When Does Life Begin?

The more appropriate question is "when did it begin?" Anti-abortion forces and women's rights groups debate the question, but science indicates it began a long time ago, about 3.5 billion years on this planet, and it simply continues.

Anyone serious about the argument needs to consider the information set forth in Neil Shubin's article in today's New York Times, "Birds Do It. Bees Do It. Dragons Don't Need To." As it happens, virgin birth is not a religious myth, but a biological function of some creatures, who create clones of themselves.

That's not, of course, what Mary is supposed to have done.

By the way, for those fundamentalists who object to the notion that we evolved from monkeys, Shubin points out that we share a common ancestor with sharks some 400 million years ago. I'm sure they'll find the "shark image" much more palatable.

A. O. Scott on the Oscars:

Today is Academy Award Sunday, that Sunday in February when there are no big sporting events on TV to distract people, which allows Hollywood to congratulate itself in front of the largest audience possible while at the same time trying to drum up interest (dollars) in its product.

The New York Times' A. O. Scott is probably the most widely respected of current movie reviewers, and he's chimed in with what seems to me to be the most quotable quote of the day on the subject: "The wonderful thing about the Academy Awards is that they are fundamentally trivial. To pretend otherwise is to trivialize movies."

Frank Rich Explains the Hillary Fall:

Writing in today's Times, Frank Rich explains the collapse of inevitability. Now that's a concept hard to get your head around. The press has been postulating thesis after thesis about what has gone wrong with the Clinton campaign for weeks now. Rich's view requires a knowledge of addition. It's the total package.

To the shock of the press, the Obama campaign, especially its campaigners, have beaten the Clinton machine like a drum, as Rich points out:

The gap in hard work between the two campaigns was clear well before Feb. 5. Mrs. Clinton threw as much as $25 million at the Iowa caucuses without ever matching Mr. Obama’s organizational strength. In South Carolina, where last fall she was up 20 percentage points in the polls, she relied on top-down endorsements and the patina of inevitability, while the Obama campaign built a landslide-winning organization from scratch at the grass roots. In Kansas, three paid Obama organizers had the field to themselves for three months; ultimately Obama staff members outnumbered Clinton staff members there 18 to 3.

Perhaps the biggest surprise has been in spousal power. While Mrs. Obama has committed a couple of gaffs during the campaign, Mr. Clinton, the consummate campaigner, the secret weapon that was supposed to usher in his wife as the first woman president, has done far more harm to her campaign than any spouse in recent history. Brother Bill's strategy in supporting his wife seems to have been to insult as many voters as possible.

And then there is her campaign manager, who is also the head of the company that handles public relations for Microsoft. That's a nice résumé. But it hardly speaks well for his full devotion to either enterprise.

Perhaps some sage advice from that great statesman, George W. Bush, is in order: "If you don't stand for anything, you don't stand for anything!" — Austin-American Statesman, 2000.

Now how can you argue with that?

How to Get Rich on the Campaign Trail:

Senate ethics rules prohibit candidates from directly profiting from campaign donations. You can't take the money people donate to your campaign and put it into your pocket.

But you can put it into the pockets of your relatives.

Today's Washington Post reports that Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer paid her son Douglas $320,409.17 directly from her campaign coffers, between 2001 and 2006. Republican Senator Mike Enzi paid his daughter-in-law $306,718.18 during the same time period. Former baseball pitcher and Republican Senator Jim Bunning from Kentucky paid his daughter $138,933.37 over a six-year period.

It appears, however, that the House is much worse than the Senate: "72 House members paid [$5.1 million] from campaign funds to relatives or to relatives' companies or employers during the same period."

Back in January of last year, a law to tighten requirements to limit such activity was defeated (surprise, surprise) in the Senate by a vote of 54 to 41. Senator Boxer voted "present."

Many people assume that Americans' Puritan heritage has to do with attitudes about sex. They're wrong. The Puritans believed that the condition of one's soul could be determined by measuring how well one did economically on this earth. We are a country in mad pursuit of the next quarterly earnings statement.