Now that Obama supports gay marriage, it will presumably be much easier to get a marriage equality plank into the platform. Still, I haven’t seen him support plank in the national platform (I haven’t seen one way or the other, buy I’ve only done a cursory Google search). So hopefully he lends his support to it, and it’s not a fight. But for now, I’m still going to push people who support that plank at the next levels.

A day following passage of Amendment 1 in North Carolina, banning same-sex marriage in the state, Obama finally reaches the tipping point in his evolution toward support of same-sex marriage:

So what was the response “across the isle?”

RNC Chair Renee Blatherspoon (or whatever the fuck his name is): “…President Obama has played politics on this issue…”

Ahhh…Obama, who has been talking about his position “evolving” on this issue has, like an evil genius, picked THIS moment to capitalize on the issue for maximum political advantage!

And elsewhere:

Ralph Reed, a top organizer among religious conservatives, said Obama’s announcement was a “gift to the Romney campaign.” [...] “The Obama campaign doesn’t have to worry about New York and California,” Reed said. “They have to worry about Ohio, Florida and Virginia and I don’t’ see evidence that it’s a winning issue in those states.”

and

“This decision may have made Barack Obama a one-term president,” Bob Vander Plaats the head of The Family Leader, a conservative faith group focused on politics in Iowa, said. This will stoke a part of the religious base even more against Obama, Vander Plaats said. “They were already fired up to get rid of Obama. This will only make them more on fire to get rid of Obama. And if I’m Romney today, I’m smiling,” he said.

In other words…this move was political suicide.

A politically shrewed move AND political suicide at the same time.

Clearly, Obama is Master of the Jedi mind trick….

I generally think it makes sense for Joni Balter to move to news. But the highlighted bit is strange.

In an email, Balter told PubliCola that her new title will be assistant political editor. “I have long wanted to try some editing,” Balter says. “I am taking the lead on the Politics Northwest blog, trying to give it a bigger presence on the site and make it a must read.”

More political reporting on the Politics Northwest blog sounds good. The best model would be Postman, but The Tacoma News Tribune’s political blog is pretty good, and has had more longevity than Postman. I hope she can pull it off, and as I’ve said, all in all, Balter moving to news is probably the right move for the paper, and hopefully for her.

Still, does Joni Balter not realize she has access to a blog now? She could have made some effort to make the Ed Cetera blog a must read. I’m sure the paper would have loved her to break some stories on that blog, instead of doing nothing with it for a while, and then giving it to an intern. And it seems that a breaking news blog would be more work than an opinion blog. Maybe it’s more different than I realize, but if the past is prologue, it’s not a good sign.

Please join us tonight for another evening of electoral politics under the influence at the Seattle Chapter of Drinking liberally. There are a number of elections we will be tracking tonight:

• Wisconsin special Democratic primaries: This election will determine Gov. Scott Walker’s Democratic challenger. Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett is favored. Also, the Lt. Gov. and four state Senate primaries will be held.
• Indiana Republican primary: Sen. Richard Lugar is in a tight race against Teabagger favorite State Treasurer Richard Mourdock.
• North Carolina Constitutional Amendment: Amendment 1, which seems likely to pass, will add this to the NC Constitution:
  

  Marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this State….

Come join the conversation as the election results are released.

We meet every Tuesday at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. Starting time is 8:00pm, but a few folks show up earlier for dinner or to watch the early returns.

Can’t make it to Seattle tonight? There are other DL meetings this week. Tonight the Tri-Cities, Bellingham, and Vancouver, WA chapters meet, and Thursday night Drinking Liberally Bremerton meets.

With 234 chapters of Living Liberally, including twelve in Washington state and six more in Oregon, chances are excellent there’s a chapter near you.

- Mother’s Day (week) actions for Macy’s workers.

- You probably wouldn’t want your dog off leash in this dog park.

- Oh, it looks like there’s a mayor’s race in Portland

- I’m glad the Obama administration is putting out feelers (h/t) on marriage equality, but it’s time to just make it happen.

- Here’s hoping Neil Sinhababu’s take on the Greek elections is right.

- How much latitude should artists have when copying photographs?

I haven’t been making fun of The Seattle Times’ Ed Cetera blog recently. And point of fact, their intern is doing a pretty good job providing content.

But fortunately, there’s still their occasional nonsense where Bruce Ramsey and Lynne Varner argue usually over some detail on a non-issue where they start out meeting each other 90% of the way. Surprisingly, this time they actually talked about a real issue: The police response to the May Day vandalism. Bruce Ramsey starts it off thus: “I’m big on individual rights, but here is where I draw a line.”

