The Dish

Friedersdorf is guardedly optimistic about tea party activists taking over of the GOP:

Some of them obviously will be corrupted, but while I don’t imagine they’ll be spectacularly better than what we’ve got now, I do think that the way they came to power might make them marginally less corrupted by the power they’ll eventually wield… if only they don’t fall prey to the catastrophic success that Ross Douthat and Ramesh Ponnurru are smartly worrying about.

What they remind me of is the Labour party in the 1980s where a core group of left-wing activists took over the machinery of local parties in response to Thatcher’s victory and dragged the party to the unelectable left. It took over a decade and Tony Blair to repair the damage. These analogies are always faulty, of course. But then I watch Marco Rubio’s response to Larry Kudlow when asked what he’d do to lower unemployment and I realize these people have literally nothing to offer on the concrete problems of the day. Listen to the fumes of calcified, callow ideology:

Sam Stein explains why the Massachusetts race could be fatal.

E.D. Kain looks at it:

All told, [Scott] Brown strikes me as the right sort of leader for the Republican party of 2010. Not exactly a social conservative, but not particularly liberal either, he represents the larger middle on social issues. On economics he is a fiscal conservative, and he doesn’t seem particularly hawkish beyond the standard, boiler-plate support for Israel. On abortion he makes a great deal of sense, and on healthcare I think he could potentially be a strong ally of some bi-partisan legislation in the future should the current bill fail.

My take here.

Jon Chait explains.

Obama himself is now going to campaign for Coakley in a huge gamble. How on earth did Massachusetts' Democratic party manage to do this to the president?

A World Progress Report.

A reader writes:

I've been reading through the live-blogging of the Prop. 8 trial and this caught my eye:

"Married couples live healthier, less likely to engage in dangerous behavior, less likely to smoke, less likely to drink in excess."

In every respect, this has proven to be true with both myself and my partner.  When I met him several years ago, I was addicted to meth.  He did what he had to do to break the addiction: we packed up, lived hand-to-hand on savings, and labored on the road for a while before settling in another city.  And with effort, with patience, and with love, we are leaving that far behind (breaking an addiction is always an ongoing process).  And for all of this, even if I weren't in love with him, I would be eternally grateful.

Meanwhile, since living with me, he has quit smoking, and both of us are drinking less. 

Instead of drinking at a bar and driving home intoxicated, we have friends over to dinner and watch a movie.  We've bought a house, have careers instead of moving from job to job, and have generally become stable and productive members of the community, no longer leading fast, hard, and dangerous lives.

These are the fruits of our marriage (which is exactly what it is, regardless of what the state says).  This is what social conservatives seek to deny me.  They would rather see me lying in a gutter, addicted to meth, and dying of HIV than a happy, healthy, productive member of society.  Because, in their minds, gay men by definition cannot be happy, healthy or productive.  I must be miserable and pitiable for my "sin."

And yet real conservatives – those who see the importance of marriage for social stability and are not motivated by fear or bigotry – should be the ones most adamant about marriage for gay men in particular. It is only if you see gay men as aliens to be ignored or cured that you can see marriage equality as a threat to society. Indeed it is only if you see gay people as inherently outside society that you can deny them the benefits of an institution that can literally save their lives and buttress their health.

Kristol parses a new poll:

The most striking finding in the Suffolk/7 News poll is that Brown has a 57 percent favorable/19 percent unfavorable rating. Coakley’s fav/unfav is 49/41. There are all kinds of difficulties with polling a special election, especially in terms of turnout—there are no real precedents from which to judge who’s really going to vote. Still, in a normal race, those fav/unfav numbers would suggest the contest is more likely to break wide open than to tighten. But that’s awfully hard to believe. And the Democratic assault on Brown this weekend will be massive.

This is about the awfulness of the candidacy of Martha Coakley and the arrogance of the Massachusetts Democratic establishment (whence, one might add, much of the leadership of the Human Rights Campaign is drawn.) The Dish's summary of her dreadful record and appalling campaign is here.

Fallows puts the Haiti death toll in context:

According to the latest news I've seen, at least 45,000 people have died in the Port au Prince earthquake. Haiti's entire national population is less than 10 million. Something like one out of every 220 people has been killed.

Megan thinks we will effectively be running the country:

Half the budget was provided by foreign aid before the earthquake.  For the next few years, we will effectively hold government power there, whether we want to or not, because we'll probably essentially be providing all of its funding, and can threaten to turn the taps off unless things go as we demand.