Now that the insulting question of whether Sonia Sotomayor is just another Harriet Miers has subsided, a new one arises: Does Barack Obama's nominee have more in common with conservative justice Sam Alito? Liberals opposed Alito far more strenuously than they did current Chief Justice and George W. Bush nominee John Roberts. An Italian from working-class roots who also attended Princeton, Alito wields the same, "up from the bootstraps" personal history as Sotomayor. And—much like the Obama administration's emphasis on its nominee's "wisdom accumulated from an inspiring life's journey"—the Bush White House stressed Alito's disadvantaged background heavily during the "rollout" of his nomination.

So was Alito helped by the same "identity politics" that critics of Sotomayor now decry? Did Roberts merely benefit from being a classically white-bread American male? And what exactly is this "life experience" hoo-haw that everyone keeps mentioning when discussing U.S. law?

Reihan Salam, a prolific journalist and critic discussed this and more with me on a recent Bloggingheads. Watch:

Tags: Sonia Sotomayor; Samuel Alito; Supreme Court; judges; diversity; bloggingheads

Sunday night was when I first found out abortionist Dr. George Tiller had been murdered. But unlike Elizabeth Weil, I knew exactly who he was. I grew up in a conservative Christian family: loving my dad's lapel pin of tiny baby feet, dropping change in baby bottles to raise money for crisis pregnancy centers, and keeping up with relevant legislation. My family and I are probably a pretty good representation of 99 percent of the pro-life movement—people who wouldn't sabotage a clinic or use violence to stop abortion, but do our best with community involvement, prayer, and our votes. So I knew who Tiller was. I've prayed for him before.

I was following the lead-up to his trial for 19 misdemeanor counts all through March. Updates hit my inbox in a bizarre parallel track to another set of breathless updates from friends. Their baby daughter was born by emergency cesarean-section three entire months early and whose survival was an open question. Everyone was pulling for her to make it—doctors, nurses, friends, relatives, co-workers. It's a strange world we live in, to get those updates and then to read about tiny babies just about the same age that hadn't had that kind of cheerleading, who had first been held in Dr. Tiller's arms instead of their parents'.

To me, all the stories of Dr. Tiller's work raise one big question, "What's life for?" Is it just to be happy and have a good quality of life? And if it is, then who gets to set that bar for us—our parents, our laws, or our faith?

I came across one answer this week from my friend Erin, just back on Monday from a trip to Uganda. You can read the whole story here, but Erin writes,

I have to tell you about a brother and sister named Kevin and Catherine. He is 24. She is 21. Their parents died and left them as orphans. Kevin received a full scholarship to attend Liberty University in Virginia and has just graduated and is coming back to Uganda on Monday. Three years ago, Kevin looked around and realized that there were other orphans that needed care, so he and his sister began to take them in. At age 18, Catherine had become a mother to these children and their head caretaker, as Kevin returned to Liberty to study. Over the past three years, the number of orphans has reached a total of 68. The ages range from 3 months up to the lower teens. Catherine, a child herself, is now mother to 68! The only income they receive is from the part-time job that Kevin has at school, which he balances with being a full-time student. This brother and sister decided together that they would give their lives to these 68 children until they are grown and can provide for themselves. Their courage is a great challenge to me.

The children only get to eat once a day, around 3 or 4 p.m. Catherine serves them tea in the morning to hold them over until then, and then lets them play in the afternoon until bed, in hopes that they will fall asleep before they realize their hunger pains and ask her for more.

For $100 we were able to buy a wide variety of food for all of the children and give them a meal that would nourish their little bodies. Catherine, knowing each child intimately, cried throughout the meal because she couldn’t remember the last time she saw them enjoy eating so much."

So I don't know what defines happiness for you, or for a baby with serious medical problems, or for the parents of those kids. But for me, I know that whatever my definition of happiness is now, I hope it can grow someday to be as life-changing and life-giving as Kevin and Catherine's.

Tags: abortion, George Tiller, late-term abortion, pro-life

For the sixth consecutive week, Kate Gosselin’s on the cover of Us Weekly. “Mommy You Are Mean” screams the headline, while her husband Jon declares, “Enough is Enough” on the cover of People. In Touch and Star are selling the Gosselins as well. Only the Enquirer has chosen an old standard for its cover, Brangelina, and even the most famous couple in the world had to share the front page, with, you guessed it, Jon Gosselin.

