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"I am Rahm Emanuel, so people say that a lot."

-- White House chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, quoted by the Reliable Source, to a woman who asked him if anyone ever tells him he looks like Rahm Emanuel.

I could forgive the dripping misogyny, but this isn't even a little bit funny.  And I don't mean that in the feminist, "You shouldn't laugh at dumb blonde jokes!" way.  I mean, it's not funny like listening to your Great Uncle Fred do his Milton Berle impression isn't funny.  Guy Cimbalo doesn't seem to realize that just saying "fuck" a lot is no longer comedy gold.  Yet historical records indicate that it lost its shock value sometime around 1966--eighth grade graduation at the very latest.

My ex-boyfriend and I had a collection of vintage Playboys picked up at a garage sale, which we used to, yes, read for the articles.  (The centerfolds had long since been scissored out, presumably by the chap who sold them to us.)  Those were good articles, written by good writers, about interesting topics--Bill Cosby on race, William F. Buckley on religion and society, Gore Vidal on . . . Gore Vidal.    Now we have Guy Cimbalo and his Frantabulous Late-Nite Borscht Belt Shockers. 

Srsly?

John Nance, the former FAA administrator, and now an aviation consultant to ABC News, says that there's a 50-50 chance that the missing Air France jet went down in an explosion. The story was just on ABC. They tended to downplay Nance's comments, but I have to admit, i was wondering about the possibility of terrorism as well. Obviously, it's too soon - and it's suspicious that no terrorist group is claiming credit, since they're usually not very shy about such things.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) announced he will seek another term in the Senate, Tulsa World reports.

You can see the gulf in the world that Obama is trying to bridge when you compare the shock that some in Washington feel when they see Obama actually trying to stop illegal West Bank settlements and the latest poll from Egypt:

James A. Dorn, vice president for academic affairs:

After 20 years China has made substantial economic progress, but the ghosts of Tiananmen are restless and will continue to be so until the Goddess of Liberty is restored.

The Chinese Communist Party's "Human Rights Action Plan" (2009-10) addresses several human rights abuses, but it fails to establish a well-defined boundary between the individual and the state that protects rights to life, liberty, and property. Until China limits the power of the CCP and allows people to exercise their natural rights, there will be corruption, and the goal of "social harmony" will be elusive. The lesson of Tiananmen is that the principle of nonintervention (wu wei) is superior to the heavy hand of the state as a way to bring about true harmony.

Just last week, Denver Post and Reason.com columnist David Harsanyi asked, "Is The Abortion Debate Changing?" Based on a recent Gallup Poll, which found that a majority of Americans considered themselves "pro-life" for the first time since the question started being asked in 1995, Harsanyi suggested "that Americans are getting past the politics and into the morality of the issue" after decades of legalized abortion. And, he argued, the morality of abortion is a lot more complicated than most pro- or anti-abortion slogans let on.

Earlier today, in response to killing of Kansas abortion doctor George Tiller, Jacob Sullum asked why anti-abortion activists rushed to condemn the death of a man who by their own accounts was slaughtering innocents. Jacob understands why the activists might say that, but argues that it's really a tactical response: That they need to distance themselves from murderous extremists.

So what do Reason readers think? Will the killing of George Tiller push more Americans to identify as pro-life? Or will it push voters in the other direction? Does it matter that Tiller was known for doing late-term abortions, which are statistically rare but gruesome?

You go back to that Gallup Poll and one thing sticks out on the basic question of whether abortion should be legal under some circumstances: Since 1976, the percentage answering yes has been around 50 percent or higher (there are a few years where it dipped into the high 40s). That is, it's been pretty stable at or around a majority number.

And the percentage of people saying abortion should be illegal under all circumstances has rarely cracked the 20 percent figure (though it has again in recent years). Similarly, the percentage saying abortion should be legal under all circumstances, which peaked at 34 percent in the early 1990s, has always been a minority position (which currently stands at 22 percent and has been dropping lately).

I suspect that as abortion becomes rarer (as Reason's Ron Bailey pointed out in 2006, abortion has been getting rarer since the 1990s and also occurs earlier in pregnancies than before), it's quite possible that the either/or positions might change, but that their movement will have little effect on the middle position of abortion staying legal under some circumstances. Even those, such as Harsanyi, who is plainly troubled by the logic of abortion, generally concede that prohibition would cause more problems than it would fix ("I also believe a government ban on abortion would only criminalize the procedure and do little to mitigate the number of abortions.").

Back in 2003, on the occasion of Roe v. Wade's 30th anniversary, I argued that regarding abortion the country had reached a consensus that

has little to do with morality per se, much less with enforcing a single standard of morality. It's about a workable, pragmatic compromise that allows people to live their lives on their own terms and peaceably argue for their point of view....

This isn't to say that the debate about abortion is "over"-or that laws governing the specifics of abortion won't continue to change over time in ways that bother ardent pro-lifers and pro-choicers alike. But taking a longer view, it does seem as if the extremes of the abortion debate - extremes that included incendiary language (including calls for the murder of abortion providers) - have largely subsided in the wake of a widely accepted consensus. Part of this is surely due to the massive increases in reproduction technologies that allow women far more control over all aspects of their bodies (even as some of those technologies challenge conventional definitions of human life).

That isn't an outcome that is particularly satisfying to activists on either side of the issue or to people who want something approaching rational analysis in public policy. But it's still where we're at and it's unlikely the Tiller case will do much to move things one way or the other. The one thing that would likely change it would be if there was a massive shift toward later-term abortions, which seems unlikely based on long-term trendlines and technological innovations.