and the party would be saved ignored a) that the Republican Party was in very bad shape even before John McCain (of McCain-Feingold and McCain-Kennedy fame, among other offenses to conservatives) nominated Sarah Palin as his running mate, and b) that there was no chance this suggestion could be accepted, at all or without John McCain effectively declaring his candidacy ended and ceding the presidency unopposed to Barack Obama, and c) the question of who the replacement would be. And this seems to be fairly normal, in the senior conservative pundits' case against Sarah Palin.

If conservative critics who wanted Sarah Palin removed from the Republican Party like a fatal cancer were wild fans of, e.g. Governor Tim Pawlenty, and convinced that once Sarah Palin was gotten rid of their man would jump into her spot and put the country to rights, that would make sense. But nothing like that is happening. Sarah Palin's critics seem in many cases (but not in Charles Krauthammer's case) to be warmly attracted to Barack Obama, and quite uninterested in who takes second spot on the Republican ticket, as long as it's not Sarah Palin.

Though many people in the mainstream media find Barack Obama very lovable, and in a sense it's not surprising that a subset of this friendly population - conservative pundits - are also friendly to him, this adds up to a pattern that does not match what one usually sees from partisan pundits in the last few weeks of a national election.

I don't understand this new pattern. So I'm throwing this out to Winds of Change readers: what do you think is going on? Why are conservative pundits acting in a way they didn't in the past, even when the Republican candidate for vice-president was performing badly?

And what if anything does it imply about the present state of the GOP and its likely leadership, ideology and prospects in the years to come?

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What are any of us but doomed, tiny creatures in an immense universe? Can we face our personal dragons better than this mouse faced its? Are we sure that we will do as well, within the limits of our circumstances, when we are put to the ultimate test?

I think it would be appropriate if this mouse was spared and set up for the rest of its natural life as a model of active courage for human beings to emulate.

There are heroes everywhere, if we are humble enough to see them, and if our eyes are kind enough to see merit where it truly exists.

These heroes can make the difference between the lowest selfish brute, un-animated by so much as a superstition, never mind an ideal, and the greatest and most daring feats of faith and civilization-building that mankind is capable of.

Even though vermin is still just vermin.

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