Michaele Salahi of 'D.C. Housewives' on 'The View'

I'd almost forgotten about the Salahis. I guess Whoopi Goldberg touched Michaele on yesterday's episode of "The View'. Now it turns out the "Real Housewives of DC" star (and former White House gate-crasher) is claiming she was "abused." And attorney Lisa Bloom (Gloria Allred's daughter) is on the case. At CBS News, "Michaele Salahi's Lawyer: 'View' Appearance Degrading." Plus, at ET, "'The View' update: Whoopi says she used 'choice words' backstage but 'didn't hit' Michaele Salahi."

The key moment's at about 1:50 at the clip. Looks like Whoopi simply touched her:

Mosque is No Way to 'Build Bridges'

From Thomas Kidd, at USA Today:

On Tuesday, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission voted, correctly, to deny landmark status to a fairly nondescript building that formerly housed a Burlington Coat Factory retailer. The only reason that the notion of landmark status had come forward (despite weak arguments about the building representing mid-19th century economic growth) was because a Muslim organization wants to build a mosque there, and the building stands near Ground Zero, the former site of the World Trade Center. Building the mosque near the epicenter of the 9/11 tragedy is in extremely bad taste, but the Constitution's protection of religious freedom should allow it to be built.



This case is a perfect example of the delicate nature of religious freedom. Religious freedom is most tenuous when the religious act in question is unpopular, and the building of this mosque is unpopular, to put it mildly. The proposed Islamic center shows an incredible lack of sensitivity on the part of the Cordoba Initiative, the group backing the mosque. One wonders whether Oz Sultan, spokesman for the group, can be serious when he says that the project will "build bridges" and that the Cordoba Initiative is "committed to promoting positive interaction between the Muslim world and the West." Could this group really be so out of touch, or is it intentionally trying to provoke a harsh reaction to prove some point? We don't know, but the overwhelming consensus of public opinion is that the idea of building this mosque on this property is deeply offensive. It insults the memory of those who died at the hands of jihadist terrorists.

More at the link.



Cartoon Credit: Sean Delonas.

In the Mail: The Obama Victory: How Media, Money, and Message Shaped the 2008 Election

Came to my home address, which is unusual. Available at Amazon.



And from the publisher's page:

Barack Obama's stunning victory in the 2008 presidential election will go down as one of the more pivotal in American history. Given America's legacy of racism, how could a relatively untested first-term senator with an African father defeat some of the giants of American politics?



In The Obama Victory , Kate Kenski, Bruce Hardy, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson draw upon the best voter data available, The National Annenberg Election Survey, as well as interviews with key advisors to each campaign, to illuminate how media, money, and messages shaped the 2008 election. They explain how both sides worked the media to reinforce or combat images of McCain as too old and Obama as not ready; how Obama used a very effective rough-and-tumble radio and cable campaign that was largely unnoticed by the mainstream media; how the Vice Presidential nominees impacted the campaign; how McCain's age and Obama's race affected the final vote, and much more.



Briskly written and filled with surprising insights, The Obama Victory goes beyond opinion to offer the most authoritative account available of precisely how and why Obama won the presidency.

'I Never Swallow'

This dude's a riot. Impeccable timing as well: "Obama does not endorse gay marriage. As a candidate for president, he consistently said marriage should be reserved for a man and a woman." Freakin' homophobe!

Plural Marriage is Waiting in the Wings

Flashback.



Stanley Kurtz, from 2005:

ON SEPTEMBER 23, 2005, the 46-year-old Victor de Bruijn and his 31-year-old wife of eight years, Bianca, presented themselves to a notary public in the small Dutch border town of Roosendaal. And they brought a friend. Dressed in wedding clothes, Victor and Bianca de Bruijn were formally united with a bridally bedecked Mirjam Geven, a recently divorced 35-year-old whom they'd met several years previously through an Internet chatroom. As the notary validated a samenlevingscontract, or "cohabitation contract," the three exchanged rings, held a wedding feast, and departed for their honeymoon.



When Mirjam Geven first met Victor and Bianca de Bruijn, she was married. Yet after several meetings between Mirjam, her then-husband, and the De Bruijns, Mirjam left her spouse and moved in with Victor and Bianca. The threesome bought a bigger bed, while Mirjam and her husband divorced. Although neither Mirjam nor Bianca had had a prior relationship with a woman, each had believed for years that she was bisexual. Victor, who describes himself as "100 percent heterosexual," attributes the trio's success to his wives' bisexuality, which he says has the effect of preventing jealousy.



