What a difference seven and a half years make. In the spring of 2003, the United States invaded Iraq, nominally to suss out weapons of mass destruction being amassed by the killer-dictator Saddam Hussein.

No such weapons turned up. Saddam Hussein was toppled, then hunted down and hanged. And the United States slogged through its long and costly commitment to Iraq: early three-quarters of a trillion dollars, nearly 5,000 American lives, and the lives and livelihoods of many tens of thousands of Iraqis.

U.S. combat troops have just left Iraq, as President Obama’s Oval Office address noted, but today we talked about what the United States and Iraq have gained from this. Not much, is what most of you think.

Former U.S. ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker agreed that it would be a long time until Iraq can achieve a recognizable and stable democracy and the United States can reap any benefit from that – years in which the U.S., as the Washington bureau chief of Al Jazeera International pointed out, has lost standing and much of whatever support it had in the Mideast.

Do please go to the Patt Morrison page and read the many comments there, sad, skeptical and dispirited, for the most part, over a war that to your way of thinking cost so much and netted so little. The good-versus-bad casting of Saddam Hussein is out of synch with the West’s nuanced history when it comes to his longstanding and bloody tyranny in his own country, a reign that nonetheless sometimes provided a counterweight to Iranian ambitions and to Muslim extremism, like banning most Sharia courts. Those were among the reasons the U.S. had a rather a cordial relationship with Iraq during some of the 1980s.

Many of you questioned why, if the United States was committed to defeating murderous tyrants, it didn’t try to oust Pol Pot in Cambodia, or Moammar Qadafi in Libya -- and why the coup attempt the United States had urged Iraqis to stage against Saddam Hussein after the first Gulf war was not backed to the hilt by the U.S. government, and failed.

This week’s departure of combat troops is not, as has been so widely pointed out, an occasion for high-fiving or ‘’mission accomplished’’ declarations, but a somber watershed in the history of a war whose costs are immediately obvious but whose benefits to this country leave much still to be understood, much less realized.

I’m still being buttonholed by listeners who were tickled at our coverage last week of the 90th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution – by one vote, cast by a young Tennessee Republican who said doing what his mother asked him to.

The 19th Amendment meant that American women finally got the right to vote almost 150 years after the Declaration of Independence. It’s hard for women now to imagine the legal status of women in the 19th century – which is to say, virtually none. Not being able to vote was only one of many bars. Women could be denied legal rights to property, to contracts, even to their own children; husbands could abuse them with virtual impunity, control their comings and goings.

Women who crusaded to get the vote were mocked, reviled, arrested and tormented in prison – and while nowadays American women are as negligent about exercising the franchise as men [GOP gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman’s lackadaisical record of not voting in the state she wants to govern is a contentious campaign point], women’s suffrage has meant [hello again, Ms. Whitman] that women have been elected to public office in slowly – very slowly – growing numbers. Still, women hold fewer than 20% of the seats in the United States Congress, where California Democrat Nancy Pelosi holds the powerful speakership of the House of Representatives.

Let's begin with a rule and a caveat: never, ever insult the Starbucks barista.

An English professor was, according to the New York  Post, escorted off the coffee house premises by New York's finest, reportedly for yelling at and then potty-mouthing a Starbucks employee; the prof told the Post that "linguistically, it's stupid" that Starbucks expected her to specify no cheese or butter when she ordered a multigrain bagel. "I refused to say 'without butter or cheese,' " is the way she put it to the Post. ``When you go to Burger King, you don't have to list the six things you don't want."  

She lost it, the story goes, and wound up yelling an anatomical epithet at the barista.

Well. For one thing, you'd expect a professor of English to have many more vocabulary options. And for another, there are so very many reasons not to holler at these hard-working service folks, not the least of which is that we may all just be one more economic downturn away from working on their side of the counter.

That being said, I am in the prof's corner when it comes to her expressed dislike for the "venti, grande" size labels Starbucks uses. McDonald's or Starbucks can deploy whatever focus-grouped, marketing-driven labels they wish, but when you sell three sizes of anything, they are, by definition, small, medium and large, which is how I order my coffee.

Americans' resistance to anything in a "small" except in dress sizes, lest we feel we're not getting our money's worth, has resulted in a small Starbucks coffee being called a "tall." I haven't been to a fast-food places in a while, but I don't remember seeing "small" on the menus.

Still, I'll only be seriously worried when someone rewrites the tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears to describe the ursines as "Large, Super-Sized and Big Gulp."

Now, on to real news: on today's program, UCI law school dean Erwin Chemerinsky walks us through how it is that judges of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decided to say "don't" to a renewal of same-sex "I dos," and ordered more legal groundwork in the Prop. 8 case -- and why same-sex marriage supporters aren't altogether displeased with that.

I can predict right here, right now, what Wednesday’s big news will be --

The long-awaited federal district court judge’s ruling in San Francisco on California’s same-sex marriage ban. We'll announce it right here on the air on this program.

The same-sex marriage ban has been brewing in a number of states for a few years, and in California’s state courts for ten years, as far back as the Proposition 22, California Defense of Marriage Act in 2000.

In 2008, Prop. 8 amped up the argument, and the case went from being a state to a federal matter when opponents of Prop. 8 took it to Judge Vaughan Walker’s courtroom.

Judge Walker has been hearing and weighing evidence about Prop. 8 for what seems like ages now, and however he rules, this one really will – as you always hear people threaten over a traffic ticket – go all the way to the Supreme Court.

