“Many of the most successful new content sites –Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, Gawker, Business Insider, and Glam Media, among them – are such an amalgam of aggregated content, partnership sharing agreements, pay per click modules, user generated contributions, and, as well, the blitherings of novice journalists (sometimes heralded as a return to long form), that it’s very hard, if not pointless, to separate real content from phony stuff,” – Michael Wolff.
But that’s the point, innit?
The rapid increase in the number of states permitting gay marriages has crushed demand for commitment ceremonies, a legally meaningless alternative many of the resorts and chapels have offered. DeCar and Flint, who has owned the Chapel of the Bells in Reno for 51 years, said such bookings have plummeted since California resumed same-sex marriages following a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision last June. “We don’t get the same amount of committal ceremonies because the real thing is so available,” Flint said. “It collapsed overnight.”
Some travel agents have tried with little success to take advantage of legal marriage in neighboring states. Terry Wilsey of A Answer On Travel said he gave up on an idea to drive same-sex couples from Las Vegas to the California state line 40 miles away for ceremonies on the California side of a golf course that straddles the state line. Aside from the fact that transportation costs are prohibitive, Wilsey also discovered the closest place to obtain a California marriage license was in Barstow, another 115 miles away.
State Sen. David Parks, Nevada’s first openly gay elected official and someone who has made a career of pushing for pro-gay laws, said an important business opportunity may already have passed. “The train left the station and we’re still standing on the platform,” Parks said. “I don’t see that we’re likely to recover that.”
St. Paul, Minnesota, January 6th, 10.05 am, -19°. Many more scenes from the historic week after the jump:
“The view from Chi-beria”, Illinois, January 6th, 9.47 am.
Schaumburg, Illinois, January 6th, 10.15 am. “About 25″ of snow, -14 degrees outside, and a wind chill of ‘I don’t even want to know’ below zero.”
Rochester, New York, January 3rd, 11.18 am, 3°
Minneapolis, Minnesota, January 6th, 9.03 am, -20°, -41° with wind chill
Chicago, Illinois, January 7th, 10.23 am. “Oh, that ice is on the inside.”
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, January 4th, 10.18 am
Minneapolis, Minnesota, January 6th, 6.45 am
Webster Groves, Missouri, January 7th, 8.30 am
Brooklyn, New York, January 3rd, 8.30 am
St. Louis, Missouri, January 5th, 2.38 pm
Oak Park, Illinois, Janurary 5th, 7.42 am
Decatur, Indiana, January 5th, 2.55 pm. “The snow is getting heavier in front of the arctic temperatures set to arrive tonight and tomorrow (-25° to -35° ). I put extra bird feed out for our feathered friends.”
Cedar Bluff, Iowa, January 5th, 6.28 pm. “Wind chill is at -21° and heading down.”
Now that Liz has dropped her primary challenge against Wyoming senator Mike Enzi, citing a family member with health problems, Margaret Carlson hopes she’ll spend her free time mending fences with her sister:
Cheney’s ill-timed race hurt more than her career. Unless she’s made of stone, she has a deeper loss — her relationship with her sister, Mary, a lesbian, who took umbrage at her older sister’s opposition to gay marriage. Every election has one winner and at least one loser, but this one has a family that lost its privacy and comity. When her father, Dick Cheney, weighed in, he took sides, supporting the sister who was running and dissing the other one. Dad clarified that Liz felt sorry for Mary. Although Liz had “compassion” for Mary, he said, that shouldn’t be mistaken for approval. … If Liz has a sick family member, she has everyone’s compassion. This must have been a tough holiday season for the Cheneys; the sisters didn’t spend them together. Now the Cheneys have a year to get it right before the next one.
Suderman paints her as a failed foreign policy hawk:
Cheney dropped out because she had no chance. And she had no chance in part because of the declining influence of the Republican Party’s most hawkish members.
Her run was, as much as anything, intended as a way to make some noise about the foreign policy issues that party hawks thought were getting lost in the shuffle, and to serve as an opposing voice to what is easiest to describe as the Rand Paul wing of the GOP, which is more worried about civil liberties and less interested in overseas adventurism or maximizing defense-sector spending. That Cheney’s campaign gives a sense of the electoral landscape within the GOP. It’s hard out there for a hawk.
