CHESTER WRITES on the autumn of the patriarch.

A CARBON DIET AT SLATE: But according to the folks at Popular Mechanics, adding extra air to your tires won’t help.

UPDATE: Some skeptical comments on the PM experiment at the link.

HAROLD FORD, JR. COMMENTS ON THE N.J. GAY MARRIAGE DECISION:

I do not support the decision today reached by the New Jersey Supreme Court regarding gay marriage. I oppose gay marriage, and have voted twice in Congress to amend the United States Constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage. This November there’s a referendum on the Tennessee ballot to ban same-sex marriage – I am voting for it.

I voted against the Tennessee provision, and would have voted against a Federal constitutional amendment, too. I checked Bob Corker’s site but couldn’t find anything on this issue.

Meanwhile, note that the GOP seems to be misrepresenting Ford’s stance on gay marriage. The Ford campaign seems to have done the same thing to Steve Cohen. Hell, I should have run, just so there’d be somebody who’d say he’s for it.

MICHAEL BARONE BLOGS his interview with President Bush.

He’s got audio, and he asked Bush about the oil trust idea.

UPDATE: Reader Richard Vermillion emails:

Just thought you’d be interested to know that Steve Forbes pushed the Iraqi Oil Trust idea this morning in his keynote speech at the Better Management Live conference in Las Vegas. In the middle of a talk about innovation in business, he took time out to endorse this “innovative” approach to stabilizing Iraq. Perhaps the idea is gaining momentum….?

Let’s hope, though it would have done more good back when it was first suggested.

ANOTHER RECORD HIGH FOR THE DOW: But nobody cares about the economy this year.

UPDATE: Pieter Dorsman thinks the news isn’t as good as the Dow records suggest. I can imagine that to be true. But I can’t imagine successive Dow records just before an election getting this little attention under a Democratic President . . . .

THE FUTURES MARKETS ARE moving rapidly in Corker’s favor on the Tennessee Senate race. Ford’s had a less-than-ideal week, but it hasn’t been that bad. Is this because of the New Jersey gay marriage decision?

UPDATE: Related thoughts here. And there’s no similar movement in the Virginia race, which you’d expect if the NJ ruling were involved.

ANOTHER UPDATE: No similar movement in the New Jersey Senate futures, either. But Hotlineblog reports that the RNC is pumping $5 million dollars into the New Jersey race in response to this decision.

MORE: Hmm. Could this fight with Steve Cohen be the problem for Ford?

It began when state senator Cohen, on a fund-raising trip to Nashville, checked in with members of the Legislative Plaza press corps and delivered himself of some typically outspoken observations about what he — honestly or conveniently or both — saw as the drag on Ford’s senatorial campaign. Cohen saw Representative Ford’s “tremendous attributes” being overshadowed by the candidacy of brother Jake as well as by a speech given by Harold Ford Sr. in which the former congressman not only conflated a Harold Jr. rally with support for second son Jake but attacked Cohen in language that disturbed many who heard or read about it with its religious overtones.

“We’re from a Christian city here,” Ford Sr. had said at one point. “[Jake] doesn’t believe in legalizing marijuana. This man that’s running against Jake wants some sex shops running in downtown Memphis on a Sunday! That’s our religious holiday.”

After remarking on Representative Ford’s “tremendous attributes,” Cohen told his audience of Nashville media, “For him to come this far and to have the effort to overreach, I guess, and to have his younger brother run in the 9th District, I think has hurt his campaign.”

Further, in a reference to Ford Sr.’s out-of-town residences: “The Ford machine used to have a lot of foot soldiers. … The top brass has moved away from the foot soldiers. It’s hard to be in touch with your foot soldiers when you’re on Fisher Island [Miami] or in the Hamptons.”

That prompted a press release in Representative Ford’s name, which said in part: “Now, it appears that state senator Steve Cohen and Mayor Bob Corker are singing from the same Ford family attack hymnal. I know that Bob Corker is attacking my family because he has come up short on ideas and answers in this campaign. I didn’t know that … Cohen was suffering from the same problem.”

The congressman’s statement also accused Cohen of support for gay marriage, amnesty for illegal immigrants, legalization of marijuana, and “a cut-and-run strategy in Iraq. . . .

“I really think that if Harold Ford Jr. had run with me on a ticket, it would have been a ‘dream team,’” Cohen mused last week in Nashville.

