Category: The Dish

Yes: the court just ruled for it – sixty years after California’s court was the first to strike down miscegenation bans. The most populous state now joins much of the rest of the Western world in bringing gay couples into the civic and human family as equals. More soon on the decision itself. One key fact: the ruling takes effect in 30 days – which means thousands of couples will be able to marry long before any initiative attempts to reverse it. So the initiative question becomes: do you want to divorce thousands of already-married couples? Or do you want to keep things as they now are? That’s a big advantage for the pro-equality forces. Money quote:

Ed Harrington, the general manager of the city’s Public Utilities Commission, was one of the staff members in the mayor’s office shortly after the decision was released. Harrington has lived with his partner for 35 years and in 2004 Harrington married about 40 same-sex couples.

"You wait for this your whole life," said Harrington, who said he planned to call his partner and say, "I love you. What more do you say on a day like this?"

This is not safe for the office. But it is safe for your sanity: that O’Reilly meltdown video has now been turned into a club mix.

This is for you, Jon Stewart. A high school principal banned any clothing that could imply support for gays and lesbians. Including, er, rainbows. A student sued:

During the trial, which was held in Panama City yesterday and today, Ponce de Leon High School’s principal David Davis admitted under oath that he had banned students from wearing any clothing or symbols supporting equal rights for gay people. Davis also testified that he believed rainbows were "sexually suggestive" and would make students unable to study because they’d be picturing gay sex acts in their mind. The principal went on to admit that while censoring rainbows and gay pride messages he allowed students to wear other symbols many find controversial, such as the Confederate flag.

He lost the case. Many in Panama City conceded that the Confederate flag also gave them a boner.

Johann Hari experiments with Provigil:

A week later, the little white pills arrived in the post. I sat down and took one 200mg tablet with a glass of water. It didn’t seem odd: for years, I took an anti-depressant. Then I pottered about the flat for an hour, listening to music and tidying up, before sitting down on the settee. I picked up a book about quantum physics and super-string theory I have been meaning to read for ages, for a column I’m thinking of writing. It had been hanging over me, daring me to read it. Five hours later, I realised I had hit the last page. I looked up. It was getting dark outside. I was hungry. I hadn’t noticed anything, except the words I was reading, and they came in cool, clear passages; I didn’t stop or stumble once.

Perplexed, I got up, made a sandwich – and I was overcome with the urge to write an article that had been kicking around my subconscious for months. It rushed out of me in a few hours, and it was better than usual. My mood wasn’t any different; I wasn’t high. My heart wasn’t beating any faster. I was just able to glide into a state of concentration – deep, cool, effortless concentration. It was like I had opened a window in my brain and all the stuffy air had seeped out, to be replaced by a calm breeze.

Once that article was finished, I wanted to do more. I wrote another article, all of it springing out of my mind effortlessly. Then I go to dinner with a few friends, and I decide not to tell them, to see if they notice anything. At the end of the dinner, my mate Jess turns to me and says, “You seem very thoughtful tonight.”

That night, I lay in bed, and I couldn’t sleep.

Count me underwhelmed. Taegen Goddard makes the case and I fisk it:

1. He’s already been tested on the national stage and not likely to cause a distracting scandal.

You mean he lost one vice-presidential election already? And , er, it’s four years later.

2. He appeals to the same working class white voters that back Clinton.

He didn’t win many over in 2004.

3. He favors Obama’s new brand of politics.

So why didn’t he do it himself?

4. He could put North Carolina and possibly other Southern states in play.

Yes, but others could do the same.

5. Clinton would probably support him. With more than 1,700 delegates in Clinton’s pocket, Obama needs to at least get her tacit approval if he wants to have a unified party.
 
I can’t see how picking the third place over her makes her happy.

Apart from that, great idea.

Pete Wehner, formerly at the Bush White House and now writing for Commentary, among other things, draws a line:

It’s perfectly acceptable if people want to criticize Obama for his comments. One could, for example, dispute Obama’s assertion that the Israeli-Palestinian issue “infect[s] all of our foreign policy.” There is a widespread view among many foreign policy elites that all the problems of the Middle East can be traced to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I believe that proposition is false and belied by history (see the Iran-Iraq war, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, and Syria’s subjugation of Lebanon for starters). In addition, jihadists don’t need the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an excuse to kill Americans. Osama bin Laden’s fatwas, issued in the late 1990’s, were at least as concerned with our presence in Mecca and Medina and our policies toward Iraq as our policies toward Israel.

Jihadists will certainly use our support for Israel as an excuse to attack us, but our mere existence will also do. That said, there are more than enough legitimate grounds on which to criticize Obama. It’s not necessary, and it’s wrong and dishonest, to tether him to claims he simply did not make. John Boehner should correct the record.

Amen.

Scott Horton recently interviewed Sidney Blumenthal on the subject. He’s not exactly the man any Republican would go to for advice, but he’s not wrong here:

John McCain’s emergence is testimony to the shattering of Bush’s presidency. Without the fracturing of conservatism, McCain would never have become the Republican nominee. It is not an accident, as the Marxists might say, that McCain was Bush’s rival in 2000, a bitterly fought contest that resulted in wounds that are still fresh to McCain. Regardless of McCain’s need to consolidate and conciliate the Republican base–and despite some Democrats’ insistence that McCain is little more than a party line reactionary–he remains an utterly singular figure in the individualistic tradition of Goldwater but lacking Goldwater’s early (at least) extremism. Ironically, at the end of the current Republican era, McCain is the last important Republican whose career stretches back to the Reagan period–and even to the Nixon years as an icon of the Vietnam War.

McCain represents continuity and a break with it. His reliance on neoconservatives for foreign policy advice is his most important connection to the Bush legacy. For McCain to win in the Electoral College, of course, he would have to reassemble the Republican coalition. But he might well have greater appeal and put into play states that dropped out of the G.O.P. alliance under George W. Bush, from New Jersey to California. If McCain did so the result would not be a restoration of Reaganism, but the basis of a post-Bush Republicanism.

I wonder if Sid would prefer a president McCain to a president Obama.

This, apparently, is the "core" of the blogosphere. More images here. Explanations here.
 

Pawlenty on the GOP’s structural problems:

The image of the white men’s club needs to go, too, says Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty. "The country is changing. The Republican Party has to have a message that reflects faces and voices of America. We have to do a better job of recruiting women candidates, candidates of color and diversity."

The omens for Congress keep worsening:

Combined with the 30 seats that the GOP lost in 2006, that would leave the party facing a 70-vote deficit against Democrats in the House — a state of powerlessness reminiscent of Republicans’ long wilderness years in the 1960s and ’70s.

The new media evolve. I’m sure you wanted to know this:

Kelly is accused of, among other things, urinating on the allegedly underage girl who appears in the sex video. On Monday, a urine smell polluted the air of the jury room where juror interviews are taking place. On Tuesday, the theme whizzed by again.

Puns and porn. What more could you ask for?