With the attacks on Syrian civilians seemingly getting worse by the day, the United Nations Security Council took up a resolution that would back efforts by the Arab League to bring an end to the crackdown, an effort that collapsed in failure as both Russia and China exercised their veto power:

UNITED NATIONS — A United Nations Security Council effort to end the violence in Syria collapsed in acrimony and a veto by Russia and China on Saturday, hours after the Syrian military attacked the ravaged city of Homs in what opposition leaders described as the bloodiest government assault in the nearly 11-month-old uprising.

The Security Council voted 13 to 2 in favor of a resolution backing an Arab League peace plan for Syria, but the measure was blocked by Russia and China, which opposed what they saw as a potential violation of Syria’s sovereignty.

Pressure had mounted on the Security Council to act as Syrian opposition leaders said more than 200 people were killed in the attack in Homs, and the White House accused Syria of having “murdered hundreds of Syrian citizens, including women and children.”

While the casualties were impossible to confirm, and were denied by Syria, reports of the bloodshed drew widespread international condemnation, and moved the Security Council toward a vote on an Arab League peace plan, despite new objections by Russia.

President Obama condemned what he called “the Syrian government’s unspeakable assault against the people of Homs,” saying in a statement that President Bashar al-Assad “has no right to lead Syria, and has lost all legitimacy with his people and the international community.”

The French foreign minister, Alain Juppé, said, “The massacre in Homs is a crime against humanity, and those responsible will have to answer for it.”

Protests broke out Saturday at Syrian embassies around the world, including in Egypt, Germany, Greece and Kuwait, and Tunisia expelled Syria’s ambassador there.

Security Council members met Saturday morning to try to resolve disagreements with Russia, Syria’s main ally, which had promised to veto any resolution that could open the way to foreign military intervention or insist on Mr. Assad’s removal.

But the resolution’s sponsors pushed the measure to a vote anyway, virtually daring Russia to exercise its veto and risk mounting international opprobrium for preventing action to stanch the escalating death toll in Syria. In the end, both Russia and China exercised vetoes.

Russia’s last-minute changes appeared to be another attempt to create equivalency between the Syrian government and the armed elements in the opposition, including by removing all the wording that detailed human rights violations by the Assad government.

Arab and Western ambassadors said they had compromised enough to meet the demands of Russia and other skeptics. The resolution that was defeated said that the Council “fully supports” the Arab League plan, which calls for Mr. Assad to cede power to his vice president and a unity government to lead Syria to democratic elections. But specific references to Mr. Assad’s ceding power and calls for a voluntary arms embargo and sanctions had been deleted from the Security Council resolution, and language barring outside military intervention was added.

Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said that Moscow still had two objections to the latest revised resolution: that it did not place sufficient blame for the violence on the opposition, and that it unrealistically demanded that the government withdraw its military forces back to their barracks.

If nothing else, this vote makes it plain that international action of any kind in Syria is not going to be nearly as easy to pull of as the Libyan operation was. In that case, the U.S. was able to get Russia and China to abstain from voting rather than exercising their vetoes. That’s clearly not going to happen this time.

Of course, the other side of the equation is what should happen in Syria, or at least what the West should do. International intervention along the lines of what happened in Libya wouldn’t seem to be the answer, especially considering that the Syrians don’t seem to be using air power against civilians and rebelling military elements the way the Libyans did. Instead, they’re engaging in large scale urban warfare in the cities that have been sympathetic to the rebels. That’s likely to be far more difficult to combat from the air, and I seriously doubt that there’s any nation on Earth that would be willing to send ground troops into Syria at this point. Then there’s the unknown factor of how Syria’s terrorist allies in Lebanon might react to outside intervention in Syria. In the long run, the Assad regime is clearly doomed, the question is how long they’re going to be able to hang on and how much damage they’ll be able to do on the way down.

Someone took a clip of a Romney/Gingrich debate exchange, added in a classic comedy routine, and had a little fun:

For some reason, various Tea Party groups across the nation have taken it upon themselves to take up a new cause, and it reads like something straight out of a John Birch Society conspiracy pamphlet:

Across the country, activists with ties to the Tea Party are railing against all sorts of local and state efforts to control sprawl and conserve energy. They brand government action for things like expanding public transportation routes and preserving open space as part of a United Nations-led conspiracy to deny property rights and herd citizens toward cities.