Whatever you have to say about the ruling, you’ll be able to say it on the air on this program – and blog it on the Patt Morrison page, too. I can’t remember running into anyone who’s lukewarm on this subject.

And ... no kids? No problem! Compared to thirty years ago, twice as many women are choosing not have children at all. Are you among them? What are the reasons, and the pluses and minuses to being child-free? Sure want to hear from you about this one.

You know, I pride myself on being politically au courant but I didn’t even know Zsa Zsa Gabor’s husband was running for governor of California – until now, when he decided not to run for governor any more.

The health of his wife, says Prince Frederic von Anhalt, dictates that he drop out of the race, which he had entered as an independent, on a platform of legalizing marijuana, prostitution and Cuban cigars.

[Herr or HH von Anhalt, your choice – he was the son of a German cop but took his title when he was adopted at the age of 37 in a business transaction – had already made his candidacy otherwise notable as far as I'm concerned. California has for decades been laudably progressive about banning the sale and importation of products made from imperiled species, from polar bears to exotic cats and reptiles. In January, alligator and crocodile joined the verboten list. The would-be gov announced his candidacy wearing alligator-skin cowboy boots.]

If by some weird chance he had been elected, at least California voters would already have had their ears attuned to a governor with a Mittel-European accent.

No matter how bad the week has been, Comedy Congress perks everyone up -- if you didn't hear it during the program, go online. Go ahead -- give yourself a treat, and a laugh! Alonzo Bodden, Ben Gleib and Greg Proops make magic when they make mock.

And, truth to tell, it has been a pretty bad week; a Pew Center poll shows that Americans are pretty cranky about virtually every institution, from government to business to the news media. This is the worst siege the economy's had since the Depression, and the latest economic numbers don't show things getting much better any time soon. Do we have good reason to be disaffected with all of our institutions, or are we being, in the words of a Slate article, ''American hypocrites,'' who've come to expect and demand a comfortable, good life and government goodies as part of it -- but don't like to pay for any of it, and are outraged that we're being asked to?

Believe me, it's a topic we're not done with by a long shot. We'll talk about it again on the air soon, and in the meantime, inveigh away here on the Patt Morrison page.

November's getting closer, and a man named John Marcotte hopes to close in on getting the million or so signatures he needs to put on the ballot an initiative to ban divorce in California. Don't go get new glasses -- you read it right. Ban divorce in California. He's leveraging off Prop. 8 with the idea that if we truly want to protect the institution of marriage, we should go all the way -- not just prohibit same-sex marriage but see to it that married couples stay together. Dozens of you had plenty to say about this on the air and now on the Patt Morrison page. If this riles you, go online and say so. We'll update you as his initiative moves closer -- or not -- to a ballot in a polling place near you.

Be sure to listen to me with Brendan and Rico on ''Dinner Party Download'' this weekend talking about diagnosing Americans' degrees of happiness  via Twitter.

http://www.publicradio.org/columns/dinnerpartydownload/2010/07/weekly-dinner-party-downloads.html

Some of you may have seen the Peabody-winning documentary on PBS earlier this year about the Chandler family dynasty in Los Angeles, founders of the LA Times and almost as powerful a shaper of the LA landscape as a seven-point earthquake. I moderated an event at the Central Library recently about the documentary, and if you didn't get to be there, here's the next best thing: a podcast of it!

Library event about the Chandlers of LA

''Rave on,'' sang Buddy Holly.

Not so fast, says LA County supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky.

A 15-year-old girl died of an evident drug overdose after the Electric Daisy music festival at the Coliseum. The doctor in charge of the California Hospital Medical Center emergency room is Dr. Marc Futernick, who had a lot of sharp criticism of rave events on the program today.

Raves, music festivals -- whatever you call them, he says, they always send far more people to the emergency room than other music events. Listen to him online on the Patt Morrison page, describing the human damage he saw in the emergency room -- including a festival-goer who had been trampled and left with spinal injuries. She still bore shoe-marks when she came in.

Drugs like Ecstasy circulate at these events, and one caller we didn't have time to get on the air agreed with Dr. Futernick about the dehydrating effects of such drugs. The caller said water bottles aren't allowed into the events, and inside, a bottle of water costs $7 -- probably not where partying teenagers would spend their money. Indeed, Dr. Futernick said one patient had swiped a water bottle from someone else -- it was spiked with drugs.

Supervisor Yaroslavsky wants a moratorium on future raves at the Coliseum, but a lot of you stuck up for them and said it's about individual responsibility. But still -- why do raves, call them what you will, send more people to hospitals proportionally than other concerts do? Got any ideas? Set them down here.

And some of you really blew your stack at us for having John Yoo on today with conservatives' reasons to oppose Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court.

Folks, here's the point: not only did he write about this very topic in the New York Times, but like him or not, agree with him or not, he was a major architect for years of Bush Administration policy about presidential authority and the ''unitary executive'' idea of broader presidential powers. What he did then is still influencing constitutional theorizing now.

Next time, the ''beauty bias.'' It's illegal to discriminate on the grounds of religion or race, but the fat, the short and the unattractive feel discrimination every day -- in the workplace and in their paychecks. Can the law look out for them, too? Should it? That's what we'll want to hear from you about, so make those phones ring like a Salvation Army volunteer standing at a Christmas kettle!

-- Patt Morrison