If standupgirl.com really was a web site where teenaged moms shared their stories and got advice, that would be one thing. But it's not. It's a fake site that's intended to spread an anti-abortion ideology by deceiving teenagers into thinking it's easy to be a teen mom.

It's like those "astro turf" organizations that pretend to be environmentalists but are actually funded by the coal or oil industry. They are deliberately created to confuse people into thinking that they're concerned with the environment (down to their environmentalist-sounding names), but they're really industry front groups. This web site is similar, only it's a front for the anti-abortion movement.

If their anti-abortion message is as powerful as they claim, why do they have to resort to deception to spread it? Pregnant teens should get information about motherhood as well as adoption and abortion, but it needs to be factual and realistic about the difficulties they'll face.

Forcing kids of the same gender to use the same locker rooms is like opening a gay and lesbian recruitment center in your school. Guys cruising other guys and girls cruising other girls is the least of it; all of that group showering, butt-slapping, and towel-snapping inevitably leads to toe-tapping in the stalls and worse! The moral fibers of this once-great nation are crumbling, simply crumbling under the onslaught of same-sex locker room perversion.

Although the "deranged wing nut" theory seems more plausible, the guy could be a deranged Hillary fan who just wants to get her attention (a la Hinckley's attempt to impress Jodie Foster by shooting Reagan).

You're free to eat tainted food because nobody is inspecting it. If your kid dies from eating E. Coli-infested hamburger, just don't eat at McDonald's any more and the free market will eventualy resolve the issue. You're also free to buy dangerous consumer products because safety standards won't be enforced. After you get electrocuted by your poorly-wired toaster, you won't buy a new one and the free market will correct itself.

You're free to starve if you lose your job because there will be no unemployment insurance or social safety net. If you do find a job, you're free to work for pennies because there won't be a minimum wage. And you are always free to throw yourself upon the charity of others -- assuming that your fellow citizens have enough spare change to give to their favorite charities instead of needing it all to keep themselves afloat.

You're free to breathe polluted air, drink chemical-laced water, and live on contaminated land because there will be no EPA to enforce air pollution controls, no federal standards for drinking water, no funds to clean up toxic spills. Don't like it? Don't buy that company's products. The free market wins again!

Theologically, the Harry Potter series is milquetoast compared to "His Dark Materials," yet I've heard hardly a peep about it from the religious wackos until now. Even my conservative Christian friends who half-believed the arrant nonsense about Rowling's books had no opinion about Pullman's more theologically subversive series. Apparently a book needs to gain some kind of critical mass of publicity before the usual suspects come out of the woodwork to make spurious claims of demonism about it.

As for publicity, the Catholic League is getting tons of it for coming out against something that looks to be the next fantasy blockbuster.

In my opinion, the Catholic League, the Harry Potter-bashers and the Sudanese officials who jailed the teacher for the "Mohammed" teddy bear are birds of a feather. All are religious authoritarians who wish to eliminate free expression and critical thought. The main difference is that the Sudanese are the only ones with the power to prosecute people who commit religious thoughtcrime. I'm sure that the Catholic League and the anti-Potter fundies would eagerly punish anyone caught reading "His Dark Materials" or "Harry Potter" if they had the ability to do so.

This is bigger than the issue of renting vs. homeownership (which is in any case something that's specific to one's individual situation). The Economist blogger posits that encouraging rootlessness and transience would be an economic win because labor would become as fluidly allocated as capital. Laying aside the question of whether people should be treated as fungible work units, economics has been the driving force behind modern mass migrations. And government policies that affect how easy or hard it is to stay put do have an effect.

However, our econo-blogging Young Turk (or is it Young Turkey?) has completely ignored the downsides of his brave, new rootless cosmopolitanism. There's a cost to rootlessness in terms of frayed community bonds, lack of personal connection to others, negative effect on family relationships -- all those "pernicious communitarian myths" that he derides. Those without a stake in a community are more likely to let its institutions and infrastructure decay. Those without personal connections to others are more likely to commit crimes and behave anti-socially. And transience makes it more difficult for family members to mutually support one another. All of these things have a significan economic cost as well as a significant human one. Call it lack of social capital.

But of course the elites that read the Economist believe that ordinary people are interchangeable; we're valued only for the labor and services we provide to our corporate masters. That's the real pernicious myth -- not the idea that communities can benefit their members to the point where some prefer to stay there despite the economic benefits of moving! Presumably our blogger has never felt any sort of responsibility towards anyone other than his precious self -- not to his family, not to his friends, not to his community. But he is woefully ignorant of the fact that his corporate employer will discard him like a piece of used kleenex when it's convenient to do so, throwing him back upon the intangible bonds of community and family that he so derides.