Sure. We all have our lines. So it’s fair to say where they are. But I feel like Bruce Ramsey is regularly saying where we should curtail our individual rights and saying he usually supports individual rights as opposed to this time. But it seems to me, he could focus more on the rights he wants to expand.

Now, I’m sure he can link to pieces about lower taxes and claim that’s an individual’s right to not pay whatever tax the column is about. But that’s not the same. I’m sure he can link to pieces where he talks about property rights, and that’s closer but still not the same; the main regulations are downstream problems and other externalities, and anyway, a lot of people don’t own property. I’m sure he can link to pieces where he has defended corporate rights when they’ve been unpopular, but that’s not anything like individual rights.

Look, I know there are drug war things where he’s been fine. But it seems he cares less about individual rights than the average liberal. But he talks about how he’s for individual rights more than just about anyone. And you’d think someone like that would go out of their way to write about the individual rights they want to expand more.

- May Day

- A road to disaster for Europe.

-Darryl linked to people who made fun of The Heartland Institute’s godawful billboards in the Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza, but here’s another link making fun of it, now mostly with the written word.

- I don’t know if other people were aware of We are the 1 in 3, but I just came across it (h/t).

- The French elected a new President.

- Cape Disappointment and Useless Bay make this list of most depressing place names.

Last week’s contest was won by milwhcky. It was the new ballpark in Miami, home of the Marlins, whose manager Ozzie Guillen shoved his foot down his throat by saying nice things about Fidel Castro.

Here’s this week’s, a random location somewhere on Earth. Good luck!

Revelation 9:7-10
The locusts looked like horses prepared for battle. They had what looked like gold crowns on their heads, and their faces looked like human faces. They had hair like women’s hair and teeth like the teeth of a lion. They wore armor made of iron, and their wings roared like an army of chariots rushing into battle. They had tails that stung like scorpions, and for five months they had the power to torment people.

Discuss.

Thom: Is Libertarianism dead?

Sam Seder: North Carolina’s anti-gay amendment will ‘protect the Caucasian race’ says Senator’s wife.

David Letterman does Stephen Colbert.

Alyona’s Tool Time Award: Gay marriage will lead to White extinction.

Foxx in the school house:

Ann Telnaes: Blind leading the blind.

Sam Seder: Tens of thousands occupy May Day, Reuters calls it a ‘dud’.

Alyona’s Tool Time Award: Some Tea Party hypocrite.

Thom: The Good, The Bad, and The Very, Very Ugly.

Roy Zimmerman: Vote Republican, NJ edition.

Thom: Some Good, Bad, and Very, Very Ugly.

Stephen: Paul Ryan’s Christian budget cuts.

Alyona: John Yoo is off the hook for torture.

Greenman: Wind power at the crossroads.

Actual Audio: Boehner versus women.

Thom: War criminal John Yoo walks.

Young Turks: The bin Laden letters.

Occupy May Day.

This week in unnecessary censorship.

Campaign 2012:

• Forward.
• Suszy Sampson’s Tea Party Report: Newt’s out! We’re left with Mitt!.
• Mark Fiore: Obama, bin Laden, and Mitt.
• Jon on the Mormonness of Mitt’s religion.
• OFA: Swiss Bank Account.
• Pap: Republicans are stuck with Mitt. Now what?
• Jen: The road to the White House runs through Virginia.
• How to stand behind Mitt.
• Stephen: Mitt and Newt BFF
• Newt isn’t Mitt’s biggest supporter.

Alyona’s Tool Time Award: Heartland Institute for “Climate change is for Unibombers.

Jen: Republican War on women is real.

Jonathan Mann: This is why I march.

Thom: Exposing the biggest, most corrupt organization ever.

Daily Show: The oppression of Missouri gun owners.

Pap and Sen. Boxer: Republican War on Women.

Republicans, get in my vagina:

Sam Seder: The rich would rather give up American passport than pay taxes.

Alyona: Rubio’s DREAM Act, more like ‘Nightmare Act’.

White House: West Wing Week.

The Strange Detention of Daniel Chong:

• Young Turks: DEA leaves student to drink his own urine
• Sam Seder: Forced to drink his own urine….
• Young Turks: Daniel Chong found meth in cell.

Jon on bin Laden’s letters.

Romney, Bachmann, McDonnell: Turning Back the Clock on Women’s Health.

Thom: Some more Good, Bad, and Very, Very Ugly.

Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.

