The Dish

Zac Morgan urges conservatives to lead the way and make a point against the Islamists at the same time:

President Obama addressed the Human Rights Campaign last night and re-declared his opposition to “don’t ask, don’t tell.”  But wait a minute: he’s commander in chief. If he’s opposed, why doesn’t he actually do something about it? Here’s one issue where conservatives with their traditional concern for the military can outbid the all-talk president.

As former JCS Chairman General John Shalikashvili pointed out in the Washington Post, scant evidence exists that allowing openly gay enlistment would harm unit cohesion or spark mass resignations from our fighting men and women.  Other countries, including the Israeli Defense Forces, have allowed homosexuals to serve, with no serious adverse effects…Besides, I can think of only a few things more fitting than for a homophobic radical Islamist in Afghanistan to discover that his latest plans for a terrorist attack were foiled because of the quick work of a gay member of our armed forces.

Mudflats impatiently taps her foot. ADN reports:

"I think they're hiding something, I think this is a travesty of justice," state Democratic Party Chairwoman Patti Higgins said Wednesday. "The law says they have 10 days to do it."

The public requests were filed 13 months ago. She can "write" a "book" in ten minutes but some things can wait.

All Hallows' Eve is right around the corner. Get your Palin on.

Suderman is against government regulation of TV commercial volume:

[T]he larger problem is the assumption this grows out of — that government's job is to regulate every minor annoyance out the lives of its citizens. That's bad for government, because it gives it unnecessary power and distracts it from legitimate government activity. It's also worse for citizens, who develop an implicit sense that, when problems arise, the way to fix them is to beg Congress, pass a law, wait for new irritations to arise, then wash, rinse, repeat. And, in the end, I think that's far more grating and obnoxious than a little volume manipulation from advertisers on the idiot box.

Is everyone who watches Fox a little deaf? It sometimes feels that way.

“They’re a shameless bunch of lying, distorting, propagandists, which I respect, and I don’t know what MSNBC would do without them,” Michael Goldfarb, on the liberal bloggers of Think Progress. My italics. His "which".

Today on the Dish we saw what was apparently a shot from the White House at “left fringe” bloggers demanding equality. Officials denied it, but Andrew suspected Rahm. John Cole and Dish readers pushed back against Sully. Benen got the back of the administration while DiA urged action.

We wondered if McCain or Schwarzenegger would be any better than Obama and if conservatives have any chance of advancing marriage equality. At the end of the day, we saw signs that the White House could be moving on DADT. Dan Blatt gave props to the gay blogosphere.

The Dish also looked back at yesterday’s best speeches, best signs, best coverage, and best anecdote – and post from Andrew. (While we’re at it, here’s the best typo from readers.)

Andrew is hosting a book signing tomorrow for his friend Tad Friend. More details here.

— C.B.

"It's often forgotten or obscured, but the central political fact now is that the Democratic Party controls everything in Washington — from the branches of government to favors doled out to lobbyists to the policies that Congress and the President enact. Wars that are fought and bills that are or are not passed and policies that are maintained are, by definition, Democratic actions. The dreaded Right can't dictate or stop anything. That's the burden of having massive majorities in all areas — everything that happens is the result of what the Democratic Party does, and that's why the divisions and conflicts that truly matter are ones with the party itself. The "right v. left" and even "Democrat v. GOP" drama dominates most of our discourse, yet at this point it is a distracting and largely irrelevant food fight. It's the Democrats who have won the last two elections by large margins and wield all the power, and increasingly the defining conflict is between those whose overarching allegiance is to Obama and the Party as ends in themselves, and those who see those things as mere means to more important ends," – Glenn Greenwald, Salon.

Kevin Drum urges patience on DADT. DiA takes a different stance:

Unlike gay marriage, it doesn’t present a natural opportunity for action on the state level. Individual states or cities could pass resolutions in support of ending the policy, but this would only be a symbolic gesture. So we could wait for action from Congress. But that will involve a long wait. And those service members are especially important these days. Mr Obama has already expressed an intention to end the policy, which means that he is already politically exposed (though the political risk is small). He is facing charges that he hasn’t fulfilled the campaign promises made to his gay supporters. We have already seen that this administration has an eye for the low-hanging fruit—the closing of the Hutto detention centre, for example. If the president issued an executive order calling for an immediate halt to the implementation of the policy, that would help the military and advance the cause of gay rights.

Nancy Scola argues:

The White House is showing a quiet eagerness to engage with online newsies, just not necessarily the very political and advocacy-minded folks of the political blogosphere. The new news ecosystem isn't foreign to them, they just see it — and its utility — differently. The Obama White House would much rather, it seems, route around those hard-core political bloggers and engage with the people who have positioned themselves online as community managers, folks who can be said to bring a constituency to the table (beyond the army of commenters and diarists some blogs and bloggers have). Case in point, the White House is right now, with no great fanfare, inviting the Consumerist and the Motley Fool to pull together questions for the White House on Obama's plan for reforming the "rules of the road" that the financial world has to follow, pegged of off a web video starring White House economic advisor Austan Goolsbee.

(Hat tip: Ben Smith)

The White House is now offering DADT repeal details:

A spokesperson for Senator Joe Lieberman confirmed that the senator had been speaking to the White House about the bill (to repeal DADT). “Senator Lieberman has had discussions with representatives of the Administration and others on the best way to reverse this policy which he has opposed since it was first proposed in 1993,” said Marshall Wittmann, Lieberman’s press secretary…

“SLDN is working with key senators on Senate Armed Services Committee and believes the White House is actively engaged to help facilitate a timely, bi-partisan bill introduction and is also having critically needed repeal discussions within the Pentagon. SLDN is counting on getting repeal done in 2010.”

We'll see. And we'll be watching.