Politics and other nightmares

Could someone explain this to me?

Juxtaposition of the day. Here's the really dangerous climate change:

The Indiana General Assembly has now put off a referendum on putting the gay marriage ban into the state constitution until at least 2016. And some predict it will never get to the voters, giving how rapidly public opinion is moving on the issue. (See here) This comes in the wake of a Virginia's same-sex ban getting overturned by a feeral judge and the tossing of Kentucky's refusal to recognize same-sex marriages from other states.

This kind of politics got tiresome a long time ago:

Today's installment of "Go ahead and vote Republican if it makes you feel better, but don't think it will change anything":

We've gone from Bill Clinton's "I tried it, but I didn't inhale" to Barack Obama's "Yeah, I indulged -- so what?" So this seems like a step back in some way:

It’s a question politicians are asked all the time: have you smoked weed? Sen. Marco Rubio won’t say.

Et tu, Rand?

Call me a dreamer, but I think this is good news: Rand Paul is pitching libertarian ideas to social conservatives. And they're listening:

If you're even a casual reader of newspapers, you know about the First Amendment -- hell, we can't shut up about it. And if you pay attention to the news at all, you've heard the Second Amendment debates: Give me that gun! Stay away from my gun! But the Third Amendment gets no attention and no respect. When have we ever had to worry about soldiers quartering themselves in our homes? Except . . .

I've always been a proponent of early voting -- the easier we make it for people to get to the polls, the better for democracy, I thought.  And the time I used it myself I found it a great convenience not to have to cram my participation into the short window of one busy work day. But here's someone giving "eight reasons for halting early voting," and some of them are pretty persuasive.