Obama has made up his mind

When asked about whether he favored choice for public school students, Barack Obama said he'd think about it with an open mind.

Apparently, he has decided--at least for himself: He favors choice. Today, he took his kids to school in Chicago, a fancy, expensive private school. Tuition at the school, the University of Chicago Lab School in Hyde Park, is more than $20,000, twice what Chicago public schools spend per student. That's even more than the $17,000 that the New Trier High school district, on the wealthy North Shore spends on each of his kids. Maybe the Rev. James Meeks should lead a protest against the Lab School, as he did at New Trier, to protest funding disparities.

Of course, Obama said he had an open mind after he said he didn't, when he told the American Federation of Teachers he is opposed to school vouchers, referring to the “tired rhetoric about vouchers and school choice.”

Democrats discover homemaking

Anna Quindlen is aghast in a Newsweek magazine opinion piece that the "right wing that trashed the women's movement suddenly finds its inner feminist."

And this, she says, is hypocrisy. Her rant starts:

Hypocrisy is only bad when it is improperly used.—George Bernard Shaw

I never thought I would live long enough to see the day when the Republican presidential candidate would cite membership in the PTA as evidence of executive experience, when the far right would laud the full-time working mothers of newborns, when social conservatives would stare down teenage pregnancy and replace their pursed-lip accusations of promiscuity with hosannas about choosing life.

Charming. Anna apparently doesn't get that her observations open her up to a similar charge. Let me demonstrate by changing just a few of her words:

I never thought that I would live long enough to see the day when the Democratic presidential candidate would cite membership in the Illinois legislature or in the Chicago Democratic machine as evidence of executive experience, when the far left would laud stay-at-home moms and suggest that they shouldn't work (i.e. be the Vice President) because who will take care of the kids? Nor did I think that I would ever hear anyone hint that having a Down Syndrome child was a bad thing, and it should have been aborted.

Here I'll continue to mimic her column, which you can follow along by going to the Newsweek link at the top of this post:

But expediency is an astonishing thing, and liberal Democrats have suddenly embraced the assertion that women can't do it all, even those so-called progressives who have made careers out of trashing that notion. They now are appalled at a woman who was back at work three days after her son, who has Down syndrome, was born. What happened to the song: "I am woman?"

This would all have been entertaining if it were not such rank hypocrisy. These are people who have inveighed against merit-based hiring and promotions, a version of which undoubtedly played a part in Sarah Palin's nomination. These are people who inveighed against personal attacks on Barack Obama when the wingnuts of their own party elevated such attacks to a fine art by accusing Palin of prentending to have given birth to the Down child because it was really her daughter's.

Well, you get the idea. Suffice to end with a quote of my choosing (if a Biblical citation is allowed). From Matthew 7:5: "You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye."