Republicans are forever arguing that some of what they want in the way of “entitlement reform” involves means-testing (or in reality, greater means-testing) of Social Security and Medicare benefits. Many Democrats resist even talking about that, partly because of the longstanding belief that means-tested programs are harder to defend politically than universal programs that benefit everybody.

This perspective has always bugged me; it amounts to saying that “progressivism” is insupportable politically unless everybody’s cut in. But this is a good example of why the “poor people programs are poor programs” argument continues to have strength, per this fine report from Tim Noah at TNR:

[D]id you know that the federal government spends more money on welfare than it does on Social Security, or Medicare, or the military? Me neither, perhaps because it isn’t true. It’s the kind of hooey that the crankier, less-informed sort of conservative is all too ready to believe. Yet the highest-ranking Republican on the Senate budget committee has lately been spreading this meme, and a variation is included in Representative Paul Ryan’s proposed budget. It’s part of a larger bait-and-switch that Republicans have been playing against Democrats, making it harder for both parties to agree on necessary spending cuts that don’t harm those in need.

The budget committee poobah is Senator Jeff Sessions. In October, Sessions put out a press release under the headline “Welfare Spending the Largest Item in the Federal Budget,” a claim repeated uncritically by Eric Bolling on “The Five,” a Fox News chat show, and on sites such as National Review and Human Events. An urban myth was born….

[Sessions] subscribes to an unrecognizably maximalist definition of “welfare,” one that includes every single federal program that’s means-tested. He includes Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, usually described as health care programs, which account for nearly half his total. He also includes Pell grants, job training programs, and various other functions that are “welfare” in roughly the same sense that all government spending is “socialism.” By stretching welfare’s meaning until it has almost none, Sessions is able to calculate the total welfare tab not at an underwhelming $96 billion, but at $746 billion, which is indeed more than the tab for Social Security, or Medicare, or defense. Then he adds in the state-funded part of these programs so he can say the total exceeds $1 trillion.

So we need more means-testing, Republicans say, but then means-tested programs are “welfare,” which means “takers” freeloading off the hard work of “makers.” That’s really having it both ways.

Salon’s Irin Carmon is an intrepid reporter of the wars over reproductive rights, so I’m inclined to defer to her interpretation of the recent cascade of state legislation banning relatively early-term abortions. She thinks it reflects one side of a “civil war” within the antichoice movement:

For years, a civil war has been brewing in the right-to-life movement, between the absolutists, who want to pass Personhood amendments and “heartbeat” bans that grab headlines, and the careful incrementalists, who are mounting a long-term campaign to stigmatize abortion and make it inaccessible through seemingly common-sense restrictions. Jack Dalrymple, the governor of North Dakota, clearly falls into the former camp: “Although the likelihood of this measure surviving a court challenge remains in question, this bill is nevertheless a legitimate attempt by a state legislature to discover the boundaries of Roe v. Wade,” he said in a statement when he signed several unconstitutional anti-abortion bills. The same thinking applied in Arkansas’s legislature, which passed a twelve-week ban over the objections of the governor, who pointed out it would just be dismissed in court.

They’re wrong, of course. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that you can’t ban abortions before viability. That’s why the incrementalists hate this stuff — which they, probably correctly, point out just galvanizes pro-choice people.

Jim Bopp, the general counsel of the National Right to Life Committee since 1978, has been blunt about laws like the ones passed in North Dakota and Arkansas: “Useless and potentially dangerous.” In a 2007 memo, Bopp, who is also special counsel to Focus on the Family, plainly laid out the strategy for overturning Roe v. Wade and banning abortion everywhere. “The Supreme Court’s current makeup” — which hasn’t substantively changed since Bopp was writing — “assures that a declared federal constitutional right to abortion remains secure for the present. This means that now is not the time to pass state constitutional amendments or bills banning abortion.” Why? It would be a waste of money at the risk of courts strengthening abortion rights, especially if the Court decided to reiterate its support for abortion rights by saying it’s protected by equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment.

Clearly both Bopp and Carmon are more certain than I am about Justice Kennedy’s current thinking on the constitutional law of abortion, after his strange majority opinion in the 2007 “partial-birth abortion” case of Gonzales v. Carhart. And I’m not the only one who’s nervous about where the Court stands today, per this reaction to Gonzales v. Carhart from the Gutthmacher Institute:

The longer-term implications of the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the ban are extremely ominous. The ruling opens the door for states to enact—or reenact—restrictive abortion laws without health exceptions, with an understanding that the courts likely will uphold them. And Kennedy’s paternalistic and moralistic statement of the “reality” that “respect for human life finds an ultimate expression in the bond of love the mother has for her child,” coupled with his “unexceptionable” conclusion (notwithstanding “no reliable data to measure the phenomenon”) that “some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained,” appear to invite states to require women seeking an abortion to be provided with “informed consent” information designed to persuade them to continue the pregnancy. Proposals already on the table would require such women to view an ultrasound of the fetus or be told scientifically unsound “facts” linking abortion to breast cancer or future mental health problems. Finally, beyond these incremental restrictions on abortion access, the willingness of the newly constituted Court to depart so dramatically from earlier precedent is seen as a further indication of the fragility of Roe v. Wade itself.

Assuming that reaction was alarmist, and/or that the blatant defiance of Roe being exhibited by Republican legislatures provides Court conservatives with the wrong kind of raw material to undermine abortion rights, then there are a couple of other possibilities explaining antichoice activist behavior (aside from the obvious desire of people who claim to believe we are living through an American Holocaust to publicly posture), per Carmon:

[W][hat are the absolutists after, besides scoring easy points with their base? Well, for one thing, court cases take years to wind their way through, and if Republicans somehow manage to capture the presidency in 2016, they could shift the Supreme Court math in their favor. That seems to be what Mathew Staver of Liberty Counsel was getting at when he said of pro-choice litigators, “They ought to hold off on their celebrations. The cases have a long way to go through the court system.”

There’s another game going on here, called out by Talcott Camp, deputy director of the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project, in an interview with the AP: ”I don’t believe these bans are going to take effect, but the danger is that they make the other laws look reasonable.” Indeed. How much have you heard about North Dakota’s requirement to make abortion providers have admitting privileges at a local hospital versus the sweeping bans?

In that reading, the flat “fetal heartbeat” bans are a diversionary tactic, and the real goal is denying reproductives rights in fact if not in law by denying women abortion services. I suspect there are all sorts of overlapping reasons for the sudden extremism, but we should all agree they ought to make prochoice folk wake up and smell the peril.

I’ve often marveled at the strange doings of Tennessee’s recently conquered Republican legislature, but the Volunteer State’s right-wing solons are really outdoing themselves now, according to a report from Tom Humphrey of the Knoxville News-Sentinel:

Legislation to cut welfare benefits of parents with children performing poorly in school has cleared committees of both the House and Senate after being revised to give the parents several ways to avoid the reductions.

The state Department of Human Services, which worked with Republican sponsors to draft the changes, withdrew its previous opposition to SB132. But the measure was still criticized by Democrats, including Rep. Gloria Johnson, D-Knoxville.

The bill is sponsored by Sen. Stacey Campfield, R-Knoxville, and Rep. Vance Dennis, R-Savannah. It calls for a 30 percent reduction in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families benefits to parents whose children are not making satisfactory progress in school.

Yes, there are exemptions for kids with diagnosed learning disabilities, and parents can get around the cut by signing up for “parenting classes” or otherwise jumping through hoops. But it’s still a classic example of “blaming the victim”—or maybe “starving the victim.”

Johnson, a teacher, said the bill will still put “the burden of the family budget on children’s performance in school” and that would mean a “huge stress on a young person who is trying to do what he can.”

She also said the legislation targets “struggling families,” while there is nothing that addresses higher-income parents who ignore their children’s school problems.

House Democratic Caucus Chairman Mike Turner of Nashville said parents of children with “undiagnosed learning disabilities” could suffer because of the bill and, even if a child is performing poorly in school, “the kid still has to eat.”

Turner also said the bill apparently does not apply to home-schooled children and, “I guess a person who wants to get around this just can say ‘I’m home schooling my children’.”

Yes, I know “parental involvement” in schools is much-valued now, perhaps too much in some respects (a lot of the “help your kids with homework” talk these days would have been called “cheating” when I was in school, and inherently favors kids with parents who have the time, resources, and education to pitch in). But you can’t help but suspect these legislators would just as soon eliminate welfare altogether and/or treat it as a privilege people have to earn by performing tasks that may be beyond their practical means.

It is psychologically important to conservatives these days to argue that the Democratic Party and progressives generally have “moved Left” under Barack Obama, partly to explain away their obstructionism and blur their own extremism, and partly because the pre-Obama Democrats under Clinton broke a long Democratic presidential losing streak. This is why Mitt Romney’s campaign kept trying to assert that Obama had abandoned Clinton’s legacy, to the point of flat-out lying about the incumbent’s position on welfare reform.

At Reason Matt Welch has offered a new variation on this theme based on what he calls “The Death of Contrarianism,” based on his claim that the Washington Monthly and the New Republic—and for that matter, the New Democrats of the Clinton era—have become more or less cheerleaders for liberal and Democratic pieties. Lost in this transformation, Welch suggests, has been a tradition of critical self-examination that was good for liberalism and good for the country:

An entire valuable if flawed era in American journalism and liberalism has indeed come to a close. The reformist urge to cross-examine Democratic policy ideas has fizzled out precisely at the time when those ideas are both ascendant and as questionable as ever. Progressivism has reverted to a form that would have been recognizable to Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann when they founded The New Republic a century ago: an intellectual collaborator in the “responsible” exercise of state power.

There is an awful lot of telescoping in Welch’s account of brave left-of-center heretics giving way to hacks. His appreciation of WaMo “contrarianism” seems to be confined to the 1970s and 1980s, which ignores the magazine’s continuing efforts to “make government work” amidst some wildly varying political and economic circumstances. He seems to think TNR went bad when Marty Peretz gave way to Chris Hughes (in truth, Peretz was marginalized at TNR and no longer represented the views of its staff and contributors, much less its readers, from at least the mid-2000s on). Worst of all, he seems entirely innocent of the endless discussion in center-left circles, continuing through the 1980s and 1990s until the present, about how to promote worthy liberal self-examination without descending into mere “contrarianism,” or providing regular material for the opposition.

One important reason the tone of liberal “heresy” has changed is that the “contrarians” won a lot of battles, from the “reinventing government” movement to a more robust support for private-sector innovation to reforms of the “welfare state” to more regular engagement with actual progressive voters as opposed to self-appointed interest group representatives. An equally important reason, which is entirely missing in Welch’s analysis, is what happened on the Right with the gradual triumph of a conservative movement that was more interested in destroying the New Deal/Great Society legacy than in reforming it. In Charlie Peters’ famous “Neoliberal Manifesto” of 1983, which Welch quotes from selectively, in the founding documents of the Democratic Leadership Council, and in the better contribution of TNR, there was a constant emphasis on maintaining progressive values and commitments but modernizing their means in order to make them more effective in meeting their stated purposes and in maintaining political support for them. The most urgent progressive political task today is surviving the conservative onslaught, so of course “contrarians” are a lot more careful about making their fundamental allegiances clear.

Since no progressive wants to find his or her “critical analysis” turned into Fox News talking points, even those most willing to question this or that element of existing policy or rhetorical practice (say, the reflexive opposition to means-testing of Social Security and Medicare on grounds that universal programs are easier to defend politically) need to constantly re-articulate their values. If that annoys or aggrieves people like Matt Welch, he can blame his friends on the Right.

The truth is that for all the past, present and future fighting within the progressive coalition, some of it quite essential (e.g., the fight over Democratic support for the Iraq War), the line separating left from right has always been more important, with the exception of professional contrarians who really didn’t care if they became objective servants of the conservative movement and its media. Maybe those are the people Welch misses. But they were never the dominant personalities at WaMo, the DLC, or even TNR (all institutions I’ve been identified with, BTW). From a personal point of view, the most “contrarian” progressive I know is Progressive Policy Institute president Will Marshall, who’s engaged in more intraparty fights than you can count. But in 2004, he co-drafted a economic policy manifesto with TAP’s Robert Kuttner. These two men were about as far from each other on the conventional intraparty spectrum as you could get—yet they thought it important to express solidarity over principles and make a largely successful effort to bridge the gap in their policy prescriptions.

That kind of intraparty debate is far from dead, and far from absent at WaMo (and I suspect from TNR). But for all its value, it could easily degenerate into the pointless wrangling you often see from Old Left academics if the broader goals of maintaining and reforming historic progressive achievements are abandoned.

It’s good to be home blogging at the trusty iMac, albeit loaded with antibiotics to combat the bronchitis that made my week in Georgia exceptionally miserable. As always, I enjoyed Kathleen Geier’s weekend blogging, and am particularly glad she did justice to the debate over Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In.

This is an unsurprisingly slow news day, but here are some mid-day morsels for your consumption:

* Best April’s Fool Joke so far, from the Twitter Blog.

* Politico’s Alex Isenstadt predicts Mark Sanford victory in SC-1 Republican runoff tomorrow thanks to name ID and money advantages, despite shaky performance in debate.

* At Salon, David Sirota notes bad timing of Colorado GOP’s battle to preserve gun rights for those convicted of domestic violence.

* At TAP, Jonathan Bernstein explores Takoma Park, Maryland’s, discussion of letting 16-year-olds vote in local elections.

* TNR republishes 1993 Michael Lewis article on being the resident goy at the magazine during Passover.

And in non-political news:

* Men’s Final Four set; Women’s Elite Eight kicks off today, featuring my Georgia Bulldogs facing the Cal Bears in Spokane.

Back after I compose a complicated post about Matt Welch’s Reason piece on the alleged decline of liberal “contrarianism.”

David Frum has generally become an interesting writer offering fresh perspectives—not least on the GOP to which he remains tenuously connected—but his CNN column on why Democrats should not “settle” for Hillary Clinton in 2016 via some “next-in-line” psychology is really flawed.

Democrats seem poised to choose their next presidential nominee the way Republicans often choose theirs: according to the principle of “next in line.”

Hillary Clinton came second in the nomination fight of 2008. If she were a Republican, that would make her a near-certainty to be nominated in 2016. Five of the past six Republican nominees had finished second in the previous round of primaries. (The sixth was George W. Bush, son of the most recent Republican president.)

Democrats, by contrast, prefer newcomers. Six of their eight nominees since 1972 had never sought national office before.

Obviously, past performance is no guarantee of future results. Democrats chose the next guy in line in 2000 — Vice President Al Gore — and they may well do so again. But speaking from across the aisle, it’s just this one observer’s opinion that Democrats would be poorly served by following the Republican example when President Obama’s term ends.

I’ve always thought the “next-in-line” explanation for Republican presidential politics was a considerable over-simplification, and actually wrong if it was used to suggest ideology matters less to conservatives than we’ve been led to believe. But even if you buy it entirely, comparing HRC to such next-in-line Republican pols as Poppy Bush in 1988, John McCain in 2008, and Mitt Romney in 2012 just doesn’t pass the smell test.

The three Republicans just mentioned never had overwhelming grassroots support in their own party and eventually prevailed over weak fields after relentlessly repositioning themselves to the Right. Both McCain and Romney, in particular, survived what can only be described as demolition derbies, and had to spend precious general-election resources pandering to the party “base.”

HRC’s immensely popular among grass-roots Democrats, not just because she is the last candidate not named Barack Obama who ran an effective presidential nomination contest, but because of the personal capital she’s built up over the years, her performance as a very popular Secretary of State, and the widely shared belief among progressives that it’s far past time for a woman to serve as president. Plus she is crushing every named Republican in early general-election trial heats.

Frum argues that an HRC nomination will inhibit the rise of fresh talent in the Donkey Party, and inhibit helpful intra-party debates. I’m all for fresh talent and helpful intra-party debates, but I’d say what Democrats probably want and need most is a 2016 victory to consolidate the policy achievements of the Obama administration while perhaps convincing Republicans the vicious obstructionism they’ve been exhibiting since 2009 is a dead end. Any way you slice it, though, treating HRC as another Mitt Romney is just laughable.

An exchange between New York’s Kevin Roose and Liberty University president Jerry Falwell, Jr., casts an interesting light on the big media meme that conservatism is being increasingly dominated by “libertarians” at the expense of the Christian Right. Asked about rumored weakening of opposition to marriage equality, Falwell the Younger had this to say about political trends at Liberty, one of the Christian Right’s primary training camps:

As you know…most of our faculty, staff and students are very conservative politically and theologically. I do not see that changing at all. For example, in Liberty’s voting precinct, Romney won 93% of the vote and that precinct had, by far, the highest turnout in the area. Students still are very much pro-life and pro-traditional marriage just like they have always been and the ones who voted for Romney indicated those two issues were the main reasons they supported Romney over Obama. The only shift I have noticed in recent years has been more support among conservative Christians, especially young ones, for libertarians. In Virginia, only Romney and Ron Paul were on the ballot in the Republican primary and Ron Paul won at the campus precinct. So, if anything, our students are becoming more conservative on the issue of limiting the size and scope of government while remaining conservative on the social issues.

What Falwell is describing, of course, is the world-view that dominates the Tea Party Movement: hard-core opposition to government “interference” in the economy combined with hard-core conservative cultural views. But it’s a world-view that’s been aborning for a long time. For the gazillions of words written about the steadily growing influence of the Christian Right within the conservative movement and the Republican Party over the last few decades, far less has been written about the equally important incorporation of “libertarian” economic and role-of-governnent extremism by the Christian Right itself.

The proto-Christian-Right of the old-timey southern conservative evangelicals of the period prior to the establishment of the Moral Majority in the late 1970s often reflected reactionary views on issues remote from central cultural concerns: hostility to labor unions, defense of segregation and neo-segregation (via church-based separatist private schools designed to circumvent school desegregation), celebration of godly “self-made-men” who had accumulated vast wealth, etc. But once the institutional Christian Right entered into what might have once been called a “marriage of convenience,” it has steadily acclimated itself to secular conservative private-property absolutism in all its forms (most notably hostility to environmentalism, often described as “pagan”). And one of the most distinctive features of the Tea Party faith has been the divinization of such views, often via idolatry aimed at the Declaration of Independence, thought to reflect a theocratic charter for America making pervasive property rights, strictly limited government and the “rights of the unborn” and “traditional marriage” the only legitimate governing tenets for the country. Libertarians, of course, share some if not all of this agenda. So a growing warmth for libertarianism within the Christian Right is not a problem for its leaders, and does not necessarily mean a growing warmth for any kind of cultural liberalism.

Indeed, as Falwell notes, this “teavangelical” coalition (as some have called it) has a common enemy:

Rand Paul wrote a column recently about his father’s legacy and he noted that the two universities that gave his father the most enthusiastic reception were UC-Berkeley and Liberty. His point was that there is support on the left and the right for more limited government and expanded individual liberties and freedom. I think he is right and I think the Republicans will continue to lose if they keep running candidates who try to move toward the middle to attract the “independent” voters.

Arguably, then, Christian Right interest in “libertarianism” is a sign of hardening, not softening, ideological bonds. And if, as appears entirely possible, Rand Paul becomes a maximum leader of conservative extremism in all its forms, that could become much more apparent.

One reason support for laws prohibiting same-sex marriage is crumbling is that supporters of discrimination have chosen a particularly poor argument on its behalf: that marriage equality will contribute to the decline of “traditional marriage” once the connection between marriage and procreation has been severed.

Aside from the rather obvious common-sense absurdity of heterosexuals refusing to tie the knot because they no longer have a monopoly on the institution, and all the cases where straight folk get married without the expectation of procreation, there’s this large data point noted yesterday by Kevin Drum:

[S]upport for gay marriage is lowest in precisely the groups that have abandoned traditional marriage in the largest numbers. If the procreation argument were really affecting marriage rates, you’d expect to see the biggest impact in the groups where this argument is most commonly advanced, and in the groups that most strongly support gay marriage. Instead we’ve seen the opposite.

With that argument decimated, resistance to marriage equality pretty much comes down to the “fear of change” factor, which is diminished every time a state (or a nation) legalizes same-sex marriage and the sky does not fall, and the “ick! factor” which leads people to view LGBT folk as “unnatural” up to the moment when they discover a loved or respected friend or family member is gay.

Some conservative evangelicals and Santorum-style “traditionalist” Catholics aren’t much affected by the growing normalization of same-sex marriage because they view it as just another example of a mainstream “secularist” culture that’s plunging the whole world hellwards. In other words, they are beginning to marginalize themselves into a counter-culture. And some old folk continue to look past LGBT friends and relatives, or deny they exist.

But by and large, the various pillars of the anti-equality majority that looked so formidable a few years ago are collapsing all around us, and it’s no wonder loud-and-proud advocates of discrimination are going all Spenglerian in their desperation and despair.

In his gloomy 2014 forecast for Senate races I discussed in my last post, Jonathan Bernstein did mention my home state of Georgia as a pick-up opportunity, partly to show how sparse such opportunities actually are. But if a viable Democrat runs (the two names popping up most often are that perennial NRCC target, Rep. John Barrow, and civic entrepreneur and political scion Michelle Nunn) and The Crazy prevails among Republicans, there’s enough of a Democratic voter base in the state to make an upset possible.

There are two more signs of The Crazy in today’s news from the Empire State of the South.

State GOP chair Sue Everhart went out of her way to express bizarre fears of same-sex marriage fraud—along with her own “ick! factor” attitudes towards GLBT folk—in comments made to a Georgia newspaper. As Brother Benen noted today, Everhart seems to have watched and internalized the 2007 Adam Sandler flick, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry (the kind of “comedy” that triggers my own “ick! factor”). But it illustrates how far out of the rapidly growing mainstream Georgia Republicans are determined to swim.

Then there’s a Roll Call article by Daniel Newhauser about the attacks already being prepared against Rep. Jack Kingston by his righter-than-thou rivals should he enter the Republican Senate primary race:

Candidates in the Georgia Republican Senate primary are jostling for the furthest right starting block in what’s likely to be a crowded race. Already the question is: Can a member of the Appropriations Committee, through which all past spending decisions have traveled, prevail in the new GOP era of fiscal restraint?

Rep. Jack Kingston is the case in point. He’s the chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services and Education and he’s expected to enter the Senate primary against Reps. Paul Broun and Phil Gingrey. Rep. Tom Price is touted as a potential candidate as well….

It’s becoming apparent that the knives will be out should the 1st District representative announce his candidacy. Broun said that what distinguishes him from the field is his fealty to constitutionally limited government.

“I think Americans want somebody who is going to reduce the spending,” Broun said in an interview. “So anyone who has voted for bigger government, bigger spending, is going to have troubles in a primary race if they’re running against someone who has the record that I have….”

In the 112th Congress, Broun had the highest rating of any Georgia candidate with Heritage Action for America, a conservative grass-roots activist group, which gave him a 96 percent score. Kingston scored lowest, at 71 percent.

Ultimately, George primary voters will judge whose argument has more credence. Joel McElhannon, a Peach State political consultant who is not affiliated with any candidate, said Kingston is at a natural disadvantage, but money, advertising and outside group involvement will decide whether the attacks stick.

“Is spending and debt and the overall economy going to be the overwhelming issue in this race? Yes,” McElhannon said. “So Jack has something to overcome there. … This issue of being an appropriator, of your track record of spending in your time in Congress … that’s really going to come into focus in this race.”

But hey, Kingston will have some powerful defenders if Broun, Gingrey or Price go after him as an appropriator:

There is evidence that Kingston may have some backup, though. Outside groups have pledged to counter attacks by candidates they perceive as too conservative to win a general election, as was the case last year with the disastrous Senate bids of ex-Rep. Todd Akin in Missouri and state treasurer Richard Mourdock in Indiana.

The Republican Main Street Partnership works to elect center-right candidates to the House. Its president, former Rep. Steven C. LaTourette of Ohio, said he can envision GOP strategist Karl Rove getting involved as well with his political action committee, American Crossroads.

“To attack an appropriator for spending too much money is kind of on the ridiculous side,” said LaTourette, a former appropriator. “In my opinion, it’d be a cheap shot and the way you push back against that is to take them to task.”

If, God forbid, I were advising one of Georgia’s wingnut candidates for the Senate, there’s no limit to the effort I’d make to encourage LaTourette and Rove to get involved in this primary on behalf of Kingston. Georgia Republican primary voters are not in the mood to let Republican Establishment “outside agitators” tell them what to do, nossireebob.

In any event, Georgia Democrats’ cup runneth over in the developing GOP crazy-fest. It will take skill and luck for them to pick off this Senate seat, but every time a major Republican figure in the state opens his or her mouth, the odds get a little better.

There’s not much news today, as one might expect on Easter Monday/7th Day of Passover, with Congress in recess. But over the weekend, Jonathan Bernstein penned a real buzz-kill for progressives in a forecast of 2014 Senate races. He didn’t even have to get into the history lessons about second-term midterms as a death trap for parties controlling the White House; the micro-landscape is bad enough:

The two most likely seats to flip are both held by retiring Democrats — South Dakota and West Virginia. One can make a pretty good argument that at least the five next most likely to flip are also currently in the Democratic column. It would be surprising, at this point, if Democrats could manage to break even, even if the national tide does wind up helping them.

The best-case scenario for the Democrats right now is probably salvaging one of the seats in either South Dakota or West Virginia, and then having GOP recruiting failures doom them in the other vulnerable Democratic seats. And somehow managing to pick off one of the longshot Democratic opportunities. That’s a break-even outcome. Realistically it’s hard to see anything better.

On the other hand, it’s not hard at all to picture Republicans picking up six, seven, or even more seats — and taking back a Senate majority. But more likely is probably a 2-5 seat Republican gain, allowing Democrats to keep their Senate majority but by only a slim margin.

Bernstein goes on to say every Senator matters, and I agree up to a point. But in terms of being able to govern the country, the most important goal for Senate Democrats in 2014 is to keep themselves in contention to win 60 seats in the much more favorable landscape of 2016. Harry Reid could change all that with unilateral filibuster reform, making majorities well under 60 meaningful as they were for most of the country’s history. But nobody’s holding their breaths for that to happen.

Being gullible by nature, I really dislike April Fool’s Day. But I know it’s important to a lot of tricksters out there, so I’ll post a couple of videos today with foolish themes. Here’s Steely Dan performing “(I’m A Fool To Do Your) Dirty Work,” in Charlotte in 2006.

Last week, Kate Losse’s review of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In unexpectedly made headlines when one of Sandberg’s PR people sent Losse a startling private tweet that read, “There’s a special place in hell for you.” This was paraphrasing Madeline Albright, who once famously said, “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.” Clearly, Losse had hit a nerve. At any rate, the wildly disproportionate response was ultra-creepy.

Of the many reviews I have read of Sandberg’s book, Losse’s is the most interesting by far, although I do have mixed (that word again!) feelings about it. I thought it made some excellent and extremely important points but was also unfair and over the top. Losse, who is a former Facebook employee, seems to question the sincerity of Sandberg’s feminism and views the book as a giant marketing gimmick for Facebook. I don’t agree; I think Sandberg’s feminism is sincere, though her version of it isn’t my version. If she wanted to invent a marketing scam that would draw more women to Facebook, far more plausible paths are available. I would think a diet book would do the trick, or an Oprah-style empowerment movement that soft-peddled the feminism.

That said, Sandberg is a canny businesswoman, and of course she is using Lean In to promote Facebook, and vice versa.

Losse got screwed over by Facebook, probably at least in part for sexist reasons. She uses this to try to debunk Sandberg’s argument that more women at the top will mean better conditions for women employees overall. But this is a weak argument. By most accounts, Facebook is a sexist company — Facebook started out as a site to rate women’s hotness and its bro culture is notorious — but it’s only one data point. And besides, it doesn’t seem to have a critical mass of women in its leadership yet (I believe Sandberg is still the only woman on its board).

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This is my review of Sheryl Sandberg’s best-selling book, Lean In. I tried to place various incarnations of it elsewhere, but by the time I pitched them most publications were Sandberg’ed out. I couldn’t get my hands on advance galleys of the book and had to wait until it was published to get a copy. Thus, I am posting my review here. I do have some things to say about the book which I haven’t heard elsewhere.

