Well said, Joseph.  The only compelling reason for the TSA is to prevent the kind of mass slaughter that occurred when the hijacked planes hit the buildings.  But, as you say, no level of invasive screening will have anywhere near the effect of having passengers and crew who are willing to fight.

An exploded airliner is a horror, but it's of significantly less  threat to national security than one that's been suicide-hijacked.  By all means, our intelligence and law-enforcement agencies should work to infiltrate and destroy any group planning to murder Americans, but we should stop pretending that the TSA can save us from another 9/11.

There are multiple factors contributing to this problem, among which gay marriage is -- at most -- one.

The first problem is way gay marriage became law.  Even in Massachusetts, it was never put to a popular vote, let alone a constitutional amendment (the most appropriate means, given the nature and gravity of the change).  This was and remains bad public policy and traditionalists have every right to be outraged.

The second, is the legal and political culture in Massachusetts that gives a judge the power to make rulings like this.  We'll see how things go in 2012 but -- Senator Brown aside -- this is still a corrupt, one-party state whose leaders have the biggest sense of entitlement you can imagine.  Our last three consecutive speakers of the state house are in prison, and our Lt. Governor crashed his state-owned car last year after driving at 108mph, which was subsequently hushed up by the state police.

Again, gay marriage is -- at most -- only part of the problem in this.

I like Ricochetoise well enough, but I'm with Katie: Ricoteers is best.

Oh my goodness, you're so right! Why, if I can't accept that there's no immorality -- or evil! -- in homosexuality, then how can I argue there's any in  murder, rape, theft, arson, or torture? Thank you, Douglas.

I disagree, but that's a very reasonable position (and here, I'm not being sarcastic).  I haven't said this in a while, but SSM proponents should stop pretending we're not asking for a major societal change.

And why is homosexuality immoral?

If that's what the authors meant, then I take back that criticism.

But given 1) that the title of their book is "What is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense", 2) the post was made in the context to the president's endorsement of SSM, and 3) that they describe the Historic/Conjugal view of marriage as "sealed by sexual intercourse," I don't see how that can be the case.

These are somewhat conventional answers, but Claudius, Marcus Aurelius, and Hadrian all come to mind for the best.

As for the worst, I leave it to Horrible Histories.

The Historic View:

Marriage as a comprehensive union...Uniting spouses in these all-encompassing ways, it also calls for all-encompassing commitment: permanent and exclusive. ...

The Revisionist View

Marriage as the union of two people who commit to romantic partnership and domestic life: essentially an emotional union, merely enhanced by whatever sexual activity partners find agreeable. Such committed romantic unions are seen as valuable while emotion lasts.

I don't think it's honest for the authors to presume that permanence and exclusivity are unique to heterosexuals or that homosexual relations collapse the moment romantic love abates.  As I understand it -- though I confess I don't have a source for this -- infidelity rates are highest among male homosexual couples, followed by heterosexual couples, followed by lesbians, which says more about sex differences than anything else.

There are strong cases to be made for keeping marriage exclusive to heterosexual couples (mostly regarding children), but that wasn't one of them.

Bingo.  To be fair, I was struck by how wishy-washy Romney's statement sounded.  But when you couple it with his record against SSM in Massachusettsand the fact that -- even under the least generous interpretation of his comments last night -- he still endorsed the NC vote, I don't think traditionalists have much cause to complain.

To combine two earlier ones:

"We are Julia."

My day is made.

EDIT: I created a tumblr account.

Can anyone think of an example of great literature that is similarly bereft of the divine?  I can't.

Atonement.  I thought both the novel and the film were unusual -- and moving -- works that illustrated the longing for the Divine or some form of transcendence an atheistic world can't provide.

Was that at the Patrick Henry University? ;)

Henry was a great patriot and -- look, I'm a small l-libertarian, too -- we benefited hugely from his skeptism of the new constitution.  It was a major failing of his not to embrace it afterward, but he's still a great man.

Just to be clear, I absolutely agree that Hamilton was the most statist of the Founders (how can we have gone this far without talking about the Whiskey Tax?).  But it's a low standard.

As for the speech in Philadelphia, bear in mind how closely he and Madison were working together at this point.  A number of scholars argue -- and I think they have it right -- that this was probably a calculated move to make the Virginia Plan more palatable to the convention ("This constitution may go too far, but at least it's not what Hamilton proposed!").

And even if Hamilton had argued sincerely for his plan, he more than made up for it in his later actions: he signed the constitution, recruited Madison & Jay to work on the Federalist Papers, and led the federalist faction at NY's ratification convention while in close correspondence with Madison.

And where was Patrick Henry in all this?  Opposing the constitution all the way.

All that aside:

1. The historical Hamilton would almost certainly not approve of ObamaCare, nor any part of the Great Society that preceded it.  Hamilton was a "statist" only in comparison to Patrick Henry or (at his most pure) Thomas Jefferson; and if Hamilton is a statist, so was James Madison.
2. N/A
3. I don't really like the phrase, but you can make a (limited) case for it.  First, there's his personal biography, which is more American than apple pie served on a red-white-and-blue table cloth.  Reputation aside, he was also was far more Burkean than most of the other Founders; he was far less Utopian than, say, Jefferson.    Third, he was the only Founder devoted to ending slavery from the very beginning.

Given that, it's important to recall that all of Hamilton's activities during Washington's first term were done in the absence of the Federal government doing anything else.  In 1789, the government could only grow because there was was no federal bureaucracy when Hamilton came to office.  Even at the height of his power a few years later, he had only a few dozen employees at Treasury, making it by far the largest Federal Department.

There's also a personal angle here: Hamilton's style made it inevitable that he would gain enemies and human nature makes it equally inevitable that his enemies would conflate their personal dislike for him with their own policy positions; just as hating his Hamilton's policies led some to hate him personally, hating him personally led others to hate his policies.  Jefferson fits into the first category, Madison far, far better into the latter as their careers progressed.