It would be so easy to put the lie to the IQ myth. Just give the test to a group of black people raised in white suburban households. If the theory were true, these people should score no better than other black people. Or better yet, perform the experiment in a country without the same history of slavery and segregation, where there are mixed race people with no strong identification with one or the other; if the theory were true, those people would score somewhere between "pure" white and "pure" black. Has anyone thought to do this yet? It is really tiresome to even see this debated in our day and age. Tiresome and distracting at best, downright dangerous at worst.

By "voters" do you mean Obama voters? This statement makes sense only through the distorted lens of the true-believer. A majority of voters, if you count those who voted for already and those who didn't vote in the Democratic primary but will in the fall, apparently have no problem with it.

I would humbly request that you be more careful in your phrasing and proofread for clarity. This sentence:

Davis has been trending Fox News' way for some time now, first as a supporter of Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman during his reelection fight in 2006 and then as a Clinton surrogate this year.

could easily be parsed as saying that his status as a Clinton surrogate implies that he's trending Fox New's way. I think that the intended meaning is that his Fox News leanings are independent of his association with Clinton but "for some time now" he's possessed both characteristics, but I had to read it three times to figure that out, and even now I'm not sure.

Everyone knows Obama is better than McCain on gay rights. But let's have an honest assessment of his positions here. If you want to compare his stance to Kerry's in 2004, it bears mentioning that they both reflect precisely the winds of public opinion at the time (and at no other time in particular). In other words they are both weasely and not founded on any particular principle other than the safest conventional wisdom. Obama is on record against gay marriage generally. His policy hasn't been to let the states decide, unless he's recently changed his mind. It's well and good that he opposes the California ban, but let's continue to expose the flaws in the anti-gay ideology by revealing the nuances of his and most other mainstream politicians' twisted logic. And to say that "some of the arguments are more persuasive than others" around Obama's recent moves toward the so-called ideological center is to beg the question, which ones are better, and which ones aren't? I am alarmed by his recent about-faces on FISA and public campaign financing, and it would be refreshing to see a more critical assessment. If War Room becomes another "Obama Good - everyone else bad" blog, I'll need to get my news elsewhere.

Xanthro summarized it really well, but if you want to get completely caught up, Glenn Greenwald here on Salon explains the whole horrible mess really clearly and thoroughly in his FISA entries. It's too bad the mainstream media doesn't bother with this. It's much scarier than they're making it look.

Obama's FISA reversal should be examined in a different context from other centrist policies, which as argued here have been hidden in plain view throughout his campaign. FISA represents something much more sinister than a flip-flop. Flip-flops can even be honest re-assessments of opinions formerly held - who doesn't wish that more of those Democrats who voted to authorize the Iraq war had flip-flopped by now?

But with FISA, Obama took a very unambiguous stand during the primary campaign, which he has now unceremoniously reversed. He vowed to defend the Constitutional protections threatened by FISA generally, and to filibuster the bill specifically.

You can argue whether the original stand was leftist or simply a defense of constitutional liberties (which to my mind is conservative, but in a very good way). But what he has done now is not a flip-flop. There has been no reasonable public defense of his motives, no thoughtful explanation for how his position has evolved. Only the cynical characterization that the new position is a "compromise," a blatantly and eminently demonstrable falsehood.

His FISA reversal is a lie and a gravely serious betrayal of his own stated positions. Let's not paper that over by lumping it in with other recent high-profile revelations that he's not exactly progressive.

If you want evidence for the supposition that if the situation were reversed, Obama supporters would demand a roll call vote, all you have to do is look at the history of their rivalry. Back in March and April when Hillary had the superdelegate lead, Obama supporters consistently warned - I'd say the tone was closer to 'threatened' - that it would be a travesty if Hillary won by a parliamentary move that would sway superdelegates to her side in contrast to the elected delegates and popular vote. Once Hillary won the popular vote and Obama the nomination, that argument went strangely silent. And now, these same people are attacking the argument that the nomination ought to be decided more democratically.

I'm not arguing for either side, and let's make it clear that Obama has won fair and square, but there's something very disingenuous about the Obama argument here. The bulk of his supporters have never argued for him on principle, only on desired outcome. The lazy analysis in this post is just the latest example.