GAY DIVORCE....A few days ago I was joking to a friend that now that gay marriage was becoming more widely accepted, the next frontier was gay divorce. Turns out that's no joke if you get married in one state but live in another. Today the LA Times tells the story of Cassandra Ormiston and her longtime partner Margaret Chambers, who were married in Massachusetts in 2004:

After two years of marriage, the 10-year relationship soured, and Chambers filed for divorce. That put the couple into a legal limbo that is becoming increasingly common as same-sex couples married in one state try to divorce in another.

A judge in Family Court, where divorces are handled, asked the Rhode Island Supreme Court for a ruling on whether his court had jurisdiction, given that Rhode Island doesn't recognize gay marriage. The state Supreme Court decided that the women weren't legally married in the eyes of the state and therefore couldn't get divorced.

Chambers then tried filing for divorce in the state's Superior Court, but last month a judge there ruled that the court had no jurisdiction over marriage dissolutions. A Massachusetts divorce isn't an option because only residents who have lived in the state for a year can file there.

"They've given us no choice but to be married forever," said Ormiston. "Their worst nightmare."

And it gets worse. Even if you get divorced in the same state you were married in, it turns out that federal law jumps up to bite you too. Read the rest to get the whole story.

MORE ON WATER....The mysterious Froude Reynolds, who "carried pipe in tomato fields, walked along canals, and studied water in California universities in preparation for current employment that makes a pseudonym a reasonable precaution," responds to David Zetland's suggestion that the price of water be determined by market forces here. Bottom line: many blog commenters, even on fine blogs like this one, are misinformed. Things are, in fact, "much less outrageous" than they used to be. I can't quite tell if that's damning with faint praise or not, but click the link if you want some up-to-date water info.

YET MORE McCAIN....As the sun was setting in Berlin on Barack Obama's big speech, John McCain stepped out from Schmidt's Sausage Haus in Ohio to rebuke his opponent:

I would rather speak at a rally or a political gathering any place outside of the country after I am president of the United States. But that's a judgment that Sen. Obama and the American people will make.

Jeez, could he be any more transparent? Why not just carry a big blinking sign saying "Barack Obama Isn't A True American Patriot"? I mean, I realize we're in the silly season and all, but as Atrios says, this criticism is head scratchingly weird. Non-presidents give speeches outside the country all the time.

And yeah, I realize I've been posting an awful lot about McCain campaign trivia lately. But the guy's really been on a helluva roll the last few days, hasn't he?

OBAMA AND TERRORISM....The Cornerites are in such an apoplectic frenzy over Barack Obama's Berlin speech that I'm almost afraid of being hit by a barrage of spittle flecked pixels if I head over there again before they've calmed down. In the meantime, though, how about this from Byron York?

It's a small passage from Obama's Berlin speech, but this formulation, common in some circles, grates on some ears, like mine:

The terrorists of September 11th plotted in Hamburg and trained in Kandahar and Karachi before killing thousands from all over the globe on American soil.

Yes, the victims were from all over the globe — places like Brooklyn, and the Bronx, and Manhattan, and Queens, and Staten Island, and New Jersey — all over. And most were Americans, weren't they?

This is crazy. Obama was in Berlin. He was trying to connect with a European crowd. He was trying to convince those Europeans that the fight against terrorism is their fight too. Isn't that a good thing? Isn't that a point that conservatives try to make all the time? What better way to make it?

TOO AWESOME....Candy Crowley on CNN: Barack Obama was, indeed, awesome in his Berlin speech tonight, but watch out! Americans might decide he was a little too awesome.

Yeesh. They just can't help themselves, can they?

IMMIGRATION....Via Tyler Cowen, here's a new paper about the effect of immigration on wages of native workers. Nickel version: among workers with no high school degree, wages go down 0.7% in the short run and up 0.3% in the long run. Among all workers, wages go down 0.4% in the short run and up 0.6% in the long run.

In other words, not much effect at all.

IMPROVING OUR SCHOOLS....Bob Somerby reminds me today to comment on Emily Bazelon's article about school integration in this week's New York Times Magazine. It's basically a review of many decades of research showing that the most important way to improve school performance is to eliminate high concentrations of poverty: other things equal, it turns out that academic achievement for all races shows dramatic gains when the proportion of low-income students in a school falls below 50% or, even better, 40%. This finding, says UCLA education professor Gary Orfield, is "one of the most consistent findings in research on education."

