Month: November 2008

College newspapers go overwhelmingly to Obama.

No signs mention McCain at a Palin rally in Florida.

Mindy Blum defends hers.

Megan has some good news:

TiVo and Netflix finally announced that they would be partnering to deliver instant streaming video.  If you have a Netflix subscription (and a TiVo, of course), you can stream all the video you want at no additional charge.  The deal makes a lot of sense:  both companies are struggling, competing with Bittorrent and the cable companies to keep their business models alive.  But together they can offer something that the cable companies will have to step up their game considerably to compete with.  Indeed, the deal makes so much sense that people have been waiting for it since 2004, when it was announced with much fanfare and then went nowhere.  Yesterday was the fruition of a long-held dream.

Virginia Postrel:

The drive for gay marriage represents the end of the sexual revolution. Marriage lost its glamour. It lost its connection to sex. Divorce got so easy that "single mom" became a sympathetic political trope. Cohabitation became normal. Nowadays, nobody–least of all gays–has to get married to be a respectable member of society. And yet people want to get married. They want to bind themselves to be monogamous. They want to promise in public to face bad breath in the morning. That’s pretty remarkable.

And one of the most historically radical of communities, the gay and lesbian population, has chosen to add this conservative choice to its array of possibilities. In so many ways, real conservatives should be rejoicing. How did such a marginalized group come to seek such a traditional way forward? And yet so many "conservatives", rather than hailing this socially positive development, demonized those of us who stood up for it, cast us out of respectable conservative discourse, and tried to do all they can to destroy and uproot our families.

It’s an emblem of what went so horribly wrong with conservatism. Fixing it will be a critical element of putting it right. Until the Republican party finds a way to talk to gay and lesbian people and our families, they will fail to become a modern political movement.

(Photo: David McNew/Getty.)

A reminder from the Republican mayor of San Diego:

If have a friend or family member in California, please take a few minutes this weekend to call them and ask them to vote No.

Well, the gay press isn’t always that awful. Here’s Chris Lisotta with an exclusive inside look at the campaign to save marriage in California.

The National Interest, traditionally a conservative realist policy magazine, offers a split decision on the election. Yglesias explains what this means. What it means, to my mind, is that serious foreign policy conservatives, who haven’t drunk the entire neocon kool-aid (or mixed it with some traditional conservatism), understand that there’s a very serious case for Obama in foreign affairs. Especially in the war on terror. I always saw neoconservatism as an important insight, if balanced with traditional conservative prudence, especially in disabusing us of the potential of Arab regimes to treat Israel with minimal respect. But when turned into a theology of sorts, and a doctrine, it has all the limits of any doctrine. It becomes resistant to reality, to events, to experience – to what we’ve learned on the ground in seven grueling years of failure. It is not a conservative impulse to double-down on such a theology. It’s a conservative impulse to step back and review it and think again.

It’s incredibly encouraging to find so many conservatives now getting there. Obama may not be the answer. But he sure is closer to it than McCain, and the neocon fanatics who surround him on foreign policy.

Robert Farley points to a print ad and and a related radio spot. He writes:

…the ads linked above are pretty goddamn ugly. They do not in any manner or fashion put the drive for GLBT civil rights in a good light; in fact, just the opposite. While pointing out hypocrisy on this issue is always rather awkward, it can be done in a way that doesn’t rely on homophobia to make the point. I certainly hope that Bruce Lunsford had nothing to do with the ads. There’s no immediate reason to think that he did; AFSCME sponsored the radio version.

Homophobia is a sin that affects all of us, right and left. No party has a monopoly on virtue – or vice. It’s important to remember that. There are good and decent Republicans in this election, as well as some unscrupulous and ugly Democrats. What Obama’s candidacy, at its best, has tried to bring out in us is that understanding. We don’t always live up to it. We should try.