The Dish

A reader points out I was wrong:

It was done with CGI. The full length CGI movie Tron came out in 1982, this video is from 1985.

Rich Lowry celebrates the impact of the disgusting ad against Harold Ford I YouTubed yesterday. Even Corker has said it went too far. But Lowry is glad. You realize eventually how few principles these so-called conservatives have. It’s about power. It’s only about power.

Is Jim Caviezel speaking in Aramaic? Anyway: here’s the counter-ad.

I have to say this must be the front-runner right now. It’s Barbra Streisand’s hideously awful video for "Left in the Dark." No, it’s not camp. It’s just too bad. Don’t miss the bit where she takes a drag on her cigarette, while her voice continues singing. She can’t even lip-sync in this one.

Matt Drudge, this one is for you.

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The Iraq war and longevity also seems to have mortally wounded the Labour government in Britain. The Conservatives – the green, gay-inclusive variety – now have a ten point lead in the polls:

Labour has the backing of only 29% of voters, equal to its lowest-ever level of support in a Guardian/ICM poll – recorded in May 1987, a month before Margaret Thatcher won a third term.

David Cameron – younger than me – could be the next prime minister. Obama doesn’t seem so unlikely in that context, does he? Except you know what that makes America? An Obamanation.

When Barney’s on a roll, he’s on a roll.

A sane and wise decision, in my view, although I haven’t read and pondered the entire ruling or the dissents (I just arrived in L.A. from Cleveland). So allow me more time for a more nuanced judgment later (I’m due on the Hugh Hewitt show for two hours soon). But the bottom line is here:

"Denying committed same-sex couples the financial and social benefits and privileges given to their married heterosexual counterparts bears no substantial relationship to a legitimate governmental purpose. The Court holds that under the equal protection guarantee of Article I, Paragraph 1 of the New Jersey Constitution, committed same-sex couples must be afforded on equal terms the same rights and benefits enjoyed by opposite-sex couples under the civil marriage statutes. The name to be given to the statutory scheme that provides full rights and benefits to same-sex couples, whether marriage or some other term, is a matter left to the democratic process."

In other words: call it a civil union or a civil partnership if you will. And the legislature needs to come up with some kind of compromise wording. But the state constitution unequivocally requires equal treatment under the law. So this is not a state imposition of civil marriage. It is a state imposition of civil unions. I think this is a perfectly sane compromise. It’s what the Brits have done. Leave the m-word to the churches; but let the state grant equal protection under the law. The Christianists can no longer claim that we are redefining civil marriage in New Jersey. We’re just being fair to gay couples who, as citizens, have every right to be treated equally under the law.

My own position, of course, is that full civil marriage rights, with the m-word, is the only just solution. But in a democracy, there is not a majority for that yet. The court, by the way, is not being activist. It had no logical option but to apply its equal protection clause to everybody. Gay people are citizens, entitled to the same civil treatment by the government as anyone else. But the court has now left it to the legislature to decide on the name.

Checks and balances; state’s rights; and fostering of both equality and responsibility. DOMA means it won’t apply to any other state. Massachusetts has already shown that civil marriage can be kept within one’s state’s borders. The conservative soul just revived a little. May it grow stronger.

Well, this Amazon data just about sums it up:

What do customers ultimately buy after viewing The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back by Andrew Sullivan $17.13?

6% buy State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III by Bob Woodward $17.05
3% buy Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas E. Ricks $15.70
3% buy The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright $16.77

3% buy The Little Mermaid (Two-Disc Special Edition) DVD John Musker $14.87

The Conservative Soul: Sexy, Scaly and Beflippered. Oh I wish I could be

Part of your world…

I keep thinking of the great Admiral Stockdale. Who am I? Why am I here? The blur of hotel rooms and radio studios and TV stations and airports and airplanes and saying things you believe but finding them making you numb and number. And I’m supposed to blog through this whole thing as well? Aaron (I might as well use my fiance’s real name from now on) calls. "Stay the course," he quips. Heh. I miss the dogs. I miss him. My mum’s not feeling well and the cell phone cuts out at the wrong moment.  And my CPAP face-mask broke. And I left the room key in the room.

And then there are moments all the time when you meet people and you engage in conversation that reminds you why you’re doing this, and what a privilege it actually is.

In the line to get her book signed the other day was a young woman who told me she was in a military academy. She told me that she was 20 years old, and that she had started reading this blog when she was thirteen. She smiled and said that she must therefore have spent a greater proportion of her life as part of the Daily Dish community than anyone else. We laughed. She told me she had read this blog back when the war seemed such a noble and vital thing and when I had been one of its foremost cheerleaders. She told me she still read it and felt much the same way I did then and understood why I thought differently now. Then she told me how worried she was, how her boyfriend was in Iraq, how she knew that what she was reading about the war was true, that she knew friends who were injured or faced death each day, and suddenly the tears welled. I had no human option but to stand up and hold her. And then her tears turned to sobs.

I draw from this one simple inference. We owe her the truth. We owe the painfully young men and women who are risking their lives for us and dying for us the truth. We owe their parents and siblings and spouses and children the truth. Not after the election. But now. When it counts. This is not something Jim Baker should decide in December. It’s something Americans should vote on – now.

"Not since the medieval church baptized, as it were, Aristotle as some sort of early ‚Äî very early ‚Äî church father has there been an intellectual hijacking as audacious as the attempt to present America’s principal founders as devout Christians. Such an attempt is now in high gear among people who argue that the founders were kindred spirits with today’s evangelicals, and that they founded a ‘Christian nation,’" – George F. Will, New York Times.