DADWAGON

If you haven’t heard about this yet today, you certainly are about to. On Tuesday night, Rand Paul, son of the Texas libertarian congressman (and presidential also-ran) Ron Paul, won the Republican primary in Kentucky’s Senate race. And on Wednesday night, he went on The Rachel Maddow Show and more or less called for the repeal of the Civil Rights Act. He’s spending Thursday doing damage control.

You remember those anti-drug ads a couple of decades back? The ones where a baby-boomer dad finds a kid’s stash and confronts him, saying “where’d you learn this stuff?” and the kid, accusingly, responds, “I learned it FROM YOU, DAD!” Pop looks stricken, and the ad then informs us that parents who smoke dope have kids who smoke dope. Or something like that.

Well, Dr. Paul is merely carrying his father’s philosophy out to its logical end. If government has absolutely zero business in the private sector, then it can’t tell you not to sell your products to people of other races. This neatly points out the brick wall that libertarians eventually run into: If you want one thing, and I want something that conflicts with that thing, and we fight it to a stalemate, someone will finally have to adjudicate, and sooner or later there’s no appeals process left except the law.

We’ll know soon enough whether Rand Paul gets bounced from the ticket, or merely goes on to ignominy in November (or, this being a race in Kentucky, whether he gets a bounce in the polls this week). But I’m curious to see whether his dad’s viewpoints suddenly see extra scrutiny.

Nice story here of the father-son dilemma, plus the clip from Maddow.

Science says: Fathers suffer postpartum depression.

About a week ago, I came across an interesting item at Salary.com (which is where I go to find out if there is anyone in the world who makes less than I do; answer: no). Each year, they run an estimate that attempts to quantify what a stay-at-home mother does, if she were paid for all her various labors.

Forget the whole thing about why aren’t there any men in there. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume by stay-at-home mom they also included fathers and just didn’t say so.

Regardless, the number they came up with was $117,856 per year. That’s what you’d be required to pay an individual (or individuals) to do the cooking, cleaning, frying of bacon in pan, sexual servicing of lazy spouse, provision of love and support for offspring, ironing, minor auto repair work, laundry, and other miscellaneous tasks that go into Mommydom.

That’s a tidy sum, wouldn’t you say?

I’m not interested in quibbling with Salary about its math or how it came up with its estimate. The funny thing to me is that I don’t actually know any full-time, stay-at-home mothers. There’s one in my apartment building, but she’s a novelist. I know plenty of mothers who take on part-time work, or leave work for a year or so and then return, but in truth, I can’t think of a single laboring-only-in-the-abode parent. Seems like all the families I know need that second income, or if not, the parent needs that out-of-the-house time to remain sane.

This isn’t related to my incredibly sophisticated lifestyle in a major cosmopolitan city, either. My mother’s side of the family lives in Mississippi, and all of the moms down there work in some form or another (often more than the dads).

Morale of the story? Think of all the money left on the table in that regard. There’s the $100K-plus due for the housework, plus the extra dough earned in the traditional workplace. It’s a financial bonanza out there.

So then why is it that everyone I know is broke?

How did I miss this fact before? Antonin Scalia, the core of the fundamentalist—er, sorry, originalist—wing of the Supreme Court, has nine children. Nine.

As Michael Kinsley notes in today’s semi-satirical essay:

Is this normal? Or should I say “normal,” as some people choose to define it? Can he represent the views of ordinary Americans when he practices such a minority lifestyle? After all, having nine children is far more unusual in this country than, say, being a lesbian.

Given that he’s out-procreated the Gosselins by one, I see a reality-TV series in his future. Nino’s Nine. I’d watch it: Even though I find his political tilt infuriating, Scalia is a genius of legal scholarship, and (to my reading) has the most formidable pure logician’s brain on the court. I’ve love to see him in a position where he’s trying to parse a phrase like, say, “well-regulated militia,” one syllable at a time, only to find that, as he speaks, his child has quietly been smearing jelly on him.

In all seriousness, though, you have to wonder how much of an involved parent he was. The demands of a career that takes one to the Supreme Court at the age of 50 involve a lot of nights and weekends at work. I have to assume that he handed most of the child-rearing off, and that what little time he had to offer was split nine ways. Mrs. Scalia is either saintly, exhausted, bitter, a deep and true believer in her husband’s primacy, or (plausibly) all of the above.