Dwight Pelz has pulled his support for the the marriage equality plank of the federal platform. He claims the problem is that this is an effort to embarrass Obama.

“I was unhappy to see them throw up some press release out there making it like this insurrection within the party,” Pelz says. “I wasn’t happy with them using my name,” he says, explaining that he didn’t like their tactics. “I didn’t realize it was part of a strategy to start a fight within the party and embarrass the President.”

“Frankly, I felt sandbagged.”

I appreciate that Pelz wants to support President Obama more than he cares about any particular plank in the platform. But if Obama can’t support a marriage equality plank, he deserves to be embarrassed. He’s on the wrong side of history and the wrong side of basic human decency.*

Furthermore, the Washington State Democratic platform will support marriage equality because most Washington State Democrats support marriage equality. Most of the caucus in the last session of the legislature supported marriage equality. We need a chair who will support for those values at the national level. I realize that party activists have the freedom to get ahead of elected officials on these sorts of issues, I just hope Pelz remembers that he’s an activist, not an elected official, now.

I hate to be cynical about this piece in The Columbian. Yes, kids should learn math. There is interesting stuff there. It opens up worlds later on. I wish I had studied harder as a kid. But math and science will never be cool.

In Our View: Science & Math Are Cool

In my view: Cool? I hope there’s some evidence to back that up instead of a HEYKIDS!!!!!! type intro.

Many middle-school students fear science and math as much as cooties and wedgies. Neither subject is ranked on their cool-things-at-school list. And later, in high school, those preconceived notions improperly guide their course selections and career choices.However, those stereotypes are fading, thanks in part to Washington STEM, a nonprofit that is celebrating its first anniversary this week. For the purpose of this editorial, the key letters in the STEM acronym are the first and the last. “Science” and “math” form the foundation — especially in middle school — for meaningful high-school diplomas, attractive résumés for college applicants and, ultimately, lucrative careers. First, though, we have to convince kids to stop hating on science and math.

Cooties? Are middle schoolers 6? For goodness sake. Look, kids should learn hard sciences. They should learn them for the somewhat important things in the paragraph, and more importantly they should also learn them for their own sake. But teachers, journalists, and other authority figures are never going to be cool. They should recognize that, and focus on why these programs actually matter.

And the rest of the article is praise for the program mostly couched, bizarrely as this sounds, as statements of praise for the program as the program. I don’t know enough about it, but I’m happy to spend money on the hard sciences. But it’s a strange intro and last line.

So spread the word: Science and math are cool. Even journalists think so.

No, I’m going to spread the word that math and science are important, and you’ll be glad you took them. But sorry, they still aren’t cool.

I was going to mention this in this morning’s open thread, but there was no way to do it in a sentence without it sounding like I was goofing on Joni Balter (although, obviously, I have in the past and may again depending on what she writes). I think it’s absolutely the right move for Balter to leave the ed page and go back to news. I don’t have any recollection of her as a reporter, but people I know, even people who are skeptical of her as an editorial writer tell me she was good at it. So we’ll see based on what she writes. If it’s solid reporting, great. If it’s nonsense dressed up as reporting, well that’s too bad.

But regardless of how Balter turns out, The Seattle Times should focus more on reporting than on editorials. It’s their bread and butter and they don’t have as much competition. While some blogs that aren’t affiliated with newspapers have reporting, a good deal of the reporting in this town comes from The Seattle Times. I hope this signals something more than just one move.

Lisa Brown isn’t running for reelection (h/t).

I have decided not to seek re-election to the 3rd district Senate seat this fall. Returning home two weeks ago, I began taking stock of my twenty years in the Legislature, reflecting on what I have been able to achieve with the help of colleagues and supporters. I decided that, though it is still immensely gratifying to serve Spokane and the state of Washington in this capacity, I am ready for new challenges.

I don’t know why anyone would want to be a legislator in this climate, so I can’t blame her. But it is a loss.

- Politicizing national security

- The Squaxin Island Tribe released thousands of juvenile coho into the Deschutes River to see where they go. “In order to find out where the good coho habitat is in the Deschutes, we need to put some coho in the river,” said Scott Stetlzner, salmon biologist for the tribe.

- I decided to keep blogging here and to give myself permission to step away when I feel the need.

- How much of their own bullshit do right wingers believe?

- It gets tougher and tougher to watch football the more stuff like this happens.

- I said yesterday that I prefer the stadiums downtown. But if that’s found to be problematic for the Port, then Rainier Valley would be fine (h/t)

- You have terrible taste

- I don’t see anything going wrong with this plan.

