yes!

Just go read the Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson op-ed in the NY Times. It's Wendell Berry! Also they talk about pasturing, which is really awesome, and about perennialization of grain crops - definitely awesome.

Soil that is used and abused in this way is as nonrenewable as (and far more valuable than) oil. Unlike oil, it has no technological substitute — and no powerful friends in the halls of government.

Agriculture has too often involved an insupportable abuse and waste of soil, ever since the first farmers took away the soil-saving cover and roots of perennial plants. Civilizations have destroyed themselves by destroying their farmland. This irremediable loss, never enough noticed, has been made worse by the huge monocultures and continuous soil-exposure of the agriculture we now practice.

Correct!

every possible kind of incompetence

The Bush administration: refusing to regulate workplace safety in order to more aggressively regulate allowable species of service animals.

I almost want to leave it at that, but there are a few things in the articles that are too good to pass up. From the OSHA article, which you should read only if you still have the capacity to be shocked by Bush administration venality:¹

In 2006, Henshaw was replaced by Edwin G. Foulke Jr., a South Carolina lawyer and former Bush fundraiser who spent years defending companies cited by OSHA for safety and health violations.

Foulke quickly acquired a reputation inside the Labor Department as a man who literally fell asleep on the job: Eyewitnesses said they saw him suddenly doze off at staff meetings, during teleconferences, in one-on-one briefings, at retreats involving senior deputies, on the dais at a conference in Europe, at an award ceremony for a corporation and during an interview with a candidate for deputy regional administrator.

His top aides said they rustled papers, wore attention-getting garb, pounded the table for emphasis or gently kicked his leg, all to keep him awake. But, if these tactics failed, sometimes they just continued talking as if he were awake.

Foulke's explanation excuse? "He was often tired and sometimes listened with his eyes closed." I am an expert on this particular tactic. It is entirely a deception.

The guide animal article profiles a seeing-eye pony, a parrot that accidentally got trained to shout, "Calm down, Jim!" when its owner is about to start a psychotic fit (incidentally, this works very well), and a monkey that staves off panic attacks. I didn't know about the psychiatric care animals, which seem very practical, although I used to work with 'therapy' dogs at a wilderness program. The range of species, and the specific considerations involved, are fascinating; Rebecca Skloot, who wrote the article, also has video and more photographs of the animals in question at her personal blog. Most interesting single tidbit: guide horses can have working lives up to 30 years.

---

1. I continue to be surprised, once in a while. I think it's less that I don't believe they would, than a sort of astonishment that somehow this administration has managed to think of everything. It's like the Eddie Izzard bit about killing extraordinary numbers of people: you screwed that up too? Really? It's impressively thorough.

I wish I owned a TV so I could watch Rachel Maddow

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

path dependence, unions, and health care

Jonathan Cohn’s piece about auto workers in the New Republic talks about both the major gains that unions won, and the way that right-to-work laws closed off opportunities for further union organizing. Union efforts developed the modern American welfare state: because union wage and benefit gains altered the market for labor, other companies had to offer better wages and benefits, and Americans became accustomed to the idea that they would receive health and retirement benefits through their employers. But globalization (which allowed manufacturing to take place in other countries) and the decline of unions changed that situation.

As Ezra Klein points out, weakening unions leads to a collective action problem:

a dilemma in which the rational actions of individual actors make everyone worse off. What's smart for the one proves to be dumb for the many. Imagine, for instance, that you are a new business entering a field where the major players are decades old. Over time, they've bargained with their workers, raised their pay, offered good health benefits and retirement packages. The rational thing for you to do is undercut their labor costs. Then you can sell the good more cheaply and take away their market share.

Klein and Cohn both point out that countries which provide their welfare state benefits directly through the government don’t face this collective action problem. Every firm both receives benefits and pays taxes to support them, so there’s no empty market space in which a firm can evade costs that others bear. This is changing to some extent as manufacturing and services both go global, but since countries are sovereign entities that have substantial control over their borders (especially over legitimate cross-border transactions), they have far more options for mitigating the collective action problem than any individual firm.

