The Dish

"You have prevented us from marrying, please do not prevent us from caring for each other," state senator, Ed Murray, after the Washington state senate passed a domestic partnership bill that grants a few basic rights to gay couples inder the law.

Those who want to prevent gay couples from caring for one another will now have to live in the Commonwealth of Virginia, the state most dedicated to attacking gay couples and families.

Ian Buruma confesses ambivalence about Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Money quote:

In Europe, even the issue of headscarves cannot be treated simply as a symbol of religious bigotry. Some women wear them to ward off male aggression, others because their parents insist on it, and some by their own choice, as a defiant badge of identity, even rebellion. Bruckner admires rebels. Should we only side with rebels whose views and practices we like? Or does living in a free society also imply that people should be able to choose the way they look, or speak, or worship, even if we don’t like it, as long as they don’t harm others? A free-spirited citizen does not tolerate different customs or cultures because he thinks they are wonderful, but because he believes in freedom.

To be tolerant is not to be indiscriminate.

(Photo: Scott Barbour/Getty.)

It fits the new party well:

"We’re going to get the band back together, and we’re on a mission from God."

More from CPAC here.

"When I look around me at the world we got, the world we created after 2001, that’s the question I keep coming back to: What went wrong? The question nags me all the more because I was part of it, swept along with all the currents that took us from the ruins of the World Trade Center through the shameful years that followed. Iraq, the war on terror, the new European culture war.

This mirror of "What Went Wrong" wouldn’t be a story on the same scale, but it has the main theme in common. It would be about Westerners who had their reality bubble pricked by people from an alien culture, and spent the next couple of years stumbling about like idiots, unable to deal rationally with this new reality that had forced itself on them. Egging each other on, they predicted, interpreted, and labelled – and legislated and invaded. They saw clearly, through beautiful ideas. And they were wrong.

Who were these people? They were us." – Bjorn Staerk, a European war-blogger, able to confront his own complicity in the mistakes we made. (Hat tip: Crooked Timber.)

Ixonia, Wisconsin, 8.50 am.

It’s this. Phillip Carter, meanwhile, explores the problem further at Slate.

Here’s a useful test.

Here is part of the presidential candidate’s long hidden senior thesis at Wellesley:

"A cycle of dependency has been created, which ensnares its victims into resignation and apathy."

This was her assessment of Johnson’s War on Poverty. Quite a little neocon, wasn’t she, as president of the college Republicans in her freshman year? Those looking through the thesis for some kind of endorsement for its subject, leftist organizer, Saul Alinsky, will be disappointed. Clinton is not a radical. She’s a deeply pragmatic, high-minded centrist – much like her husband, without any of his charisma.

I’m not sure Barack Obama has sounded an off-key note in his campaign thus far. Am I swooning? No. I’ve learned my lesson. But read this NPR interview, where Obama has to walk through a racial and cultural minefield. He strides straight ahead, unflappable and sane. I think his appeal is precisely this. He is moving our narrative forward. He is able to speak of race and faith and politics without the usual ideological cant, and without the conventional cliche-ridden positioning. Compare him with Romney’s or Clinton’s parsed pirouettes. They just don’t feel fake in comparison; they feel old. Money quote from Obama:

NPR: Do you think that your life and your experience as an African American would cause you as president to pursue any particular policy differently than if you’d been white? Would you be a different president in some way?

Obama: There are certain instincts that I have that may be stronger because of my experiences as an African American. I don’t think they’re exclusive to African Americans but I think I maybe feel them more acutely. I think I would be very interested in having a civil rights division that is serious about enforcing civil rights laws. I think that when it comes to an issue like education for example, I feel great pain knowing that there are children in a lot of schools in America who are not getting anything close to the kind of education that will allow them to compete. And I think a lot of candidates, Republican and Democrat, feel concern about that. But when I know that a lot of those kids look just like my daughters, maybe it’s harder for me to separate myself from their reality. Every time I see those kids, they feel like a part of me.

Why do I keep feeling that he’s actually being honest?