Up until a few months ago, chances were good-to-great that if you picked up a tabloid one of the following subjects would appear on the cover: Brangelina, Jennifer Aniston, TomKat or Britney Spears. But recently, the attractive, famous folk who have dominated gossip for years and years (even when, as with Aniston, the relevant story happened eons ago), have suddenly, ignominiously been shoved to the side by a rag-tag crew whose members include the Gosselins, Octomom, Susan Boyle and, to a certain extent, Michelle Obama. These women share one characteristic in particular, and it is not an unsettling fecundity: they’re not rich. (Heather Havrilesky just wrote a piece for Salon about this exact same group appropriately titled, “The Triumph of The Uncelebrity”)

The collapse of the economy has plainly altered our taste in celebrities. Conspicuous consumers like Lindsay, Paris and Britney are out. In are a group of women that, if not quite like the rest of us, are certainly not members of the richest one percent. This isn’t the first time serious circumstances have altered our gossip preferences. D.J. Taylor’s group biography Bright Young People, published a few months ago in the States, chronicles the rise and fall of a cohort of rich kids famous just for being famous in 1920s and ‘30s London. (This cadre was also the subject of Evelyn Waugh’s scathing Vile Bodies). They threw the best parties, made the biggest scenes, and dominated the gossip columns. When the war started, and many of them had long since turned into ne’er-do-wells and alcoholics, their hijinks tapered off, seeming out of sync with a more serious time. In other words, Paris et. al. were not the first of their kind to hog the spotlight, or the first to lose it.

Still, I am surprised by the speed with which the tabloids have transitioned to a whole new cast of characters, and how exactly that transition maps onto the recession. Maybe there’s a little cause and effect here. Celebrities, the rich, spoiled, private-jet owning kind, (who had already, as Havrilesky points out, gotten pretty boring) had to curtail their ways, not just for the sake of propriety but because random clubs in Vegas stopped opening and the rest stopped being willing to pay them $20,000 just to show up and drink a Red Bull. The party is literally over, and so are all the related photo ops.

But it’s not as if what the tabloids cover—babymaking, marriages, divorce, breakdowns— or what they fundamentally are—a celebrity making machine— has changed. In that light, the decision to cover the Gosselin’s marital strife and not Brangelina’s, or Michelle Obama’s baby bump and not Katie Holmes’s, or Susan Boyle’s breakdown and not Lindsay Lohan’s becomes a real either/or choice. Us Weekly will write about pregnancy: do they obsess on a celebrities’ experience? Perhaps a young starlet has a bun in the oven? Or do they pick a woman who, if not quite normal, is at least regular, physically and financially (and in the instance of Octomom, actually strapped for cash)? In short, do they pick a celebrity or an uncelebrity?

These uncelebrities are regular in another sense: they've plainly been altered by the tabloid culture of the last decade. Imagine for a second that our collective, societal obsession with famous people actually sent out some sort of dangerous, mind melting, fame rays (actually, you don't have to imagine): These women are the mutant results. There's Octomom, the mother who wants to be Angelina, The Gosselins, a family torn apart (in the tabloid’s estimation) because they've pursued fame, and Susan Boyle, a woman who lost her mind because of spotlight. The tabloids have been obsessed with rich, famous, glamorous people for years and now it’s the uncelebrities turn to be the show. Who will be unlucky enough to come next?

Tags: Brangelina, Fame, Jon & Kate, Kate Gosselin, Octomom, Susan Boyle, Tabloids

Judith Leavitt has written a history of fatherhood, specifically about the evolution of male participation in the process of giving birth. In a review of the book in the Wall Street Journal, Jonathan Last reports the less-than-shocking news: The 20th century saw men becoming more and more involved with the process of pregnancy, and less and less commonly banished from the premises during the birth itself. This has culminated, Last explains, in “all manner of idiocy,” from fathers who videotape the birth to fathers cutting the umbilical cord. Commence axe grinding:

Ms. Leavitt quotes one doctor's argument from the mid-1960s: "As the charm of woman is in her mystery, it is inconceivable that a wife will maintain her sexual prestige after her husband witnessed the expulsion of a baby—a negligee will never hide this apparition." Another doctor concluded: "On the whole, it is not a show to watch." We all laugh at how benighted such views are. (Even if there is, just possibly, some truth in them.) Yet today it is socially acceptable to father a child without marrying the mother or to divorce her later on if mother and father actually do bother to get hitched. And at the same time there is zero tolerance for a husband who says: "No thanks, I'll be in the waiting room with cigars." Ms. Leavitt's fascinating history suggests that childbirth is just one more area where our narcissism has swamped our seriousness.

