The Republic of T.

I wish I had more time to write about this — and by the time I do have time to write about it, others will have already said what I would have — but this is easily the best news I’ve heard in a long time.

A federal appeals court Tuesday struck down California’s ban on same-sex marriage, clearing the way for the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on gay marriage as early as next year.

The 2-1 decision by a panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found that Proposition 8, the 2008 ballot measure that limited marriage to one man and one woman, violated the U.S. Constitution. The architects of Prop. 8 have vowed to appeal.

The ruling was narrow and likely to be limited to California.

The ruling upheld a decision by retired Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn R. Walker, who struck down the ballot measure in 2010 after holding an unprecedented trial on the nature of sexual orientation and the history of marriage.

In a separate decision, the appeals court refused to invalidate Walker’s ruling on the grounds that he should have disclosed he was in a long term same-sex relationship. Walker, a Republican appointee who is openly gay, said after his ruling that he had been in a relationship with another man for 10 years. He has never said whether he and partner wished to marry.

Freedom To Marry’s Evan Wolfson wraps it up nicely in this statement.

“Today’s powerful court ruling striking down the infamous Prop 8 affirms basic American values and helps tear down a discriminatory barrier to marriage that benefits no one while making it harder for people to take care of their loved ones. The Ninth Circuit rightly held that a state simply may not take a group of people and shove them outside the law, least of all when it comes to something as important as the commitment and security of marriage. We salute the American Foundation for Equal Rights, which brought this challenge to Prop 8.

“This monumental appellate decision restores California to the growing list of states and countries that have ended exclusion from marriage, and will further accelerate the surging nationwide majority for marriage. As this and other important challenges to marriage discrimination move through the courts around the country, Freedom to Marry calls on all Americans to join us in ensuring that together we make as strong a case in the court of public opinion as our legal advocates are making in the courts of law. By growing the majority for marriage, winning more states, and tackling federal discrimination – Freedom to Marry’s ‘Roadmap to Victory’ – we maximize our chances of winning when one case or another finally reaches the U.S. Supreme Court.”

I wrote earlier that Newt Gingrich’s campaign is one of mutually assured destruction for the GOP. No one, I wrote, has to lift a finger to destroy Newt Gingrich. Just stand back, give him room, and he’ll do it himself. The thing is, you want to stand way, way back — otherwise Newt’s liable to try and take you with him. The problem for the GOP is that they can’t put enough daylight between themselves and Newt. And even if they manage to do that, they’re still stuck with Mitt.

The latest self-destruction of Newt Gingrich will be televised. If he’s able to carry on after losing the Nevada Primary to Mitt Romney, and make good on his promise to campaign all the way to the convention in Tampa, we can look forward to more performances like his post-Iowa temper tantrum, his post-Florida flame-out, and his bizarre concession-speech-cum-press-conference after Nevada. (more…)

MItt Romney is taking a lot of heat for saying that he’s “not concerned about the very poor.” To be fair, he also said he’s not concerned about the very rich either. Lucky for him the feeling isn’t mutual that that side of the economic divide. According to recent FEC filings, the very rich are very concerned with Mitt Romney’s campaign for his party’s presidential nomination. And why shouldn’t they be concerned? After all, some of them are Mitt’s friends and former colleagues.

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I mentioned earlier that I’ve been doing a bit of writing about the GOP candidates for the day job. Those posts are limited to policy issues, usually economic policy. But, like I said in the posts about Newt, there’s a lot more I’d like to get into with these guys that wouldn’t be appropriate elsewhere.

Which brings me back to Rick Santorum. It’s been a while since I posted another edition in this rather long series. I have so little time for non-work-related writing these days, that I seldom write about LGBT issues. (As a result, the hate crimes project is so embarrassingly out of date, that I’ve let the hosting account lapse, and probably won’t bring it back online because at this point I’ll never get it up to date.) Sometimes I question whether I can even be called a “gay blogger,” except as a blogger who happens to be gay, but rarely ever writes about gay issues (anymore).

