Quick reactions to some headline issues of the day.

If I were a professional television pundit, my career would depend on appearing to know the answer to everything, so I'd have to advance whole opinions with ideological commitment and full voice. But I'm not, so I don't.

None of these are fully formed opinions, and some are very skimpy indeed. I might well change my mind after more thought or more information, but it's my gut reaction right now.

Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff: No impression

Hillary Clinton as secretary of state: Negative. I'm not a big fan of Hillary, and foreign policy is what I liked least about her husband's administration. Bush's imperialism was worse than Clinton's only in its scale and in its bungling. In terms of vision and ideology, Clinton might well be worse.

Eric Holder as attorney general: Positive. I'd never heard of him before this year. From what little I've read, he sounds promising on the issue of making the justice department more devoted to rule of law than political muscle for the current executive, which is what I'm most interested in. We'll see.

Robert Gates as defense secretary: Mixed but net negative. Continuity is nice. I'm not sure I see much "bipartisanship" here, though, since Gates, in spite of being a Bush crony, isn't a Republican. Like Richard Clarke, he's a career bureaucrat ready to work with either party. What gives me pause about Gates is that he's a longtime CIA man who, as far as I can tell, has alwats supported the CIA notion of "intelligence", whereby the goal is to supply information to support predetermined political decisions, as opposed to seeking whatever information is the truth in order to decide policy based on it.

Tom Daschle as HHS secretary and "health czar": No impression.

(Lest I give the wrong idea, as of this moment the only one of those whose appointment has actually been officially announced is Rahm Emanuel. As far as I know, the rest are only being rumored, with varying degrees of certainty.)

Ted Stevens: I'm certainly glad he lost his Senate election. As for his criminal trial, I don't much care. I think Stevens is a prime example of Michael Kinsley's law of scandal (from his TRB days): The scandal is not what's illegal; the scandal is what's legal. Stevens was a terrible senator because of all the perfectly legal influence-peddling he's done over the years, and it's for that that I want to give him the boot, not for the rare occasion when he slipped up and accidentally broke the law, too. The actual charge he's up on is rather petty — not even any actual corruption or bribery, but merely failure to report income. I don't know the details of the case, but if it's overturned, I wouldn't immediately assume it's a miscarriage of justice.

Clearly, Uncle Ted has done a world of bad, but none of it is actionable, so instead they're nailing him for this little impropriety because that's all they've got. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I don't like to see someone get away with real corruption, and I like the message that no one is above the law. But that should be about equal accountability before the law. I don't like it when a celebrity gets away with something a normal person couldn't, but by the same token if a celebrity is singled out and prosecuted for something that others routinely get away with (eg, Martha Stewart), I don't like that either.

I just hope that Stevens' trial and appeal are properly decided on the law, separate from any political consideration, whatever that turns out to be. If they're going all hard-ass on some minor and questionable point only as a proxy for other political misdeeds we think he's done, that's sailing awfully close to political persecution of the Don Siegelman variety, and I don't think that's a good thing.

Gay Marriage: Mixed, but lukewarm in favor of it. I would have voted against Prop 8 if I were a Californian, but I'm not particularly outraged that it passed, and I find some of the rhetoric after the loss to be a little over the top (though I suppose that's par for any political course). For me, the only part of this that's a real public issue is that straight couples have access to a large collection of legal rights (and responsibilities) that same-sex couples can't get, which is unfair. To me, that's the part that needs to be fixed. So long as there's some sort of domestic partnership or civil union providing the same rights, I'm pretty much content that there's no gross injustice going on. To whatever extent marriage is more than just a collection of legal rights, I don't think it's really the public's business.

I still incline toward the semi-radical idea that the real answer here is to get government out of the marriage business altogether. Whether you're married is a matter for you and your family and your church; all that the government should care about is the legal rights, which is to say civil unions for all. Although my own personal relationship with the institution of marriage has changed drastically not once, not twice, but thrice since then, my political position hasn't really changed since I wrote this, almost five years ago.

Bailout for Detroit: Mixed, but primarily against. By default I am against bailouts, but I'm open to them if one can demonstrate a public good. So far I'm not seeing it. Megan McArdle has been particularly good on this issue, I think. Especially this post, which I loved both as policy and as poetry.

What I wish most of all on this issue (and on pretty much any other) is that the rhetorical standard for discussing it were not to pick pro or con and make the case, but rather to list all the possible goals that the program might achieve and sort them according to whether they are or aren't a good reason to commit public funds. When I read the various arguments, I sometimes think "that might be nice for those people, but it doesn't serve the general public interest" or, other times, "if it actually achieved that, that would indeed be a genuine public interest". If we can first seek a consensus on what a program should and shouldn't do, we can then use those goals to tailor a program that's actually good. By arguing first about whether to have a bailout, and only afterward deciding how to do it, I worry that we'll just end up throwing money at whoever's political interest is best lobbied for.

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