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Saying the country can't "cut our way to growth," the President has some serious infrastructure money in his budget, along with serious help for America's manufacturers. This will create jobs and make our economy more competitive. Republicans are already blasting it as "more government spending."

The Republican coalition, and indeed American conservatism itself over the past 30 years, has been characterized as an odd, almost unnatural pairing of "culture warrior" social conservatives and Ayn-Rand-fixated fiscal conservative, held together by little more that intellectually inconsistent rhetoric and the willingness of both parties to contort themselves beyond recognition to keep this

I have always wondered why the libertarians almost always choose the right wing party in America, when theoretically, they could just as easily choose the left. I have variously chalked it up to hypocrisy, selfishness or greed, since when it comes down to it, most of them seem far more interested in property rights than individual liberty (or, at least, seem to define individual liberty as narrowly applying to their right to own property.) But that's facile. I always figured there had to be more to it --- I just don't believe that the only thing that animates human beings in money, not even Randian libertarians. Humans are far more complicated than that, and there are much more primal motivators at work.

Over the course of the last few weeks, we've been talking a lot about Ron Paul and his odd notions about women's reproductive freedom. And we've also talking about the Catholic Bishops and the Religious Industrial Complex and their more conventional objections on the same subject. Coalitions are one thing, but this one, on this subject, doesn't make a lot of sense. Except, it actually does, which I learned from talking to Corey Robin about his book last night on Virtually Speaking. He sent me here for a smart take on it from Mike Konczal:

I see the religious conservatives getting ready for this battle, but where are the libertarians? Perhaps we need a refresher course on the libertarian case against female sexual autonomy and birth control. For this, let’s go to our man Ludwig von Mises and his 1922 book Socialism. The book is a full-frontal assault on all things socialist; one of the many cases he brings is against “free love” and for the traditional family.

Why? He starts the case like this: “Proposals to transform the relations between the sexes have long gone hand in hand with plans for the socialization of the means of production. Marriage is to disappear along with private property… Socialism promises not only welfare—wealth for all—but universal happiness in love as well.”

Corey Robin suggested I check out this book, and it is great. I love this part, as it is very relevant for the Right today: “The arguments, sometimes unctuous and sometimes venomous, which are put forward by theologians and other moral teachers, are entirely inadequate as a reply to this programme.” The socialists are coming with a plan to equalize gender relationships – and by making the wife an equal of the husband it is only a matter of time until the worker seeks to be the equal of the boss, and with sex itself freely shared among consenting equals how can we even maintain the idea of “private property”? The theologians in charge of sex and the family are both (a) inadequate to stopping them and (b) kinda creepy about the whole sex thing to boot (Mises goes on at length about this). The libertarians are going to need to man up on this.

For the last several days there has been an absolute furor over the Obama administration's decision to require employer health insurance plans to cover birth control. Republicans went so far as to claim that the Obama administration is "at war with religion" -- and worse. The media is covering and covering and covering Republican condemnations of the Obama administration.