Round-Up

1. Jill (Brilliant at Breakfast) on the illusions of not-rich Republican voters:

   And still they vote Republican. They vote Republican because they want to believe that their plight is the fault of black people, or of the very women in the workplace who are keeping a roof over their heads because for some reason, female unemployment is less. They want to believe their plight is the fault of illegal immigrants who they think took their jobs from them by being willing to work for peanuts. They want to believe that if those hippies had just kept their mouths shut in the sixties, the world would be like it was for their grandfathers, who worked eight hours in the plant, were home at five o'clock for dinner, had steak once a week for Sunday dinner, and then retired with a full pension and paid retiree medical insurance. They want to believe that this isn't as good as it's ever going to be again. Because the dream dies hard.

   With a long Krugman quote and a small sample of Charles Murray because

   Only someone who is paid a handsome salary by the American Enterprise Institute can say with a straight face that $27,860 is enough to live "a decent existence" when $22,350 is the federal poverty level for a family of four.

2. The personification of NOM (the [ugh] organization, not the syllable that means yummy food), Maggie Gallagher, was profiled at Salon by Mark Oppenheimer, and two reactions were:
1. From Pandagon:

   Oppenheimer really spells out something that's well-known in activist circles around gay marriage, both pro and con, which is that Gallagher's hostility to gay marriage is rooted, bizarrely, in her endless bitterness that her pregnancy in her sophomore year resulted not in a proposal of marriage, but in being dumped. This wound is the one her entire life is about tending (not healing, because she really scratches at it and keeps it nice and raw). Really, she's about the closest thing that modern life has to one version of the movie villain, the person whose profound evil is rooted in a single trauma, and who without that might have been a really good person.

2. From Noli Irritare Leones:

   If, on the other hand, you don’t see any reason to believe that Ruth’s and Leslie’s marriage will precipitate the unraveling of the traditional family and subsequently the stability of society and the ruin of us all, if you think, for instance, that, for all that Maggie Gallagher’s Yale boy friend walked away from their son, on a societal level an increase in fathers walking away from their children is more likely to be precipitated by a decline in blue collar jobs with good union wages, then Gallagher’s activism will seem woefully misdirected. Particularly if you don’t see Ruth’s and Leslie’s marriage as all that different from your own.

Which rather solidifies my opinion of Ms. Gallagher as "a crank."  (Has Massachusetts or Sweden or Iowa sunk into the sea yet or gotten hit with a load of brimstone?)
3. Bob Somerby (The Daily Howler) on fitting one's (conservative) ideas to a candidate.

   Brooks is sketching a novel the pundit corps likes to type about major candidates. Here’s the problem: By now, it’s abundantly clear that this novel doesn’t fit Candidate Romney. For good or for ill, it’s abundantly clear that Candidate Romney’s outer pronouncements don’t flow directly from his inner core. For good or for ill, he doesn’t possess an unshakeable set of convictions.

4. One Christian's experience with the "slippery slope."

I had a phone interview. I'll be very surprised if I get the job.