Category: The Dish

Santa Monica, California, 2 am.

Gays should not expect any bipartisan attempt at progress for gay couples or people from the Human Rights Campaign, Steve Miller argues. He’s right; and anyone who has followed gay politics for a while knows it. HRC is a patronage wing of the Democratic party, designed primarily to get its members jobs in future Democratic administrations or with Democrats on the Hill (even while Howard Dean treats them like the help). The idea that they would even consider endorsing a pro-gay Republican on a national level is absurd.

I’ve watched the military battle and the marriage battle for almost two decades now. HRC has been AWOL on both. For much of the 1990s, they were an active force opposing the fight for marriage equality, because the Clintons gave them their marching orders. The current leadership are Hillary-bots, and if she becomes president, they will go back to their role in the 1990s: as spin-meisters for the Democratic establishment. If you’re for gay rights, do yourself a favor. Give your money to groups that actually care about gay rights. Off the top of my head: Freedom To Marry, the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, Immigration Equality. If you want to give to HRC, just give it directly to Hillary. It’s more efficient.

A reader writes:

I was mildly confused by this statement in your posting about Rudy and the Christianists:

"Land said the mayor’s annulment, divorce and subsequent third marriage will seal the deal against hizzoner for social conservatives."

Juxtapose it with this:

George Barna, a born-again Christian and the head of a research group that does surveys among faith groups, finds that only 19 percent of Northeasterners have divorced, compared to 27 percent of Southerners and Midwesterners. Barna’s surveys also revealed another surprise – the divorce rate among conservative Christians is much higher than for other faith groups. Twenty-seven percent of born-again Christians have been divorced, as opposed to 24 percent of other Christians, and – Holy Moly! – only 21 percent of atheists and agnostics.

What matters is not what Christianists do, but what they say. Don’t you realize that by now?

Murray Waas has a useful tick-tock, with fresh reporting, of the leak wars between Cheney and the Congress that led up to the Plame affair. In so many ways, Cheney was hoist by his own anti-leak petard.

The Onion has the scoop.

They met – in 1957. She recalls it here:

More reflections on the repulsive over-class here and here.

A welcome development reported by Joe Klein:

At his very first Iowa town meeting, [Obama] showed the courage to tell his Democratic audience things it didn’t want to hear. Asked if he would cut the Pentagon budget, he said, "Actually, you’ll probably see an initial bump in military spending in an Obama Administration" in order to add troops and replace the equipment lost in Iraq. Then he told a teachers’ union member that he supported higher pay for teachers but also–the union’s anathema–greater accountability. The crowd was silent as he said these things. But there are different sorts of silence, and in this case, they were hanging on his every word.

He’s drawing huge crowds in South Carolina as well.

The perils of mastering a new technology:

Check out this morning’s transcript. See if you can keep up with the parsing and reparsing of positions designed to placate the base, while not treading on any national land-mines. In comparison, Hillary sounds almost humanoid.