For a variety of reasons I prefer having the stadiums in walking distance of downtown than I would having them further out. It’s great to be able to amble home after a game or take my bike back to my apartment without breaking a sweat. Still there’s something nice about riding the light rail when the team is in town.

While I wasn’t going to the Sounders game, I happened to be riding into town from Columbia City at 6:30. The train wasn’t jam packed, but the seats were taken and people were standing. People in Sounders gear talking to strangers about the game and the season. There’s a sense of community that you don’t get fighting traffic and trying to find parking.

This David Brooks piece is mostly just an excuse for him to make his hillllllllllarious plumber joke.* But then he realized that he only wrote enough to fill a third of the column and had to fill it with nonsense. I wasn’t going to mention it, but since it’s going around various other blogs, I thought I’d mention it too.

So far this year, both President Obama and Mitt Romney seem more passionate about denying the other side victory than about any plank in their own agendas. Both campaigns have developed contempt for their opponent, justifying their belief that everything, then, is permitted.

In both campaigns, you can see the war-room mentality developing early.

He gives one example of each campaign caring more about denying the other candidate victory than about their own agenda. See of you find the falseness in this equivalence:

In November, the Romney campaign ran a blatantly dishonest ad in which President Obama purportedly admits that if the election is fought on the economy, he will lose. The quote was a distortion, but the effectiveness of the ad was in showing Republican professionals and primary voters that Romney was going to play by gangland rules, that he was tough enough and dishonest enough to do so, too.

Last week, the Obama campaign ran a cheap-shot ad on the death of Osama bin Laden. Part of the ad was Bill Clinton effectively talking about the decision to kill the terrorist. But, in the middle, the Obama people threw in a low-minded attack on Romney. The slam made Clinton look small, it made Obama look small, it turned a moment of genuine accomplishment into a political ploy, but it did follow the rules of gangland: At every second, attack; at every opportunity, drive a shiv between the ribs.

Romney quoting Obama quoting McCain’s adviser 4 years ago, but passing it off as Obama saying it now on the one side. An Obama campaign video talking about the Bin Laden raid and noting that Romney wouldn’t have done it based on things he said in the campaign in context on the other. Really, if those are your extremes, let me suggest one side is worse than the other.

When Newt Gingrich first hinted at running for President in 2010, I knew it would be fun. Alas, fun has run its course.

Now, after a week of “pre-suspensions,” Newt has gone and quit us. And now that Newt has quit, he leaves behind a set of winners and losers:

• Loser: Newt’s creditors, who will likely be bilked out of millions.
• Loser: Newt’s “Think Tanks” and Not-Lobbying Organizations that have been driven to bankruptcy.
• Loser: Callista Gingirch, who has lost her one and only opportunity to be upgraded from “Third Lady”…
• Loser: Newt’s publisher, who must now put black dots on the remaining inventory of his books before tossing them into the bargain bin. Although, in balance, they probably had an EXCELLENT run of it so far, with a massive donor-sponsored book tour, complete with Guvment-provided security, and MSM-subsidized publicity.
• Loser: The people of Puerto Rico who aspire to Statehood
• Loser: The people of Moon Colony one who long for Statehood
• Winner: Mitt Romney, who can finally do that pivoty, etch-a-sketchy thing.

Leave your list of winners and losers in the comment thread….

Over at Sound Politics, that still exists, Ron Hebron is mad at Dan Savage for saying the part of the bible that says you should kill gay people is bullshit like the part that says you should stone non-virgin women on their wedding night.

Addressing a national conference of high-school journalists, Savage was calling the Bible bull**** repeatedly. Students started to leave. So he called them pansyasses. When the adult presenter calls 17-year-old students names isn’t that bullying?

He apologized for the pansyasses thing, as well he should. But he didn’t say the entire Bible was bullshit, just the bullshit parts. Also, why bowdlerize bullshit but not pansyass?

The Journalism Education Association and the National Scholastic Press Association paid Savage to address the students. Didn’t they know what they were getting? We did.

Who the fuck is “we” here? Does Hebron think he’s the Queen of England? But the larger point is that people who use the Bible to justify hatred should be called out. And if the National Scholastic Press Association wants to have him say that, that’s fine. But even if you’re a Christian, it’s worth hearing.

… keep in mind that while a few pissed off people with a penchant for breaking shit are completely irresistible for TeeVee news, so are prostitutes and strippers…

Prostitutes and Strippers Oh My!

KOMO just reported someone was arrested for not giving up their flag pole.