They are showing up at planning meetings to denounce bike lanes on public streets and smart meters on home appliances — efforts they equate to a big-government blueprint against individual rights.

“Down the road, this data will be used against you,” warned one speaker at a recent Roanoke County, Va., Board of Supervisors meeting who turned out with dozens of people opposed to the county’s paying $1,200 in dues to a nonprofit that consults on sustainability issues.

Local officials say they would dismiss such notions except that the growing and often heated protests are having an effect.

In Maine, the Tea Party-backed Republican governor canceled a project to ease congestion along the Route 1 corridor after protesters complained it was part of the United Nations plot. Similar opposition helped doom a high-speed train line in Florida. And more than a dozen cities, towns and counties, under new pressure, have cut off financing for a program that offers expertise on how to measure and cut carbon emissions.

“It sounds a little on the weird side, but we’ve found we ignore it at our own peril,” said George Homewood, a vice president of the American Planning Association’s chapter in Virginia.

The protests date to 1992 when the United Nations passed a sweeping, but nonbinding, 100-plus-page resolution called Agenda 21 that was designed to encourage nations to use fewer resources and conserve open land by steering development to already dense areas. They have gained momentum in the past two years because of the emergence of the Tea Party movement, harnessing its suspicion about government power and belief that man-made global warming is a hoax.

In January, the Republican Party adopted its own resolution against what it called “the destructive and insidious nature” of Agenda 21. And Newt Gingrich took aim at it during a Republican debate in November.

Tom DeWeese, the founder of the American Policy Center, a Warrenton, Va.-based foundation that advocates limited government, says he has been a leader in the opposition to Agenda 21 since 1992. Until a few years ago, he had few followers beyond a handful of farmers and ranchers in rural areas. Now, he is a regular speaker at Tea Party events.

Membership is rising, Mr. DeWeese said, because what he sees as tangible Agenda 21-inspired controls on water and energy use are intruding into everyday life. “People may be acting out at some of these meetings, and I do not condone that. But their elected representatives are not listening and they are frustrated.”

Fox News has also helped spread the message. In June, after President Obama signed an executive order creating a White House Rural Council to “enhance federal engagement with rural communities,” Fox programs linked the order to Agenda 21. A Fox commentator, Eric Bolling, said the council sounded “eerily similar to a U.N. plan called Agenda 21, where a centralized planning agency would be responsible for oversight into all areas of our lives. A one world order.”

This reminds me of Dan Maes, last year’s Republican candidate for Governor who said at one point that Denver’s plan to increase the number of bicycle lanes on city streets was part of some United Nations plot.

Maes ended up coming in third behind the eventual winner John Hickenlooper and Tom Tancredo, who entered the race as a third party candidate shortly after Maes made those bizarre comments. Nonetheless, it points to an element of the Tea Party movement that I’ve noticed from the beginning.  While It certainly cannot be said to be true of everyone who choose to identify themselves with the movement, there is clearly a certain element that isn’t all that much different from the same paranoid wing of conservatism that William F. Buckley Jr. worked hard to bar from the conservative coalition back in the 1950s.

He succeeded back then, but those people never really went away. Groups like the Birch Society stuck around in the shadows of American politics, as did others, including magazines like The Spotlight, whose mailing list Ron Paul used in the 19 90s to sell subscriptions to a newsletter that became increasingly obsessed with odd conspiracy theories. The 90s saw this movement revive itself in the form of the militias, the people who believed that black helicopters laden with United Nations troops were just over the horizon, and the various insane conspiracy theories that grew around the Clinton Presidency. It was the ideology and movement that gave birth, in at least some sense, to Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nicholas and the deaths of 168 people in Oklahoma City in 1995. And now it’s found a home back inside the conservative movement that had once shunned it.

