Taegan Goddard gives Quote of the Day honors to Barack Obama for this: I think families are off limits. I would never consider making Cindy McCain a campaign issue, and if I saw people doing that — I would speak out against it. And the fact that I haven’t seen that from John McCain I [...]

James Fallows passes on the said news that Charlie Moskos, the preeminent military sociologist of his era, died yesterday at the age of 74. The email from his wife of 41 years, Ilca, began: “Charles C. Moskos, of Santa Monica, Calif, formerly of Evanston, Ill, draftee of U.S. Army, died peacefully in his sleep after [...]

While gays still can’t marry in New York, marriages performed out-of-state will now be recognized when they come home. Same-sex marriages legally performed elsewhere will be recognized in New York in response to a state court ruling this year, Gov. David Paterson’s spokeswoman said Wednesday. State agencies, including those governing insurance and health care, must [...]

California’s is having to revise its marriage licenses to be a bit more gender neutral. California officials are telling county clerks that they can start issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples on June 17. The state Office of Vital Records says it chose June 17 because the state Supreme Court has until the end of [...]

Kevin Drum, responding to Jonah Goldberg‘s argument that George Packer‘s “The Fall of Conservatism” erroneously conflates conservatism with the Republican Party, retorts: No political ideology lives in isolation. We judge communism by how Mao and Stalin implemented it, we judge 60s-era liberalism by how LBJ and the Democratic Party implemented it, and we judge social [...]

John McCain has repudiated, rejected, denounced, distanced, and otherwise made it clear that he’s not a big fan of John Hagee, who he thinks is a nut. In the face of mounting controversy over headline-grabbing statements from Pastor John Hagee, CNN has learned presumptive Republican nominee John McCain has decided to reject his endorsement. The [...]

Slate‘s Dahlia Lithwick has an amusing if ultimately silly column on the gay marriage ban in California and people’s decrying of “activist judges”. She snarks about “activist citizens” and an “activist legislature” and concludes, “That makes everybody an activist in California, just by virtue of the fact that they are acting.” Ha! So clever! Let’s [...]

The California Supreme Court has overturned the state’s ban on gay marriage in a 4-3 decision: The California Supreme Court ruled today that same-sex couples should be permitted to marry, rejecting state marriage laws as discriminatory. [...] The long-awaited court opinion, written by Chief Justice Ronald M. George, stemmed from San Francisco’s highly publicized same-sex [...]

Of the most Popular pages in Conservapedia, “The Trustworthy Encyclopedia,” 7 of the top 10 and 17 of the top 50 have variants of the word “homosexual” in their titles. 2. Homosexuality (2,391,500 views) 3. Teen Homosexuality (417,124 views) 5. Arguments Against Homosexuality (332,492 views) 6. Homosexual Agenda (331,597 views) 8. Ex-homosexuals (317,296 views) 9. [...]

Barack Obama’s foray into pop psychology, trying to explain why rural Pennsylvanians aren’t warming to him and are asking him to talk more about patriotism, is causing quite the stir in the blogosphere. “You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs [...]

The state has an 8th Amendment duty to protect those it incarcerates from brutality, a duty which it quite often fails to carry out because of indifference and the hiring of “corrections officers” who are often of incredibly low intellectual caliber and moral character.

Absolut Vodka has got some ‘splainin’ to do: Laura Martínez found the ad in the print edition of Quién magazine in Mexico City and it’s going viral. Jim Hoft has picked it up, calling it an “Absolut-ly Outrageous Ad,” Pierre Legrand profanely calls for a boycott, and Brian Ledbetter goes with “Absolut-ly Insulting.” Michelle Malkin [...]

A Politico story headlined “Pentagon balked on gay partner travel” is generating some buzz. Actually reading the story, though, makes it clear “the Pentagon” did no such thing — and not just because buildings can’t balk. Prior to the Easter recess, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was forced to intervene with Defense Secretary Robert Gates in [...]

Andrew Sullivan argues that America’s reaction to Barack Obama’s speech on race relations later today will tell us a lot about ourselves. Today will be a crucial day. It will be a day when we will discover if America’s racial environment – and the emotions and feelings and anger and fears that it entails – [...]

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer has finally resigned. New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer is resigning following intense pressure to step down because of a prostitution scandal. Spitzer says his resignation is effective Monday. THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below. Gov. Eliot Spitzer has decided [...]

It’s been occasionally remarked in recent years that George McGovern, who lost the 1972 election to Richard Nixon in a landslide because he was so ultra-liberal, became more conservative after leaving public life and starting his own business. A column in today’s WSJ, “Freedom Means Responsibility,” will certainly add another log to that fire. His [...]

