Friday Open Thread [1.17.14]

Yeah, the marriage equality battle is over. We won. Here are poll results from freaking Utah:

48-48. Tied in Utah. Josh Marshall:

It’s even more clear now that the battle for the principle of marriage equality is genuinely over. Not just in blue states, which we knew, but even in many of the most conservative states in the country. (Nate Silver argued last year that Mississippi and Alabama are likely to be the final same sex marriage hold outs.) What we have now isn’t so much a battle as a vast moping up operation, a race between legislatures and the courts to catch up with galloping public opinion.

Since last month we know have this most recent federal court decision in Oklahoma, another state with some claim to being the most conservative state in the country, tossing out the state’s ban on same sex marriage. To play the devil’s advocate, we can note that the judges in the Utah and Oklahoma cases were Clinton and Obama appointees. (The Judge with the narrower ruling in Ohio is another Obama appointee.) We’ve yet to see a judge appointee by Republican president make a similar ruling.

But judges don’t generally like to get overruled or get too far out in front of higher court rulings. One judge going off on his or her own is one thing. Three making such a finding in short order suggests that Justice Scalia was right in stating what most others recognized: that the Court’s decision in Windsor leaves virtually no constitutional ground for states to reject same sex marriage.

Barbara Bush doesn’t want Jeb to run for President. Now that’s motherly love.

Marc Ambinder: “I tend not to see every presidential policy speech as legacy-defining, but Friday’s speech might just fit the bill. Obama has used his second term to review and claw back the advancing national security state that he endorsed and expanded when he took office. I’ve written this before, but he really does not want to be known as the president who enshrined indefinite detention of terrorism suspects into law, or who abused the state secrets privilege, or who allowed the surveillance state to run amok.”