TALKING TO TERRORISTS....On Thursday President Bush said that talking to "terrorists and radicals" is appeasement, and later that day John McCain said he agreed. But in the Washington Post today, James Rubin says that McCain hasn't always felt this way:

Two years ago, just after Hamas won the Palestinian parliamentary elections, I interviewed McCain for the British network Sky News's "World News Tonight" program. Here is the crucial part of our exchange:

I asked: "Do you think that American diplomats should be operating the way they have in the past, working with the Palestinian government if Hamas is now in charge?"

McCain answered: "They're the government; sooner or later we are going to have to deal with them, one way or another, and I understand why this administration and previous administrations had such antipathy towards Hamas because of their dedication to violence and the things that they not only espouse but practice, so . . . but it's a new reality in the Middle East. I think the lesson is people want security and a decent life and decent future, that they want democracy. Fatah was not giving them that."

I imagine that McCain will wriggle out of this somehow. Maybe by claiming that "sooner or later" means, um, later. Or that "deal with them" doesn't include actually talking to them. Or something. But it sure sounds as if he was in favor of talking to Hamas before he was opposed to it.

YAK YAK....I have to admit, Chris Matthews does occasionally have his moments.

WILL CALIFORNIANS VOTE TO BAN GAY MARRIAGE?....It's almost certain that an initiative to ban same-sex marriage will be on the California ballot this November. How likely is it to pass?

Here's a very crude cut at an answer. Lots of polls have been done over the years about attitudes toward gays, and they all show a similar trend: people have become more gay friendly at the rate of about 1% per year. Here are some examples from Karlyn Bowman's 2006 roundup of historical poll data:

• Same-sex relations "not wrong": increased from 11% to 31% between 1973 and 2004.
  

• Gays should have equal employment rights: increased from 56% to 89% between 1977 and 2006.
  

• Gay marriage should be valid: increased from 27% to 39% between 1996 and 2005.
  

• Gays should have adoption rights: increased from 29% to 45% between 1994 and 2004.
  

All of these questions have had ups and downs over the years, but on all of them the population has gotten steadily more gay friendly. The exact rate of change per year on these four questions is: .66%, 1.14%, 1.2%, and 1.45%. The average of all four is 1.11% per year.

In 2000 Californians voted to ban same-sex marriage by a margin of 63%-37%. If attitudes toward gay marriage have followed their historical pattern, about 9% more Californians are in favor of it this year, which means they'd still vote to ban it, but by the smaller margin of 54%-46%.

In other words: this is likely to be very close. These numbers have fairly big error bars attached to them, and it's also possible, especially in California, that attitudes toward gay marriage since 2000 have softened faster than in the past. Still, right now it looks to me like the odds are slightly stacked against those of us who favor same-sex marriage. This is going to be a very tough campaign.

MUNICH! MUNICH! MUNICH!....Over in Israel today, George Bush got right down to business and compared Democrats to the Hitler appeasers who sold out Czechoslovakia just before World War II. Barack Obama shot back that this was a "false political attack" and that Bush was a liar. Christopher Orr thinks this is great:

I'm struck by how politically foolish this assault appears to be. Bush attacking Obama, and Obama counter-attacking Bush, while John McCain sits on the sidelines, is a disastrous dynamic for the GOP. The more Obama can frame this race as him vs. the most unpopular president in modern history, the easier a time he'll have in the fall.

As it happens, McCain didn't sit on the sidelines. He and his pal Joe Lieberman chimed in to say that Bush was absolutely spot on. But I suspect that this is even worse: after all, Democrats are going to do everything they can to promote the "McBush" meme this year, and diving in feet first to say "Me too!" when Bush hauls out artillery like this is just going to make their job easier. If McCain wants to sign on with Mr. 28%, who are we to complain?

On the other hand, Obama's response seemed slightly off to me. "It is time to turn the page on eight years of policies that have strengthened Iran and failed to secure America or our ally Israel" sounds a little rote, doesn't it? I guess a presidential candidate can't afford to sound unpresidential, but I still think I would have preferred something like a Reaganesque shake of his head followed by "It's always Munich with these guys, isn't it?" There are times when mockery is the best policy.

GAY MARRIAGE UPHELD IN CALIFORNIA....As expected, the California Supreme Court, in a 4-3 decision, ruled today that state laws banning same-sex marriage are discriminatory:

The long-awaited court decision stemmed from San Francisco's highly publicized same-sex weddings, which in 2004 helped spur a conservative backlash in a presidential election year and a national dialogue over gay rights.

....Today's ruling by the Republican-dominated court affects more than 100,000 same-sex couples in the state, about a quarter of whom have children, according to U.S. census figures.

Here's the conclusion of the majority decision affirming the right of gay couples to marry:

[T]he exclusion of same-sex couples from the designation of marriage works a real and appreciable harm upon same-sex couples and their children. As discussed above, because of the long and celebrated history of the term "marriage" and the widespread understanding that this word describes a family relationship unreservedly sanctioned by the community, the statutory provisions that continue to limit access to this designation exclusively to opposite-sex couples — while providing only a novel, alternative institution for same-sex couples — likely will be viewed as an official statement that the family relationship of same-sex couples is not of comparable stature or equal dignity to the family relationship of opposite-sex couples.

Furthermore, because of the historic disparagement of gay persons, the retention of a distinction in nomenclature by which the term "marriage" is withheld only from the family relationship of same-sex couples is all the more likely to cause the new parallel institution that has been established for same-sex couples to be considered a mark of second-class citizenship.

Finally, in addition to the potential harm flowing from the lesser stature that is likely to be afforded to the family relationships of same-sex couples by designating them domestic partnerships, there exists a substantial risk that a judicial decision upholding the differential treatment of opposite-sex and same-sex couples would be understood as validating a more general proposition that our state by now has repudiated: that it is permissible, under the law, for society to treat gay individuals and same-sex couples differently from, and less favorably than, heterosexual individuals and opposite-sex couples.

In light of all of these circumstances, we conclude that retention of the traditional definition of marriage does not constitute a state interest sufficiently compelling, under the strict scrutiny equal protection standard, to justify withholding that status from same-sex couples. Accordingly, insofar as the provisions of sections 300 and 308.5 draw a distinction between opposite-sex couples and same-sex couples and exclude the latter from access to the designation of marriage, we conclude these statutes are unconstitutional.

And now it goes to the voters. In November we'll see how far we've come in the past eight years.

A BETTER YOU....Via Andrew Sullivan, Johann Hari describes his experiment taking Provigil, the pill that college students describe as "Viagra for the brain":

I picked up a book about quantum physics and super-string theory I have been meaning to read for ages, for a column I'm thinking of writing. It had been hanging over me, daring me to read it. Five hours later, I realised I had hit the last page. I looked up. It was getting dark outside. I was hungry. I hadn't noticed anything, except the words I was reading, and they came in cool, clear passages; I didn't stop or stumble once.

Perplexed, I got up, made a sandwich — and I was overcome with the urge to write an article that had been kicking around my subconscious for months. It rushed out of me in a few hours, and it was better than usual....The next morning I woke up and felt immediately alert. Normally it takes a coffee and an hour to kick-start my brain; today I'm ready to go from the second I rise. And so it continues like this, for five days: I inhale books and exhale articles effortlessly. My friends all say I seem more contemplative, less rushed — which is odd, because I'm doing more than normal. One sixty-something journalist friend says she remembers taking Benzadrine in the sixties to get through marathon articles, but she'd collapse after four or five says and need a long, long sleep. I don't feel like that. I keep waiting for an exhausted crash, and it doesn't seem to come.

I want some! Maybe not permanently or anything, but I have to admit it would be interesting to give it a try and see if I suddenly started churning out dozens of brilliant blog posts a day.

Of course, there's always the possibility that Provigil would be bad for blogging. Perhaps I'd get an idea, slip into a zone, and only emerge five hours later. The resulting post would be brilliant, I'm sure, but I'd only crank out one or two a day. That's not much of a blog. Perhaps there are advantages to a short attention span.

PANIC IN THE RANKS....The sense of panic among Republicans after their congressional loss in Louisiana on Tuesday is pretty remarkable. Here's Scott Reed, a former RNC official: "Republican leadership needs to really take a good look in the mirror. They're taking the party off the cliff." And Tom DeLay: ""We haven't hit bottom yet. I've never seen members so frustrated or demoralized."

There's plenty more where that came from, and the most popular response seems to be a stampede by everyone to run away from everyone else. John McCain doesn't want to be associated with Congress, the GOP congressional caucus doesn't want to be associated with George Bush, and Bush himself is on autopilot, currently in Israel accusing Democrats of being the heirs of Neville Chamberlain. Meanwhile everyone agrees that the Republican "brand" is now toxic. Maybe they need a new slogan?

McCAIN AND WITHDRAWAL....Back at the end of January, John McCain's coup de grâce against Mitt Romney was a completely bogus charge that Romney wanted to "wave a white flag" in Iraq. "My friends, I was there," McCain said. "He said he wanted a timetable for withdrawal."