What Klein and Cohn both ignore is how things got to be this way. Why does the US, unlike every other wealthy country, rely largely on private employers for its welfare state services? The answer is complicated, but one part of it is union co-optation. In most countries, unions pushed for national health insurance; in the US, unions made what looked like a temporary, tactical decision to push for an employer mandate to provide health insurance, and to negotiate individual agreements with employers that offered union workers health insurance. The Taft-Hartley act, which Cohn notes allowed right-to-work laws and made union organizing much more difficult, combined with the Employee Retirement Income Security Act to give unions substantial control over multi-state health and welfare funds. It didn't just limit organizing - indirectly, it limited activism.¹

Just as union ability to organize was declining, and as the percentage of workers who were unionized dropped, unions were handed control over health and welfare funds, which they viewed (correctly) as a major potential source of continued influence and as a potential recruiting tool. National health insurance, which would make the Taft-Hartley funds obsolete, would deprive unions of one of the best reasons for employees to join a union. In other countries, unions focused on winning guaranteed health benefits, vacation time, and retirement security through the political process, rather than through bargaining with a single employer at a time. In the US, partly because of the arrangement of institutional incentives but also for other reasons (which I think I used to know more about), unions negotiated an expansion of the private welfare state. It doesn’t look like such a good bargain now: we’re losing those benefits one employer at a time, and we never did get maternity leave. I have some hopes that the slow-motion collapse of private benefits will generate the political will for an expansion of public, guaranteed benefits, as seems to be happening with health care. We still need to remember, while we do it, that today’s temporary, tactical decision can radically change tomorrow’s incentives and possibilities.²

---

1. I know about this stuff from reading Marie Gottschalk (in college, and again today): "It's the Health-Care Costs, Stupid!" and The Shadow Welfare State.
2. Shout-out to Paul Pierson!

a manoeuvre!

My first reaction to Rick Warren being selected as speaker was something like this:

Listen, it's my right to marry that Rick Warren wants to take away. I hate the man, for his sexist opposition to women in positions of authority, his stand for forced pregnancy, his homophobia.

But I find it pretty persuasive when a Balloon Juice commenter points out that anointing Warren as the next evangelical leader puts Dobson out in the cold and means that we'll have some evangelical leaders who aren't dead set against all progressive politics. We'll peel some evangelical votes off by emphasizing poverty and the environment, and we'll get more Democrats in Congress and more progressive programs on those issues. We'll get better policy out of it, so I'll swallow that symbol.

Ezra is right about the use Warren will make of that power, but that's only a concern insofar as Warren giving the invocation will give him a larger audience. I'm betting not. I'm betting he already has the audience and congregation he's going to get - that the major effect of tying Warren to Obama will be to make the Democrats more acceptable to evangelicals rather than the evangelicals more acceptable to the Democrats. So ok. I'll trust Obama to make that decision right now. If we start getting bad policy out of the deal, that'll be the time to get mad.

I've changed my mind, partly. I believe Amelia that there are other, real progressives out there on the evangelical scene - people for whom poverty isn't an afterthought, but same-sex marriage is. And I also find Amelia's argument compelling: that Obama is supposedly someone for whom scripture has some real meaning, and that choosing Warren suggests either that he cares rather less about theology than he has claimed, or that Warren is in line with his theology. So I don't think this was such a great decision anymore: this wasn't his only option, or even his best option, and it suggests that he is not serious about things which he claimed to be serious about. Like gay rights, women's rights, and science.

(I'm not saying, by the way, that Obama should never talk to Warren. Just that delivering the invocation is a much larger public honor than inviting him to dinner at the White House. Though the day when Warren's views are considered as socially unacceptable as David Duke's cannot come too soon.)

I also, in thinking that this was a clever piece of triangulation, had argued against being angry about the pick. I was wrong. We should be furious. One, having all these straight people online being angry about queer issues cheers me up. I love knowing that queer issues are not peripheral for my straight friends, but something that actually is close to their hearts - and I'll say that I was surprised and warmed by the reaction to Prop 8, even among people I'm close to. Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight mentioned the increasing engagement on queer issues earlier this week as well, and points out that we're seeing a rapid transformation in public opinion. Eight years ago, neither candidate for president favored civil unions; this year they both did.

Second, I think Ta-Nehisi Coates is the person who really has it right on this.

My job isn't to make Barack Obama's job easier. And--as I'm sure he knows--his job isn't to his marching orders from the bloggers who have no political capital to lose. Jelani talks about Adalai Stevenson putting segregationist John Sparkman on the ticket. I think about Lincoln promising to unite the country, blacks be damned. And now Biden defending the Warren pick. I want to be clear--in the context of who they are, national politicians, these people are not "wrong." I think Biden, like Stevenson, and like Lincoln make a solid, political case.
But that doesn't make Frederick Douglass wrong either. That doesn't make black leadership wrong for denouncing Stevenson. And it doesn't make those of us who believe that a man who bans gays from his church should not be giving the invocation, wrong. Obama and co. have the job of building national consensus. We have the job of expanding the boundaries of that consensus. We are in conflict, and this is as it should be. Seriously, what is one without the other?

And not just that, true as it is. Obama just pissed off a lot of queer people, and a lot of our already pissed off straight allies. He owes us. And he just burned up all his queer-friendly cred: not just because he chose Warren, but because people - some of them straight - made a gigantic fuss about it. Because we expected something better. So now Obama owes those of us who care about queer rights. We have the chance to get better policy precisely because people got mad about Warren. There's more about gay issues on the Change.gov site than there was on the campaign website. Baby steps. But now he's got something to prove. I have to say, I don't mind that as an outcome.

choice schmoice

Ta-Nehisi Coates asks, about the whole gay marriage thing, "What if it is a lifestyle?" The argument (as often publicly made) for letting us queers do our thing rest on the idea that we didn't choose to be gay, and thus can't choose to be straight, so it's just mean to try to force us into a role that won't work. Ta-Nehisi says,

"Implicit in that logic is a kind of judgment, the notion that if I could choose, I obviously would choose to be white. But what if I just like being black? What if I could choose and would still choose black? Ditto for homosexuality. So what if you do choose to be gay? I understand that a lot of the science says you don't, but why do we accept this implicit idea that heterosexuality is, necessarily, what everyone would chose?"

This has bothered me for a long time - last night, I watched Jon Stewart going after Bill O'Reilly about gay marriage, and Jon Stewart's framing, as it was to Mike Huckabee, is that he didn't choose to be straight, people don't choose to be gay, and you shouldn't be harassed for something that's not your fault. There's a sense that if you could help it, you should - that being gay is bad, but you're forgiven because you can't help it.

I don't think my relationship is bad. I don't wish I were dating a man. And - here's the tricky part - I could help it.

The science, for whatever it's worth, is mostly done on men. And I think that many gay people do experience their sexuality as something fairly immutable that has been the case for a very long time. But I don't. Gender doesn't seem to be a particularly important constraint for me. Not that I'm not picky, just that I'm not at all picky about that. I'm particular about politics, and I like my gender presentation a little outside the mainstream, and I like people who have a critique of capitalism. No investment bankers, thanks. But the thing is, I've dated guys, and it's not like I'm never attracted to them. I could, in a different world, probably choose to be straight. But I chose to be in a specific relationship with a specific woman - I chose a same-sex relationship. And I'm really, really happy about that choice. But it does mean that the idea that queers are alright because we didn't choose it is a bad fit for me. I did choose it. Am I still alright with Jon Stewart?

It's also hard on young queer people, because it suggests that being gay is so awful that you'd never choose it if you had an alternative. I used to think that, actually. A gay friend thought, when she was in middle school, that if she were gay she would never ever tell anyone. (Fortunately for us all, she changed her mind.) Similarly, I was looking through a diversity curriculum for activities, and there was one in which the participants were asked to imagine a gay person's life and go through all the moments where that person is rejected, harassed, and hurt for being gay. The idea was to convince straight participants not to be mean to queer people, but put one queer kid in the mix, and that poor kid gets to spend the activity thinking of how bleak the future is, and struggling to choose not to be gay. And that's what's really crazy-making about the "it's ok because you can't help it" rhetoric: how do you know if you can help it or not unless you try? It suggests that every decision about being attracted to or involved with someone of the same sex ought to be run through a screen of "do I have to?" It almost needs the oppression there, because without the oppression, maybe people would just choose to be queer and you wouldn't know who can't help it.