Fine. And much of Bazelon's article is about the efforts of school districts around the country to use various forms of race and class-based integration to keep their schools below the magic 40% barrier. But then, we get the kicker:

Many big cities have a different problem. Simple demographics dictate that they can't really integrate their schools at all, by either race or class. Consider the numbers for Detroit (74 percent low-income students; 91 percent black), Los Angeles (77 percent low-income; 85 percent black and Hispanic), New York City (74 percent; 63 percent), Washington (64 percent; 93 percent), Philadelphia (71 percent; 79 percent), Chicago (74 percent; 88 percent) and Boston (71 percent; 76 percent). In theory, big cities can diversify their schools by class and race by persuading many more middle-class and white parents to choose public school over private school or by combining forces with the well-heeled suburbs that surround them. But short of those developments, big cities are stuck.

There's nothing wrong with writing about the efforts of school districts (most famously, Wake County, NC) to integrate their schools and improve performance. But the elephant in the room is that by far the biggest problem with poverty-stricken schools is in big cities, and in big cities there's simply no way to do this. No amount of busing, magnet schools, charter schools, carrots, sticks, or anything else will reduce the number of low-income students in each school below 40% when the entire school district is 80% low-income.

And yet, we get endless stories about Wake County (I've read at least three or four just in the past couple of years) with virtually no acknowledgment that even if class-based integration works, it's a small-scale solution. Bazelon, to her credit, does mention it, but then immediately drops it to return to the integration story.

I don't know. Maybe it's just too depressing to write about. If the effect of concentrated poverty really is "one of the most consistent findings in research on education," and if there's no plausible way to reduce concentrated poverty in our biggest school districts, then we're stuck. We can play around the edges and make small gains here and there, but in the long run nothing will change. And who wants to write a story like that?

UPDATE: Over at Taking Note, Richard Kahlenberg thinks I'm being too pesimistic:

Urban school district lines are not divinely inspired. They are created by states....And even where school district lines are hard to change, boundaries are not impermeable. An estimated 500,000 students cross school district lines every day to go to school in another district.

....One of the longest standing and most successful urban-suburban transfer programs is in St. Louis, where over the years fully a quarter of the student population has had access to good suburban public schools....Two-way transfer programs can also be highly successful. Hartford, Connecticut's urban-suburban public school choice program prides itself on allowing children to move in both directions. Not only do urban students have a chance to attend high quality suburban schools, there are long waiting lists for white middle class kids to attend urban magnet schools, such Hartford Montessori school.

Point taken. Integration in big cities is a lot harder than in smaller school districts, but it's not impossible to make progress.

OBAMA vs. McCAIN....For some reason, there seems to be endless chatter among liberals right now who are worried about how Obama is doing against McCain. Why is the race tightening? Why hasn't there been a bump from Obama's overseas trip? Etc. etc.

Beats me. But the race sure doesn't seem to be tightening to me. Different polls show different things, and different poll averages show different things, but the one I usually use (from RealClear Politics) showed Obama ahead by 4.8 points last week and ahead by.....4.9 points this week. So he's doing fine.

As for the world tour, it's gotten him a ton of coverage during a month that's usually light on people paying attention to politics, and the coverage has mostly been very positive. That's a good thing. It may not have given him an instantaneous bump, but honestly, we should all calm down over stuff like this. Not everything shows up in tracking polls within 24 hours. The trip is good for Obama, it increases his foreign policy cred, and once it's out of the way he'll be pretty well positioned to stay home and bear down on the campaign later this summer.

Long story short, I'm not really very worried. McCain will make progress here and there depending on where he spends money and what the issue of the hour happens to be, but overall he's not making up any ground. My bet is that three months and $300 million from now, Obama's going to pick up several more points in the polls and be ahead of McCain by eight or nine points. It ain't over til it's over, but right now it doesn't look to me like there's really anything much to fret about.

DRUDGE....From Time's Karen Tumulty, traveling with Barack Obama in the Middle East:

Some of the reporters traveling with Obama were surprised upon landing to discover their editors in something of a frenzy. The reason: Drudge is using terms like "chaos" and "mob scene" to describe Obama's visit early this morning to the Western Wall. But that's not the way the pool saw it. (When I asked pooler Jeff Zeleny of the NYT about the Drudge version, he was puzzled and conferred with the other poolers and emailed me back: "No mob scene. Not even close.")

