The Dish

Some smart observations from Larry Sabato:

Democratic National Committee Chairman and Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine is also high up on the list of losers. He presided over an electoral debacle in his own state. Unlike his predecessor, Gov. Mark Warner, he failed to prepare the way for a Democratic successor in Richmond and probably made a serious mistake in becoming chairman at all. It took him out of state too much and made him a partisan rather than a unifying figure. National ambitions have tripped up four of the last five Virginia governors. When you only have one four-year term, maybe the voters expect you to take care of business at home. Bob McDonnell might want to remember that when he is touted for the 2012 national GOP ticket. 

Turnout played a huge role in the outcomes in both NJ and VA, with Republicans showing up in droves and Democrats going fishing, at least to some degree. In Virginia, one result of absentee Democrats was the lowest voter turnout for a gubernatorial election in the state's modern two-party history (1969 to 2009). The 2009 turnout of 39.8 percent of the registered voters was the lowest in forty years. Even with all the population growth since 2005, the absolute voter turnout in 2009 (1.97 million) fell below that of four years ago (2.0 million). And the electorate was barely more than half that of 2008 (3.7 million). Astounding.

A reader writes:

I'm sitting in a coffee shop and I watched the video of the girl being surprised by her father, and I'm literally crying. A barrista comes up and asks me what's wrong, and I show her the video, and she's crying. A couple of other people gather, and they're crying. The whole damned coffee shop is crying.

It did the same thing to me. The love in that moment expressed in the child's face is simply unforgettable.

Free Exchange glances at this week's job numbers:

Even as production grows, firms are slashing jobs, wringing more out of fewer workers. Hours worked declined as well, a bad sign for recovery in labour markets. In the manufacturing sector, productivity was up 13.6%. "It’s a favorable environment for profits," deadpanned Barclays Capital's Dean Maki. That's a pretty stunning number. It suggests growth will have to be a lot faster to begin creating jobs, and it indicates, once more, that inflation poses absolutely no threat to the economy. It's a perfect time for a more aggressive approach to monetary policy, and I wouldn't be surprised if this contributed to enthusiasm for measures that subsidise hiring.

A reader writes:

As a straight man, I've found that the best answer to my children's questions about gay couples is the simplest: they love each other just like mommy and me. They have accepted this observation without any confusion on their part.

That's certainly the case with the kids in our family. I remember the first time my young niece and nephew came to Provincetown to visit me and Aaron (before our marriage). We never sat them down and told them we were gay. We didn't tell them what our relationship was (they were 8 and 11 respectively). But after a couple of days, my niece asked about a trip we were planning: "Is uncle Aaron coming?" She got it instantly. Kids not told that gay people are evil do not see us as evil; and they see our marriages as like any others. My niece can actually recite by heart the vows we took at our wedding, which is more than I can do any more. But this is still obviously a work in progress across the country and the world. Another reader writes:

With regard to your reader's comments, my partner and I own a home in a typical neighborhood on the South Shore of Boston.  Every Halloween we carve a pumpkin and buy candy for the trick or treaters.  And for the past eight years we have lived here, we watch as several families with little ones visit every house on our street except ours.  We have watched families literally cross to the other side of the street of the street and glare at our house as they walk by.  We do not know these people, but clearly they have been informed about us, the homosexual couple who lives down the street.  This happens in Massachusetts; this

isn't even Oklahoma.

I am willing to entertain the notion that parents are generally uncomfortable about discussing sex, and especially homosexuality, with their children, but do they vote against gay marriage because of discomfort?  Let's be very clear about this: the anti gay marriage crowd repeats the false argument that homosexuality will be taught in school because it alludes to age old myths and smears about homosexuals as recruiters, corrupters and predators of youth.  That's bigotry.  Perhaps it appeals to a subconscious form of bigotry, but it's bigotry all the same.

Andrea Stone reports:

The latest Army statistics show a stunning 75 percent of military-age youth are ineligible to join the military because they are overweight, can't pass entrance exams, have dropped out of high school or had run-ins with the law.

