CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- "I'm a journalist," says Diana Gessler, 66. "I journal."

The faithful supporter of Mitt Romney, blissed out after his speech at Astrotech Space Operations, shows me the art book in which she draws pictures of what she sees.

Romney, she said, was the "only adult" in the field. "Newt throws tantrums," she said dismissively. But you know who I really needed to talk to? Her friend Michelle Herbeck, 55, a leader of the Space Coast Patriots. This was the local Tea Party organization, represented by a fan of Mitt Romney.

"There's a lot of misinformation about what the Tea Party wants," she said. "We're against socialism." She wasn't too bothered by Romney's health care compromise in Massachusetts? "That was a state-level reform, and he doesn't want to implement it nationally," she explained. Romney was a businessman, like Rick Scott, the gubernatorial candidate she backed in 2008. (Bill McCollum, the state's former attorney general, was the establishment candidate against Scott; he now backs Gingrich. This might, for high-information voters, be an important strike against the former speaker.)

Herbeck had suffered financially from the Obama administration's NASA cuts. Romney only dealt generically with that issue. "Our space program is an integral part of American exceptionalism!" he said. "I'm not going to come here today and tell you precisely what the mission will be. I'm going to tell you who I'm going to give it to." It was a mighty contrast to Newt Gingrich, who'd come to this area with talk of an eight-year moonshot and permanent colony.

"Newt's being unreasonable," said Herbeck, rolling her eyes. "Anybody can run for president and promise a lot of crap."

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: