Ronald Bailey doesn’t seem to like kids much, perhaps because they can’t buy his books or otherwise support his "voluntarily childless lifestyle." As Matthew Yglesias (whose position has its own problems, according to our pomocon friend) notes, this calculation works--I’d say might work--until you’re old. But perhaps Bailey doesn’t care about the loneliness of old age without children and grandchildren, or perhaps he doesn’t plan to grow old. And it’s quite likely that he’s utterly indifferent to the cost of social insurance and other government programs that provide benefits to the elderly. Does he care about a functioning economy, one vibrant enough to generate his private retirement income? Who’s going to collect his trash, clean his streets, and keep him safe from criminals and terrorists? Or won’t there be any terrorists and criminals in his largely child-free future, where all the unpleasant stuff is taken care of by robocop and robotrashman?

But let me return to the central point: one of the things that makes us human is feeling and living up to responsibilities for others, which is manifest much more powerfully in child-rearing than even in marriage (especially if you’re talking about two "autonomous adults," each of whom is earning an income sufficient to support himself or herself). Bailey’s position seems to run away from adulthood, because it isn’t much fun. The libertarians I respect are grown-ups who aren’t afraid of grown-up responsibilities.

Jay Cost suggests that there is indeed some evidence that HRC is a "good closer," but wonders if that means much more than that typically ill-informed late deciders have heard of her. If that’s true, then it’s hard to imagine that those folks haven’t heard of Obama by now.

Daniel Henninger argues that the Democratic primaries are auditions for the part of selling a dream. Is anyone prepared to contend that Obama isn’t the better salesman?

Karlyn Bowman and Ruy Teixeira (doesn’t he play first base for my Braves?) walk their readers through the state of the art in political demography. Here’s one of the interesting nuggets:

Married voters typically vote solidly Republican and married voters with children even more so. But their representation in the national electorate is waning, as are some values to which these groups have traditionally been linked. According to Tom Smith of the National Opinion Research Center, two-parent families with kids at home were 23% of the population in 2006, down from 45% in 1972. The proportion of never-married adults rose to nearly a quarter of the electorate between 1972 and 2006, up from 15%. Overall, never-married, divorced, or widowed women are now a narrow majority of adult women, and unmarried households are now a majority of the nation’s households. The growing, unmarried slice of the electorate is tilting Democratic.

I never had the fortune of meeting William F. Buckley, or hearing him in person, but I find myself envying those who did. You can read plenty of reminiscences and appreciations over at The Corner, which will, I’m sure, be draped in black for the foreseeable future (as well it should be).

The Democrats press their attack on John McCain as he attempts to opt out of public financing. Some conservatives appear to be enjoying the spectacle.

The definitive post on the subject is by former FEC Commissioner (and current Ohioan) Brad Smith.

All this leaves me with a few questions unanswered. First, does or does not Barack Obama have a hold on Bush FEC nominee Hans von Spakovsky? The WaTi article says he withdrew his hold in December; everyone else says the hold is still in place. Since that nomination is what is effectively preventing the FEC from reaching a quorum so as to be able to resolve this dispute, people need to be asking Obama and his fellow Democrats about their actions. The opposition to von Spakovsky is connected with his role in promoting voter ID legislation and purging the voter rolls of felons. Partisan Democrats don’t like him. Are they going to be able to get away with prosecuting their partisan ends and putting a cloud over the McCain campaign? As I said before, since they don’t actually have to do anything to keep this mess going, and since it’s pretty arcane, I fear that they can get away with it. Who’s going to put the heat on them? The press? President Bush? The RNC?

The good folks at Acton have given me an incentive to think about the Pew survey I mentioned yesterday. They even suggested that I take a look at these two essays on church-shopping, which seems to be one of the big take-aways from the report.

Virtually all the major stories on the survey make our church shopping the headline, followed closely by the observation that we’re headed toward minority status for Protestants, and the observation that the secularist category is growing like gangbusters. This WaPo article is typical. The WaTi’s Julia Duin (for my money one of our best religion beat reporters) focuses on the decline of Catholicism (kept afloat by immigrants, but losing those raised in the Church) and the rise of evangelicalism. Get Religion’s Terry Mattingly nicely summarizes the various angles stories have taken.

As for me, I have lots of questions. To wit: why do people move from one church or denomination to another? Are they changing or are the denominations changing? (In the Knippenberg family, it’s a bit of both. We attend a church that’s somewhat like the church in which my wife grew up, but it’s a different denomination. As for my own upbringing...well, that’s another story.)