Or perhaps, per Mark Joseph Stern, a failed anti-gay candidate:
The takeaway here is not necessarily that the era of anti-gay politicking is entirely over; as Windsor reaches into the states, conservative legislators will undoubtedly continue to score support by stoking homophobic animus. Instead, the undignified collapse of Cheney’s campaign suggests that, in 2014, a candidate cannot simply demonstrate hatred of gay people to pull in conservative votes. Aside from illustrating the depths of her bigotry by betraying her own sister, Cheney presented few coherent policies on the campaign trail. By dint of publicity—publicity she practically demanded—she became known as a hardline anti-gay candidate. And that did absolutely nothing to narrow her humiliatingly low popularity, to boost her fundraising, or to garner conservative support.
Larison thinks the answer is simpler:
Even if she had tried to attack Enzi on foreign policy grounds, there are so few differences between them on these issues that there would be nothing for her to say. The main and fatal weakness of her campaign was that it had no reason to exist: the incumbent she was challenging was popular, he had a reliably conservative voting record, he wasn’t tainted by any scandal, and her only qualification for public office was that she had held a position in the Bush administration with responsibility for the region that saw its greatest errors and failures. If Cheney’s failed campaign has any significance beyond its implications for her own career, it demonstrates that Republican primaries can’t be won on a platform of nothing more than increased combativeness for its own sake.
Alex Altman says there are few tea leaves to read here:
What does her failed campaign tell us about the political landscape in 2014? Not much. Nearly all of the Republican primary scuffles this cycle feature a Establishment-type incumbent trying to fend off a Tea-infused upstart. Cheney’s challenge to Republican Mike Enzi didn’t fit that format. The Tea Party was not a factor. Both are Establishment figures. Neither are squishy moderates by any means. The race drew national attention (and national money) because of Cheney’s name and network, but on the ground it was very much a local affair, flavored by issues like coal.
If there is a lesson to draw from the race, it may be that the Republican grandees with targets painted on their backs this year may be tougher to take out than people think. Pundits will snark about the colossal failure of Cheney’s campaign, but up close she was a strong candidate: smart, polished, and informed. But Enzi had few vulnerabilities. During three terms in the Senate, he’s compiled a deeply conservative voting record. He’s widely praised for constituent service back home. And his low-key, avuncular style plays well with the sparse and spacious frontier state he represents.
“It’s not a gay issue, it’s a human issue” – @GlennBeck on why he’s standing with GLAAD about Russia: http://t.co/Fa5AgG77mc
— TheBlaze (@theblaze) January 6, 2014
Jamie Kirchick, like Glenn Beck, wants to widen the debate over “Russia’s anti-gay crusade scapegoating a vulnerable minority”:
Nearly every mention of the legislation passed last summer refers to it as “anti-gay.” Yet the words “gay” or “homosexual” do not appear anywhere in the law’s text. While it’s true that the law’s intention is to limit positive (or even neutral) discussion of same-sex relations, the real problem is that it constitutes an assault on the fundamental free speech rights of all Russians, not just gay ones. Rather than highlight the anti-gay nature of the law, activists in the West would do far better to criticize it first and foremost as a violation of freedom of expression. In this way, they can appeal to the vast majority of Russian citizens who, as polls make clear, are not nearly as approving of homosexuality as Westerners.
The case to be made to these Russians is that, while they may find homosexuality distasteful and scorn gay people as neighbors (don’t even think about proposing equal marriage rights), they ought to be able to discuss these matters in an atmosphere of openness, free from the Soviet-era fear that they could be jailed for expressing an unpopular opinion. For if the Kremlin can ban positive references to homosexuality today, it can just as easily ban negative references to Putin tomorrow.
