The Dish

It’s been rightly praised here where I found it. This passage struck me:

First, who you marry is far more important than what career you choose. Over the course of a life that has taken me across three continents, I have met many accomplished men and women. And I have always been astonished by the number who give more thought to choosing the job they may hold for a couple of years than to choosing the spouse to whom they will pledge – before God and their friends – to remain with until death they do part.

I wonder if McGurn even thought for a second that for maybe 3 percent of his audience, "who you marry" is an illegal question. In Kansas, where he was speaking, three out of a hundred of the graduates he was addressing are barred from ever marrying the person they love by state constitutional amendment. And McGurn supported a president who wanted to make their potential marriages illegal not just in Kansas but in all fifty states in perpetuity as a matter of the federal constitution.

Actually, I don’t wonder. I don’t think such a thing even occurred to McGurn when he said it. Gay people are as invisible to him as they are to the president he served, a president who is supposed to serve all the people but couldn’t ever address a gay group or acknowledge gay people’s existence – unless explicitly asked – for almost eight years of his presidency.

But imagine if it meant you; that you are barred by law and by the state constitution from ever marrying the person you love. "Who you marry is far more important than what career you choose." How would that otherwise admirable piece of advice make you feel?

Noam writes:

A lot of people say that one benefit of the extended primary has been to force Obama to build organizations in states he might have neglected–or at least to build them earlier than he would have. I’ve always responded that Obama would have built organizations in key states whether or not he was contesting a primary there–that pretty much anything a contested primary forced him to do he could have done had he already wrapped up the nomination.

However you feel about this question, though, Florida should shed some light on it come November. I’d guess that the Obama organization there turns out to be just as strong as the Obama organization in, say, Ohio, which benefited from the contested primary. But we shall see.

Noah Millman outlines why Barr could make an impact in 2008. Matt agrees.

Because it appears we have to remind some people:

Hours after Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina agreed to sign a loyalty pledge put forward by party officials in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York followed suit. The decision seemed to dash any hopes of Mrs. Clinton relying on a strong showing in Florida as a springboard to the nomination.

“We believe Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina play a unique and special role in the nominating process,” Patti Solis Doyle, the Clinton campaign manager, said in a statement.

The pledge sought to preserve the status of traditional early-voting states and bring order to an unwieldy series of primaries that threatened to accelerate the selection process. It was devised to keep candidates from campaigning in Florida, where the primary is set for Jan. 29, and Michigan, which is trying to move its contest to Jan. 15.

From Zogby:

Against McCain, Clinton wins just 70% support from African Americans – fully 25% less than Obama wins in that demographic.

Tyler Cowen speculates why Japan has so many.

"The race for the Democratic nomination—"race" is hardly the right word, is it?—now feels like a quantum physics problem: How long can a body exist in a state approximating motionlessness without actually stopping?" – John Dickerson, Slate.

The ACLU is running a series of posts on torture this week. Larison,  Greenwald and Joan McCarter have posts up. Here’s Larison:

Should torture prove to be useless, as it typically does, the unnecessary nature of the practice becomes hard to avoid, which is why two different rhetorical tactics are employed. First, you will have the outright denial that torture is taking place (“we don’t torture,” Mr. Bush has said on more than one occasion) and then grudging acknowledgements that “extreme” measures have been used (“enhanced interrogation techniques”), and finally a justification of the actual inflicting of mental and physical duress on detainees. Mr. Bush’s cheerleaders on blogs and radio are quite explicit about this. Blogger Dean Barnett once wrote, “The torture opponents’ entire premise rests on the erroneous notion that one can successfully wage war without cruelty and savagery. I wish they were right. But they’re not.” Challenged by one of his listeners that he supported torture in recent weeks, radio host Michael Medved unflinchingly agreed that he did. What is first wrapped in euphemisms is then openly defended and even celebrated as necessary. Central to this is the denial of the rationality of the enemy, which is tantamount to a denial of their humanity.

What Medved and other torture advocates fail to do, moreover, is confront the fact that what they are defending is illegal and requires amending US law and withdrawal from the Geneva Conventions. Like so many "conservatives" today, they refuse to take full responsibility for their actions.

Gary Hart notes an often-overlooked aspect of Obama’s transformational campaign so far. Yes, there was "bitter-gate." But that was an off-the-record remark amplified by one of his supporters. Yes, there has been Wright. But I don’t see how Obama could have disowned him before he did without wrecking his own reputation for integrity, and violating his own sense of personal loyalty. Against this, you have a rookie national campaigner slaying the biggest brand-name and machine in his own party and building a majority against a veteran like McCain. Anyone who under-estimates his skills is a fool.