So many young people between the prime recruiting ages of 17 and 24 cannot meet minimum standards that a group of retired military leaders is calling for more investment in early childhood education to combat the insidious effects of junk food and inadequate education. "We've never had this problem of young people being obese like we have today," said Gen. John Shalikashvili, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Meanwhile, we're throwing out qualified West Point Arab linguists – because they are gay. Insane.

David Link makes a very important point here that bears underlining. Tuesday was a great day for gay rights everywhere but Maine:

We won voter approval of (1) domestic partnerships in Washington; (2) an anti-discrimination ordinance in Kalamazoo; (3) an openly gay city council president in Detroit; and (4) an openly lesbian mayoral candidate in Houston. That seems to say something about the state of anti-gay prejudice in this country.

I agree with David that public opinion is now decisively inclusive of gay people – on every issue but civil marriage. But even on that last issue, we are now essentially neck and neck in California and Maine, the last two states to have referendums on the matter, and we are over 50 percent in Washington state for domestic partnerships that are identical to civil marriage on a state level, but without the m-word. 

The anti-gay forces are fighting on the last ground they can win.

On the military ban, on employment non-discrimination, on civil unions, the failure to act is not a function of public opinion. It's a function of the Democratic party's general wussiness. On marriage, the only lever that is now working against gay couples – scaring parents about kids – doesn't work in the courts or legislatures because it isn't an argument as such; it's a feeling. So these referendums are grueling and the playing field is against us. In every other respect, we have won or will win if we can get the DNC to stop treating us as lepers. All we need is civil marriage in one state for a generation and the war is over. They will fight a rearguard action to humiliate, browbeat and stigmatize those of us building our relationships and families. But that is all they can do.

I was too nice in ascribing merely a trillion dollar deficit bequeathed to Obama, as a reader reminds me:

According to the treasury department's Bureau of Public Debt, the federal deficit went from $5,728,195,796,181.57 on January 22, 2001 to $10,626,877,048,913.08 on January 20, 2009. Bear in mind that the allegedly fiscally conservative Republican Party ran this government for six of those eight years. Roughly two trillion of that debt was added after Democrats took over Congress in 2007.

Adding $5 trillion in debt in eight years is unprecedented in US history outside the Second World War. But that's what Bush and Rove and the GOP did. And now they lecture everyone else about fiscal responsibility.

Here's my litmus test for the Tea Party right: when they hold up effigies of Bush and Cheney as socialists, I'll take them seriously. Until then, they're more partisan than principled.

A fourth-grader is about to give a report about her dad stationed in Iraq:

EMBED-Tricked On Halloween – Watch more free videos

Reacting to an article on a family that was savagely tortured and murdered, Sonny Bunch defends the death penalty:

Every time I start to waver on my support for the death penalty — as I did in the wake of another New Yorker piece, about a possibly-innocent man who was executed — I see a story like this and it snaps me right back into line. I’m all for containing prosecutorial abuses. I’m all for reforms to the way prosecutors seek the death penalty…[But] those monsters — the animals who would do that to a family of human beings — don’t deserve to live, and I don’t buy the argument that it’s a harsher penalty for them to live out their lives in prison. I want the state to wreak vengeance upon them. And, god help me, I want them to suffer when it happens. If this makes me a bad person, then so be it.

Will at Ordinary Gentlemen has mixed feelings. I do not believe the point of the law in the West is revenge. It's justice. In fact, avoiding revenge and filtering the emotions of crime through the restraint of the criminal justice system, with due respect for the accused, is what separates us from other less evolved places. And if the death penalty is used, it should not be to impose suffering. It should be to demonstrate deterrence and justice. I should add, of course, that I oppose the death penalty in all cases – because I do not trust government with the capacity to end a captive human being's life, because I do not believe any justice system is perfect enough to do that without error, and because I believe that murder is absolutely wrong.

Alaska's most famous baby-daddy gets the Shatner treatment.