And thus, as it so often does, sad-sack nostalgia for a lost era of male privilege passes for high moral seriousness. Note that the book under consideration would appear to have nothing to do with the subject of out-of-wedlock births. Last would just like to point out that it’s “unserious” to demand that men assume involvement beyond smoking in the next room, because, hey at least they’re in the vicinity. Not like those other fathers! How much do you pregnant broads expect? This is the rhetorical equivalent of your kid saying he shouldn't be forced to go to school every weekday; after all, some kids in Afghanistan never go to school. Presumably, a serious defense of Last's position would sketch some actual arguments in favor of male exile from the maternity ward. But it's surely easier to change the subject and yearn for a Mad Men-esque division of labor.

Photograph of pregnant woman from Stockbyte/Getty Images.

Tags: childbirth, fatherhood, labor

"It's more fun to be an opposition bomb-thrower than a palace guard" was Dana Milbank's analysis in today's Washington Post noting the lackluster turnout of the former Take Back America crowd at the America's Future Now conference this week in D.C. Attendance at the gathering of liberal interest groups dropped to 1,500 from 2,500 last year, during the presidential campaign. The movement advocacy groups and think tanks may suffer a bit from brain drain as many organizers of progressive causes have migrated to the administration. Milbank's colleague Dan Eggen wrote that Clinton White House Chief of Staff John Podesta, who founded Center for American Progress estimates that "40 staff members from his project are employed in the Obama administration." The folks who worked against the Bush crowd are having their turn at the top, and despite diminished rallying focus they like how things are headed. Diversity, climate change policy and health-care reform are priorities again.

Conservatives don't think the harmony will last and can't resist throwing spitballs while they reorganize their own opposition. Calling his liberal counterparts "competing parasites," frequently quoted Republican Grover Norquist says the left is experiencing a "false sense of comity." Noting liberals' propensity for family feuds, he predicted "the unions will come up against the environmentalists, and the whole thing will start to fall apart."

Tags: liberal interest groups

Without question, this was the first serious foreign policy speech Obama has made as president. In giving it, he broke a number of taboos and slid over several potential minefields, reaffirming America's commitment to Israel as well as to Palestinian statehood in front of an Egyptian audience, and going out of his way to make statements about democracy, womens' rights, and religious freedom. If the speech were the dawn of a new age of public diplomacy then I'm all in favor.

Two things worried me about it, however. For my taste, there was too much "on the one hand, on the other hand" about the language, including (I'm agreeing with Meghan here) on women. He didn't have to start that particular riff by declaring that "there is debate about this issue," as if the repression of some very fundamental rights of half the human race were somehow "debatable." And he could have spared us the comment about the "struggle for womens' equality' in America," as if we were all in this together, us and the regimes who stone women for adultery. He did a similar thing on religious freedom, noting that there are some legal difficulties for Muslim charities in America, as if that problem was somehow comparable to the absolute ban on Christian practice in Saudi Arabia. I could go on. In fact, if you look carefully at the different sections of the speech you'll see that he did this kind of thing on every issue.

I assume this equivocation was a deliberate rhetorical tactic, designed to soften the message. And under normal circumstances, I'd be bothered. But in this case, it hardly matters, since almost no one in Cairo, or anyone almost anywhere in the world, is going to remember the details of what Obama said anyway. The importance of this speech was in the imagery, in the impression of a new opening, in the hint of new kinds of partnership to come, in the fact that it was made in downtown Cairo, at a real Egyptian university and not at some diplomatic conference center. Which gets me to the other thing that bothers me: To date, the Obama administration has shown a striking lack of interest in what we used to call "democracy promotion" such as courses for judges and journalists,or radio debates about human rights—mundane programs which we used to be rather good at designing and lately seem not to be. Other than a few references to student exchanges and the like, I didn't hear anything that made it sound as if the Obama administration has thought a lot about how to follow up on this speech, and that worries me. "Dialogue" is all very well, as long as the president doesn't believe that "dialogue," by itself, will fix anything at all (and sometimes I worry that he does). As an opening shot, this was a good one. What's next?

Tags: cairo, muslim women, Obama, obama's speech in cairo, women's rights

Yesterday, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham met with Sonia Sotomayor and decided she was not, after all that, a racist. "There is no evidence of that," he said soberly. What did he expect? That Sotomayor would look haughtily down at him and say, "Old white man, you can't cook marcilla for sh--!" Newt Gingrich too has apologized, saying that the word "racist' should not have been applied to her as a person, but maybe, perhaps to her words.

You have to feel bad for Republicans. Throughout the nineties, they reveled in mocking the left for its PC excesses—the self policing, the endless parsing of words, the primacy of emotions over hard, cold facts. Now, with the nomination of a Latina for the Supreme Court, they find themselves trapped inside that same hell.

