THE CHILD PHILOSOPHER.

THE SEXY KISS IS THE 2 FEMALES. “One of Time’s two new cover photos declaring ‘gay marriage already won’ looks like a wedding kiss. The other looks more like a makeout session.” I love how — straining to be properly gay-friendly — TIME let the real nature of homophobia show. I call sexism!

DID DANA MILBANK CALL CLARENCE THOMAS AN OREO? No. He called him a tagalong.

“IDAHO TEACHER INVESTIGATED FOR SAYING ‘VAGINA’ DURING BIOLOGY LESSON.”

“CONGRESS DECIDED… TO EXPRESS MORAL DISAPPROVAL OF HOMOSEXUALITY.” Justice Kagan quotes from the legislative history of DOMA at today’s oral argument in United States v. Windsor. And Paul Clement reels out a fine response.

ABOUT THAT ASHLEY JUDD “RAPED TWICE” LINE that Ed quotes, infra. Since when does having been victimized count as evidence of your ability to fight?

UPDATE: Turns out she’s not going to fight.

SCOTUSBLOG WINS A PEABODY AWARD. That’s the first ever for a blog. Well deserved. And here’s a SCOTUSblog tweet from today’s SCt argument:

Final update: #scotus 80% likely to strike down #doma. J Kennedy suggests it violates states’ rights; 4 other Justices see as gay rights.
— SCOTUSblog (@SCOTUSblog) March 27, 2013

JUSTICE KENNEDY TALKS OF “THE VOICE OF THESE CHILDREN” — a striking phrase, which I tracked down to the amicus brief of the Family Equality Council. Is this the key to understanding the swing vote in the Prop 8 case?

THE CRUZ BIRTHERS.

TOM GOLDSTEIN ON TODAY’S PROP 8 ORAL ARGUMENT. “But Justice Kennedy seemed very unlikely to provide either side with the fifth vote needed to prevail. He was deeply concerned with the wisdom of acting now when in his view the social science of the effects of same-sex marriage is uncertain because it is so new. He also noted the doubts about the petitioners’ standing. So his suggestion was that the case should be dismissed.” The audio and transcript are not yet available. I want to form my own opinion. I’m not surprised that Kennedy performs public agonizing over the judicial role and seems entirely different from the Ginsburg-Breyer-Sotomayor-Kagan set. That doesn’t mean he won’t join them in the end.

PUTTING THE CUR IN CURTILAGE.

WHICH MEGAFAMOUS PERSON HAD A MEGACOLON? Take the “Gulp!” quiz. (And read this cool article about chewing by Mary Roach, whose new book is “Gulp!”).

ANTHONY LEWIS HAS DIED.

THE SOO LOCKS opened today. Don’t say you’re not impressed unless you’ve watched the time-lapse video.

THANKS TO GLENN for inviting a set of us intruders onto his blog. It’s always fun to get a chance to be here on the big stage, though I felt a little out of place this time, because I was an Obama voter in 2008, and though I didn’t vote for him this time, I do have at least mixed feelings, and I do think life will go on along the path my fellow citizens have chosen. We’ll never find out what would have happened on that other path. There would have been assorted troubles and set-backs. We must take the path of our beautiful democracy, within which Barack Obama will be President for 4 more years. There is much to life beyond politics, especially the crazy politics of minutely monitoring all the polls, the gaffes, and the rhetoric. Liberation lies everywhere, waiting to be discovered, in love, in art, and in all the details of the short life we’ve been granted. Look up. Look around. Pay attention. Life is beautiful and life in America is a fabulous blessing. And if you want to talk about it all, there’s always the Althouse blog, where the comments threads will spiral out, I hope, for a long long time. Come hang out with us there, if you like. And thanks, as ever, to Glenn, for his brilliant, endlessly inspirational blog.

DID ANYBODY LIVE-BLOG THE BIG GARY JOHNSON/JILL STEIN DEBATE? Why yes! Jaltcoh did. Me, I was at a Bob Dylan/Mark Knopfler concert here in Madison (and I was glad that nobody on stage so much as mentioned politics other than poetically and distantly with references, for example, to the chimes of freedom). From the Jaltcoh live blog of the Johnson/Stein debate:

9:57 – Johnson says that Stein seems to think government is the answer to all our problems, and he asks Stein what she thinks about net neutrality. Stein says she’s for it, and adds that she doesn’t assume government is the answer to every problem. “I’m not an ideologue. I’m a doctor. I don’t actually know much about ideology. As a doctor, I look for practical solutions.”

UPDATE: Actually, Bob Dylan did go a bit political, halfway through the encore he said: “We tried to play good tonight since the president was here today.” And “Don’t believe the media. I think it’s going to be a landslide.” I could argue “Don’t believe the media” isn’t really too political and the deference to the President is distanced, but I must confess that I’m the kind of person who slips out during the encore to beat the parking-lot crowds.

WHY ARE YOU CRYING? Oh… it will be over soon.

