More good news… Domestic partnerships are already legal in the nation’s capital. But yesterday’s vote, billed as an important milestone in gay rights, explicitly recognizes relocated gay married couples as married. The initial vote was 12-0. The unanimous vote sets the stage for future debate on legalizing same-sex marriage in the District and a clash [...]

It’s all done for Coleman, and yet… From Star Tribune: Democrat Al Franken today extended his lead over Republican Norm Coleman in Minnesota’s U.S. Senate election, after the counting of about 350 formerly rejected absentee ballots this morning. Franken captured 198 of the ballots, while Coleman took 111. The ballots added 87 votes to Franken’s [...]

Thanks to John, I am pointed to these two rather strange arguments in favor of the Drug War and against libertarian use of statistics on race against the Drug War from Jonah Goldberg. John does a pretty good job explaining why Goldberg’s arguments are so strange. The only thing I’d really add is that the [...]

And this time it was done through the legislative branch. So this is a much more significant win for equal rights advocates because people can’t pin this on “activist” judges. From WCAX: The Vt. Senate voted to override the governor’s veto of the same-sex marriage bill. This morning, the Senate voted 23 to 5 to [...]

A speech from the Senate Majority Leader in Iowa sums it up pretty succinctly… This is why I’m telling folks that the marriage between the social conservatives and the fiscal conservatives is done. Because this next generation of voters favors progressive social policy in bigger numbers than any other generation in history. And fiscal conservatives [...]

(AP world headquarters) A while back, the A.P. targeted a site called the Drudge Retort for using excerpts of its stories on the site. This caused quite an uproar among bloggers because they felt that excerpting portions of a story’s copy was considered “fair use”, and I let my feelings be known as well. The [...]

Having more volunteerism in our communities is undeniably a good thing and the Senate just passed the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act by 78 to 20. So a big win for bipartisanship today. Here’s more from CNN: Among other things, the bill would more than triple the number of positions in the AmeriCorps program, [...]

Fred Kaplan has an excellent article in Slate detailing why North Korea is so hard to deal with and how Obama should proceed after the recent missile launch. Over the last few decades, our policies towards North Korea have seemed to be all talk and no action. We’ve all but wagged our finger off. Kaplan [...]

Greetings Donklephant readers. Many moons ago at Debatewise HQ we came across Donklephant and the following message… Tired of the rhetoric, bomb-throwing and partisan hackery? Here we offer a respectful, honest forum for people who want to have a conversation about politics, the world and beyond. …and we sat up and paid attention. Like Donklephant, [...]

At the center of President Obama’s overhaul strategy for Wall Street are the “stress tests” which will be applied to all financial institutions. But how accurate will the test results be? That will depend on whether the treasury takes off-balance-sheet assets into account, experts say. This is Danielle Ivory, reporting from the American News Project [...]

When I read the headline of this poll(“Partisan Gap in Obama Job Approval Widest in Modern Era”) I thought it seemed a bit weird. And then I looked at the numbers… The faulty logic is glaring. Note it’s apparent that Clinton enjoyed less Republican support than Obama did, but since Obama has more support from [...]

(Note: For those of you who use Twitter, there’s a thing called “re-tweeting” which basically involves taking somebody’s tweet, putting an “RT” in front of it and then publishing it as your own. The effect is you’re reproducing somebody else’s content, but giving them props for writing something interesting. Understanding this practice is key to [...]

Yet another step towards the goal to make the government’s actions more transparent than any other time in our history… “In late May, Data.gov will launch, in what US CIO Vivek Kundra calls an attempt to ensure that all government data ‘that is not restricted for national security reasons can be made public’ through data [...]

Three police officers dead because of paranoia. Here’s more… A man opened fire on officers during a domestic disturbance call Saturday morning, killing three of them, a police official said. Friends said 23 year-old Richard Poplawski feared the Obama administration was poised to ban guns. [...] One friend, Edward Perkovic, said Poplawski feared “the Obama [...]

Gregory talks with the new CEO of GM and the roundtable discusses the auto situation, North Korea’s missile launch and Obama’s G20 trip. I’m still not liking Gregory as the new anchor, but my guess is that it’s his seat until he wants to leave. That’s how this stuff usually works. Oh well.

If you use the Twitter as much as I do, like I do, then you’ll definitely want to check this out. And scene… (h/t: Mashable)

“The time has come for both left and right in this country to rediscover what philosophers call the “principle of charity” which asserts that a discussant’s argument should be interpreted in the way most compatible with the assumption that they are reasonable and well-intentioned.” – Jason Arvak in his post “On Lowering The Partisan Heat. [...]

The strategy is simple. Quit plowing billions into the programs that aren’t working and up the funding for some programs that do. From Wash Post: Gates’s aides say his plan would boost spending for some programs and take large whacks at others, including some with powerful constituencies on Capitol Hill and among influential contractors, making [...]

Pretty cool story about love in a digital age. From NY Times: Ann Althouse, 58, is a law professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison who blogs about politics, law and cultural whatnots in a sharp, occasionally ribald tone. She admires Rush Limbaugh, voted for George Bush in ’04 and Barack Obama in ’08. She [...]