She has not gone away:
“We had John McCain and Mike Huckabee and Gov. Romney and Rudy Giuliani, but Sarah Palin came in on the last day, did a fly-around and, man, she was dynamite,” Chambliss said. “We packed the houses everywhere we went. And it really did allow us to peak and get our base fired up.”
The extremism in the Vatican deepens:
Benedict’s envoy to the United Nations, Archbishop Celestino Migliore, has announced that the Vatican will oppose a proposed U.N. declaration calling for an end to discrimination against homosexuals. At first blush, no one should be surprised to find the Catholic Church hierarchy butting heads with gay rights activists. But this particular French-sponsored proposal, which has the backing of all 27 European Union countries, calls for an end to the practice of criminalizing and punishing people for their sexual orientation.
Allahpundit comments on this video of Bombay security forces outgunned by the terrorists:
Marc provides a guide to its meaning:
Should Republicans have reason to crow about their chances in 2010? On the one hand, there’s no Bush on the ticket. Ok, there might be one, but he’ll be in Florida, and besides, he’s not THAT Bush. Two: the Democrats are in charge, and Republicans will have something to rally the base with. Three: … three is a "but." But… more Republican retirements are expected, including at least two in blue states (Chuck Grassley of Iowa and George Voinovich of Ohio.)
Hollywood delivers:
Not easy – and much harder than Bush or Clinton. But Alphacat is trying.
Thomas P.M. Barnett weighs in:
…as the drawdown in Iraq unfolds, we will begin to see whether or not the surge really ended the internal violence or just delayed it inevitable final spasms. There is no regional agreement, much less forum for any such agreement to be pursued, regarding Iraq’s future. So little’s been decided even as much has effectively been postponed. In short, the question of Iraq coming apart still remains, with me still thinking the soft partition (already here on the Kurds) is inevitable, the only question being the nature of the weak federalism. The Sunnis may have given up the dream of a unitary Iraq, but I’m not sure the Shia have–much less Iran.
Vaughan Bell examines grief hallucinations:
Mourning seems to be a time when hallucinations are particularly common, to the point where feeling the presence of the deceased is the norm rather than the exception. One study, by the researcher Agneta Grimby at the University of Goteborg, found that over 80 percent of elderly people experience hallucinations associated with their dead partner one month after bereavement, as if their perception had yet to catch up with the knowledge of their beloved’s passing. As a marker of how vivid such visions can seem, almost a third of the people reported that they spoke in response to their experiences. In other words, these weren’t just peripheral illusions: they could evoke the very essence of the deceased.
Lehrer adds: "In other words, we hallucinate a loved one because the brain can’t bear to let go. It’s like a phantom limb, only the phantom is actually a phantom."
Nate Silver analyzes Chambliss’s victory:
…while proportionately lower black turnout tells part of the story, Chambliss also appeared to gain with white voters.
In certain ways, this is an awkward time for a Democrat to be running for office. On the one hand, with the imminent end of George W. Bush’s term in office, and the fact that Barack Obama has effectively been serving as shadow present — Obama is generating between two and three times as much news coverage as Bush according to Google traffic metrics — it has already become harder for Democrats to pin our country’s problems on the Republicans. Yes, Bush did damage to the Republican brand that will last for years to come, but it’s the Obama brand that’s strong more so than the generic Democratic one. On the other hand, because Obama hasn’t actually been in office, the Democrats do not yet have any accomplishments to point to.
After a vote in which a minority of two or three percent were denied civil equality under the law and in which many thousands of couples had their legal marriages voided, Jonah Goldberg thinks the real victims are Mormons:
It’s just that Mormons are the most vulnerable of the culturally conservative religious denominations and therefore the easiest targets for an organized campaign against religious freedom of conscience.
He cites an ad campaign that wasn’t sanctioned by the No On 8 campaign, and summarizes the wave of peaceful protests by tens of thousands across the country by picking a few of the worst incidents of the fringes as a way to discredit the civil rights movement. He cannot in any way substantiate the notion that the marriage movement amounts to "an organized campaign against religious freedom of conscience."
(If you want to read Goldberg’s real views on "the divinization of conscience," see here.) I know of no campaogn for civil marriage equality that is not emphatic that religious dissenters retain an absolute right to refuse to recognize or perform such marriages. I for one will fight for their right to dissent just as fiercely as I will fight for my own civil right to marry.
Jonah, moreover, does not mention the fact that the Mormon hierarchy planned this campaign for eleven years, that their decision to make this a public issue is unprecedented in the history of the LDS church, and that their donations made up a huge proportion of the Prop 8 forces. He doesn’t mention that their public bluff that they only care about the m-word and favor rights for gay couples has been called in Utah, where gay rights advocates are demanding the LDS church back strong civil union laws (and the LDS church is resisting). He cites no instance in which any Mormon anywhere has had any right removed or threatened by marriage equality.
Apart from that: another triumph of intellectual honesty.
The Dish 