The XX Factor: What women really think.

The Obama Straddle, in Three Acts

As riveting images and stories pour out of Iran, the Obama administration's lack of moral clarity today is getting to me. As in:

The State Department asked Twitter to defer maintenance so that Iranians could keep using the site to organize and inform, but Obama could only bring himself to say that he found the violence "deeply troubling," a muted response in the circumstances, as my colleague John Dickerson pointed out.

The administration will announce some benefits for the partners of gay federal employees today, but not full health insurance... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

Indictment to Cheer

The case of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri was No. 1 on my list for Bush holdovers in desperate need of new thinking from the Obama administration. It wasn't a hard call. Al-Marri is the only person arrested in the United States who the government is holding indefinitely in military detention without charges. And now, in a huge switch that makes me feel a whole lot more sure that we've finally made it to a new legal era, al-Marri is about to be indicted. Normally, defense lawyers don't applaud when it's announced that their clients will face charges. But Marri's lawyers have been battling since 2003 to get their client before a judge in the regular old federal-court system.

Those same lawyers will no doubt be incredibly frustrated if the Supreme Court now dismisses al-Marri's constitutional challenge to his detention as moot. If the court had ruled for al-Marri and rejected the sweeping Bush claim of executive power, that would have been enormous vindication. But we don't know what the court would have done. And now we know that the executive branch is capable of doing the right thing.