I know this is a naive question and all that, but jeebus. Are these guys ever going to stop letting Drudge lead them around by their nose rings? What's it going to take?

ON THE GROUND IN IRAQ....Blake Hounshell interviews McClatchy's Baghdad bureau chief, Nancy Youssef, about facts on the ground in Iraq:

FP: There's been a debate in the media about how much credit should be given to "the surge" for what you're seeing now. Barack Obama said it was just one of several factors that helped improve the security situation. Nuri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, didn't even credit the addition of U.S. troops in his recent interview with Der Spiegel. Meanwhile, John McCain gives the surge the lion's share of the credit. Who do you think is right?

NY: When you ask the Iraqis here, they say that the added U.S. forces were a part of it, but what really turned things around was the Sahwa movement [of former insurgents switching sides], Moqtada's ceasefires, and in their minds, Basra. Basra was the first Iraqi-led success story, and it really changed the momentum. So, the Iraqis that we talk to see it as a complex equation with the U.S. troop surge as just one factor. And frankly, the situation on the ground suggests that they're right, because the surge troops have left, and the security situation remains better.

....FP: Do you think that Maliki is overestimating his ability to keep things under control as U.S. forces draw down?

NY: When I was embedded with Iraqi troops in Amarah, in the south, they didn't fire one shot. They made maybe a handful of arrests. They didn't find any real Mahdi Army leaders. They're knocking down open doors, so it's not surprising that things are going well. The Mahdi Army has fled.

What happens when they come back? Can the Iraqi Army take charge? And the truth is right now, nobody knows. But I tell you, having embedded with the Iraqi Army, they are worried about it. They know that the wins in Basra and Sadr City and in Amarah did not happen because they were outfighting the militiamen. It was because Moqtada al-Sadr said "Don't fight," and most of those militiamen fled. What happens when they inevitably come back? How confident can we be that the security gains are sustainable when the Iraqi Army has to face a real fight? And nobody knows the answer.

It's only natural that Iraqis are going to play up the Iraqi factors that helped improve security, just as it's only natural for Americans to play up our contributions. Still, Youssef is pretty clearly saying here that of course Obama is right when he says there are multiple reasons for the reduction in violence in Iraq, including not just the surge, but also the Sunni Awakening and the Mahdi Army ceasefires.

(But — what if you simply redefine the surge to include all these things? Then McCain is right after all that the surge deserves most of the credit. And believe it or not, that appears to be his strategy. "A surge is really a counterinsurgency made up of a number of components," he said on Wednesday. "I'm not sure people understand that 'surge' is part of a counterinsurgency." Things are really getting desperate in McCain land.)

In any case, the Basra thing is interesting too. At the time of the battle, last March, it certainly looked to me as if the Iraqi forces were doing poorly in Basra, and to this day there remain some unexplained oddities about how the fighting concluded and who was calling the shots when it did. Still, even though it required U.S. help, there's no question that in the end the pacification of Basra was a success. That said, if it's true that that success is driving a big chunk of the Iraqi public's newfound confidence, it would sure be interesting to finally know what really happened in Basra. Did Maliki's troops really win? Or did the Mahdi Army simply decide to fade away, as Youssef suggests? Why? Was the ceasefire orchestrated by Iran? Those questions, which were all hanging in the air after the battle was over, seem to have evaporated in the months since. It would be nice to see some fresh reporting on this now that the smoke has cleared and we have nearly half a year of distance from the fog of events.

THE EMPTY SUIT MEME....For those of you who don't keep up with the conservative blogosphere, one of the memes they've been trying to push for the past couple of weeks is this: Barack Obama may give a good prepared speech, but his dirty little secret is that he's actually an empty suit who's totally at sea without a teleprompter. Today, for example, Andy McCarthy, channeling John Hinderaker, offers up this snippet from an Obama press conference in Jerusalem:

Just this past week, we passed out of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, which is my committee, a bill to call for divestment from Iran, as a way of ratcheting up the pressure to ensure that they don't obtain a nuclear weapon.

But Obama isn't on the Senate Banking Committee! Busted!

I dunno. Do they really think this tack is going to work? It's true that Obama flubbed that sentence, but that's all it was: a verbal flub. What he meant was that the Banking Committee had recently reported out a bill that included some provisions from a bill he cosponsored in 2007. So he should have said "my provisions," or something like that, not "my committee."

