The Dish

"My wish is that we be made chaste, continent, and thrifty — but not yet," – Paul Krugman.

"I've been thinking I might leave the party. A lot of my Latino Republican friends have been talking about it after this law," – Adam Bustos, a third-generation Mexican-American, who has voted Republican since Ronald Reagan ran for president.

The GOP is now doing to Latinos what it did to gays. Its leaders – by backing the Federal Marriage Amendment in the last decade and now the Arizona law in this – are essentially saying that they do not understand how these measures could impact a minority's collective psyche. Whatever the technical merits of either measure – and there were intellectually coherent (if, to my mind, unpersuasive) defenses of both – the lack of empathy or understanding is the real issue. It places the Republican "us" against the minority "them." This is not just a failure of empathy; it is failure of judgment. The votes of Latinos will be massively important in the very near future, and the number of people who know and love gay people grows daily.

The Republican base's inability to place itself in the shoes of homosexuals who are being told they could be second class citizens for ever or in the shoes of Latinos being told they are effectively guilty before being found innocent is a fatal moral and political gambit. Once your party has revealed that it cannot empathize and is willing to stigmatize an entire minority, it takes decades to reverse the damage.

Just to blow Mark Steyn’s mind. To the tune of “I vow to thee, my country.”

Bill Maher delivers a passionate and patriotic defense of free speech:

Ross describes the downsides to having a whopping 57% of illegal immigrants come from one country:

A more diverse immigrant population would have fewer opportunities to self-segregate and stronger incentives to assimilate. Fears of a Spanish-speaking reconquista would diminish, and so would the likelihood of backlash. And instead of being heavily skewed toward low-skilled migrants, our system could tilt toward higher-skilled applicants, making America more competitive and less stratified.

PoliticsHome's current projection:

 

Notice that the Tory vote keeps going up, though. They're at 35.5 percent now. If they can add a few more points, they could get a clear, if fragile, majority. The latest Ipsos/MORI polling in swing Labour seats gives the Tories real hope of a small majority, depending on what happens elsewhere in the country. The map above looks like an electoral Rubik's Cube for a reason. If the Liberals had not had a transformative campaign, Cameron's strategy of focusing on the marginal swing seats would be bearing more dividends.

Notice also the real news here: if the Liberals come in second, two points ahead of Labour, and yet get less than half Labour's seats, the pressure for electoral reform – and some sort of more proportional representation – will intensify. In some ways, the battle now is between the Tories and the Liberals – to ensure or to avoid a deep reform of the voting system.

Geoffrey Dunn disassembles her lawyer's latest claims.

This strikes me as a big deal. In an effort to win back the gay vote, the Tories' "Contract For Equalities" expands on the Conservative support for civil partnerships thus:

''We will also consider the case for changing the law to allow civil partnerships to be called and classified as marriage.''

So we may soon have a major conservative party in the Anglosphere committed to full marriage equality for gay and lesbian couples. Nothing could more dramatically expose the gulf between Britain's Tolerant Tories and America's Christianist Republicans.

The torture exposer and the torture authorizer meet at the WHCD.