There are plenty of legitimate issues to debate when it comes to development issues and the extent to which governments at all levels are attempting to control the manner in which people can use and dispose of their private property. It’s a debate worth having and one that people should get involved with at the local level if they are truly concerned about it. Living in the delusion that it’s some kind of United Nations plot, however, is neither helpful to any cause nor does it make people tend to think that you’re a person worth listening to. If the Tea Party movement wonders why some people don’t take them seriously, it’s because they allow people like this in their ranks.

Nanny Bloomberg (D R I) and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino (D) have thoughtfully provided us with an excellent opportunity to take a bathroom break without missing any of this year’s crop of clever Super Bowl commercials. They’re going to run a spot hawking Mayors Against Illegal Guns, the gun-control group they founded in 2006 whose major accomplishment to date is having amassed a membership with a criminal conviction rate an order of magnitude higher than CCW permit holders.

Somehow, I suspect the ad will fail to mention that fact.

Regarding why he did not congratulate Mitt Romney on his Florida win, Newt Gingrich said the following:

"They outspent me five to one to quote destroy Newt Gingrich?" Gingrich said in an interview on CNN’s "The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer." "You know, I think that doesn’t deserve congratulations. I think that’s reprehensible, I think it’s dishonest, and I think it’s shameful."

I can understand why he feels that way.  However, this is the kind of thing one typically keeps to oneself.

Further, Gingrich is complaining about the established rules of the game.  If he truly believes what he is saying I look forward to his post-election crusade to radically restructure American campaign finance and the like.  It would, no doubt, be entertaining.

Newt Gingrich won’t be holding the traditional post-caucus victory party in Nevada tonight, and that has led some to wonder about the state of his campaign:

Instead of the traditional election night party, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich will hold a press conference after the Nevada Caucus on Saturday, raising new speculation about his future in the race.

An e-mail sent to reporters on Saturday morning set the Las Vegas press conference for 11 p.m. to midnight Eastern time.

Gingrich has had a rough time on the trail ahead of the Nevada Caucus, the first presidential contest in the West. Sources in or close to his campaign gave reporters incorrect information that Donald Trump would endorse Gingrich (he endorsed rival Mitt Romney). Gingrich also missed a meeting with the Silver State’s popular governor, Brian Sandoval, a Rick Perry supporter who was viewed as a possible Gingrich endorsement after Perry dropped out and endorsed the former House Speaker, according to The New York Times.

Some are wondering if this means Gingrich will announce something about the future of his campaign tonight, but it seems unlikely.

In today’s New York Times, Gail Collins opens a column about the Susan G. Komen Foundation/Planned Parenthood controversy that arose this week by observing the extent to which nearly everything in our society ends up becoming politicized:

This week we had a huge political fight about breast cancer. Clearly, we have now hit the point where there’s nothing that can’t be divided into red-state-blue-state.

Nothing. The other day I saw a blog called “I Dig My Garden” that had a forum on whether Republicans could truly love gardening. And there was a little dust-up in Albany over politicization of a local pet blog, which had featured a discussion on Mitt Romney’s driving to Canada with the family dog strapped to the roof of the car.

But breast cancer would seem like the last thing to go. Everybody hates cancer and everybody likes breasts — infants, adults, women, men. Really, it’s America’s most popular body part.

Indeed, part of the reason for the overwhelming success that the Komen Foundation has had over the years is the extent to which it has been able extend its pink ribbon campaign into so many different parts of our culture. You see pink-adorned packages in grocery stores, for example, and both the NFL and Major League Baseball have taken up the cause at various points during their respective seasons. Some on the outside have criticized Komen in this regard because of its aggressiveness in defending its trademarks, not to mention the fact that it often seems that “Breast Cancer Awareness” crowds out attention that should also be paid to other diseases, some of which are even deadlier. Nonetheless, up until this week, it was hard to think of anything more non-political than being against breast cancer and in favor of the most well-known foundation dedicated to fighting it.