Maybe the futures markets think so, too?

MORE STILL: Michael Silence finds the Ford/Corker race “surreal.”

STILL MORE: As of Thursday morning, the markets have rebounded. Go figure.

A HUMAN RIGHTS CAMPAIGN STAFFER turns out to be behind the Foley affair website, according to this report. GayPatriot is unhappy: “I think the HRC needs to come clean and fully explain to those of you who give them money exactly what the hell they are up to. This entire matter has put every gay American into a bad light by equating child predators with being gay. The HRC has a responsibility to tell us what they know and when they knew it. They are now directly responsible for the anti-gay atmosphere that has emerged from the scandal that one of their own employees helped launch.”

Related thoughts here.

FRANCE PREPARES FOR MUSLIM RIOTS with 50,000 riot police.

GAY MARRIAGE UPHELD IN NEW JERSEY: The Supreme Court of New Jersey rules: “Denying committed same-sex couples the financial and social benefits and privileges given to their married heterosexual counterparts bears no substantial relationship to a legitimate governmental purpose. The Court holds that under the equal protection guarantee of Article I, Paragraph 1 of the New Jersey Constitution, committed same-sex couples must be afforded on equal terms the same rights and benefits enjoyed by opposite-sex couples under the civil marriage statutes.”

A copy of the opinion can be found here.

UPDATE: Having (very quickly) skimmed the opinion, it seems the Court is allowing that civil unions might be good enough, so long as they’re comparable to marriage in terms of benefits, but it seems to leave open the possibility that only marriage that’s called marriage might be good enough.

I agree with the result (that is, I favor gay marriage as a policy matter). The reasoning is okay (based on a cursory reading it seems consistent with this approach), though the 90-page opinion shares a flabbiness with earlier cases like Goodridge. I think, though, that changes like this are better made through legislative than judicial means, and that this may well benefit the Republicans substantially in the coming elections, as people like my reader Steve White who worry about judicial activism are given a new reason to go to the polls and vote for anti-gay-marriage initiatives.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jeff Soyer agrees.

Brendan Loy: “As a proponent of gay marriage, I’m happy with the result. As one who hopes the Democrats take back at least one house of Congress, I am fearful of the backlash. But perhaps the possibility of ‘civil unions,’ as opposed to ‘gay marriage,’ will blunt the backlash somewhat.”

The opinion allows that something not called “marriage” might be enough, but it pretty clearly leaves open the door to hold otherwise later. And the concurrence/dissent says: “I can find no principled basis, however, on which to distinguish those rights and benefits from the right to the title of marriage, and therefore dissent from the majority’s opinion insofar as it declines to recognize that right among all of the other rights and benefits that will be available to samesex couples in the future.”

It thus seems that this isn’t really a “third way” approach to gay marriage. This is a clean win for gay marriage advocates, not a partial victory.

MORE: Eugene Volokh has further thoughts, and observes: “this decision, whether you like it or not, seems to be an illustration that the slippery slope is a real phenomenon.”

MORE STILL: Dale Carpenter, having reviewed the opinion, says it’s an example of how unstable the middle ground is:

New Jersey ran into trouble because, having started down the path to full equality for gay individuals and couples through a variety of state statutes and judicial decisions, the state could not give any good reason why it should continue to differentiate. For example, the court noted, the state has adopted a domestic partnership system that gives gay couples a list of rights also given to married couples. But yet the domestic partnership system does not extend other rights of married couples to these same-sex couples. What’s the basis for granting a select list of the rights but not the others? . . .

The whole case, then, shows how unstable a middle ground can become in the hands of an aggressive court. The slope on that middle ground seems much more slippery for courts, which demand what they regard as principled reasons for any distinction, than it is for legislatures, which may refuse to budge for no reason other than that the votes aren’t there to do more or because of simple fiat.

I believe that Justice Scalia has made just that point. Carpenter concludes: “The question then is, having closed the gap with respect to all rights in marriage, what basis could there possibly be not to close the remaining gap with respect to equal status in marriage?” I agree that the “civil union” approach is unlikely to last in light of this decision, which carefully doesn not rule out an equal-status requirement.

VERY INTERESTING DISCUSSION of what we’ve done wrong in Iraq and what we ought to be doing now — with the observation that simply getting out would be worse than “a dozen Somalias” — in a letter from Iraq over at Best of the Web.