It reminds me a little of the way women are encouraged to ask ourselves, "do I need that?" about food and, well, really about most of our desires that are for ourselves. It's kind of a crap way to approach your life, and I worry that the language of the current 'tolerance' fight for queer people perpetuates that kind of approach instead of accepting that queer relationships don't need more justification than straight ones.

(I know I promised some thoughts on education policy. I'm working on it!)

this post brought to you by the New Jersey Transit news stand

Dear Vanity Fair,

Perhaps you commissioned Maureen Dowd to write about Tina Fey knowing only that she was a New York Times columnist, and never having read any of her columns. I’ve actually read those columns, though, and the profile she turned out was exactly what I would expect. You did a disservice to Tina Fey, and to your readers. We learn little about Tina Fey’s childhood, nothing about her philosophy of writing, nothing about her transition to acting – nothing about the substantive development of her personality and career. Instead, we hear endlessly about her German father and German work ethic, her Greek mother, her weight gain, weight loss, frumpy dresses, mousy appearance, thrift store sweaters, worries about her body. The weight and body image angles are particularly upsetting, since Dowd uncritically accepts the idea that thin equals beautiful, and thus that thin equals successful. But the cumulative effect really says it all: after reading that article, I was bored, offended, and self-conscious about my ass. Tina Fey’s talent deserves better. So does my reading time.

Better luck next time,

North

education reform and junk analysis

Shorter David Brooks: "I know nothing about the subject I'm writing on, and would like to display my ignorance for the world to see."

I don't have time to write a full analysis right now. I'll do it on Sunday or Monday. But I just want to say. People who don't know shit about shit should stop talking about schools and education reform. Of course, if that were the standard, David Brooks wouldn't get a column at all.

nerd!

You know you're a sustainable farming nerd when you get all engrossed reading the Organic Valley farmer profiles. This one made me happy: the farmers switched to grazing from row crops, and from Holsteins to Jerseys, and went to seasonal dairying, and they're happier and have a better family life and the cows are happier too. If you, too, are a sucker for little stories about the world getting better, you can get a few minutes of enjoyment here.

I'm in love

If you haven't seen the dancing walrus video, you owe it to yourself to spend the next 49 seconds watching it. Especially if you're too busy. Then, if you have a couple minutes, you should read the Natalie Angier article about walruses. Sample: "Males woo females with lengthy compositions that have been compared in the complexity of their structure and phrasing to the songs of nightingales and humpback whales, but that use a greater number of body parts." Attention walruses: you are amazing. Please come visit.

just in time for the holidays!

I hope none of the three children in my generation ever has occasion to send a letter like this to another sibling.

The Gingriches are going to have a fun Thanksgiving.

traveling; home

I've been in Chicago for the last two days. It's cold and windy, and my grandmother is crazy; otherwise great. At the coffee shop this morning, the cashier asked where I'm from.¹ I don't know if I look out of place - in Hyde Park? it's full of dressed-up pseudo-hipsters! - or if my voice, which is ridiculously scratchy, makes me sound like I have an accent.

I claimed Philadelphia, because I'm not there. In Philadelphia I would have claimed Des Moines. In Des Moines? I guess I would have said, "I grew up here," which is not quite the same as, "I'm from here." I always claim the last place I was, which means I can never be home. Next year I'll probably be from Philadelphia full time.

Anyway. When I told him I was from Philadelphia, he said congratulations. The Phillies win, which seemed like such a big deal at the time, is such ancient history that he had to remind me why Philly got congratulations. After the Phillies won, there were riotous celebrations; for days afterward, Philadelphia was full of irritable, slightly hungover fans who wandered around shrieking "Go Phillies!!!!1!" every time they saw anything red. They were kind of like grumpy, overtired bulls.