This was an early indication that McCain was pretty much willing to say and do anything to win the nomination. But that was then and this is now: polls show that Americans overwhelmingly favor a withdrawal from Iraq and McCain wants to win the presidency. Result: in a speech today in Ohio outlining his vision for what he wants the world to look like at the end of his first term, McCain says he'll bring the troops home:

By January 2013, America has welcomed home most of the servicemen and women who have sacrificed terribly so that America might be secure in her freedom. The Iraq War has been won. Iraq is a functioning democracy, although still suffering from the lingering effects of decades of tyranny and centuries of sectarian tension. Violence still occurs, but it is spasmodic and much reduced. Civil war has been prevented; militias disbanded; the Iraqi Security Force is professional and competent; al Qaeda in Iraq has been defeated; and the Government of Iraq is capable of imposing its authority in every province of Iraq and defending the integrity of its borders. The United States maintains a military presence there, but a much smaller one, and it does not play a direct combat role.

So that's that. McCain expects to withdraw all but a handful of troops from Iraq by 2013. Sure, he's just sort of fantasizing here, and I imagine we'll hear some revising and extending once reporters start asking him pointed questions about this. But his intent is obvious: he wants to let the voting public know that he really, really wants to get out of Iraq soon, just like Barack Obama. It's looking more and more as if everyone's going to be campaigning against the war this year. Welcome aboard, Senator.

QUOTE OF THE DAY....From Andrew Tobias, responding to Jon Stewart's characterization of George Bush as a moron:

"Bush is hardly a moron. He wanted the rich — in particular the oil guys — to do well and they have (phenomenally well). He promised to appoint more Justices like Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia and he did. He didn't want to work terribly hard and he hasn't. He wanted to show that government can't do things very well, and he has. Morons are not usually so successful in getting what they want."

Well, OK. I guess I'll have to think of something else to yell at the TV set then.

SAME SEX MARRIAGE IN THE GOLDEN STATE....Via Andrew Sullivan, the California Supreme Court will announce its decision on whether to legalize same-sex marriage on Thursday at 10 am:

No one knows for sure what the decision will be — but, given the length of time this has taken, it's perfectly possible the court will order civil marriage equality immediately without a stay. That would lead to thousands of irrevocable civil marriages and set up a ballot initiative this fall as a potential watershed for civil rights.

Those in favor of civil equality better get ready. The gay civil rights movement will never have waged a battle this big, this expensive or this important. We can win at the ballot box as well as in the courts and legislatures. And the good news is that the Republican governor has said he will oppose any initiative to take marriage rights away, if they are granted. Hold on tight.

I think it's widely expected that the court is going to legalize gay marriage, and the initiative to strike down their ruling has already gathered over a million signatures and is just waiting for verification from the Secretary of State before it goes on the November ballot. It's 14 words long, identical to the wording of Prop 22 back in 2000: "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California." This time, however, it's a constitutional initiative, not a statutory initiative, so if it passes it will be immune to court challenges.

Prop 22 passed overwhelmingly with 63% of the vote. Has 13% of the state decided to relax since then and allow gay couples to live in peace? We're about to find out.

THE AMAZING MONEY MACHINE....Josh Green has an interesting piece in the Atlantic this month about Barack Obama's online fundraising machine. It's focused mainly on the technology behind the machine and how it sprang from the venture-capital oriented worldview of Silicon Valley, but this little nugget caught my eye:

And as a newcomer to national politics, [Obama] needed to establish credibility by making inroads to major donors — most of whom, in California as elsewhere, had been locked down by the Clinton campaign.

Silicon Valley was a notable exception. The Internet was still in its infancy when Bill Clinton last ran for president, in 1996, and most of the immense fortunes had not yet come into being; the emerging tech class had not yet taken shape. So, unlike the magnates in California real estate (Walter Shorenstein), apparel (Esprit founder Susie Tompkins Buell), and entertainment (name your Hollywood celeb), who all had long-established loyalty to the Clintons, the tech community was up for grabs in 2007. In a colossal error of judgment, the Clinton campaign never made a serious approach, assuming that Obama would fade and that lack of money and cutting-edge technology couldn't possibly factor into what was expected to be an easy race. Some of her staff tried to arrange "prospect meetings" in Silicon Valley, but they were overruled. "There was massive frustration about not being able to go out there and recruit people," a Clinton consultant told me last year. As a result, the wealthiest region of the wealthiest state in the nation was left to Barack Obama.

Furthermore, in Silicon Valley's unique reckoning, what everyone else considered to be Obama's major shortcomings — his youth, his inexperience — here counted as prime assets.

