Instapundit:

CALIFORNIA’S SUPREME COURT STRIKES DOWN the state’s ban on gay marriages. Did it just hand the state to McCain? Well, possibly.

Personally, I favor gay marriage, but I think it would be much better if it were adopted through political, rather than judicial, channels — though I realize that some would call that a distinction without a difference where California is concerned. . . .

I had been saying the same thing on Dean’s World most of last year (and would link to that chain of posts but, alas, there’s not such thing any more on that blog — here’s one ), except the favoring part. The next step, of course, is the proposal in California of a constitutional amendment to reverse this decision (since the Cali court claims to act under constitutional color), and, depending on California’s procedure for making a constitutional change, myriad legal, political and judicial attempts to keep that off the ballot and at all costs prevent the occurrence of democracy … the whole tiring, usual thing that has played out everywhere.

It’s kind of like the revenge of Rose Bird!

According to the New York Times, Sen. Arlen Specter is once again criticizing the New England Patriots. Could somebody please explain to me why a senator is involving himself in what’s essentially a bush-league sports scandal?

I can almost understand Congress holding hearings about steroid use in baseball, as drug use is a major issue across multiple sports and there have been allegations of widespread drug use in baseball.

But a senator taking on a single team? Surely Specter has something better to do with his time.

It has always seemed to me as if those who claim to be motivated and affected by intellection, cold logic, reason, to the exclusion of emotion, are really placing, or even jamming, slamming down, a template of rationality atop what is in fact a natural tendency to do quite the opposite. Or to be quite the opposite.

Some people, of course, are merely cold fish. But they don’t usually talk about their unemotional nature, nor even the emotionality of others; by and large feelings and spiritual temperatures do not register with them at all. I had a fine WASP roommate at Princeton, whom I love, who was like this. This is the hard oak of which our country is framed, mind you. To some extent, this personality type (if it even rises to that level!) may be contrasted with the older Eastern European Jews who made up my family and families like mine — affectless, yes, but upon inspection mainly affecting stoicism as a mask for the pain that they were living, and had lived, more or less for the previous century.

Mr. Spock, as you recall, could not register emotion. Or, rather, his “race,” the Vulcans, had disciplined itself not to, because emotion, when permitted, dominated them entirely, and they became beastly. Captain Kirk, meanwhile, could shmaltz his way through life being what he was and, foibles and all, more or less handle it — the peaks, the valleys, the humanity of it all. The closest things to a Protestant stiff on the Enterprise were probably those dispensable, and always dispensed with, security guys in the red tunics. Everyone else was too busy being an ethnic stereotype… but who am I to say?

Watch out for those Mr. Spock types. Still, icy cold waters run deep.

Dean Esmay:  Why I’m No Longer A Libertarian.

Not that I’m one to talk, either, but I hadn’t realized that Jonathan Alter was the inspiration for the George Costanza character on Seinfeld!

And Mickey Kaus… um, Kramer?

The Journal News:

A tech-savvy White Plains woman whose apartment was burglarized solved the crime herself after she was able to log on to her stolen laptop, photograph one of the suspects with it and get photos of another, police said.

Edmon Shahikian, 23, of 13 Cobbling Rock Road, Katonah, and Ian Frias, 20, of 1609 E. 174th St., the Bronx, were picked up at their homes Wednesday night after the victim turned the pictures over to police. The police said they recovered most of the $5,000 worth of electronics stolen in the burglary.

“Our victim did a phenomenal job,” said Lt. Eric Fischer, commander of the Detective Division. “She knew her computer, and she let us know as soon as she obtained the information. We rolled on it immediately, and the result is the arrest of two burglary suspects and the recovery of most of the stolen property.”

Now the stolen stuff tells on you! Pretty impressive. Hat tip to Avigdor M’Bawlmawr.

You sometimes have to go deep below the surface, even into the dark and dank, to find beauty. At least, of a certain kind.

This is a subway station wall ornament at the Borough Hall Station in Brooklyn — “BH” … for Borough Hall.

Michael Young at Reason Magazine is shocked, shocked at all that “strange new respect” being directed to Hezbollah by “the writer and academic Norman Finkelstein.” (Via Goldberg, via Instapundit.)

“Writer and academic”? Yeah, wasn’t Joseph Goebbels one of those, too?

Then, as a topper — Noam Chomsky! Sympathetic to Arab mass murderers, those guys? Really? Who knew. Good thing about these Internets is you get the news and stuff fast!

For some reason, I’ve taken an interest in some of the more accessible books about evangelical Christian culture. I just finished Hannah Rosin’s God’s Harvard, and I’m almost done with Daniel Radosh’s Rapture Ready. I’d like to read a book that looks at contemporary Christian evangelical culture from the inside, but does so with at least a moderately critical eye. Any suggestions?

John Hawkins polled righty bloggers (I was a no-show this time — got to keep him honest!) and has now published a list of The 25 Most Influential People On The Right According To Conservative Bloggers.