Election day was totally different. I wouldn't have been anywhere else. After they called the election - at 11:01 pm - people poured out into the streets and danced, banged pot lids, chanted, sang, shouted, hugged each other, drummed. The church on the corner near my house has a tiny school, and on Wednesday morning all the kids, ages 4 to 13, were out there waving home-made "Honk 4 Obama" signs and screaming and dancing. People smiled at each other on the street.

I know Obama's bound to disappoint us. I know it. And I'm ready to leave Philadelphia, because if I don't do it soon I never will. But that day, I wouldn't have been anywhere else.

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1. He and the woman barista, who had an amazing voice, both seemed to be flirting with me. Do they flirt with all their customers? Do I just look that queer?

words we'll be done with after Tuesday

It's like this election has its own vocabulary: double down, vetting, surge, in the tank, rogue, close the deal.

Conspicuous by its absence is the most useful phrase to describe the last several months: jump the shark.

(See This. Fucking. Election for a last-minute replay of this. fucking. election.)

on the phone with Barack

Because I'm really, really cool, I was getting some coffee ice cream and Nutella (with bonus roasted almonds on top!) together to eat while I watched the Daily Show. And the phone rang. And it appears that Jon Carson, Obama's voter contact guy, decided, why don't we just call everyone? And put them on a conference call with Obama?

I feel slightly suspicious of my telephone, and absolutely validated in feeling that this election is just like a sports game. What is going to happen next?

[I am not a hard-core volunteer - I volunteered once and signed up for 3 days of GOTV - so I'm curious who else got that call.]

election lost on a technicality

Godwin's Law

"As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

John McCain, on the LA Times's refusal to release (per its promise to its source) a tape of Obama at a fellow professor's going away party from Chicago:

"I'm not in the business of talking about media bias but what if there was a tape with John McCain with a neo-Nazi outfit being held by some media outlet?"

According to internet tradition the first person to make such a comparison loses.

Can this election please just be over already?

"They spent 6 times my yearly income on her wardrobe"

Look, I want to be sympathetic to Sarah Palin spending $150,000 on new clothes. I buy that she needed new clothes, even though she wasn't "a beet farmer last week" (if you want to see how she dressed before, there's a set of photos on the Seattle PI website; a lot of what she wore in Alaska would have been savagely mocked if she wore it in front of a national audience). The demands of the national stage are intense, and much more so for women: no female political figure (and I include Michelle Obama and Cindy McCain) could follow the Obama strategy of wearing a rotating set of identical dark two-button suits, white shirts, and variably colored ties. I also buy that those clothes have to be not only varied, but high quality, expensive, and fashionable, and that people will notice and mock her if they are not. And she needs a lot of them, because she can't wear the same thing every day, or even twice in the same week - and even then she needs far more clothes than seems normal, because she doesn't stay in one place long enough to get everything cleaned and sent back to her before she leaves, so they probably have to get shipped by her post-event team.

But $150,000! That's a different $2000 outfit every day of a 2.5 month campaign. It's just, just.. it is just not reasonable. I have been to fancy department stores! There are very nice outfits available for much, much less than $2000, and her standard outfit of femme skirt with jacket is completely amenable to mixing and matching. (I'm not the only one who can't figure out where the money would go: the editor of Glamour magazine basically agrees.) If it had been some smaller, seemingly unreasonable amount of money, like $50,000 or $75,000, I could have seen defending Palin. But I just can't make the numbers make sense.

(post title from the Political Schmientist)

crazy pills

The whole scrap about Ayers and ACORN in the debate the other night (if you missed it, the short version is that McCain said he didn't care about some washed-up old terrorist and then talked about him ad nauseam, and Obama said this is ridiculous) reminded me of some of the more totally insane things about this election: namely, that people are willing to believe all kinds of terrible things about Obama and vote for him anyway. Ben Smith at Politico has the best examples: a canvasser in Fishtown, a Philadelphia neighborhood, finds people who are outright racist, but "they would call him a n----r and mention how they don't know what to do because of the economy."