That’s all over now, of course. I don’t know how long Komen has been giving grant money for early breast cancer screenings to Planned Parenthood, but I can honestly say that until this week I neither had any idea that they were doing it, nor would I have particularly cared had I found out about it. For reasons that are worthy of a post all its own, though, Planned Parenthood has become a political lightning rod in recent years thanks largely to the fact that a relatively small portion of what it does, by most reasonable estimates no more than 10% per year, includes abortion services (not the 90% that Jon Kyl once claimed and then deleted from the Senate record after his staff emphasized that what he said was “not intended to be a factual statement.”) Its understandable why people who feel strongly about that issue would have strong opinions about Planned Parenthood, but when one takes into account the fact that the organization also provides services to poor women, including providing contraceptives and screenings for breast and cervical cancer, the notion that the entire organization and anyone who donates to it must be condemned strikes me as completely nonsensical. (Note that I am not addressing here the issues surrounding Federal funding of Planned Parenthood, which is an entirely separate issue in my mind, although it is worth noting that polling indicates that the public opposes the Republican position on that issue).

In a rational world, it strikes me that one should be able to make a distinction between those aspects of an organizations practices one approves, and those one does not. In Komen’s case, they had obviously made the determination that helping to fund Planned Parenthood’s early breast cancer screenings was compatible with the mission of the Foundation which they have described in the past as including both funding research to find a cure for breast cancer and increasing the survival rate for those diagnosed through better early detection methods. As with any form of cancer, the early breast cancer is detected, the more likely it is that someone will survive. Viewed from that perspective alone, the decision to provide grants to organizations like Planned Parenthood makes perfect sense.

Of course, once an issue that people feel strongly about gets involved, the possibility for rational discussion goes out the window. When Komen decided to cut off the grant to Planned Parenthood, pro-choice groups reacted negatively and rallied around Planned Parenthood. Now that they’ve changed their mind, it appears that pro-life groups are reacting the same way. For the most part, this is because it appeared from the beginning that Komen’s decision was based in politics, not in any objective evaluation of whether or not the grant was in the Foundations interest. So, whether it intended to or not, the Komen Foundation has now become known as an organization that took sides in the culture war, then switched sides, under circumstances that look perfectly amateurish from a Public Relations point of view.

Why these seemingly simple health issues should become so politicized is the question Collins asks.

But of course, it’s not just health issues that seem to have become politicized. Just this past fall, while he was leading the Denver Broncos to a series of seemingly improbable come from behind victories, a young Quarterback named Tim Tebow found himself the latest battleground in the culture wars. Tebow’s successes were touted by many Christians as proof of the power of his faith, and his losses were often cheered by obnoxious atheists like Bill Maher.  Tebow was even being courted by Republican candidates for President for an endorsement. To his credit, Tebow didn’t encourage any of this nonsense and remained far more sanguine about his success than the people who had latched on to him. Nonetheless, just like women’s health for a time something as seemingly non-political as professional football quite literally became a football itself in the culture wars.

Those are just two examples of how seemingly innocent subject have become politicized for no rational reason. Some of it, no doubt, is based on cultural differences between different parts of the country, but that alone doesn’t explain it all.  Perhaps it’s a reflection of how polarizing the Red State/Blue State divide has become in recent years that even the things that should unite us end up dividing us. Perhaps it’s the pervasiveness of the cable news/talk radio culture.  Whatever the cause, it doesn’t strike me as very healthy that we have, as Collins notes, reached a point where quite literally anything can become a battleground between Team Blue State and Team Red State.

Byron York wondered on Twitter this morning if it wasn’t time for a Republican politician to call the bluff of various musicians who challenge candidaates’ right to use licensed music at campaign events. The linked NYT article doesn’t shed any new light on the controversy but the accompanying picture did:

One wonders why any Republican politician would want to be associated with this image.

The birther movement suffered yet another totally predictable setback yesterday when a Georgia Administrative Law Judge ruled that President Obama was eligible to be President under the Constitution and would appear on Georgia’s ballot:

President Barack Obama’s name will remain on the Georgia primary ballot after a state law judge flatly rejected legal challenges that contend he can not be a candidate.

In a 10-page order, Judge Michael Malihi dismissed one challenge that contended Obama has a computer-generated Hawaiian birth certificate, a fraudulent Social Security number and invalid U.S. identification papers. He also turned back another that claimed the president is ineligible to be a candidate because his father was not a U.S. citizen at the time of Obama’s birth.

