After the Mayor received an "Ebby", at least so the Becket Fund folks claim, a Nativity Story trailer may be shown in Chicago’s Daley Plaza after all.

Howard Friedman notes another front where a menorah was removed in order to avoid having to permit the erection of a creche. This article, linked by Professor Friedman, offers a good rundown of the unfortunate dispute.

This WSJ editorial makes the case against blogs. In a nutshell:

The right now is partially a function of technology, which makes instantaneity possible, and also a function of a culture that valorizes the up-to-the-minute above all else. But there is no inherent virtue to instantaneity. Traditional daily reporting--the news--already rushes ahead at a pretty good clip, breakneck even, and suffers for it. On the Internet all this is accelerated.

The blogs must be timely if they are to influence politics. This element--here’s my opinion--is necessarily modified and partly determined by the right now. Instant response, with not even a day of delay, impairs rigor. It is also a coagulant for orthodoxies. We rarely encounter sustained or systematic blog thought--instead, panics and manias; endless rehearsings of arguments put forward elsewhere; and a tendency to substitute ideology for cognition. The participatory Internet, in combination with the hyperlink, which allows sites to interrelate, appears to encourage mobs and mob behavior.

If nothing else, this list is more entertaining than most of the others you’re going to be suckered into reading over the next few weeks. The number one story, in my opinion: IVF-PGD (preimplantation genetic diagnosis) clinics have already made it possible for couples to select genetically defective embryos. We can no longer take comfort in the thought that those who longed for the tyrannical power to design their babies would at least want the best for them.

My mom reported this to me the other day as I was complaining about the fact that our first live Christmas tree was going limp. I didn’t believe her, so I looked it up and, sure enough, Mother knows best. Unfortunately, our tree is already past the point of no return and, besides, I don’t know any old guys with a prescription. Who knew?!

I noted some time ago Brink Lindsey’s proposal of a lib-lib alliance and Jonah Goldberg’s promise to write about it. Well, Jonah G. has made good on his promise, but only for NR subscribers. Here’s the most interesting snippet from behind the firewall:

Nonetheless, the tension between conservatives and libertarians is not as one-sided as he and others would have us believe. Libertarianism was once primarily concerned with negative liberty — i.e. delineating a zone free of government intrusion. Meyer’s libertarianism was primarily concerned with the ability of the individual to find the virtuous path within “an objective moral order based on ontological foundations” best expressed in Western civilization. As such, fusionism was less a coalitional doctrine than a metaphysical imperative. But these days, phrases like “objective moral order” will get you knocked off Cato’s Kwanzaa-card list. Liberty’s virtue is no longer that it supports the virtuous. Rather, according to today’s leading libertarians, economic freedom’s virtue lies in its ability to provide everybody the custom-made lifestyle of his choice.

***

This emphasis on the liberating power of technology and wealth — i.e., materialism and positive liberty — represents an enormous philosophical transformation within libertarianism that echoes, albeit faintly, elements of the economic liberalism of John Dewey and FDR. It also shows that today’s libertarians have a different view of the 1960s than their forefathers, such as Meyer. Evaluating the ideas within this burgeoning enterprise would require another essay, and a very long one. But three preliminary points are worth mentioning. First, a new left-leaning fusionism is a long way off. The flaws in Lindsey’s dream are Aesopian: The scorpion had to sting the frog because that is what scorpions do; liberals have to engage in economic social engineering because that is what they do. Second, sure, lib-lib tactical alliances are possible, but conservatives would be idiotic to whine excessively about them. After all, the true sign of your movement’s success is when your opponents start copying you.

Lastly, if the conservative-libertarian union is in trouble, it’s not solely because conservatives have strayed from their vows. Marriages tend to dissolve when both parties “grow apart,” and libertarians have been doing quite a bit of growing themselves. “You’ve changed” is a fair accusation from both sides, though “I don’t even know you anymore” is surely an exaggeration. Perhaps the real lesson here is that conservatives and libertarians need to recommit themselves to the fusionist project. In other words: Let’s seek counseling.

Jonah G. seems to me correct about the current general libertarian indifference to the connection between virtue and responsibility, between "private" taste and character, on the one side, and the capacity for self-government, on the other. He’s also right that the Sixties may have ruined the old-fashioned libertarianism that could readily fuse with conservatives.

From the Levenger Catalogue ("tool for serious readers") comes the perfect Christmas gift: The Claremont Unifier! As you can see from the photo, it has no hidden comparments, no esoteric markings or invisible ink wells. (Or so it would seem.)

David Stern has spoken. Carmelo Anthony will serve a 15 game suspension for his role in the on-court riot Saturday night at Madison Square Garden. The other players deemed culpable received lesser but still stiff penalties. The teams were hit with $500,000 fines.

A few quick thoughts. I approve of ‘Melo’s punishment, which is considerably above that meted out for previous incidents and thus is likely to be reduced on appeal. (The fact that Isaiah Thomas skated, as usual, is appalling.) Stern knows that the league took an enormous public relations hit from the Ron Artest brawl a few years back and he thought he’d gotten his message across to the players. Evidently not. He had to pick out the highest profile offender and raise the ante.

Fighting is hardly new to basketball. Kermit Washington punch’s nearly killed Rudy T. The sainted Larry Bird and Dr. J even got into it, although it was a typical pro sports fight, no harm no foul. But over the past decade pro basketball had seemed on the verge of spilling out of control and into the stands, culminating in the Artest fiasco. Thus Stern’s intervention.

There once did seem to a self-enforcing mechanism that limited the mayhem when the league was much smaller and the big men much bigger (in the sense that you really, really didn’t want to fight them). Wilt Chamberlain – a gentle giant, really, but a giant nonetheless – once decided he’d break up a shoving match involving one of the league’s tough guys, Wayne Embry (6-8, 280 or so), if I recall correctly. Wilt picked him up by his jersey and sort of slid him out of bounds, from the free throw line. Everyone stopped and stared. Wilt had gotten angry. You wouldn’t like Wilt when he was angry. That was that. No one stepped in to challenge Wilt. I don’t think even a technical foul was assessed. On with the game.

Perhaps my rosy-eyed revisionism is unjustified. But I wonder how much of these gang-like brawls in basketball are related to the gang-like culture with which many of the young players identify. They are clever – they fund showy charitable activities, as Carmelo Anthony has done, but then they are off to their favorite head-banging nightclub, where they wind up in a parking lot fight at 3 in the morning. ESPN has been running an interesting feature on pro athletes and guns. One estimate of pro basketball players puts gun ownership at 90%. Many athletes carry guns. They point out that they feel they need the protection when their public visibility makes them likely targets. Boston’s Paul Pierce was knifed and seriously injured a few years ago. One of course supports their Second Amendment right to protect themselves and their family. But in this case Karl Malone, former NBA great, outdoorsman and hunter, scoffs. He says it’s not about protection of home and person. You take a young athlete, drunk, with his posse, at a club at 3 in the morning, with a gun. Good luck.

Jonah G. doesn’t agree with Michael G.. For what it’s worth, I think that Gerson is right about the stakes and probably right that "civil society" can’t simply resurrect itself where it’s broken.

My concern is that opening the door to government programming usually lets in a lot more than someone like Gerson (or Jeb Bush or Mitt Romney or Sam Brownback [who goes unmentioned in MG’s piece]) presumably wants.

This article reports on controversy over plans for the G. W. Bush library at SMU. There have been articles written and letters of protest circulated. Francis Beckwith says he’d be happy to see the library at Baylor, his institution (and one of the competitors, along with the University of Dallas).

This emotionally wrenching and extraordinarily well-written piece by an 18 year-old girl who is the product of sperm donor, ought to give pause to anyone who thinks these matters are all just a matter of personal choice . . . for the parents.

Will has a very interesting column on McCain’s and Romney’s immediate problems. McCain, to avoid contradicting himself, may be soon be stuck with repudiating the president’s Iraq strategy as immoral. And Romney, in light of new evidence, now has a harder time showing that he’s not contradicting his earlier, more socially liberal positions just to gain conservative support. (It does appear that Romney did attempt to position himself to the left of Ted Kennedy on some issues when he ran against him.)