And then, well, this kind of speaks for itself, although you should click over and read the whole thing: after watching a no-holds-barred ad for a focus group, the kind that throws Wright and Ayers and everything at Obama, this happens.

The next was a woman, late 50s, Democrat but strongly pro-life. Loved B. and H. Clinton, loved Bush in 2000. "Well, I don't know much about this terrorist group Barack used to be in with that Weather guy but I'm sick of paying for health insurance at work and that's why I'm supporting Barack."

She thinks he was a member of a terrorist group. She's voting for him anyway. Like other members of the focus group, she was willing to accept these racially motivated slurs, but she didn't think acting on them was in her own best interest.

The guy who organized the focus group said, "I felt like I was taking crazy pills."

This has a little to do with why I think having Obama as president would be amazing for race issues in this country. I mean yeah, the far-right crazies - the Patriot movement, the white supremacists, the kind of people David Neiwert at Orcinus keeps an eye on - will go nuts. Obama will need incredibly intense security. But most people will see a black man (biracial, yes, but in a lot of the country he just reads as black) being president, doing a pretty good job of it, and most importantly seeming like a smart decent guy, and it'll change their gut feelings about race the same way it happened for this guy:

"I’ve always been against the blacks," said Mr. Rowell, who is in his 70s, recalling how he was arrested for throwing firecrackers in the black section of town. But now that he has three biracial grandchildren — “it was really rough on me” — he said he had “found out they were human beings, too.”

It's not like anyone wakes up and suddenly things are fine, but it changes people's ideas of what's possible and what's normal.

McCain Watch '08: out of touch

Last night at the debate, McCain talked about his health care plan, explaining to the audience that it would let them shop around! Choose whatever insurance plan they wanted! He sounded like he thought people would appreciate the offer and be happy not to be locked into whatever plan their employer offers.

Which, frankly, is a nutty thing to think.

Buying individual health insurance is a painstaking, unpleasant process in which you are constantly trying to figure out exactly how screwed a particular plan will make you if you have a major health problem - this involves reading legalese in 4-point font - and exactly how restrictive the particular insurance company will be about the doctors you can see and conditions they'll cover. Not to mention that it's absurdly expensive - McCain's $5000 credit does essentially nothing for anyone with a major pre-existing condition. But even if it were free, getting health insurance for yourself sucks. I did it this year, and if it should be easy for anyone, that person is me: I am young, reasonably healthy, don't smoke, and have neither pre-existing conditions nor a family to worry about; I'm also over-educated and good with numbers. It still sucked. I was sure I was getting screwed, and I took a crappier plan than I would ideally like because at least I can afford the premiums.

Anyone who's ever had to deal with their own health insurance knows it sucks, and you're better off getting it through your employer, who by virtue of scale will be able to negotiate a better and less expensive plan (same argument holds for single-payer, not that I'm holding my breath). So when McCain talks about how great it's going to be to be able to find the best health care plan for yourself, all he's saying is he has no damn clue what getting health insurance is like. And he doesn't. He was in the Navy until April 1, 1981, and was elected to Congress in 1982, where he's been ever since. With the exception of one year of his life, he has had government health care immediately available; during that year, he worked for his father-in-law, a hundred-millionaire. Any guesses as to whether he was offered health insurance with that job? His insurance has always been taken care of. So he's trying to encourage the rest of the country to take on a complicated, onerous, confusing responsibility for managing their own health insurance - something he's never done himself, or showed any interest in doing, because it sucks. But he's fine with it sucking for the rest of us.

"But he's still the undisciplined, spoiled brat that he was when he went in."

I read Rolling Stone's profile of McCain out loud to the Gardener (yes, the whole thing; procrastination > gravity). My first reaction was something like, that poor guy. He sounded like a miserable, obstinately angry, misogynistic child, desperate to live up to a standard he could never meet, always trying to make up for being a screw-off by getting his way. We hear that McCain tried to pick up girls as a high school sophomore; when they laughed at him, "he cursed them so vilely that he was hauled into court on a profanity charge." In the story, McCain erupts in anger, crashes two planes, almost gets kicked out of school twice, acquires the nickname McNasty, and, constantly on the verge of failure, relentlessly returns to his family connections to bail him out. The man needs help.

