Missed another day this week. We apologize for the inconvenience.

* Major gay-rights victory in Iowa (!) today as the state's Supreme Court unanimously rules in favor of marriage equality. Some commentary from Daily Kos, Matt Yglesias, and Washington Monthly. It'll be interesting to see how this affects presidential politics in 2012—given Iowa's importance in the primary process Republican candidates may feel significant pressure to move to the left on this issue. Iowa is now the third state where gay marriage (as opposed to some version of civil union) is legal, joining Massachusetts and Connecticut.

* Wild new technology demoed at TED. It's a projector that turns basically any surface into a touchscreen, including your own body.

* National Catholic Reporter has a report out this week demonstrating the decades-old origins of the Catholic Church's priest scandal. My sense is that this continues to badly hurt the reputation of Catholicism, though perhaps I just run with a bad crowd. Via Cogitamus.

* Because Bush's DOJ bungled the prosecution of Ted Stevens, the Alaska GOP wants a do-over election. That sounds reasonable. That's usually how these things are handled, right?

* Also on the Sarah Palin beat the poetry of Sarah Palin and the poetry of Glenn Beck. Via MetaFilter.

"Challenge to a Cynic"

You are a cynic.
Because show me where
I have ever said
That there's absolute proof
That nothing that man
Has ever conducted
Or engaged in,
Has had any effect,
Or no effect,
On climate change.

CNN's John King says the McCain camp has given up on Colorado alongside Iowa and New Mexico.

They are now finishing with a very risky strategy. Win Florida... Win Nevada, that is a state that is now critical to the McCain math even though it is only five electoral votes. And here is the biggest risk of all: they say yes, they have to win North Carolina, yes, they have to win Ohio, yes, they have to win Virginia— trailing or dead even in all those states right now—but they are betting, Wolf, on coming back and taking the state of Pennsylvania. It has become the critical state now in the McCain electoral scenario, and they are down 10, 12, even 14 points in some polls there...

I hate to give free advice to McCain, but this is lunatic. The RCP average for Pennsylvania is +11.7 Obama. Pollster.com has it at 15.2%. Nate Silver puts McCain's numbers in PA at 2%.

How bad are McCain's internals in Colorado, if he thinks he has a better chance in PA? He has no chance in PA.

FYI: if he does win PA, I will personally burn both Neil and Srinivas in effigy. Sujata too.

UPDATE: Nick at Cogitamus points at one thing that distinguishes Pennsylvania from other potential McCain last-chances: no early voting.

Presumably this has something to do with information based on Colorado's early vote totals; the McCain campaign must believe that they can't achieve a large enough Election Day victory to offset Obama's advantage in early voting.

Of course, Pennsylvania—Pittsbugh and Philadelphia with Alabama in the middle, in Carville's famous phrase—is also more ripe than Colorado for racially coded campaigning, as Shankar points out in the comments.

The Stump time travels to a scene from the 2012 Republican primary:

Gov. Palin: We are going to change America, change it from higher taxes, higher crime, and a quagmire in Afghanistan.

Fmr. Gov. Romney: I know how to make change. I'm running on 20 years of a record of change of commitment to America and conservatism, Gov. Palin is running on the strength of a speech from four years ago. Are we going to have change with results, or change with a teleprompter? We know what that has gotten us.

That's pretty much right, except my gut tells me it may be 2016.

I've lost quite a bit of respect for the "netroots" side of the lefty blogosphere in the last few weeks, as they've allowed a slight preference for Edwards (and, really, for Edwards's recent rhetorical style) to solidify into a nonsensical belief that Obama is some sort of crypto-Republican. I find this really inscrutable, as do most of the people I talk about politics with in the meat-, email-, and telephonospheres—it's perfectly clear to me that either Edwards or Obama would easily be the best candidate for the left that the Democrats have put forward since at least 1992, and that we should all be very happy to be faced with such a choice.

Clinton, of course, is clearly the real enemy of the progressive left, a reality that seems to have been forgotten in the netroots' understandable disappointment over the evaporation of Edwards's chances of a sizeable Iowa bump in the face of Obamania.

Shankar sent me this Daily Kos diary last night, which I think lays the differences between Edwards and Obama out rather well—it really is a question of style, not substance, and insofar as these stylistic differences are substantive we ought to prefer Obama's strategy to inclusive coalition-building to Edwards's strategy of martyred righteousness:

Perhaps the key thing to understand about Barack Obama's political philosophy is that it is not a gameplan to get us to agree with conservatives, but a gameplan to get conservatives to agree with us. It is an opportunity to redefine progressive positions and conservative positions in a way that is favorable to us. If partisan politics are conceived of as a matter of good and evil, or immutable concepts like class conflict, we may win some battles, but we are unlikely to win any wars. If, on the other hand, we can understand the origins of conservative identity and understand its fluidity, we stand some chance of being able to reshape it in our image.