There's a difference between verbal flubs, which every candidate makes plenty of, and gaffes that reveal some kind of serious misunderstanding of the world. When John McCain refers to Czechoslovakia, for example, that's just a verbal flub. When he tries to convince us that the surge was responsible for the Sunni Awakening, that's a serious gaffe. Somebody who really understands the past few years of history in Iraq just wouldn't make a mistake like that.

Obama makes verbal flubs as often as anyone (57 states, "eight or ten years," the banking committee thing), but he almost never makes genuine gaffes. The reason is simple: he's a very sharp, very grounded politician who's exactly the opposite of an empty suit. As M.J. Rosenberg says today, "He's smart. He reads. He knows his sh*t."

I'll be curious to see if this meme manages to ooze its way upward into the mainstream press, but I doubt it. It's just too dumb. I think the wingosphere would be better off sticking to the messiah schtick.

EAST COAST BIAS WATCH....The Wilder Effect? I thought it was the Bradley Effect. LA's guy was first, after all.

POSTSCRIPT: Google backs me up: 3,820 hits for Wilder Effect compared to 44,900 hits for Bradley Effect. Take that, Virginia.

POSTSCRIPT 2: Still, good to know it doesn't exist anymore, regardless of what it's called.

THE WILLIE LOMAN DEMOGRAPHIC....I suppose this campaign poster for John McCain is mockable on a lot of different levels, but if you want to know what it reminds me of (and you do, don't you?), it's those Successories™ themed motivational posters that have been such an object of sport over the past couple of decades. You know the ones: "Excellence," "Determination," "Leadership," etc. etc. Right? And while the lazy bastards at despair.com probably won't come up with their own jeering take on McCain's poster, that doesn't mean you can't. Just go here and create your own.

Still, let's face it: as my wife keeps reminding me, there's a demographic that loves this stuff. Just like there's a demographic that doesn't appreciate sarcastic young whippersnappers and sympathizes with McCain's difficulty in learning how to use the internet. The problem is that it's a fairly small demographic and they're all going to vote for McCain already. Everyone else just snickers at this stuff.

MORE CAMPAIGN MUCK....Chris Orr suggests that John McCain ought to quit whining about the amount of press coverage Barack Obama is getting:

The truth is that, while the inordinate coverage of Obama hurts McCain in some ways, it also dramatically decreases the costs of his mistakes. What exactly are the stories McCain wishes the press had paid more attention to during the last few weeks? His mathematically irreconcilable economic promises? Adviser Phil Gramm's "nation of whiners" comment and job at subprime abettor (and alleged tax-evasion specialist) UBS AG? Surrogate Carly Fiorina's confusion over McCain's stance on whether insurance plans should cover birth control? McCain's suggestion that he somehow knows what Maliki wants better than Maliki does? The string of gaffes in his presumed area of expertise (Sunni vs. Shia, Somalia vs. Sudan, Czechoslovakia, the "Iraq-Pakistan border," etc.)?

The truth is, when you're running a campaign as weak as McCain's has been, in a political environment as hostile to the GOP as this one, the less attention anyone pays to you the better off you probably are.

True enough, but "better off" only means he loses in November by a little bit rather than a landslide. An even better strategy would be to do something genuinely worthy of press coverage. Accusing Obama of being a poltroon or a genocide flip-flopper probably isn't it, but surely McCain can come up with something that's (a) newsworthy but (b) doesn't irrevocably ruin his reputation for decency at the same time? I suspect that firing Steve Schmidt would be a good place to start, but that's just a guess.

BUSINESS TRAVEL....In recent decades, the cost of air travel has decreased and so has the service. MattY sees dark forces at work:

But what's missing from this analysis is the executive suite. This is where folks have been able to give their employees a de facto pay cut in terms of subjecting them to cheaper, lower-quality air travel and plow the profits thereby gained into corporate jets and first class tickets. A sweet deal for them, indeed. In other words, business travelers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your missed connections!

I'm totally on board with populist CEO bashing, but I'm pretty sure this isn't right. Compared to, say, 30 years ago, travel is indeed a lot cheaper, but the result isn't increased corporate profits, it's more business travel: the white collar wage slaves of 2008 suffer through way more business trips than their fathers did in 1978. That's a bummer, but it's a slightly different bummer than Matt suggests.

NOTE: No, I don't have any figures to back this up. Life's too short. But if anyone wants to point toward some, comments are open.