The findings by Malihi, a judge for the State Office of Administrative Hearings, go to Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who will make the final determination. Last month, at a hearing boycotted by Obama’s lawyer, Malihi considered complaints brought by members of the so-called “birther” movement.

With regard to the challenge that Obama does not have legitimate birth and identification papers, Malihi said he found the evidence “unsatisfactory” and “insufficient to support plaintiffs’ allegations.”

A number of the witnesses who testified about the alleged fraud were never qualified as experts in birth records, forged documents and document manipulation and “none … provided persuasive testimony,” Malihi wrote.

Addressing the other claim that contends Obama cannot be a candidate because his father was never a U.S. citizen, Malihi said he was persuaded by a 2009 ruling by the Indiana Court of Appeals decision that struck down a similar challenge. In that ruling, the Indiana court found that children born within the U.S. are natural-born citizens, regardless of the citizenry of their parents.

Obama “became a citizen at birth and is a natural-born citizen,” Malihi wrote. Accordingly, Obama is eligible as a candidate for the upcoming presidential primary in March, the judge said.

As I noted when I wrote about this last month, there was no legal merit to the claim that the President isn’t a natural born citizen because his parents were not both citizens when he was born. That’s not now the Constitution works when it comes to citizenship.

There are only two classes of citizen under the Constitution, people who are citizens from birth and people who become citizens through naturalization. It’s rather obvious from context that when the Founders used the term “natural born citizen” in the Constitution, they did so to limit eligibility for the Presidency to those people who were citizens from the time they were born. The first Congress clarified this matter even further when it passed the first naturalization law, which provided that “”The children of citizens of the United States that may be born beyond the sea, or outside the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural-born citizens of the United States.”  This is why someone like John McCain or George Romney was eligible to be President; McCain was born to American citizens in the Panama Canal Zone, Romney’s parents were American citizens who had fled to Mexico and stayed there until the Mexican Revolution in 1912.  The 14th Amendment further clarified this by providing that anyone born in the United States, other than the child of a foreign diplomat, was a citizen from birth regardless of parentage. In 1898, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark that the Supreme Court definitively stated that people born of immigrant parents in the territorial United States are citizens from birth, in other words they are natural-born citizens. All Judge Malihi had to do was applied this law and history to the facts, and the finding was rather straightforward. Barack Obama was born in the United States, his mother was a U.S. Citizen. Therefore, under at least two legal theories he is a natural born citizen. Any argument to the contrary is simply utter nonsense.

There is some significance, I suppose, in the fact that this is the first time that a Court at any level has ruled on the merits of the birther’s idiotic claims and rejected them as the nonsense they are. However, I doubt that’s going to deter them. Already, the same group of people are making similar arguments about Marco Rubio and Bobby Jindal, both of whom were born in the United States to immigrant parents who had not yet become citizens. Much like the people who believe that the 16th Amendment was never actually ratified, or that history has suppressed the passage of an amendment that makes it illegal for lawyers to serve in Federal Government positions, this is a legal conspiracy theory that’s likely to be around for as long as the tin-foil hat brigade is around.

Here’s Judge Malihi’s decision:

Farrar-Welden-Swensson-Powell v Obama – Judge Malihi Final Decision – Georgia Ballot Challenge – 2/3/2012
 

Not surprisingly, the Commander of the Military District of Washington has chosen to accept the findings of a preliminary hearing held last year, and ordered that Pfc. Bradley Manning face a General Court Martial for the charges that he stole hundreds of thousands of pages of classified documents which eventually ended up in the hands of Wikileaks:

The commander of the Military District of Washington has ordered a court-martial for Pfc. Bradley E. Manning, the former intelligence analyst accused of giving hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.

Maj. Gen. Michael S. Linnington made the decision Friday after reviewing testimony and arguments from a preliminary hearing at Fort Meade in December, officials said.

There was no word on whether the as-yet-unscheduled court-martial would also be held at Fort Meade, one of three installations within the military district equipped to host such a proceeding.

Manning, 24, is charged with aiding the enemy and violating the Espionage Act. If convicted, he could be sentenced to life in prison.

