... but does Salon have to do it, too?

Jon Avorisis is the one who seems stuck in the wrong decade. He doesn't understand that DADT, and other parts of the anti-gay backlash - including DOMA - happened PRECISELY because Clinton rushed in with his attempt to allows gays to serve openly.

Obama recognizes that real change on this issue is going to come in baby steps, and that Washington can not appear to be pushing "the gay agenda" down middle America's throat.

Mr. Avorisis, would you be happier if Obama tried to repeal DOMA today an failed, or if he bided his time, took a few small steps rather than one giant leap, and effected real change? Do you really think the votes to repeal DOMA exist? How much political capital do you want shattered against fortress walls that aren't yet ready to break, but can still be weakened?

I don't know whether to be more upset that the right is trying to say that knowing about crimes (assuming the allegations against Pelosi are true) and not doing everything in your power to stop them is the same as orchestrating those crimes ... or that the media and, judging from some of the letters here, the left, seem to be going along with it.

Stop letting the wingnuts on the right set the debate.

At some point, we can have a debate about how much you had to know, and when you had to know it, for it to be a crime. Whatever crime that is, it pales in comparison to the work done by Cheney, Addington, Yoo, and others.

Did Pelosi know? I don't know. I don't care. We have real war criminals to worry about.

There is a difference that seems to elude you:

State law ALLOWED what Palin ENACTED.

Before she was mayor, Wasila's budget included funds for the police to pay for the rape kits. When she was mayor, that budget changed. It became the official policy of Wasilla.

No other city in Alaska behaved similarly as a matter of policy.

You don't get it.

You just want to get yours, and because "yours" is a historically oppressed minority group, you mistake your selfishness for justice.

Of course you charge that I'm a sexist - because anyone who disagrees with you must be part of the system keeping you down.

Give me a break.

If you haven't noticed, multiculturalism is happening without anybody having to set quotas (and it's interesting to see how many Salon commentators are giddy about the prospect of quotas). As barriers have fallen, the most qualified - regardless of race or gender - have risen to the top. Open your eyes and take a look at the world around you: it's not 1975 or even 1990 anymore. Change is happening without anybody having to discriminate to force the issue.

You see, I grew up believing that discrimination on the basis of race or gender was wrong. Not wrong unless my group benefitted from it, no, wrong, period. It seems you took a different lesson: not that discrimination is bad, but discrimination is bad when it happens to you.

Ponder for a moment what the world would look like if everybody had that attitude.

No reasonable person could have a problem with putting another woman on the supreme court. If Obama picks one, she'll get my enthusiastic support.

But I really hate this ugly, "my group first!" attitude being shown by Joan Walsh. Of course, it's not surprising - it was at the root of her support for Clinton during the Democratic Primaries - but it really misses the point.

"We need more women!" coming from Joan Walsh, is little different from someone like David Duke saying, "We need more white men."

Your commitment to multiculturalism is displayed not in how hard you lobby for own special interest, but in how hard you fight for OTHER minority groups, even if it's against your own narrow self-interest. Walsh is also stoking the fears of conservatives, because, following her logic to its logical conclusion, it won't be appropriate to appoint a man to the bench for another four vacancies. Of course she would deny such a thing now, but how is two less "tokenism" than one? So long as the pick is motivated primarily by the race or gender of the appointee, how can it even NOT be tokenism?

At the end of the day, the goal has to be for these little wars to fade away, so that we don't even notice, and Obama has done a nice job of filling his cabinet in such a way that, say, we don't think of Eric Shinseki as the first Asian-American to hold that job, but rather we see him as the supremely qualified candidate that he is.

I'm quite confident that there are similarly supremely-qualified women who Obama can appoint to the bench, and if he chooses one of them, that'll be fantastic. However, the "supremely qualified" part is much more important than the "woman" part. And if that candidate is a different minority or - gasp! - a white male, but is still supremely qualified, I would hope than Joan Walsh would be an voiciferous in her support of that candidate as she would for a woman.

I don't expect such a thing, however, after Walsh's disgraceful performance during the presidential elections.

... if states had a bit of fiscal discipline during good times.

There's just no excuse for states like California (my home state!) or the federal government to be running massive deficits during good times. If California had operated with even a modicum of responsibility during the recent boom years, then borrowing now would be a non-issue.

But since nobody has the stones to make tough choices when they don't have to, we already had massive deficits, and that makes further borrowing more and more difficult.