The Dish

Nate Silver runs them:

A statistical analysis I conducted last month, which was based on the results from previous gay marriage referenda in other states, gave the Yes on 1 side just an 11 percent chance of prevailing, although the fraction rises to 32 percent after an ad-hoc adjustment for the fact that this is an off-year election. In spite of the PPP poll, I'm not especially persuaded to deviate substantially from those numbers: the polling average still favors the 'No' side, albeit narrowly; the 'No' side seems to have run the superior campaign, and the cellphone issue may be worth a point or two. The tight polling, certainly, should keep everybody on their toes, and gay marriage could quite easily be overturned. But I'd still put the Yes on 1 side as about a 5-to-2 underdog.

A victory for equality would be a huge boost to efforts in New York, New Jersey and Washington DC to get equal treatment under the law.

Rush Limbaugh on Gawker.

A reader writes:

Your line, “If pubs served pot rather than beer, violent crime in Britain would plummet,” could have been cribbed from this song by The Streets.

Jonah Goldberg sounds chipper:

For some time now Frank Rich, Sam Tanenhaus and countless others (including David Frum) have been arguing that the GOP is a rump party and the only way for it to survive is for it to embrace me-too Republicanism of one flavor or another. The story of all three major races (VA, NJ, and NY-23) is that this conventional wisdom was incandescently wrong and ill-advised…The GOP is an unapologetically conservative party, providing a choice not an echo, and — horror of horrors — it’s working.

This was signaled by Karl Rove last week as the way to frame Tuesday's votes. But Rove is the worst political strategist of several generations, and these three mid-mid-term races do not a long-term strategy make. They are almost tailor-made for a protest vote (and anyone watching Fox News these past few months must believe that a communist take-over designed to destroy America is worth protesting). That protest vote may even bring the GOP real gains next year. But when voters actually decide on what direction they want the country to take in 2012, and the actual policies they favor, and know they might be electing an actual government, the equation shifts.

That's why I think it's perfectly possible that many partisan Republicans like Goldberg will have a wonderful time these next two years but will be bitterly disappointed until they craft an actual policy message that appeals with leaders who seem capable of governing a divided country. Tactics will keep them going; a profound lack of strategy and policy seriousness will kill them (absent some huge intervening event or a massive Obama fuck-up.) It seems to me that that point has not yet been even marginally reached. In fact, the image of the GOP as purely obstructionist has deepened even as the "choice not an echo" meme has gained traction.

Yglesias's thoughts on party discipline work as a counterpoint:

The common sense way to behave is to try to insist on orthodoxy in places where orthodox candidates can clearly win, but to be more flexible elsewhere. Instead Democrats are dealing with a rogue senator from Connecticut, while the GOP drove Arlen Specter out of the party for being an occasional deviationist in a state that’s consistently backed Democratic presidential candidates for 20 years.

So do James Joyner's:

 While I’m a Big Tent guy who thinks the Republican Party needs to accept the fact that winning seats in the Northeast will require backing candidates who would be considered “liberal” in Mississippi, I fully understand the thinking of people like Malkin who prefer an ideological party.  At some point, having an “R” after a candidates name doesn’t mean much if they’re going to work against your leadership.   But you can’t have it both ways.  Either the GOP accepts people like Scozzafava as candidates in liberal districts or it runs them off to become Democrats.

John Cole:

You know the thing that I find most amusing about the NY race is that what they are basically telling every moderate Republican across the country is that it doesn’t matter if you’ve been a loyal Republican for decades, it doesn’t matter if you know the district and the people, it doesn’t matter if you fit the district, and it doesn’t matter that you have given decades to the party.

What matters is orthodoxy, or obedience to principles of fiscal responsibility the GOP hasn't actually lived up to in a generation and fealty to discrimination against gay couples and banning all abortion.

This is effective as a rallying cry, but someone open to persuasion is confronted by some uncomfortable facts. The first is that these conservatives have yet to tell us what spending they would specifically cut.

By spending, I mean entitlements and defense, the only two areas where any serious effort to cut the debt will be found. Which entitlements does the GOP propose slashing? (Yes, slashing really is the only option to get us back to fiscal sanity.) Which war does the GOP propose ending? Which troops does it believe should be brought back to the US or laid off? How will Medicare by saved?

