Bloggers descend on the British parliament for a blogathon. One deputy already has a blog and he’s btter known for it:
James Crabtree, the organiser of the seminar and head of the Voxpolitics project, says the idea of the evening is not to evangelise the case for weblogs – a form of online diary and comment site with links – but to ask what they can do well, and what they are not useful for. He points out that as recently as 1995 only one MP had a website, and now they are universal, and predicts the same uptake for blogging. “If you look at Tom Watson, six months ago nobody had heard of him. Now, if you type ‘Labour MP’ into Google, you get Tom Watson, not Tony Blair.”
So the tectonic plates of media and political power slowly shift.
KERRY AND GAY MARRIAGE: Maybe I was too harsh. Yes, his position is better than many on the right. But I don’t see why liberals should be given a pass on this issue. They need to explain why they support inequality for gays, without a facile resort to broad platitudes – monogamy, child-rearing, etc. – that collapse upon inspection. In Kerry’s case, as I argued yesterday, his second marriage to a divorcee does not exactly conform to a traditionalist notion of civil marriage in which it is for life and for children. But Kerry is also an example of another piece of heterosexual privilege: the zero estate tax on married couples. As a reader explains:
You missed the biggest Kerry hypocrisy. While Kerry moans about the Republican goal of eliminating the estate tax, he says nothing about the unlimited marital exclusion to the estate tax.- Talk about a loophole!
Over a half billion passed to his present wife from her first husband’s estate, free of estate taxes.-The same unlimited marital exclusion will allow that same accreted fortune to pass to Kerry in the event his wife dies first, again free of estate taxes.
Why should a gay couple be denied this benefit? Or put it another way: why does Kerry believe that he is worthy of inheriting a fortune tax-free, but a gay spouse who has lived with her partner for sixty years isn’t? Shouldn’t someone ask him this question?
NYT TWELVE STEPS: A guide to overcoming an addiction.
The Dish 