National Review’s editors have a solid idea for John McCain:

If McCain stood for a large expansion of the tax credit for children, and made that expanded credit apply against payroll taxes, he could deliver serious relief to many overtaxed middle-class families. The financial sacrifices that parents make contribute to the future health of Social Security and Medicare, and ought to be counted against their taxes to support those programs. It is a matter both of fairness and efficiency. An expanded child credit would also put money in families’ pocketbooks at a time when the chief economic concern they have is not the housing crisis or unemployment but rather rising prices. And it would make it much harder to paint McCain as offering “a third Bush term” on the economy.

Cutting taxes and saving babies. It’s a one-two punch that will Reagan Democrats worried about Obama’s liberalism and lack of experience into McCain’s camp.

Child pornogrpahy is already against the law. But the case before the Court was whether the promotion of child pornography without actual possession was protected free speech.

Thankfully, seven justices on the Court threw this argument to the curb. (Pathetic that two justices think you have a right to advertise child porn so long as you don’t actually have it. Hello?)

But you won’t find me doing cartwheels over this decision. The High Court did what it’s supposed to do. To get ecstatic over this ruling is like congratulating a father for not leaving his wife and kids. Buddy, that’s your job!

Oh? What’s that, you say? The Supreme Court has decided not to throw out a law that bans advertising child porn because, you know, you really shouldn’t advertise or promote a product which is illegal? Hurray! What beknighted wisdom our Nine Overlords have! Long live the Kings!

Elizabeth Schiltz at Mirror of Justice provides links to two politicians who deserve some attention. Congresswoman Kathy McMorris (Rodgers, WA), and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin are both mothers with down syndrome children, and both celebrate their young children as true gifts.

Palin said of her new child, “We understand that every innocent life has wonderful potential.” And again, “I’m looking at him right now, and I see perfection.” McMorris appears in a YouTube spot with her 1 year old and explains how being a mother changed her life, and changed her priorities.

While their successful election to political office has earned them the attention of their communities, both Palin and McMorris deserve our praise for celebrating the gift of motherhood and children.

Katha Pollitt, columnist for The Nation writing in today’s Chicago Tribune argues that the Pope and the Catholic Church are the real enslavers of women. Looking back at the recent visit of the Holy Father, Pollitt wonders:

“Where were the tough questions about the church’s absolute ban on contraception, condoms, divorce and abortion—even to save a woman’s life? If it was up to Benedict, we might be more stylish than the plural wives of the FLDS, but we’d be trapped in marriage and have 15 children just like them. In the United States the Catholic Church has lost some of its moral authority—thank you, pedophile priests—but it has more temporal power than you might think.

…FLDS men have many wives and the pope has none, which goes to show there’s more than one way to keep women pregnant and in their place.”

Pollitt suggests that the Church’s consistent teachings on love and marriage are responsible for ‘millions of lives’ in Africa for opposing contraception and condoms in the fight against AIDS. But the larger premise of her article, and for that matter, the underlying assumption of the entire pro-abortion movement is that motherhood is a curse.

Never mind that women are naturally and exclusively the member of the human species endowed with the role of carrying and bearing the gift that is a new human life. Never mind that 30 years of abortion and birth control have produced an entire generation of women who now suffer from depression, thoughts of suicide, infertility, breast cancer, and other threats to their health. Never mind that the cultural legacy of our abortion culture has produced more divorce, single-parent families, and male neglect of their responsibilities as fathers, while women have been reduced to sexual playthings, urged in both dress and disposition to tantalize men, and satisfy their sexual urges without any commitment to permanence in marriage or children.

The thought that the Pope and the Church might actually teach what they do because they want to liberate women, is unthinkable. The possibility that men and society ought to respect women for what they are, and that laws ought to affirm the dignity of women, particularly in their natural roles as mothers, is anathema to so called ‘feminists’ like Pollitt.

How dare the Pope, or the Catholic Church, suggest that perhaps, just maybe, there is a better way.

Ramesh Ponnuru and Robert Stein have made a strong case for giving families tax breaks from payroll taxes (not just income taxes). After all, for Social Security to survive, we need more children.

The authors have also suggested permanently reduces tax rates on capital gains, dividends, and estates, cutting the top income-tax rate and the corporate-tax rate, and abolishing the alternative minimum tax on individuals.

Sounds like a great tax policy for McCain to get behind.