All right, so this could just as well be called "In tonight's pages". But stick with us here. There's lots of meaty opining worth lingering over for an intellectual evening meal. The editorial board weighs in on the California Supreme Court's decision to take the case challenging the validity of Prop 8: The board regrets that the Supremes didn't allow the case to "percolate up through the lower courts," but hopes they strike down the gay marriage ban. Then the board veers south to Latin America and urges Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega to work with the opposition movement and designate independent observers to oversee the contested results in the Managua municipal elections.

Over in Op-Ed, it's mostly a presidential program. Historian Joseph Ellis imagines how Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson would react to Barack Obama's election. Lincoln, he suggests, is smiling somewhere. Jefferson, however, is a tougher call. After all, he believed that should blacks ever be freed, it would be best to transport them back to Africa or the Caribbean. Ellis writes:

In the end, I would like to cut Jefferson some slack, assume that his racial prejudices would fall victim to his lifelong urge to be at the cutting edge of liberal reform and that he could embrace Obama as a palpable refutation of his earlier and now anachronistic convictions about color.

Lionel Beehner and Vikram J. Singh also dive into the presidential waters, urging Obama to avoid the pitfalls of basing foreign policy on leaders' personalities. And Columnist Rosa Brooks runs through some of the Bush administration's more noxious executive orders and rules changes. They'll require a "rapid bureaucratic de-mining operation," she says, one best carried out by Clinton veterans. And Patt Morrison wishes mazel tov to Congresswoman Linda Sanchez, writing that the her status as an unwed mother would have been shocking 20 years ago, but times have changed.

AP Photo/Kevin P. Casey