In the increasingly unlikely event that Edwards does win Iowa, then maybe he does somehow get the big Joementum and is able to score the nomination after all, as ubiquitous lefty blog commentary Petey has consistently argued since last year—but I really don't see that happening. (In terms of pure electability, it's probably even true that Edwards/Obama is the Democrats' best hand—though as I've said before the Democrats will almost certainly win the White House no matter who they nominate. Regardless, Edwards still won't win the nomination.) Infinitely more likely than an Edwards nomination is a scenario in which Obama and Edwards divide the progressive left throughout the primary and Clinton takes the nomination with what's left, thereby squandering what has been the left's best chance for transformative political realignment in over a generation.

This is why I and others think Obama victories in Iowa and New Hampshire are so very crucial—they knock out Edwards for good and leave the fight between a weakened, possibly crippled Clinton and a surging Obama. That's not just the best outcome for the Democrats as a party, it's the best outcome for the progressive left and thus the best outcome for the country as a whole, and I sincerely hope we see it. For the first time since early afternoon on November 2, 2004, and the second time since the dark days of December 2000, I'm hopeful we might actually get a good outcome in the grand universal coin-flip this time around. We'll get our first hint tonight.

Via Matt Yglesias, rumor has it that both Biden and Richardson will throw their support in Obama in non-viable districts in the Iowa caucus.

More cautious optimism for Obama supports: Dennis Kucinich has instructed his supporters to vote for Obama on the second ballot—though in fairness it must be noted that Kucinich's support in Iowa is significantly shallower than it was in 2004, when he struck a similar deal with John Edwards.

The real question is this: what will Biden, Dodd, and Richardson do?

It's a poll, and worse still it's a poll of the incomprehensible Iowa caucus system, but if the Des Moines Register poll that called 2004 right is to be believed Obama should win Iowa by a good margin. More than that, the poll's internals show Obama with huge support from independents—their breakdown of likely Democratic caucusers includes only 50% Democrats and 40% independents, which if true would be an unprecedented level of caucus participation from independents and suggests a Reaganesque blowout in November if Democrats have the wisdom to nominate him. Steve Benen at Washington Monthly has a nice roundup of responses to the poll, including Marc Ambinder's aforementioned breakdown of the poll's demographics and the Edwards's campaign's skepticism that so many alleged first-time caucus goers will actually attend. Best of all is this from TNR's Noam Scheiber, quoted in its entirety for optimism:

Just to add a bit to Mike's thoughts on the Register poll--Obama's lead is clearly driven by three factors: His lead among first-time caucus-goers, his lead among independents, and his lead among young people. What's interesting about the poll is that all of these groups make up a larger portion of its likely caucus-goers than in most previous polls. So the Register is basically saying that the groups that disproportionately favor Obama are much more likely to turn out than they have in the past. Now, the Register has a reputation for being the gold standard of caucus polling, so that may well be true. Or the paper could be way off the mark. But the thing is, it may not matter either way. That's because the Register poll isn't just a description of what's going on. More than any other poll, it actually influences what goes on. Iowans will wake up tomorrow to find a headline that says, "Obama Widens Lead Over Clinton." And, human psychology being what it is, that may well push them into the Obama camp Thursday night.

Meanwhile, in the Republican camp, Huckabee continues to lead the field despite the fact that he is a well-established maniac.

Two more days...

For any readers who might happen to live in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada, or other early primary states, here's the YouTube video of the speech Barack Obama gave in Iowa yesterday. (I've seen a lot of links to this today, and though it's rather long, it's very good, and this is all incredibly important—I'm convinced that the outcome of the Democratic primary over the next few weeks will determine what sort of country we're going to have for the next decade, for better or for worse.) Take a look...

A new poll shows Hillary Clinton with only a one-point lead over Barack Obama in New Hampshire, down from a high of 20, while another shows him up by three. (Still another poll has Obama up by eight in Iowa.) Meanwhile, on the other side of the fence, Huckabee continues to reveal that he's more than a little bit of a douche in an article to be published this week in the New York Times Sunday Magazine that asks the immortal question "Don't Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?"

Incidentally, Mormons also believe Gandalf is taller than Dumbledore and that Superman could beat the Flash in a race. It's really crucial that these differences get laid out before the election.

Civil rights victory in Iowa (not a typo!): Judge strikes down Iowa gay marriage ban.