"Portland" - Middle Brother
Great cover of a great Replacements road song -- "it's too late to turn back here we go." [You didn't think I was going to play the song referenced in the Post title -- I'd rather raise the bastard spawn of Ross Douthat and David Brooks.]
- Getting back to the story of King & Spalding dropping the defense of DOMA case and instead, what appears in essence to me, to have decided to force out the former Solicitor General of the United States, Paul Clement, for insisting on keeping the case is a major deal. I've had a few dealings with King & Spalding, a large Atlanta-based corporate law firm, over the years and I would never describe them as folks who are in the vanguard of the revolution if you get my drift. Moreover, it appears that one of the clients who pressured them to drop the case was the Coca-Cola Company, also not noted for its left of center orientation. (The CCC has always been notoriously anti-union.) As I noted in comments below, it is a mark of an incredible shift in public sentiment that defending DOMA would be seen as taking on a potentially damagingly unpopular cause. Remember, when DOMA was passed fifteen years ago, the vote in the House was 342-67 and in the Senate it was 85-14, whereupon it was signed into law by President Clinton. Now, a huge southern corporate law firm -- one that has had numerous conservative operatives in its highest ranks -- believes that defending the law in court would be contrary to its own interests -- to the point where it is dropping what could be a pretty lucrative piece of litigation and jettisoning one of the more prominent Supreme Court advocates of recent times. Moreover, it is risking alienating right wing activists in so doing and obviously calculating that this is less damaging than handling the case.
This is a pretty big deal culturally and politically. To me, it sends a clear message to the anti-equality folks that they cannot prevail in the long run -- and possibly not even in the short run.
- Right Wing Affirmative Action and the New York Times -- Last week it was David Brooks making the case for religious orthodoxy and the need to keep people in line through rigid doctrine lest they begin thinking on their own. Today, chunky Bobo a/k/a Ross Douthat makes the case that hell's just gots to exist lest life become a mockery of a sham of a travesty, one in which, as Amanda notes, the dirty girls get away with being so dirty. Is it just me or is there something bizarre about having Op-Ed columnist weigh in on invisible places and arguing in the daily paper that it's important, regardless of the absence of evidence, that people believe in them so that they can be coerced into behaving correctly?
What else is going on?