In a close race, you can point to pretty much anything as "the difference." But if Green is right, Clinton's neglect of Silicon Valley ranks as one of the biggest mistakes of her campaign. Obama may have been uniquely situated to take financial and political advantage of the boom in social networking sites, but I sort of doubt it. I'll bet Hillary could have done it too. She just didn't.

UN-REGRESSING A CARBON TAX....The other day I mentioned that a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases would be a huge windfall for power companies if the permits are given away based on past history instead of being auctioned to the highest bidder. What's more, energy prices would rise substantially (that's the whole point) and the poor would be hit much harder by this than either the middle class or the affluent.

A cap-and-trade scheme that auctions off 100% of its emission permits would eliminate the windfall profits, but it would still act essentially as a regressive carbon tax, raising the price of energy and hitting the poor disproportionately. The nice thing about the auction, though, is that it provides government revenue that can be used to offset the regressivity of the original tax. But if we did that, would there be any revenue left over for anything else?

An analysis by CBPP says yes. They conclude that about 15% of the revenue would be needed to compensate companies for their losses and about 14% would be needed to hold low-income consumers harmless. That leaves more than 70% for other purposes, including funding of green R&D. Here's their basic recommendation for helping the poor: "We propose pairing a tax rebate with climate rebates issued through the electronic benefit transfer (EBT) systems that state human service agencies use to provide assistance to many poor people....Funds set aside for climate rebates should go to intended beneficiaries, not administrative costs or profits. Accordingly, policymakers should provide relief as much as possible through existing, proven delivery mechanisms — such as the EITC and state EBT systems — rather than new public or private bureaucracies, which entail very substantial administrative costs."

More here if you want to read up on this stuff.

APPALACHIA....This map of voting patterns in the Democratic primary race has now shown up on a bunch of different blogs, but I'm reproducing it yet again because it really is kind of fascinating. It comes from DHinMI, and it shows all the counties where Hillary Clinton has won 65% or more of the vote. Her area of greatest strength, it turns out, isn't whites per se, or old people, or the working class. It's all those things, but it's all those things mainly in Appalachia.

(The gray areas are states that haven't voted yet. Last night, West Virginia filled in nearly of its counties with purple, and Kentucky is expected to do likewise next week.)

The working theory here, of course, isn't that Appalachians love Hillary so much, but that Appalachians are uniquely uncomfortable voting for a black guy. Josh Marshall chalks this up to history: "Each of these regions was fiercely anti-Slavery. And most ended up raising regiments that fought in the Union Army. But they were as anti-slave as they were anti-slavery, both of which they viewed as the linchpins of the aristocratic and inegalitarian society they loathed."

This stuff is way, way outside my wheelhouse, so there's nothing much I can add. But the concentration of those purple dots is really striking. It's not clear if this really means much for the general election, but it might. Feel free to speculate in comments.

SHOPPING CARTS....I'm fighting off a cold. Blecch. I blame unsanitary shopping carts.

What else could it be? For years I've been mocking those antibacterial wipes that supermarkets have started putting out by the shopping carts. Just more yuppie idiocy, I figured, part of the trend toward protecting ourselves from every remote possibility of harm no matter how dumb. I mean, how paranoid do you have to be to insist on wiping down your shopping cart before you head into the store?

Well, fine. I'm a believer now. Push a shopping cart around on Sunday and get sick on Monday. QED. Just like those telephone handset sanitizers from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. You might call this the addled logic of a sick man, and you'd be right, but I don't care. No more shopping carts for me.

Anyway, if I write anything dumber than usual today, that's why. Blame the disease. Please.

REPUBLICAN LOSING STREAK CONTINUES....Mississippi's 1st congressional district may be a longtime Republican stronghold, but as usual this year, that didn't matter:

Travis Childers, a conservative Democrat who serves as Prentiss County chancery clerk, defeated Southaven Mayor Greg Davis by 54 percent to 46 percent in the race to represent Mississippi's 1st Congressional District, which both parties considered a potential bellwether for the fall elections.

....House Democrats now hold a 236 to 199 majority, up from 203 seats they controlled two years ago.

....Democrats begin the march into the fall elections with an enormous cash advantage: $44 million for the DCCC to $7 million for its GOP counterpart as of March 31. And 25 other Republican incumbents have decided against running for reelection, providing Democrats with more opportunities to make gains.

That's an 8-point victory in a solidly Republican district. The GOP even brought in Dick Cheney to campaign and tried to tar Childers as an Obama lover. But nothing worked. Even in Mississippi, they just don't want anything to do with Republicans anymore. It's going to be a ver-r-r-r-y long summer and fall for the GOP leadership.