On the social issues, the practical questions are just as salient. We know that the GOP is horrified by gay people and our relationships. So what rights does the GOP believe gay couples should have? Civil unions? Domestic partnerships? Or nothing but psychiatric treatment? Which specific rights that straight couples have should gay couples be denied?

And on abortion: does the GOP favor making abortion illegal in all cases if Roe is overturned? Or legal in some respects? Again: I have no idea what the actual policy is. Until these proposals are actually fleshed out, we should regard this upsurge as therapy, not politics. But we should also encourage the practical policies to be spelled out.

Ackerman gets a response from Peter Galbraith, a former United Nations official in Afghanistan:

The run off was certain to be more fraudulent than the Aug 20 vote with more ghost polling centers and the same corrupt officials in charge. We are now stuck with the same corrupt and inefficient [incumbent President Hamid] Karzai that we had for the last seven years but now he is also rightly seen as illegitimate by a large segment of the Afghan population and by public opinion in the troop contributing countries. No amount of spin can obscure the fact that we spent upwards of $200 miilion on an election that has been a total fiasco.

And if this isn't a golden opportunity to drastically scale back our commitment, what would be? A clear reversal of course by Obama would be a sign that he can make a decision that the Beltway establishment does not have the strength to make; that he really is a change agent; that preventing Iraq from imploding again is now a more serious worry than propping up an unpopular, corrupt regime in Kabul … and losing more decisively to the Taliban in the end.

It's hard to find a more sublime version of it than Laura Ingraham's email:

Conservatism is the most influential political philosophy of the past 100 years because it's built upon essential truths.

The past 100 years? I don't know any Hooverites who think the last century was a triumph for small government and individual liberty. Look at the size of government since 1909. Look at the level of taxation. Look at the welfare state. Look at racial civil rights. Look at the role of women. The West is immeasurably more statist than it was a hundred years ago, and even the most dramatic counter-revolutionaries, such as Reagan and Thatcher, did very little to alter the contours of the state. The Bush Republicans implemented the biggest expansion of government power, debt and spending since LBJ.

But, look, Ingraham isn't really thinking here. This is a statement of doctrine, not politics, and all religions require a certain mythology (the idea that a conservative movement that began in the late 1950s extends backward to the earliest part of the century is truly religious thinking). So one can forgive the thoughtless hyperbole.

What worries me is the slow transformation of what was a vital pragmatic adjustment to liberalism's policy failures in the 1980s into a kind of eternal dogma. But tax cuts are not always the solution to every emergent problem; global warfare may not be the best way to exercize American power in the multi-polar world we now live in; social change – a multi-racial society where women and gays seek and deserve full equality – should be imaginatively shaped by the right, not outright rejected on religious or nostalgic grounds.

My friend Rex Wockner is writing peerless stuff. This really is another epic battle, and the best GOTV operation will win. In some ways, this is a war of nerves, and the far right knows how to win those. But we can and must as well.

However long it takes, how many battles we have to lose before we win the war, however hard it is to put your very integrity as a human being on the line for approval by strangers: this is worth doing. This is why we're here. This is what we're supposed to do.

Everyone has been wondering just how strong or sustainable the recovery has been. The GDP number and this new report on manufacturing suggests the comeback may be stronger than recently assumed. Then this:

The National Association of Realtors' index for pending sales of previously owned homes surged 6.1% to 110.1 in September from 103.8 in August, the industry group said Monday. The increase marks the eighth consecutive rise in pending home sales. Analysts surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires had expected pending sales would rise by 0.7%.

I'm not an expert, but neither are the experts. What are the consequences of a much stronger recovery than many expected? Meep, meep.

Mac McCallister, a friend of Tom Ricks, thinks that Abdullah is just playing politics:

The Pashtun Karzai is still the front-man in this charade…In the meantime all will send delegates to Abdullah Abdullah to talk him off the ledge…The negotiations to keep Abdullah Abdullah in the game will be interpreted by all that Abdullah Abdullah has both credibility and legitimacy. In the end Abdullah Abdullah's faction will be offered a greater share of the spoils… Karzai will be President… and the government will continue to frustrate the hell out of us.