The De Bruijns' triple union caused a sensation in the Netherlands, drawing coverage from television, radio, and the press. With TV cameras and reporters crowding in, the wedding celebration turned into something of a media circus. Halfway through the festivities, the trio had to appoint one of their guests as a press liaison. The local paper ran several stories on the triple marriage, one devoted entirely to the media madhouse.



News of the Dutch three-way wedding filtered into the United States through a September 26 report by Paul Belien, on his Brussels Journal website. The story spread through the conservative side of the Internet like wildfire, raising a chorus of "I told you so's" from bloggers who'd long warned of a slippery slope from gay marriage to polygamy.



Meanwhile, gay marriage advocates scrambled to put out the fire. M.V. Lee Badgett, an economist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and research director of the Institute for Gay and Lesbian Strategic Studies, told a sympathetic website, "This [Brussels Journal] article is ridiculous. Don't be fooled--Dutch law does not allow polygamy." Badgett suggested that Paul Belien had deliberately mistranslated the Dutch word for "cohabitation contract" as "civil union," or even "marriage," so as to leave the false impression that the triple union had more legal weight than it did. Prominent gay-marriage advocate Evan Wolfson, executive director of Freedom to Marry, offered up a detailed legal account of Dutch cohabitation contracts, treating them as a matter of minor significance, in no way comparable to state-recognized registered partnerships.



In short, while the Dutch triple wedding set the conservative blogosphere ablaze with warnings, same-sex marriage advocates dismissed the story as a silly stunt with absolutely no implications for the gay marriage debate. And how did America's mainstream media adjudicate the radically different responses of same-sex marriage advocates and opponents to events in the Netherlands? By ignoring the entire affair.



Yet there is a story here. And it's bigger than even those chortling conservative websites claim. While Victor, Bianca, and Mirjam are joined by a private cohabitation contract rather than a state-registered partnership or a full-fledged marriage, their union has already made serious legal, political, and cultural waves in the Netherlands. To observers on both sides of the Dutch gay marriage debate, the De Bruijns' triple wedding is an unmistakable step down the road to legalized group marriage.



More important, the De Bruijn wedding reveals a heretofore hidden dimension of the gay marriage phenomenon. The De Bruijns' triple marriage is a bisexual marriage. And, increasingly, bisexuality is emerging as a reason why legalized gay marriage is likely to result in legalized group marriage. If every sexual orientation has a right to construct its own form of marriage, then more changes are surely due. For what gay marriage is to homosexuality, group marriage is to bisexuality. The De Bruijn trio is the tip-off to the fact that a connection between bisexuality and the drive for multipartner marriage has been developing for some time.

Photo Credit: "The Polygamists - FLDS: An exclusive look inside the FLDS."



And from the comments at Christianity Today:

Big deal. Sticking a reproductive organ into an excretory canal will never constitute grounds for biblical marriage. Also, it's not over, yet. This will be appealed to the SC where it will be a 5 to 4 decision against homosexual marriage. If not, there is no logical reason to prevent plural marriage or any other arrangement. This federal judge must be a crackhead.

RELATED: From Dale Carpenter, "A Maximalist Decision, Raising the Stakes" (via Memeorandum).

WikiLeaks: Criminal Enterprise

From Marc Thiessen, at Washington Post, "WikiLeaks Must be Stopped":

Let's be clear: WikiLeaks is not a news organization; it is a criminal enterprise. Its reason for existence is to obtain classified national security information and disseminate it as widely as possible -- including to the United States' enemies. These actions are likely a violation of the Espionage Act, and they arguably constitute material support for terrorism. The Web site must be shut down and prevented from releasing more documents -- and its leadership brought to justice. WikiLeaks' founder, Julian Assange, proudly claims to have exposed more classified information than all the rest of the world press combined. He recently told the New Yorker he understands that innocent people may be hurt by his disclosures ("collateral damage" he called them) and that WikiLeaks might get "blood on our hands."

With his unprecedented release of more than 76,000 secret documents last week, he may have achieved this. The Post found that the documents exposed at least one U.S. intelligence operative and identified about 100 Afghan informants -- often including the names of their villages and family members. A Taliban spokesman said the group is scouring the WikiLeaks Web site for information to find and "punish" these informers.

Beyond getting people killed, WikiLeaks' actions make it less likely that Afghans and foreign intelligence services (whose reports WikiLeaks also exposed) will cooperate with the United States in the future. And, as former CIA director Mike Hayden has pointed out, the disclosures are a gift to adversary intelligence services, and they will place a chill on intelligence sharing within the United States government. The harm to our national security is immeasurable and irreparable.

RTWT.

Interesting discussion (FWIW), from Charli Carpenter, "Wikileaks and 'War Crimes'."

Cameras in the Supreme Court

Making the case at Reason:

HAT TIP: Glenn Reynolds.