Manning is accused of sending raw field reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, diplomatic cables from U.S. embassies around the world and a video of a U.S. helicopter attack in Baghdad to be published online.

The U.S. Army Trial Judiciary will now assign a military judge, who will set a date for Manning’s arraignment, motion hearings and trial.

During a preliminary hearing in December, Army prosecutors called computer forensic investigators who testified that materials uploaded to WikiLeaks came from computers on which Manning worked.

Manning’s attorneys sought to portray him as a troubled young man who struggled with gender identity, was isolated from his fellow soldiers and should not have been given access to the classified materials.

Manning, who lived in Potomac and studied at Montgomery College before he enlisted in the Army in 2007, attended the hearing but did not speak. It was his first public appearance since his arrest in Iraq in May 2010.

During his detention, his case became a cause celebre among anti-war activists, who say the footage of the 2007 Apache helicopter attack that he is alleged to have released appears to show evidence of a war crime.

At least one of the charges against Manning, Aiding The Enemy, carries with it a potential death sentence but it appears that military prosecutors will demur from seeking that sentence and instead ask for life in prison. Between that charge and the others than Manning faces it’s fairly certain that, if convicted, he would never see the outside of a military prison again for the rest of his life. Judging from last year’s preliminary hearing, the outcome of the case hardly seems to be in doubt. Manning’s lawyers offered no real defense at that hearing, not that they were required to, but it was rather clear from the arguments they did make that they didn’t really have much to argue on their clients’ behalf beyond questioning and testing the elements of the prosecutions case. The logical thing at this point would be for them to try to cut a deal on Manning’s behalf, but it’s possible that Manning himself doesn’t want to plead guilty.

The other unresolved question in the Manning case, of course, is the status of Julian Assange and others associated with Wikileaks. As I noted while the hearing was ongoing, military prosecutors revealed at the time that they had recovered online communications between Manning and Assange that apparently predated the time when Manning stole the classified material. This material has been turned over to civilian prosecutors who are apparently investigating the matter further. Whether there’s enough there to charge Assange under the Espionage Act or anyone else remains unclear at this time, though. Of course, American prosecutors probably aren’t in a rush when it comes to getting something on Assange, he remains under house arrest in the United Kingdom where he’s fighting an order that he be extradited to Sweden to face rape charges. If we want him, we’re going to know where to find him.

I’ve followed the recent brouhaha over the Komen Foundation’s decision to defund–and then de-defund (maybe)–Planned Parenthood out of the corner of my eye, mostly on account of I really don’t gave a damn. But NRO’s Daniel Foster drew my interest with his assertion that, “You Should Find the Anti-Komen Backlash Disgusting, Even If You’re Pro-Choice.” Given that I’m anti-abortion, find Planned Parenthood rather disgusting on its own merits, and had no problem with the backlash, I read on.

He cites Will Wilkinson”s observation, “I’ll be damned if this doesn’t look a bit like PP throwing its weight around, knocking a few pieces of china off the shelves, sending a message to its other donors: “Nice foundation you got there. Wouldn’t want anything to, you know, happen to it.” Wilkonson doesn’t actually offer any explanation for this, but Foster concurs wholeheartedly:

Look, the beauty of free speech is that, if you’re inclined to do so, you can write a check to PP in an act of solidarity, or write a check to Komen as an expression of moral approval. That’s all fine. But there’s something quite a bit different, something creepy and not a little despicable, about the Planned Parenthood set’s besmirching Komen’s good name across a thousand platforms for having the audacity to stop giving them free money.

[...]

Imagine I volunteered to run a cub scout troop, and for years, when the annual soapbox derby came near, I knew I could count on Joe’s Deli as good for a hundred dollar donation. If one year Old Man Joe decided he didn’t want to donate any more — because he didn’t like the design of our racer, or because he thought his hundred bucks was better spent on a little league team, or because he disapproved of the scouts’ stance on gays — what on earth would justify me going on public access TV to grill Old Man Joe on why he hates kids? What would justify me hacking the Joe’s Deli web site or maliciously editing Old Man Joe’s Wikipedia page? What would justify me goading a handful of my city councilman into standing up at the next town meeting and publicly calling on Old Man Joe to reinstate his donation?

