Maine voters will decide on November 3 whether to repeal a law, signed by the governor in May, that legalized gay marriage. A Public Policy Polling survey released Tuesday shows that voters are split evenly on the issue: 48 percent of respondents said they'll vote to keep the law ("No On 1"), while another 48 percent said they'll vote to nix it ("Yes On 1").
Maine's gay marriage opponents recruited Frank Schubert, the p.r. strategist behind last year's Proposition 8 advertisements in California, to employ his signature tricks--including telling voters that, if the law remains as it is, gay marriage will be taught to schoolchildren. The law includes no language about altering school curricula, and last week, Maine's attorney general confirmed that her "analysis of the issue reveals no impact" on what students are taught. But Yes On 1 is still pressing the point--and hard. Brian Brown, executive director of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), which is backing the Yes On 1 campaign, told me there's plenty of evidence that the law will allow gay marriage to infiltrate classrooms. "We don't have to guess or create hypotheticals. We already know," Brown insisted. "Let's not argue about the fact that this is what same-sex marriage proponents want."
Evidence aside, however, there's a nagging question about Yes On 1's chief grievance: What exactly does it mean to "teach gay marriage"?
When the world last left Wesley Clark in early 2004, he was a streaking meteor of a presidential candidate. Still fresh from leading NATO in the Kosovo war, he arrived as a savior for the left, who saw a bulletproof patriot that the rest of America could believe in; hero of the netroots, beloved by Michael Moore and Madonna; hope of the Clintonites, delighted by such a clean ideological slate.
It is just about 15 years since Yasir Arafat received the Nobel Peace Prize. Everybody understood that the two leaders of the State of Israel who shared the award with him, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, actually deserved it. But Arafat's primary deed in life was to be a terrorist. A tactician of terror and a strategist of terrorism. Thinking about Arafat in the royal palace made me cringe then. When I went to Al Gore's installation two years ago, I could not get out of my head that the rais had stood in the same spot, a usurper and a fraud. It was he who denied the Palestinians a state in 2000 and 2001 by refusing Ehud Barak's far-too-generous terms, terms which will never be offered again. Never. This is Arafat's real achievement: He protected Israel from its own good will.
But it is not Arafat's prize that absorbs us now. It is Barack Obama's. Edward Jay Epstein knows about the quotidian rules of the honors. Here they are:
Senator Kent Conrad's smack-down of Senator Jim Bunning provided one of the few entertaining episodes in this week's Finance Committee hearings. But another moment during the same debate, one involving Senator Olympia Snowe, deserves some attention, as well.
For those who missed it, the debate was over Bunning's proposal that Finance wait for final legislative language before holding its final vote on a health reform bill. (Typically Finance crafts its bills in plain English and converts to legalese only after approval.) Bunning's amendment failed as the Democrats, including Conrad, voted almost unanimously against it. But Snowe voted with Bunning and made an explicit plea for more time, noting that the Congressional Budget Office had recently said it needed two weeks to produce its final cost estimate. "If it takes two more weeks, it takes two more weeks. ... I don't understand, what is the rush? ... I want to know what the final number is on any bill that I vote on in this committee."
Why did Snowe do this? I've heard two different interpretations.
It’s now widely believed that the global recession is coming to an end, but the path out has been far from typical: This time around, China, not the U.S. has led the global recovery. With its $600 billion stimulus package and with banks lending with abandon, China has become the engine of global manufacturing and industrial activity.
Ed Kilgore is managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, and a frequent contributor to a variety of political journals.
Believe it or not, it's becoming possible to get a feeling for how the health care reform struggle may play out this fall.
Ed Kilgore is managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, and a frequent contributor to a variety of political journals.
My, it's been an interesting week for the two Republican senators from my home state of Georgia.
Ed Kilgore is managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, and a frequent contributor to a variety of political journals.
Ed Kilgore is managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, and a frequent contributor to a variety of political journals.
The verse is from Psalms 119, that is, King David, poet and hero.
Robert Malley and Hussein Agha are (let me just to be polite say "adversaries" instead of) enemies of Israel. That is why they are so welcome in the New York Review of Books and, of course, on the op-ed page of the New York Times where their latest missive, "The Two-State Solution Doesn't Solve Anything," appeared on Tuesday. (The same piece was published simultaneously in the Guardian, the closest thing to a pro-jihadist publication in ordinary journalism.) While fronting as an academic at St. Antony's College, Oxford, Agha makes no bones about his role as a strategist for the Palestinian leadership or as one of his admirers and the brains behind "J-Street," Daniel Levy, (the son of Lord Levy but that's another ugly story) characterizes him, "a track-II activist." In any case, Agha is not a flack for the official Palestinians; he is really and for all intents and purposes just one of them, even more under their intellectual discipline than Rashid Khalidi. Unlike Khalidi, he is also coarse.
Whether Agha is track-II or track-I, however, Robert Malley was once a real comer. He was a special assistant on Israeli-Arab affairs to President Clinton and then reappeared with basically false narratives of the Barak-Arafat negotiations as the Democratic administration limped to an end. When Barack Obama was running for the nomination, the Clinton campaign put out rumors that Malley was one of Obama's middle east advisers, and then the McCain campaign picked up the same tale, with even less scare-success than Hillary had.
I was one of those who put the kibosh on the story, and I was correct. Malley was not attached to the Obama campaign and he is not attached in any way to the present administration. You can understand why. Primarily, it is because he is against a "two-state solution." There were hints of that in his previous appearances in print. But there are no deceptions in the present Times article. The Times and the NYRB, for that matter, have previously published encomia for a "one-state solution." You will recall Tony Judt's outcroppings for that. But, then, you should also recall Leon Wieseltier's devastation in TNR.
Ed Kilgore is managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, and a frequent contributor to a variety of political journals.
Ed Kilgore is managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, and a frequent contributor to a variety of political journals.
Ed Kilgore is managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, and a frequent contributor to a variety of political journals.
Ed Kilgore is managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, and a frequent contributor to a variety of political journals.
It's one of those irresistible Dog Day stories, I suppose. The college football blog Every Day Should Be Saturday has the goods:
Ed Kilgore is managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, and a frequent contributor to a variety of political journals.
Ed Kilgore is managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, and a frequent contributor to a variety of political journals.
Ed Kilgore is managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, and a frequent contributor to a variety of political journals.
Ed Kilgore is managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, and a frequent contributor to a variety of political journals.
Ed Kilgore is managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, and a frequent contributor to a variety of political journals.
Since you'd get the general idea from news coverage that Democrats are at each other's throats, and are gravely dissatisfied with President Obama, it's always interesting to look at those few public opinion polls that supply breakouts not only by partisan self-identification but by sub-category or faction.
Ed Kilgore is managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, and a frequent contributor to a variety of political journals.
Ed Kilgore is managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, and a frequent contributor to a variety of political journals.
For all the ideological talk about divisions among Democrats on health care reform, there are some institutional issues that are equally important. Ezra Klein did a good job of analyzing the House-Senate dynamics over the weekend:
Ed Kilgore is managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, and a frequent contributor to a variety of political journals.
Ed Kilgore is managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, and a frequent contributor to a variety of political journals.
Ed Kilgore is managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, and a frequent contributor to a variety of political journals.