Sen. Jeff Sessions is perhaps the most pitiable victim. He was rejected for a federal judgeship 23 years ago after it was discovered he may have called the NAACP "un-American" and possibly praised the KKK. Now, he is bending over backwards to play the statesman, saying he "enjoyed the conversation" with Sotomayor. What choice does he have? Joking about the KKK (his defense) ain't as easy as it used to be, and he doesn't want to end up like his old friend Trent Lott. Plus, not four years ago the Hispanic vote was supposed to rescue the Republican party from downfall, and redeem their questionable past.

Of course there is an easy answer to this. It's called the law. If you want "evidence' of "that"—" that" being a jurisprudence you find distasteful or un-judicious, look for it in the briefs.

Tags: jeff sessions, lindsey graham, Newt Gingrich, sotomayor and republicans

Recently, British film censors cut a movie scene where a woman appeared to ejaculate, because they believed the fluid must be urine, and British obscenity laws forbid urinating on fellow actors. But female ejaculation is a well documented medical phenomenon, according to this history of female ejaculation in the New Scientist, and only resisted by the medical establishment because, well, women can't be equal in everything.

The Kama Sutra mentions "female semen." One 17th century Dutch physician mentioned "liquid as usually comes from the pudenda in one gush." The researcher who discovered the  "G" spot and then named it after himself documented cases involving so much liquid they required a large towel to clean up.

More recently, a few gifted women have demonstrated for dumbstruck gynecologists. But the establishment insists this is just some form of incontinence. Sharon Moalem, an evolutionary biologist at Mount Sinai and author of How Sex Works, is out to prove them wrong. She has tested the fluid to prove that it has low urea, a hallmark of urine. In her singular quest for equality she is out to prove that the fluid originates in a female prostate—a part of female anatomy often left out of women's anatomy textbooks. She is even studying whether it has the same chemicals that are found in semen.

Tags: female ejaculation

So Barack Obama's historic speech in Cairo is already getting rave reviews. It was, indeed, vintage Obama (if that's not an oxymoron), using his biography as a point of entrance and connection, eschewing what he views as old, false dichotomies, and stressing a pragmatic, hopeful way forward. One of Obama's strengths is the manner in which he dives into the thicket that many politicians talk around; his speeches often put complicated things in deceptively simple ways, as when he said that just as Islam is not the stereotype many Americans make it out to be, nor is "America ... the crude stereotype of a self-interested empire." He put his money where his mouth was. Where the Bush regime refused rhetorical nuance and deflected criticism by using words like "patriotism" and "democracy," by stark contrast, Obama spoke directly about America's complex history when he mentioned our role decades ago in the overthrow of a democratically-elected government in Iran. One question, though: Was he tough enough about women's rights? This was one area where I felt Obama didn't push hard enough, though his position is one I respect, and he frames it cogently. As he put it, "I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal, but I do believe that a woman who is denied an education is denied equality. And it is no coincidence that countries where women are well-educated are far more likely to be prosperous." I wish, though, he had said more on this subject; it has always seemed to me that his one point of weakness has been in reaching out to women in particular. Thoughts?

Tags: Barack Obama, cairo, egypt, Islam, speech

Forbes.com has released its "Celebrity 100" list of the world's most powerful celebrities and the top four slots are held by women: #1: Angelina Jolie, #2: Oprah Winfrey, #3: Madonna, and #4: Beyonce Knowles. Half of the top ten are women, although they make up only a quarter of the top 25. Last time around, Oprah, who made $275 million in the last year, as opposed to Jolie's paltry $27 million, held the number one spot. This year, Jolie proves money isn't everything. Looks are! Actually, Forbes.com sites Jolie's philanthropic work and the tabloid ruckus over the birth of her twins to be significant contributors to her ascent to the top spot. Who knows if rumors swirling around the possible demise of her relationship with Brad Pitt (#9) will hurt her chances next year for topping a list I'm sure she cares not a wit about.

Despite the toileting of the economy, Forbes.com notes, celebrities have proven resilient! "In a year filled with humbling bank failures and violent stock market swings, the earning power of the 2009 Celebrity 100 remained remarkably resilient. The cumulative earnings of the 2009 list totaled $4.1 billion, up slightly from last year's $4 billion haul." Great. I feel so much better now. At least the rich are still rich. Now, I can sleep at night.

Some stars, though, took a rankings bath. Justin Timberlake didn't even make the list. (I, for one, am outraged.) Jennifer Lopez suffered the same fate. Neither did Tyra Banks. Other women of note who made the list: Stephenie Meyer (#26, who wrote the Twilight series), Miley Cyrus (#29), Ellen DeGeneres (#40), Sarah Jessica Parker (#58), Meryl Streep (#64), Serena Williams (#67), and Gisele Bundchen (#72). Who came in dead last? Race car driver Danica Patrick. Bummer, #100.

Tags: celebrities, forbes, forbes.com, women