Yesterday, John McCain announced that he was “honored” to receive the endorsement of Pastor John Hagee, a Texas-based preacher who can probably be most charitably described as “pro-Apocalypse”. McCain lavished praise on him for being “pro-Israel”, but as Sarah Posner (via Matthew Yglesias) points out, what he actually stands for is the destruction of Israel [...]

Andrew Sullivan appreciated the late William F. Buckley, Jr.’s civil tone on matters of homosexuality, especially as contrasted with other conservatives of his era, but laments that “Buckley never challenged what he believed was a necessary moral and social injunction against gay love, marriage and sex.” GayPatriot‘s B. Daniel Blatt is more charitable, noting that, [...]

Mark Halperin argues that Hillary Clinton is hamstrung in her campaign against Barack Obama by the need to have party unity for the general election and lists sixteen “Things McCain can do when running against Obama that Clinton has been unable to do well or at all.” Among them: 1. Play the national security card [...]

Erik Wemple reports that new Washington Times editor John Sullivan has ended the use of scare quotes for everyday words. He sent out this All Staff email: Here are some recent updates to TWT style. 1) Clinton will be the headline word for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. 2) Gay is approved for copy and preferred [...]

The Clinton campaign is circulating a 2006 photo of Barack Obama in Somali tribal clothes, playing to the “B. Hussein Obama is a secret Muslim” nonsense, and getting properly excoriated from the left and right alike. Indeed, even Robert Spencer[*] judges the “Obama-Is-Secretly-A-Muslim” rumors to be “a lot of hooey.” The attack is backfiring on [...]

A joint study of field grade officers by Foreign Policy and the Center for a New American Security finds that the toll of two wars has been a major strain on the American military but that it is not broken and morale remains high. These officers see a military apparatus severely strained by the grinding [...]

A study (or, rather, a report on said study) by two law professors on the relationship between the availability of high-interest payday loans and representation by Christian conservative legislators is generating some blogospheric commentary. The study’s abstract: The culture war has become a national moniker describing a variety of policy debates between social conservatives and [...]

The Prickly Pair Edition OTB Caption ContestTM is now over.

While New York does not allow gay marriage, it must recognize marriages performed elsewhere — even other countries — a appeals court judge has ruled. A New York appellate court ruled Friday that valid out-of-state marriages of same-sex couples must be legally recognized in New York, just as the law recognizes those of heterosexual couples [...]

Floridians are being treated to some robo-calls attacking Mitt Romney that HuffPo’s Sam Stein and some homosexual activist leaders call “gay bashing.” Here’s the ad in question: Mitt Romney thinks he can fool us. He supported abortion on demand, even allowed a law mandating taxpayer-funding for abortion. He says he changed his mind, but he [...]

One of the key points I meant to address but failed to in my earlier response to Steve Bainbridge is this: Mason Colley quipped that “Victory brings obliviousness; defeat, attentiveness.” [...] Just as the Israelis had to be punished for listening to the 10 fearful spies, the GOP needs to be punished for having been [...]

There’s been a lot of discussion around the blogosphere about the, um, difficulty some brick-and-mortar bookstores seem to have in ensuring that customers can acquire a copy of Jonah Goldberg’s new book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning (Amazon sales rank as of this posting: [...]

Mike Huckabee is coming under quite a bit of fire for some remarks he made on yesterday’s “Meet the Press” about homosexuality: MR. RUSSERT: But this is what concerns people. This, this is what you did say about homosexuality: “I feel homosexuality is an aberrant, unnatural and sinful lifestyle.” That’s millions of Americans. GOV. HUCKABEE: [...]

Columbus, Ohio police are using hot, topless women to seduce men into exposing themselves in public so that they can arrest them. Robin Garrison, an off-duty 42-year-old firefighter, was walking in Berliner Park in Columbus, Ohio, in May when he saw a woman sunbathing topless under a tree. He approached her and they started talking [...]

Peggy Noonan sizes up the presidential field for “Reasonable Person” qualities and passes all of the major candidates except Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. Her reasoning on Clinton is, frankly, unreasonable: Because she’s polarizing, she wouldn’t be able to rally the nation in a crisis. By that standard, of course, the current president isn’t “reasonable,” [...]

The continuing rise of Mike Huckabee — he’s now vaulted to the top of the polls in South Carolina [and now Florida!] to go along with his surge in Iowa, New Hampshire, and the national surveys — has created the inevitable backlash. It’s the fate of frontrunners, especially unexpected ones, to see a close examination [...]

Wow, some Military Members are Gay. “60 Minutes” must be scrambling for ratings in its latest “don’t ask, don’t tell” report. A gay soldier says he disclosed his sexuality to his superiors, even offering graphic proof, and was neither discharged nor reprimanded, despite the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on homosexuality. What, the military [...]