Alas, between commuting to work, putting in eight hours, commuting back home, having family dinner, spending time with the kids between dinner and bedtime, helping Parker with his homework, putting the kids to bed, sharing the work of keeping the house relatively clean, and then finishing up the hour’s worth of work I bring home, there are just not enough hours in the day. And I’m usually to physically and mentally exhausted to do much of anything with what’s left of the 24 hours in question.

But that’s another post for another day.

It was my work-related blogging that alerted me to a remark Santorum made, comparing gay parents to felons, which inspired me to return to this series.

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At the risk of repeating myself, my response to the Romney campaign staffer who summed up the Florida primary by saying “It’s about destroying Gingrich,” is the same as my response to Sarah Palin’s claim that the “liberal media” and “the establishment” were out to destroy Newt Gingrich: Nobody needs to lift a finger to destroy Newt. All you have to do is sit back, give him room, and let him do it himself.

In fact, Newt’s accomplishing his own destruction just by his dogged determination to stay in the race all the way to convention, and he’s threatening to take his party down with him.

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Another GOP debate as come and gone, and there’s a clear consensus on who won and who lost this round. After two fabulously bombastic debate performances, Newt Gingrich was defeated by the one man he can never seem to beat: himself.

Ultimately, Newt’s problem is just being Newt. It always has been, because the real Newt bears a strong resemblance the one portrayed in his opponents attack ads.

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OK. I love old R&B music just as much as president Obama does. I sing along with Aretha Franklin, Al Green, and Dionne Warwick all the time — at home, in the car, etc. I get it. I do.

But will somebody on Obama’s campaign staff please tell him to stop singing in public? Mrs. Obama, can you speak to your husband about this? [Via TMP.] (more…)

There are some interesting details about Newt Gingrich’s response to ex-wife Marriane’s explosive revelations.

How Clintonian of him. (more…)

I’ve been having some fun with the Republican presidential candidates lately. It’s funny, how much these guys get right — when they attack each other, that is. But I haven’t had nearly as much fun with a couple of candidates as I could. Until now.

Yes, it’s too easy. Certainly, it’s low-hanging fruit. But this is politics. There’s no such thing as a shot so easy that you shouldn’t take it. So, let’s go there. And let’s start with Newt Gingrich.

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After Newt Gingrich was rewarded with a surge in the polls, for playing the race card during the South Carolina GOP debate, Mitt Romney launched another all out attack on Newt –  this time focusing on Newt’s record as speaker, with an assist from some Republican former members of Congress. But Romney isn’t forgetting his other rivals. He’s unleashed the mother of all robo-call campaigns, and one of the main targets is Rick Santorum. Now that Romney’s narrow victory in Iowa has vanished — transformed into virtual tie, thanks to a 34-point Santorum lead combined with missing precincts and other irregularities — we can probably expect more attacks on Santorum.

The thing is, Romney’s attacks on Santorum are spot on. It’s not about Santorum’s extremism, though there’s more than enough material there. The label that may undermine Santorum with Republican primary voters isn’t “extremist.” It’s “Washington Insider.”

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It if seemed as though Newt Gingrich — veteran of pitched partisan battles, and no-holds-barred ideological cage matches — had been off his game of late, he came roaring back during the GOP debate in South Carolina. After flip-flopping on his attacks on Mitt Romney’s record as a vulture capitalist, Newt went a long way towards making both Republicans elites and the conservative base forget that he made them spend a week struggling with a problem for which they not only have no solutions, but they haven’t even decided is a problem. He may even have convinced some that he’s got what it takes to face off against President Obama in November. He confirmed, yet again, the worst of many Americans’ suspicions about conservatives and about the GOP.

And all he had to do was play the proverbial race card. With that, Newt knew he just might have a winning hand.

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It looks like the old joke about the weather — “If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes and it’ll change” — is also true about Newt Gingrich. If you don’t like this Newt Gingrich, wait five minutes and he’ll change. When it comes to his attack on Mitt Romney’s vulture capitalist past, Newt has changed more often than the weather these last few days.

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It looks like attacking Mitt Romney’s Bain resume has become the bane of Newt Gingrich’s campaign. In his latest flip-flop, Newt wants a do-over on his 28-minute Romney attack ad.

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The Romney campaign’s “Bain problem,” which is also now the Republican party’s problem, doesn’t look like it’s going away anytime soon. Sure, Republicans are figuring out that this is not a winning issue for them. Thus they’ve circled their wagons around Romney, and even tried to get Newt to turn it down a couple of notches. Even the funder who gave Newt the money to green-light “When Mitt Romney Came To Down” is having second thoughts.

But never mind all that. The story has now gotten big enough to draw Sarah Palin out of an extended break from her bus tour, to advise Romney to open up the books on his tenure at Bain. (more…)

There’s one Newt Gingrich flip-flop I left out of my previous post about his latest flip-flop, concerning his on-again-off-again-on-again attack on Mitt Romney as a vulture capitalist. It’s a big one, and — in typical Newt fashion — he says it really somebody else’s fault. (more…)

It’s starting to look like Newt Gingrich has more in common with Mitt Romney than just a background in vulture capitalism. During the Iowa primaries, Gingrich attacked Romney’s “flip-flops” on a number of issues, but Newt has his own list of “flip-flops.” Yesterday he added another one to the list, when he flipped-flopped on his attack on Romney’s vulture capitalist past — twice in one day.

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Mitt Romney, with a win the New Hampshire primaries under his belt, seems ready to take the GOP presidential nomination in a walk. However, if the last few days are any indication, it’s not going to be a cakewalk. There’s plenty of time for Romney to stumble, and plenty of people can easily trip him up — his opponents, his surrogates, and even the candidate himself.

Romney won the New Hampshire primaries, but some Granite State Republicans were “disappointed,” and some even complained that Romney’s “insincere comments” during his victory speech didn’t do much to “seal the deal.” That’s funny, because it was a very conservative speech according to Michael Tomasky, and one almost tailor-made for the GOP’s base.

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Yesterday, I posted about Newt Gingrich’s scathing — and utterly truthful — attack on Mitt Romney, just in time for the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries. Now, Newt is catching heat from conservatives for hitting a front runner none of them seem to like much anyway. But Gingrich is only giving as good as he got when Romney (among others) unloaded on him in Iowa.

Like I wrote yesterday, the biggest benefit of the GOP’s never-ending primary season is that every time one of the remaining candidates attacks another, we rediscover how right these guys are about each other. (It turns out, Newt has his own ties to vulture capitalism.) Newt’s attack on Romney’s record relies heavily on the truth. That’s because Newt learned an important lesson from Romney’s attacks against him in Iowa: The truth hurts.

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One of the benefits of the seemingly endless Republican primaries, aside from the entertainment value, is the opportunity to discover how right the candidates are … about each other. With the Iowa primary and its game-changing outcome behind them, and even-higher-stakes in the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries ahead of them, the remaining candidates have intensified their attacks on one another. What’s more striking than the intensity of the candidates’ obligatory attacks, however, is the accuracy of their worst accusations against one another.

The most recent, and perhaps most striking example, is Newt Gingrich’s latest attack on Mitt Romney.

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Back in 2009, I asked “What’s Wrong With Wall Street?”, and then spent three posts answering that question.

In my daily perusal of economic news, I have found myself more than once staring my computer monitor in open-mouthed wonder, occasionally exclaiming, “You’ve got to be kidding me,” or “What’s wrong with these people?”,or something like that. To do what they’ve been doing, you’d either have to not be paying attention to what’s going on or just not care.

In their case, it’s a little of both. And it’s diagnosable, if not treatable.

How else do you explain the utterly mystifying payment of $18.4 billion in bonuses to some 80% of Wall Street employees including employees of firms being bailed out by taxpayers, who are due to shell out another $350 billion? And even as Americans are losing their jobs and their homes, in the midst of a financial crisis largely brought on by the financial sectors arcane shenanigans?

I even offered my own diagnosis as an armchair shrink.

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