Nothing. Nothing would justify that. Nothing at all.

This  is incredibly tortured logic.

First, the actions in question were taken by NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, some geek presumably unaffiliated with Planned Parenthood, some other people presumably unaffiliated with Planned Parenthood,  and some local city councilman, respectively, and not Planned Parenthood.

Second, your local Cub Scout troop is not a multi-billion dollar international advocacy group that runs a ridiculously annoying annual campaign with the National Football League and gets massive taxpayer subsidies and Joe’s Deli is not the national lightning rod for the most controversial public policy issue of the last four decades.

Third, the beauty of free speech is that you get to say whatever you want and other people are free to say whatever they want in response. As Scott Lemieux notes, “Komen’s right to ‘dispose of its money as it sees fit’ (which absolutely nobody denies) does not entail a right to be exempt from criticism — let alone a right to a permanent level of donations.”

Fourth, as Simon Maloy and others have pointed out, it’s not as if the pro-life forces haven’t applied pressure in the other direction. Kathryn Jean Lopez celebrated their victory when Komen pulled its funding, observing, “This Komen-Planned Parenthood relationship has long been a target of pro-life activists and, media bias aside, this appears to be a remarkable turning point.”  Yet these same people are baffled that there was a counter-reaction.

It’s not just Foster. WaPo’s Jennifer Rubin:

It’s remarkable, when you think about it: One private foundation decides not to give money to a charity but instead to pursue its core mission through other entities. And for this, a storm of vitriol descends on the foundation from elected officials and elite opinion-makers. If it were any other issue (e.g., pet rescue, education, save the whales), it would be unthinkable for members of Congress to weigh in. I mean a private charity kind of gets to decide where to spend its money, while its donors can continue to give or not as they see fit, right? Ah, but when the topic is abortion, all rules go out the window.

But, again, Komen isn’t a private charity; it’s a very prominent advocacy group that enjoys millions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies each year. And Planned Parenthood is likewise a recipient of taxpayer dollars and political maneuvering.

Rubin continues:

Planned Parenthood can raise its own money (which it did in spades in the wake of the flap). Those who want to give to a breast cancer charity can donate with the peace of mind that their money will be used to fight breast cancer. (Donors did so generously as a result of the controversy.) Now Planned Parenthood’s bosses have every right under current law to do what they do and raise money to fund their organization. But shame on them for intimidating other groups that might contemplate the same move as the Susan G. Komen Foundation made.

I’m sympathetic to part of the argument here. While I find the ubiquity of the Komen campaign annoying and counterproductive, I did operate under the assumption that they were at least using their proceeds to find a cure for breast cancer. I mean, it’s right there in the name. Given that Planned Parenthood isn’t in that business (although they do perform breast cancer screenings), it seems like an odd use of resources.

Still, the notion that speaking up for Planned Parenthood and decrying Komen for switching sides in a politically charged fight is somehow “intimidation” is absurd.

Cullen Roche observes,

I was driving all day long yesterday and heard an interesting statistic on the radio. The last 14 coin flips in the Super Bowl have been won by the NFC. The odds of this happening are 16,000:1. Beyond a statistical anomaly. Anyhow, the commentator, a Vegas bookie, was discussing a bet they had going in which they wager on the coin flip every year. He was talking about how silly the bet is because, obviously, the odds are 50% heads or tails. But Vegas is playing it NFC vs AFC and guess what? 75% of the public is betting on the NFC to win the coin flip!

Roche chalks this up to the “recency effect” and implies that it’s a delusion. It strikes me as simple Bayesian logic. Theoretically, the odds of a coin landing on heads are 1 in 2 and that, since either the NFC or AFC will be represented by heads, the odds of either conference winning the coin flip are equal. Forced to bet on which conference will win and given even odds, then, it’s 50-50 that you’ll win.

Yet, in this case, bettors have additional information: The NFC has won the last 14 flips in a row! A 16,000:1 happenstance! That’s probably just a bizarre coincidence. But there’s at least some tiny chance that it’s something else. So, given even odds, why wouldn’t you bet on the NFC’s winning again?