I’M SORRY, ED, but both of those sculptures are aesthetically awful. The older one is actually worse because Rupert Schmid only intended to say “beauty” and failed. Viola Frey was doing comical commentary and (arguably) succeeded. I’m sure Frey would have found it funny that you and PJMedia deplore her work, but Schmid would have felt wounded to have been thought a tasteless hack.

“COULD HURRICANE SANDY SWING THE ELECTION? If Romney wins, is Roe v. Wade toast? Four different theories on why Obama tanked in the first debate? Contemplating a Romney upset in Wisconsin? Benghazi is worse than Watergate….” A Bloggingheads discussion between Bob Wright and me. Highlights include me assuming the brilliance of John Roberts and Bob propounding the old change-of-altitude explanation for Obama’s performance in Debate #1.

ADDED: By the way, my “coastal cities” theory — that Sandy could suppress urban Democratic voting and leverage upstate Republicans — could apply to Wisconsin, where Democratic power is highest in Milwaukee, on the coast of Lake Michigan, where the National Weather Service is saying there could be waves as high as 33 feet.

UPDATE (From Ed): James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute is also exploring the ways that Sandy could impact the election.

OBAMA’S PREGNANCY? Listen to Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper’s hickenblooper (recorded very roughly, by me, from this morning’s “Meet the Press”).

THE THIRD TAMMY VS. TOMMY DEBATE WAS “A SMACKDOWN”: “When it was all over… Baldwin had taken quite a beating from the governor. Oh, she fought back, but Thompson’s victory was almost as decisive as Mitt Romney’s drubbing of Barack Obama in their first debate.”

A DEBATE-INSPIRED HYPOTHETICAL: “Say you’re a police investigator, and you find a dead body with no clear cause of death. It’s a high-profile case, and the public wants to know if there was foul play. You give a press conference in which you say, ‘One thing’s for sure: no act of murder will ever shake our resolve.’ By making that statement, have you announced that the person was definitely murdered?…”

CANDY CROWLEY INSERTED HERSELF INTO THE DEBATE, OUTRAGEOUSLY, to break up Romney’s most dramatic moment, when Romney was questioning what Obama said the day after the attack in Benghazi. Obama had said he’d called the attack an “act of terror” and Romney was staring him down about it. Crowley broke up the showdown, saying “He did in fact call it an act of terror,” which took the wind out of Romney’s sails. We were advised to check the transcript, but the dramatic moment was lost. The transcript shows Romney was right, and Crowley and Obama were wrong.

ADDED: The phrase “acts of terror” does appear in the remarks: “No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for.” As Patrick Brennan says at NRO: “One could take that as a reference to acts which include the tragedy in Benghazi, obviously, but there was clearly no effort made to label it an act of terrorism. One reason why this might be: According to U.S. law, acts of terrorism are premeditated. The Obama administration’s line for days following Obama’s Rose Garden statement suggested that the attack wasn’t premeditated.”

“CAN I GIVE IT TO MY MONKEY?”

“WE’RE GOING THROUGH A ‘MISSION ACCOMPLISHED’ MOMENT,” said Darrell Issa on “Face the Nation” today:

This is not very Republican, if you will, but when President George W. Bush went aboard an aircraft carrier and said, “mission accomplished” I listened rightfully so to people saying, look, but there’s still problems, and they’re still dying, and quite frankly, things got worse in many ways after that famous statement.

Excellent interviews at the link with both Issa and Sen. Lindsey Graham. Graham accuses the Obama administration of “trying to spike the ball after killing bin Laden” and “creat[ing] a false narrative about the true state of al Qaeda and it all caught up with them in Libya.”

UPDATE: (From Glenn): Reader Ron Jones writes: “Both Dr. Althouse and Mr. Issa apparently need a reminder that President Bush didn’t say ‘Mission Accomplished’ — it was on a banner on the ship he was speaking from. And as has been pointed out hundreds of times, it was the SHIP’s mission that had been accomplished, not Mr. Bush’s.”

AND: I’m just quoting Issa, but I don’t think Bush can disown the banner he spoke under. I know there’s this way of constraining the meaning of the banner, but Presidents should take responsibility for their messages, and Bush (kind of) did in his book “Decision Points”:

I hadn’t noticed the large banner my staff had placed on the bridge of the ship, positioned for TV. It read “Mission Accomplished.” It was intended as a tribute to the folks aboard the Lincoln, which had just completed the longest deployment for an aircraft carrier of its class. Instead, it looked like I was doing the victory dance I had warned against. “Mission Accomplished” became a shorthand criticism for all that subsequently went wrong in Iraq. My speech made clear that our work was far from done. But all the explaining in the world could not reverse the perception. Our stagecraft had gone awry. It was a big mistake.

Ironically, Issa was trying to highlight how bad it was for the Obama administration to push the narrative that it had vanquished al Qaeda.

ALSO: Bush is such a convenient punching bag. Many Republicans leverage moderating-seeming comments off what they assume is our rejection of Bush. I wonder how many of us there are who really do appreciate what Bush did and would like to see him brought in from out in the cold.