In this morning's WaPo, George Will is distressed by (what he considers) the high birth rate of the African-American evacuees. He can't help

"indelicately noting how many of the victims were women with children but not husbands."

And you know what means:

"That translates into a large and constantly renewed cohort of lightly parented adolescent males, and that translates into chaos in neighborhoods and schools, come rain or come shine."

John Roberts' nomination for the Supreme Court has called attention to his wife's unpaid legal work for a super-slick anti-choice group deceptively called Feminists For Life. Should we feel that this will effect Roberts' judgement on the Court? Family man Rick Santorum doesn't think so, but other Americans may beg to differ.

FFL is part of of a another deliberately ms-titled anti-choice campaign called Women Deserve Better. I would be interested in hearing what other readers think about FFL. Judging from this group's website, I think it has a creepily eugenic edge . . .

According to John Tierney's column in today's NY Times The Old and the Rested, America's Social Security system promotes "greed and sloth" on the part of older Americans.

After all,

"Americans now feel entitled to spend nearly a third of their adult lives in retirement. Their jobs are less physically demanding than their parents' were, but they're retiring younger and typically start collecting Social Security by age 62. Most could keep working - fewer than 10 percent of people 65 to 75 are in poor health - but, like Bartleby the Scrivener, they prefer not to."

Tierney reveals his own bizarre class bias when he asks:

"Is it possible that people this age are still physically capable of putting in a full day's work at the office?"

Here's the latest attack on age 55+ voters who are skeptical about Social Security privatization by the Bush Administration and their journalistic shills. In today's Washington Post George Wills dumps on older Americans:

First he sneers at Democrats (nothing new there), but then he goes after all Americans born before 1950:

"The Democrats' strategy of brute negativism is inherently unstable because it depends on furious hostility to the president's plan from people for whom the plan is irrelevant -- the elderly, all of whom are going to live out their lives under the current system. Because Democrats are counting on confusion among the elderly, Democrats and their media echoes are insisting that they have won the debate and that personal accounts are dead. They know the president probably will win the reform battle if he merely moves the elderly to their proper place on the sidelines during this debate."

David Kuo, the former deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, has written a sad and angry article for Belief.net about the Bush administration's "minimal commitment" to funding faith-based community services. Kuo writes about his disenchantment with the White House: "From tax cuts to Medicare, the White House gets what the White House really wants. It never really wanted the "poor people stuff."

The White House had better use for the money promised for faith-based projects: "In June 2001, the promised tax incentives for charitable giving were stripped at the last minute from the $1.6 trillion tax cut legislation to make room for the estate-tax repeal that overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy."

Here's a new "grass-roots" group set up to mislead women about privatizing Social Security"

"For Our Grandchildren"

http://www.forourgrandchildren-pageserver.org/blog/index.php?view=180

Who set up and pays for this slick website? According to the NYTimes:

"The group is run by a woman named  Sandra Jaques [a "single mom"] Mr. Bush promotes his agenda with testimonials from "regular folks," in the words of Joshua B. Bolten, the White House budget director, who introduced Ms. Jaques.

But Ms. Jaques is not any random single mother. She is the Iowa state director of a conservative advocacy group, FreedomWorks, whose founders are Jack F. Kemp, the former vice-presidential nominee, and Dick Armey, the former House Republican leader."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/17/politics/17mom.html