With Troy and Senator Jim Dubakis who also got married today. :) and my husband. I like how that sounds. pic.twitter.com/jFN3493H5i
— Seth Anderson (@jsethanderson) December 21, 2013
Toobin wonders:
During this long journey through the judicial system, the same-sex couples who married while it was legal to do so in Utah will find their unions in a kind of netherworld. They are not suddenly divorced, but it’s not clear what will happen if they now try to obtain the kind of government benefits that married people normally receive. Can they file joint state tax returns? Can they obtain health-insurance benefits as spouses? Can they be treated as spouses when they seek to visit one another in the hospital? Further litigation on this question is possible. (After Proposition 8 ended California’s first, brief experiment with marriage equality, in 2008, that state’s Supreme Court upheld the legality of the same-sex weddings that took place while they were legal.)
Noah Feldman asks similar questions:
Right now in Utah, some people are in a marriage limbo. They have married since the district court ruling, and now their unions are recognized by the federal government, too (one presumes) under Windsor. If the state ban is reinstated, what then? They will be unmarried (maybe) under Utah law. Will they be federally unmarried, too? It’s not an abstract question, since they might not be able to get married in other states that recognize gay marriage since they aren’t residents of those states. In short, we may be facing citizens who are married in no state but are married federally.
Mike Dorf notes that “the Supreme Court could have–and should have–resolved this question with its order”:
It could have added a couple of lines specifying that these marriages either are or are not to be treated as valid in the interim. My own view is that, even if the Court was right to stay the judgment with respect to Utah same-sex couples who haven’t married yet, it should have said that the already-married 900+ couples should be treated as legally married pendente lite. After all, part of the rationale for staying the judgment is to avoid having couples marry but then be told that their marriages are invalid. That rationale doesn’t apply to the 900+ because declaring their marriages void pendente lite inflicts the very harm that a stay is meant to avoid. But even if the Court disagreed with me about that point, it could have said so expressly, rather than leaving Utah citizens and the state uncertain about the legal status of their marriages.
I don’t know why the Court didn’t expressly resolve this issue but I have a pretty good guess: I suspect that the Justices could not achieve unanimity on this point and so they compromised on an ambiguous ruling.
Following a company drug test, Brandon Coats lost his job because he tested positive for marijuana:
“I’m not going to get better any time soon,” paraplegic plaintiff Brandon Coats told reporters after his 2010 firing by Dish Network was upheld in a precedent-setting Colorado Court of Appeals case last April. “I need the marijuana, and I don’t want to go the rest of my life without holding a job.” As the Denver Post reported, Coats alleged he was illegally fired by the cable company Dish Network for using medical marijuana to mitigate muscle spasms. (Coats was fired three years before Colorado voters legalized recreational marijuana use; his case rested on the state’s Medical Marijuana Amendment, which went into effect in 2009.) Dish did not respond to Salon’s Thursday morning inquiry.
“If Mr. Coats can’t win this case, then nobody can,” Coats’ attorney Michael Evans told Salon. “He’s about as bad as you can get in terms of physical disability … He was a great employee, and they admit that he was never impaired [at work] … He was following all of the laws.”
Now that regreational marijuana is legal in Colorado, Andrew Cohen anticipates more stories like Coats:
Coats has a legal right to ingest cannabis for medicinal purposes but no legal right to have his employer recognize that right in a way that provides him with a reasonable remedy.
In this way his case and his cause have forced state and local officials to confront another one of the truths that surrounds this story. It is not just another court fight over the rights and responsibilities of employers and employees, although it surely is that, as well. It’s also about figuring out a way for the law to account fairly for the different rates at which alcohol and marijuana leave the human body. Alcohol comes and goes in a matter of hours or days. THC can stay for weeks.
And that means, for now anyway, a Colorado employee can get drunk as a skunk on a Saturday night and have no fear on Monday of losing her job to a drug test so long as she shows up sober and ready to work. And it means that the employee’s coworker cannot have even a puff of pot on that same Saturday night without fearing that a subsequent drug test will cost her a job, even if she also shows up sober and ready to work on the following Monday. That’s a patent inequality that is as easy to explain as it is difficult to justify: a “zero-tolerance” drug policy that employers conveniently apply to some lawful drugs but not to others.