AS A SORT OF FOLLOWUP to my column today, here’s a piece from Slate on hospital infection control, and how we should be doing more.

MARK HALPERIN ON MEDIA BIAS: Is he the Evan Thomas of this election cycle?

UPDATE: Reader John Kluge emails:

Isn’t the apparent shocking admission of liberal media bias a sign that the media thinks it has done its job and ended Republican control of congress? I seem to remember the same round of mea culpa’s after Clinton’s election in 1992. The media admitted after a Dem was safely ensconced in the Whitehouse that maybe they had been a little too hard on Bush and Reagan and needed to try to be more supportive of the government in the future and less suspicious of the government. Now with the Republican Congress in trouble two weeks before the election we get the NYT admitting it was a mistake to out the NSA funding surveillance and now this admission that maybe the networks are too liberal. To me this just the media seeing that its job is done now trying to reposition itself in the center and salvage a shred of credibility to be used in 2008.

Possibly. Or there may be a less-far-reaching motive for generating all that buzz right about now . . .

A LOT OF PEOPLE HAVE BEEN TALKING ABOUT Brooke Allen’s new book, Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers. I haven’t read it, but George Will has, and he liked it.

Michael and Jana Novak, meanwhile, have a different take.

DAVE SHEARON has thoughts on positive psychology and country music. With a bonus Firefly/Serenity reference.

AUSTIN BAY QUIZZED DONALD RUMSFELD OVER LUNCH yesterday, and has posted a transcript.

And there’s much more in his column.

BLOGGING FROM IRAQ, Michael Fumento slams the media:

During my three embeds in Iraq’s vicious Anbar Province, I’ve been mortared and sniped at, and have dodged machine-gun fire — all of which has given me a serious contempt for the rear-echelon reporters. When I appeared on the Al Franken Show in May, after my second embed, it was with former CNN Baghdad bureau chief Jane Arraf — who complained about the dangers of being shot down by a missile while landing in Baghdad, and the dangers of the airport road to the International Zone (IZ) . . . and how awful the Baghdad hotels were. . . .

CBS News cameraman Paul Douglas and freelance soundman James Brolan were blown up by an improvised explosive device (IED) while accompanying CBS correspondent Kimberly Dozier, herself critically injured. They were embedded with the 4th Infantry Division. So were ABC anchorman Bob Woodruff and his cameraman, who were critically injured by an IED. Time correspondent Michael Weisskopf had his hand blown off trying to toss a grenade out of his Humvee when he was embedded with the 1st Armored Division. These, not the hotel-bound credit-claimers, are the journalist-heroes of the Iraq War.

Read the whole thing. (Via Bob Owens who summarizes pithily.)

NEW FRONTIERS IN GERMICIDAL LIVING: In today’s TCSDaily column, I look at future developments in public health.

Plus the kickoff to the revolution!

UPDATE: Reader David Handron emails:

I teach at Carnegie Mellon University, and yesterday I noticed that there is a hand sanitizer dispenser at the exit of the computer cluster where I’m teaching this semester.

It seems like a great idea to me, especially since colleges and universities are some of our great unsung incubators of disease. Every few months, we send students all over the country (or world!) to collect all sorts of germs, bring them back together to see what kind of new germs we can breed, and then send them back out into the world again.

Yes, there’s always a fresh round of colds, etc., after fall, Christmas, and spring breaks. I suspect that finding places to interrupt the spread of this kind of thing would do a lot of good.

A BAD REVIEW for the latest NRSC anti-James-Webb ad.

UPDATE: Reader David Farkas emails:

Miller is 100% right. The ad was a total loser. It might actually have been the kiss of death for Allen, sorry to say. Being totally honest, if I were a Virginian, I’d vote for Webb because of that ad alone. And there are many like me. I know many people in Newport News (My good friend was the Rabbi there for five years until two months ago, when he moved to Cleveland). They naturally vote GOP, but they certainly care more for the military than a political party. If they heard that Republicans are bashing Webb for defending military culture, or for being against women in the military, they won’t even think twice about supporting him. Glenn, there’s nothing to talk about. Allen can only pray people somehow forget about it.

Ouch.

BARACK OBAMA, a deadly threat to Hillary’s plans?

MORE CRITICISM of the military’s information war efforts, from Greyhawk of The Mudville Gazette.