Another issue: the secular number in the survey is large--around 16%, as I recall. But only 4% of those call themselves atheists or agnostics. The other 12% are divided between people who apparently don’t give religion a thought (let’s call them "worldlings") and those who are kinda sorta spiritual but don’t fit into a denominational box at the moment. Some of the latter are immigrants; some others are young folks. Both these types find themselves in circumstances when their identities (for want of a better term) are in flux. I assume that many of them will settle. Where? So-called seeker-friendly churches are made for people like that, though one hopes that they eventually move from seeking to finding. In a similar vein, I’d add that one thing that tends to motivate people to church or back to church is marriage and family. All of this is a long way of saying that I’m not sure that our relatively high (by American standards) percentage of people who claim no religious affiliation is necessarily a harbinger of a post-religious future. It may be, but a lot depends, I think, on such "mundane" considerations as whether the decay of the family continues apace and whether churches and denominations do a good job of reaching out to immigrants. (Indeed, if our religious health were my principal consideration, I’d be very accommodating to immigrants...and make certain that women and children accompanied the young men. Without the former, the latter are much less likely to find their way into a church.)

Your thoughts and observations are welcome, especially before tomorrow morning, when I’ll be joining the Radio Free Acton podcast.

Update: The not-yet-ex-Catholic Jon Schaff has more. (I by the way do not mean to suggest that he’s on his way to being an ex-Catholic, but I do think he nails one of the problems with Catholic religious education as I experienced it--at least episodically--growing up.) Which leads me to another question connected with our religious fluidity: to the degree that churches all too often consist of rather poorly educated ex-members of other churches, how on earth can anyone successfully inculcate anyone in a religious tradition? Pastors have to carry an awful lot of weight, a problem that’s compounded in the Roman Catholic Church by the relative shortage of priests.

Earlier this month at CPAC, Ashbrook Chairman Marv Krinsky gave the annual John Ashbrook Award to Lee Edwards. We put together the following video for the dinner as an introduction to John Ashbrook and the work we are doing here at the Center.

Being otherwise occupied, I missed this article last week (hat tip to Howard Friedman through Jordan Ballor). The usual secularist subjects want to strip the affirmation of religious hiring rights from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) Act renewal. Their argument is the old "no government funding of religious discrimination" canard, with which I dealt many moons ago here. The short version of my argument is that we’re not funding religious discrimination, we’re supporting religious freedom in carrying out programs that work. We shouldn’t fund programs because they’e religious, but because they work. We shouldn’t refuse to fund programs that are religious if they work, assuming that a wide range of alternatives is available (and also funded). This isn’t a violation of the First Amendment.

One point about Hillary Clinton’s dire situation hasn’t received enough attention: her need to win both the Texas and Ohio primaries on March 4. A split-decision next Tuesday will be as damaging to her campaign as two defeats. Today’s Real Clear Politics average of the latest polls shows Clinton 8 points ahead of Obama in Ohio and 1.5 points behind in Texas. Polls in both states have shifted in Obama’s direction over the past week. According to Marc Ambinder, Clinton’s advisors now “figure that a loss in Texas is as likely as a win in Ohio.”

To put this problem of needing two big victories in military terms, Clinton’s position is like an army that needs to stretch its forces to defend the entirety of a long front, facing an opponent that can mass its troops for an assault on the point of its choosing. The similarity to Robert Lee vs. Ulysses Grant becomes stronger considering that Obama, like Grant, has more troops and more firepower. His campaign organization has shown itself to be more nimble and disciplined than hers over the past 8 weeks. He spent five times as much as she did on television advertising in Wisconsin. His financial advantage over the next week will be smaller than that but still considerable. With that advantage Obama can put extra ads on the air in Texas, if that continues to look more promising, while spending enough in Ohio to pin Clinton down there and prevent her from shifting resources to Texas.

Facing this tactical challenge, Hillary’s army in not only running low on bullets but, as you would expect after losing 11 straight battles, suffering morale problems. Patrick Healy reported in the New York Times that some Clinton campaign staffers are “burning out.” Some have “taken to going home early — 9 p.m. — turning off their BlackBerrys, and polishing off bottles of wine,” he writes, while others “have taken several days off, despite it being crunch time.” Mike Allen and John Harris reinforce that point in today’s Politico, portraying a campaign team “consumed with frustration and finger-pointing” that has “slipped into full recriminations mode.” The campaign has become “a grim slog,” they write.

There’s another survey--described in this article--that points toward the weakness of our schools as transmitters of anything like our full cultural legacy. Yes, the kids get Martin Luther King, but not Martin Luther; civil rights, but not so much the Civil War.

And this explanation won’t wash: it is, after all, possible to read about our history and culture.

I haven’t yet seen the report itself. When I find it, I’ll provide a link and will doubtless have more to say.