Michael Strain outlines a jobs agenda for the right. Among his many heterodox ideas:
Conservatives should … consider some creative reforms of the unemployment-insurance system. Giving unemployed workers a modest cash bonus when they secure employment has been shown to be effective in shortening the length of unemployment spells, and, if targeted at workers who have a high probability of exhausting benefits, it can actually save the taxpayers money in the long run. It seems implausible that a re-employment bonus would have a large effect on long-term unemployment, but evidence suggests that it would help in addressing shorter unemployment spells.
There is also some evidence that giving out lump-sum unemployment benefits may be preferable to the current system of weekly checks. Under traditional unemployment insurance, a worker forgoes his unemployment benefit by taking a job. Lump-sum unemployment insurance may be beneficial because it would mitigate the weekly-check system’s incentive to delay starting a job. With lump-sum unemployment benefits paid, say, every month rather than every week, a worker who got a job at the beginning of a pay period could take in both unemployment compensation and a paycheck for that month. If this gets workers off unemployment faster, then the program could save money over traditional unemployment insurance.
There’s a hell of a lot there worth pondering and thinking through. What’s thrilling about it is its final break with the 1970s and 1980s – and a creative response to the actual problems of today combined with the lessons of the last five years. Tomasky’s response:
I liked the essay and even agreed with a respectable percentage of what Strain had to say. But reading it was far more infuriating than reading something by a conservative and disagreeing with every syllable, because articles like Strain’s refuse to acknowledge, let alone try to grapple with, the central and indisputable fact that the contemporary Republican Party—his presumed vehicle for all this pro-jobs reform—has opposed many of these initiatives tooth and nail.
Yes, of course. But you have to start somewhere. These things take time and instead of pissing on writers thinking outside certain orthodoxies, why not encourage them? Pierce also dismisses the article, along with my recent post on the Pope and the GOP:
The problem, of course, is that not a single policy proposal in the piece has a snowball’s chance in hell of passing the House Of Representatives as that body is currently constituted.
That is because the House Republican caucus remains thoroughly wedded to the economic snake-oil introduced into the national bloodstream by the sainted Ronald Reagan in 1980. Until the Republicans abandon supply-side economics as the phantasmagoria it always has been, there is no hope for the kind of reform Strain seems to be advocating.
We can see the same self-annihilation in Andrew Sullivan’s little cock-a-doodle-doo regarding how the pope’s recent pronouncements on economic justice have discomfited the economic royalists for whom Reagan’s policies opened the door. … Who was it that nailed the Laffer Curve to the doors of the cathedral? It was Ronald Reagan — and, elsewhere, Maggie Thatcher — and I don’t recall any great howls of Papist outrage from Sullivan back then, when everything the pope condemns today was just winding into its political strength.
In 1979 and 1980, I was sixteen and seventeen. The top rate of tax in my country was close to 98 percent. The government owned almost every major industry. The economy was crippled by abuse of union power. A once-great country was reduced to something nearing Eastern Europe. I believed then and believe now that reforming that socialist over-reach (yes, in Britain it sure was socialist), reigniting entrepreneurialism, cutting taxes, and facing down the Soviet empire were all important advances in my home country and, to a lesser extent, in the US. But even in my early 20s, I opposed deficits and deficit spending – I was much more a Thatcherite than Reaganite. Indeed, Thatcher never bought the Laffer curve. But my broader point is that times and circumstances change. I don’t believe that FDR’s policies would have been appropriate in the 1950s, for example; I don’t think that the economic problems in 1980 are in any way comparable to the economic and social problems we face today.
Pierce, of course, needs no understanding of any particular set of circumstances, no grip on the contingent issues that emerge over time, no need to judge any specific situation to judge what might be the best set of options. For him, doctrinaire liberalism is the only option now, then and for ever (just as his foes on the ideological right see Reaganomics as some kind of eternal truth). I find that far more disturbing intellectually than the ability to absorb new data, new facts, and adjust to new policies. That’s what Levin and Ponnuru and Strain and Wehner and Gerson are doing. I wish them all the very best, and the Dish will do what we can to air the debate and encourage fresh thinking. We need a viable conservative party in America. Right now, we only have a sub-moronic populist rabble.