By the time the article reached McCain's political career, all my sympathy had evaporated. He's a habitual liar, a corrupt, dishonest, dishonorable, deceitful politician. He needs help, but keep that man away from the presidency. "Seen in the sweep of his seven-decade personal history, his pandering to the right is consistent with the only constant in his life: doing what's best for himself."

Gross.

the vp debate

I don't understand the reaction to the VP debate. Biden had a lot of great moments: reclaiming the 'ordinary guy' mantle by talking about raising kids alone after his wife died, saying that McCain was no maverick on the things that count, saying on climate change that "if you don't understand what the cause is, it's impossible to come up with a solution." Palin kept it to no more than about three total melt-downs into incoherence, each of which came when she neither answered the question asked nor shifted entirely to a different topic, but rather talked around the question. Her attempt at telling us her Achilles heel was a notable example of this. Gwen Ifill was unbelievably tame, not pushing either candidate to give a straight answer to any question - though Biden actually did answer every question, at least briefly, so she could only have pushed Palin much.

So far so good, and nothing the blogs and newspapers aren't talking about. But for my money, Biden's best moment was his closing statement, which I'm putting below. It starts at about 1:38, and it hits all the right notes - a story about his dad in Scranton, an appeal to America to 'get up together', and 'may God protect our troops,' which coming from an observant Catholic with a son in the military sounds utterly sincere.



The most extraordinary moment in the debate, though, goes not to any of the absurd things Palin said about Obama's record (for a partial list of things she lied about, check here) or Biden dismantling McCain or even Palin saying how wonderful it is that "We both love Israel!", but to the same-sex marriage question. Here's Biden's response, in print, to whether benefits should be extended to same-sex couples:

"Absolutely. Do I support granting same-sex benefits? Absolutely positively. Look, in an Obama-Biden administration, there will be absolutely no distinction from a constitutional standpoint or a legal standpoint between a same-sex and a heterosexual couple.

"The fact of the matter is that under the Constitution we should be granted -- same-sex couples should be able to have visitation rights in the hospitals, joint ownership of property, life insurance policies, et cetera. That's only fair.

"It's what the Constitution calls for. And so we do support it. We do support making sure that committed couples in a same-sex marriage are guaranteed the same constitutional benefits as it relates to their property rights, their rights of visitation, their rights to insurance, their rights of ownership as heterosexual couples do."

Palin's response?

"Well, not if it goes closer and closer towards redefining the traditional definition of marriage between one man and one woman. And unfortunately that's sometimes where those steps lead.

"But I also want to clarify, if there's any kind of suggestion at all from my answer that I would be anything but tolerant of adults in America choosing their partners, choosing relationships that they deem best for themselves, you know, I am tolerant and I have a very diverse family and group of friends and even within that group you would see some who may not agree with me on this issue, some very dear friends who don't agree with me on this issue.

"But in that tolerance also, no one would ever propose, not in a McCain-Palin administration, to do anything to prohibit, say, visitations in a hospital or contracts being signed, negotiated between parties.

"But I will tell Americans straight up that I don't support defining marriage as anything but between one man and one woman, and I think through nuances we can go round and round about what that actually means.

"But I'm being as straight up with Americans as I can in my non- support for anything but a traditional definition of marriage."

Despite Biden's slip - saying "same-sex marriage" when he meant to say unions or something like that - both candidates are basically arguing for same-sex couples to get approximately the benefits of marriage. Which, ok, why don't you just give everyone civil unions and get the government out of the business of marriage altogether? But the fact remains that five years ago, sodomy statutes could be enforced; now, both sides of the ticket support civil unions for gay couples, and it's essentially uncontroversial (at that level - obviously it remains tremendously controversial at the level of, say, referenda). That ain't peanuts.