ORLANDO, Fla. -- John McCain was not just Mitt Romney's warm-up act tonight. He was the warm-up for Puerto Rico Gov. Luis Fortuno, a new Romney endorser, whose arrival heralded the use of new hype-em-up campaign music.

The phrase "the personal is political," coined by second-wave feminists, has been distorted and manipulated far beyond what it was originally meant to describe--basically, it was encouraging women to realize that many of the problems that seem personal are due to political forces of misogyny and sexism--but I can't think of a better opportunity to revive it than in response to this obscenely apoliticized article by Elizabeth Bernstein, writing for the Wall St. Journal, about couples who struggle over nagging. Bernstein admits that women are more likely to be labeled nags than men, but she downplays the problem. More importantly, she frames at as a problem that rises out some mysterious, unchangeable struggle between men and women--despite her claims that it goes both ways, unsurprisingly she could only find examples where the wife was labeled the nag--that has to be mitigated, mainly by the nag doing even more work to seem placating and passive, to avoid annoying her husband.

It is winter again in Cairo. Amid continued civil disobedience, backsliding by the military “transitional” government and souring attitudes, people rightly took time this week to celebrate the rising that ejected Hosni Mubarak’s despotic regime a year ago.

Cullen Murphy’s new book on the Inquisition, God’s Jury, argues that we’re not as great as we think we are. Yes, Murphy says, the Inquisition is behind us, but more of its elements live on than we realize, and sometimes we seem less enlightened than the Inquisitors. Consider, as Murphy does here, the Bush administration’s view of torture: