Absolutely odious.  No principle in heaven or on earth justifies this.

UPDATE: The problem doesn’t appear confined to GLBT domestic partners.  Evidently, under Rhode Island law, a general will and power of attorney are insufficient for anybody to make funeral arrangements for a decedent who is neither a spouse nor a blood relative without completing some statutorily-required form.

Governor Carcieri, of course, remains a vile jackass.

I’m filing this entry under “Conservative Stupidity,” but it’s going to take me a minute to get there, so bear with me.

For those unaware, President Obama delivered a speech to the nation’s students, today.  The speech was inspirational in nature, and focused on personal responsibility, achievement, and perseverence — an unobjectionable and indeed laudable message, all the way around.

When the plan was first disclosed last week (in advance, it should be mentioned, of the release of the text of the President’s remarks), it created something of a furor on the starboard side of the political spectrum.  Some parents threatened to hold their kids out of school rather than subject them to what they expected to be left-wing prosetylizing; it’s unknown how many actually did so.

The entire episode strikes me as a case study in the problems of keeping the Outrage Meter permanently dialed to 11.  There was certainly a kernel of legitimate concern here: beyond the well-known propensity of liberals to politicize everything, beyond even what Bitter calls the “creepiness factor” which fuels the suspicion that it would not be out of character for this divisive and intensely-partisan administration to use a speech to schoolchildren as a political platform, the original lesson plan provided by the Department of Education to accompany the speech called for schoolchildren to write letters to themselves describing how they could be of service to our Narcissist-in-Chief.  So one could easily disapprove of the exercise on that basis.

However, once the lesson plan was revised, and once the text of the speech was released, further vociferous objection became silly.  As I noted above, the President’s message was unobjectionable and laudable.  With respect to the DOE’s revised materials, I find myself in agreement with John at Powerline that any self-respecting teen forced to endure the lesson plan is likely to conclude that President Obama is the lamest human being on the planet.  And, sure, the speech exuded a creepy collectivism, and a president — any president — has no portfolio to be addressing kids about their schooling and about life in general.  But frankly those ships have long since sailed, and those of us who would prefer a wall between school and state can surely find a better hill to die on.

Appropos of this: there is a great temptation to merely snark that Barney Frank labelling anything “vile” and “contemptible” is a fabulous takes-one-to-know-one moment.  However, this is an apt demonstration of the Stuck Clock Principle: unless someone is proposing herding people into ovens, saying their proposal amounts to “Nazi policy” is profoundly offensive and stupid.  Something can be bad policy without dragging Hitler into it.  Similarly, not everything the Nazis did was uniquely evil — I am certain, for instance, that Hitler brushed his teeth.

This goes, incidentally, for the Code Pink types on the left as well as these Bircher fools on the right.  The Bush-Hitler comparisons have been repulsive and unedifying lo these last eight years (and it would be nice if the left could collectively bring itself to admit that, but I won’t hold my breath); the Obama-Hitler comparisons are equally so now.

CORRECTION: Turns out that the fools aren’t Birchers, but Lyndon LaRouche-ites.

Enough already.

Even assuming just for the sake of argument that Jerome Corsi isn’t a complete kook, and there may be some legitimate questions over the validity of Mr. Obama’s birth certificate — and let me be clear that I don’t subscribe to that view — nobody cares.  The guy’s president.  There are ample grounds on which to criticize and oppose him without resorting to “Hillary Clinton had Vince Foster killed!”-level conspiracy-mongering.

Seriously, Mr. Boehner?  Just shut up.  There is no scenario or spin under which the conduct of the spendthrift Republican majority of 2000-2006, or of the Republican minority from 2007-present, can be explained as the behavior of people who, “believe that a smaller, less costly government gives us a healthier economy and a healthier society.”

Some of us out here in the cheap seats actually believe that.  You and your colleagues, in contrast, are demonstrably poseurs trying to play us for votes.  The Democratic Party pursues a frightfully wrongheaded agenda of big-government communitarianism, but at least they’re reasonably honest about it, and don’t claim to be devotees of personal and economic liberty, and financial responsibility, while overseeing some of the biggest expansions of the federal government, and of the federal debt, in history.

Want to credibly pose as a fiscally-responsible small-government type?  Start acting like one.  The country will be better off having a clear choice between competing visions of how far government control should extend over the lives and livelihoods of the citizenry.  Right now, all the country’s got is a clear choice between a party of utopian collectivists and a party that needs to be fitted for clown shoes.