Much better work is being done for free by milbloggers — whom the Pentagon is trying to shut down.

TIM BLAIR: “I’m sure one side or the other is winning this dispute … but neither can agree on the score.”

I’ll just cheer from the sidelines. Plus, a Palestinian brain-drain.

SO AS A RESULT OF THE JOHN BIRMINGHAM BOOK MENTIONED BELOW, I got an Amazon recommendation for a rather different book, How to Become an Alpha Male.

Er, aren’t all bloggers Alphas, by definition? I can’t say much about the book, but from looking at the reader reviews I learned that there’s such a thing as “the seduction community,” described in an entirely un-ironic and unself-conscious sense (more on that here) and that there’s good advice to be had on body language:

such as not be hunched over with your eyes cast downward

It’s hard to argue with that! Another book I wouldn’t have noticed, and another “community” I would have missed, if it weren’t for the magic of collaborative filtering — and its occasional misfires.

SAM VENABLE has a very nice column on Tennessee’s anti-gay-marriage amendment. Excerpt:

But no matter how the votes stack up for one candidate over another, there’s one facet of the 2006 campaign that historians will study long after we’re all in the bone yard:

It’s how Tennesseans reacted to the proposed constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

I hope this measure fails. I certainly will vote against it. It’s as wrong as those antiquated laws forbidding interracial unions.

It doesn’t take a genius to realize this is a hot-button issue politicians dearly love. But that’s what I find so intriguing. This proposal oughta be hands-off for die-hard liberals and die-hard conservatives alike.

Liberals should view a ban on gay marriage as mean-spirited and discriminatory. Conservatives should view it as intrusion by the government into citizens’ private lives.

Indeed.

UPDATE: Reader Steve Galbraith writes:

You got me on this one. How is not having the government recognize gay marriage as being equivalent to a heterosexual marriage intruding into someone’s private life? Who’s private life is being affected?

If the government simpy says, “You may marry whomever you want, we just won’t recognize it”, the state is simply staying out of private matters.

If on the other hand government recognizes same-sex marriage, isn’t that bringing a private matter into the public sphere? Isn’t it taking a private matter – gay marriage – and having the state regulate that relationship?

I’m essentially agnostic on this issue. Were it up for vote in a statewide referendum, I’d probably vote in favor of it. But it does seem to me that in doing so I would be using state coercion to force those who didn’t recognize it as a lawful marriage to do just that.

Recall Berlin’s negative and positive liberties. Isn’t having the state recognize marriage an example of positive liberty – a dangerous state action – as opposed to a negative action.

Well, ideally I’d take the state out of the marriage business entirely and make it a matter of contract. But if the state is in the business of recognizing marriages I think it needs a good reason to discriminate. That some people say “Yuk” is, as with Leon Kass’s concerns about science, not a good enough reason in my opinion.

That said, I think it’s a terrible mistake to call those who oppose gay marriage “bigots” and the like, given that the majority of Americans feel that way. I think that attitudes will change with time, and that’s why I’m against efforts to lock-in current attitudes.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Steve White emails:

On your post concerning the Tennessee ‘anti-gay’ marriage amendment: perhaps these amendments wouldn’t be so popular, passing with 70 to 75% of the popular vote in states that have had referendums, if the people of said states could trust their courts not to intervene. Given the notoriety attached to states where a district or supreme court has suddenly discovered a right for gays to marry, a fair number of voters may have decided that it is they or their legislators who will make this decision in their states and not their courts, thankyouverymuch.

Well, there has been some judicial activism here, but not that much. And these amendments don’t simply restrict change to the legislative realm — they generally ban it, period.

Meanwhile, reader Phil Connors has lots of unpleasant things to say, and also thinks he’s “outing” me:

Is “Helen” an ironic nickname for some guy named Allen?

No, I like football and girls. But somebody could do something with that idea. Take it away, Frank J.!

MORE: And, in fact, Frank J. springs to my defense: “I’d say there’s at least a 48% chance that Glenn Reynolds isn’t gay, which is good enough to put this rumor to rest.”

So there.

MEGAN MCARDLE: “Watching Sky News is weird, because half the news is about America, and half of that is wrong. . . . Maybe tomorrow I’ll take in some British actors doing bad impersonations of Americans.”

DANNY GLOVER LOOKS AT “The military’s love-hate relationship with blogs.”