The bottom line is that while, for me, ultimately it adds up to a net plus, I feel considerable ambivalence about this book. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more the ambivalence it stirred up. I think this book is great at giving empowering, female-specific career advice, and igniting a broad conversation about our stalled feminist revolution. But it’s awful when it comes to realistically anchoring that advice in the context of our radically altered, high-unemployment economy.

Moving on to specifics: Sandberg is good about discussing the chicken/egg question of internal and external barriers to women’s leadership — the issue that those external barriers need to fall down, but that they won’t unless individual women start pushing them. Like any good lefty, I strongly believe that structural issues are a far more significant impediment to women’s progress than are individual ones, and that collective action is more powerful than individual effort. That said, you can’t get around the fact that individual behavior also plays a role, and that in order to gain more economic power, women must also attention to that. While Sandberg does support policy solutions like workplace flexibility, child care, etc., her book is about the individual stuff. I will pay her the respect of reviewing the book she actually wrote by focusing what I think she gets right — and wrong — about the individual-level issues. The collective, structural issues will have to wait for another time.

The first thing feminists approaching this book should realize is that, as a perusal of her list of all-time favorite books will confirm, Sandberg is no intellectual, and she is unfamiliar with academic feminism. Her book is not feminist theory or feminist polemic. She’s a corporate tycoon, and this is a business book — a kind of memoir/advice book hybrid. It should be read in that spirit.

The whole genre of business books and trendy management “theory” (I had to read some of this twaddle for my MPA program, God help me) usually makes my eyes roll so far to the back of my head they fall out and hit the floor. So in that context, I was surprised by how much I liked this book. What’s such a game-changer is to see one of these books written by an out-and-proud feminist, a woman who says, “A truly equal world would be one where women ran half our countries and companies and men ran half our homes. This would be a better world.” — and really seems to mean it.

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This week was potentially historic in the battle for gay rights, as the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case that could significantly advance the right to same-sex marriage. During arguments it became apparent that Justice Scalia didn’t realize that gay adoptions were legal in California. I know that Paul and Ed have already covered this ground this week, but I wanted to return to it, because I have a more personal take.

I first discovered that gay couples could adopt during my first job out of college. My boss, who was the director of a small social service agency in New York City, had adopted a disabled girl with his partner. This was in the mid-90s and I believe they had adopted her a couple of years before. Memories are hazy at this point, but I think they were the first — or one of the first — gay couples in New York State to adopt a child, where neither parent was the birth parent.

I was surprised to learn that such an adoption was legal. Although I’m straight, I’ve always followed LGBTQ rights issues closely. Ever since I first started thinking about politics, it seemed like a compelling issue to me. Partly it was simply as an important human rights issue, but also, as a feminist, I saw it as part of the broader project of overthrowing oppressive gender norms. This is why, for once, I mostly agree with Ross Douthat’s column today, in which he argues that the growing acceptance of gay marriage is undermining traditional patriarchal marriage. And he says that like it’s a bad thing!

Anyway, I knew that, back then, even in liberal New York City, gays and lesbians were not protected from employment discrimination, nor did they enjoy civil partnership benefits, let alone marriage. So how did they win the right to adopt? Alison Gash’s excellent article in the upcoming issue of the Monthly provides a history. The short answer is that it was done under the radar, in family courts that received little public scrutiny. By the time anti-gay activists were aware of what was going on, gay adoption was an established practice and as such, hard to get rid of.

Now moving on to the more personal side of this story: just this week, I became aware of an awesome gay adoption story, and it involves someone I knew growing up. Peter Mercurio is a New York City-based playwright and screenwriter who grew up in the same small town I did. His parents and my parents were good friends and belonged to the same Catholic parish. One day twelve years ago, Peter’s then-partner, now-husband Danny found an abandoned infant in a New York City subway station. He acted like a good citizen and called 911. Three months later, after Danny testified in family court about how he found the baby, the judge unexpectedly asked him if he would be interested in adopting the baby. The entire courtroom was stunned, but Danny said yes. Peter tells the whole story in this New York Times essay. Read it, and if your heart doesn’t melt, it’s probably made out of stone. You can also watch the video at the end of this post — it’s an interview Peter and Danny recently did with Anderson Cooper.

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