David Brooks has a sober and thought-provoking take on Mitt Romney’s “Mormon speech,” simultaneously praising its intricate weaving of philosophy and worrying that his method of arguing for inclusion of Mormons in the political sphere was at the cost of excluding non-believers. When this country was founded, James Madison envisioned a noisy public square with [...]

While the right side of the blogosphere busied itself with outrage over planted questions in the YouTube debate, our counterparts on the left were exulting over news that Rudy Giuliani billed New York City taxpayers for security services and travel expenses for his then-mistress (now wife) back in 2000. TPM’s Josh Marshall has dubbed this [...]

The Todd Rundgren Edition OTB Caption ContestTM is now over.

The blogosphere is abuzz over the revelation that Keith Kerr, the 74-year-old retired Army colonel and California National Guard general who stunned the candidates in last night’s YouTube debate with the announcement that he was openly gay, works for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Jonathan Martin describes the question itself as “a powerful moment.” A retired [...]

Bob Novak has a scathing attack on Mike Huckabee’s conservative credentials. Huckabee is campaigning as a conservative, but serious Republicans know that he is a high-tax, protectionist advocate of big government and a strong hand in the Oval Office directing the lives of Americans. Until now, they did not bother to expose the former governor [...]

A championship womens’ bridge team went Dixie Chick and are now facing possible sanctions. In the genteel world of bridge, disputes are usually handled quietly and rarely involve issues of national policy. But in a fight reminiscent of the brouhaha over an anti-Bush statement by Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks in 2003, a team [...]

Two pieces today give insights into the longshot presidential bid of Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and the role of evangelical leaders in the Republican Party. Michael Gerson notes Huckabee’s irritation that demonstrably less conservative opponents are garnering endorsements that should rightly be his. When I asked former pastor and current presidential candidate Mike Huckabee his [...]

Josh Marshall, somewhat obliquely, makes an excellent point about today’s endorsement of Rudy Giuliani’s presidential bid by televangelist Pat Robertson. Giuliani’s claim to the presidency is based on his service as mayor during and immediately after 9/11. What stops him from being a shoo-in for the nomination is his track record supporting abortion rights and [...]

Sam Brownback is set to endorse John McCain for president. Sam Brownback, a Kansas conservative and favorite of evangelical Christians, will endorse his former Republican presidential rival John McCain, GOP officials said Wednesday. The nod could provide a much-needed boost, particularly in Iowa, for the Arizona senator and one-time presumed GOP front-runner whose bid faltered [...]

MSNBC is looking to capitalize on the success of Keith Olbermann’s leftist rants by hiring more people like him, including Rosie O’Donnell, Jacques Steinberg reports in today’s NYT. Riding a ratings wave from “Countdown With Keith Olbermann,” a program that takes strong issue with the Bush administration, MSNBC is increasingly seeking to showcase its nighttime [...]

Brigadier General Paul Tibbets, best known as the pilot of the Enola Gay that dropped the Little Boy atomic bomb onto the Japanese war-supporting city of Hiroshima, has died at the age of 92. In recent years he has made the news about being unrepentant over what some vocal (revisionist) critics consider a war crime. [...]

The religious nuts who have been going around the country picketing the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq have been hit with an $11 million civil judgment. A Baltimore federal jury awarded nearly $11 million Wednesday to the father of a Marine killed in Iraq, deciding that the family’s privacy had been invaded by a [...]

The NYT today laments the the demise of gay neighborhoods. There has been a notable shift of gravity from the Castro, with young gay men and lesbians fanning out into less-expensive neighborhoods like Mission Dolores and the Outer Sunset, and farther away to Marin and Alameda Counties, “mirroring national trends where you are seeing same-sex [...]

After spending the week getting hammered for inviting a gay-bashing gospel singer to tour with him in South Carolina, Barack Obama has added an openly gay minister to the line-up. In response to an uproar from gay activists, Democrat Barack Obama’s presidential campaign on Thursday added a gay minister to the lineup for its weekend [...]

The Obama campaign has organized a gospel tour of South Carolina featuring controversial anti-gay activist Donnie McClurkin. A Gospel concert tour organized by the Barack Obama campaign on behalf of the candidate is stirring controversy among some gay activists. The three-day tour through early-voting South Carolina starts this Friday and finishes Sunday with a concert [...]

Harry Potter’s mentor, Dumbledore, is a closeted homosexual, author J.K. Rowling has revealed. Harry Potter fans, the rumors are true: Albus Dumbledore, master wizard and Headmaster of Hogwarts, is gay. J.K. Rowling, author of the mega-selling fantasy series that ended last summer, outed the beloved character Friday night while appearing before a full house at [...]

Michael Kinsley argues that the intellectual positions of the two major parties are incoherent and concludes that libertarians “are going to be an increasingly powerful force in politics.” Many people feel that neither party offers a coherent set of principles that they can agree with. For them, the choice is whether you believe in Big [...]