So Guv’nah Brownback (R-Koch) has floated the idea of restoring some funding to the state arts commission. Naturally there are strings: the restored budget is less than a third of what was cut last year, and the proposal makes no attempt to approach the money needed to qualify for NEA grants. It also combines the arts agency with the film commission, an agency whose work is by nature temporary and project-based.

You can’t have your cake and eat it too, at least not without baking the cake first. Like, with heat, man. You know? Okay, my point is this: is it so implausible that a flat $200,000 budget was the plan all along? Here’s an idea that seems like a reasonable compromise, and the man who floated it, a shrewd negotiator. The effect, though, is that not only is the bar for measuring compromise now lower, but as a bonus, the public discourse about the virtues of public arts support has shifted rightward. Rather than celebrating the obvious economic, educational and long-term benefits of a functional arts life on a state level, supporters have to use the words “essential” and “non-essential.” If you’re a person who nickels-and-dimes all public expenditures, this is a juicy plum indeed: long after you’ve replaced one fool with another, you can still ask people which they’d prefer: a jarful of piss, or a jarful of peanut butter. As if the person holding the position of politician — or artist — were more important than the institution. (This point is articulated beautifully here.)

Unsure which side of the line dividing advocacy from paranoia this lands me.

Operation Rescue, who organized highly public protests outside Dr. Tiller’s clinic, is falling over themselves trying to get away from Scott P. Roeder. So is Phill Kline, who himself had been bearing down on Dr. Tiller since 2003. Yet any other day, they pee in a circle around their One True God, and still manage to sleep at night.

I’m looking for a guiding principle here. Not so much an authority to appeal to, lest the potential for abuse become overwhelming, but a workable way of talking people like this down. If that principle is equal justice for all, then he has his day in court for premeditated murder. If that principle is tolerating difference, or intellectual honesty, or conversation and investigation, then we figure out how to make these real in the face of seemingly intractable differences. If it’s the rule of law I want, then, well, you get the idea.