January 2010
As the Dish enters its second full decade, best wishes from me, Chris, and Patrick. (And Aaron, Dusty and Eddy.) We’re taking it easy tomorrow and this weekend.
A reader writes:
This was a very good post. I would urge though, while grieving for all that went wrong in Iraq, and all the needless loss of life, to not give up hoping, and keeping others hoping and working, for a decent outcome there.
The Arab world is not Iran. It lacks the natural political dynamism of Persia. That is why a popular revolution there is so hard. And when you empower...
The more we hear the clearer it is that profound incompetence allowed the trust-fund Nigerian to get on that flight to Detroit. I mean: the fundamentalist’s dad all but begged the CIA to keep tabs on his son.
Many on the Cheney right complain that moderate Muslims do not expose the radicals in their midst. But here we had a moderate Muslim prepared to hand over his own son to prevent...
A shout-out to two media stars: Gretchen Carlson and Mike Allen. Both are tools. Carlson is exposed so totally here as a chilling, hollow, hologram of a human being by Jon Stewart:
Allen, meanwhile, earns a living as a journalist while moonlighting as a spokesman for Dick Cheney’s spittle-flecked attacks on the president as a traitor to his country for not torturing prisoners. The most...
December 2009
Videogum splices together the best viral videos of 2009:
Fox News Fail:
(Rasmussen-free.)
A surprisingly candid December 31 document dump from the CIA.
“I do try to keep my Blogposts non-personal — but on a personal note, although I haven’t talked about him much in recent years except to a few people, I’ve been thinking a lot during the past few weeks about my longtime partner, Darryl. He died after an auto accident two days after our 10th Anniversary. It was quite some years ago, so the good memories remain.
I’m...
(We all followed them. It was, to my mind, easily the most significant event of the year: the seismic movement against the theocratic fascism of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, as they forced a fraudulent hack onto an unwilling populace despite a landslide victory for his foes. What the full consequences will be we still do not know. But this statement by Mousavi in June is as eloquent as it is...
Same as 2008 (though this one is close but too silly) - and a role model for us all, whatever that snarky critical beardities blogger says. More Bruce beardage apres le saut:
Like so many of the choices facing Barack Obama, the Iran conundrum is not of his making but one he has no choice but to confront. I see few ways, alas, in which the US and its allies can prevent Iran getting a nuclear weapon capacity in the near future. Maybe there was a chance earlier this decade, but it seems pretty hopeless to me now. A military attack would be a catastrophe; it would...
A timeless tribute to David Levine by John Updike:
“Besides offering us the delight of recognition, his drawings comfort
us, in an exacerbated and potentially desperate age, with the sense of
a watching presence, an eye informed by an intelligence that has not
panicked, a comic art ready to encapsulate the latest apparitions of
publicity as well as those historical devils who haunt our...
Rasmussen, the Republican polling outfit, does a slew of polls showing the American public eager to leave the Geneva Conventions, leave the UN Convention Against Torture, repeal domestic law and torture terror suspects. Goldfarb all but volunteers to torture him himself. Jennifer Rubin accuses the Obama administration if deliberately abetting terrorism by sticking to the rule of law.
...
Martin Fletcher explains:
Iranians are doing these things not because they are told to, but
because they choose to. For a reviled regime that rules by diktat, that
has to bus in supporters to fill its rallies, that must be a difficult
concept to grasp.
Protests are now common not just in Tehran, but in conservative
cities such as Mashad and Qom. The regime’s use of violence during the
holy...
The cordon sanitaire they placed around Palin is getting tighter as the evidence of her mendacity grows. Here’s the Palin approach to transparency and press freedom:
Sarah Palin’s Wasilla book signing had a few rules. “Per Todd
Palin”, three of us were banned. “Public servants” in their police
uniforms at a “public event” in a “public...
Todd Palin, outraged by something or other:
Full doc at TPM.
The only decent thing to do is to hope for his swift and full recovery so we can get back to exposing his blarney and bile. Get well soonest.
Bruce Bartlett examines just how much worse current legislation on health insurance and taxes is because of Republicans’ refusal to engage the process at all.
A reader writes:
I think Maher’s point about how we aren’t declaring war on cars in
order to stop automobile deaths is an excellent one (and one I’ve been
making for years now).
In 2008 there were 34,017 deaths (and nearly 100,000 major injuries)
related to automobile accidents in the United States. Terrorists would
have to blow up 113 Boeing 777-200s each year in order to kill...
The Dish is so meta: Best New Blogs Of 2009 50 Best Protest Signs 15 Funniest Local News Reports Of 2009 50 Funniest Headlines Of 2009 Most Ridiculous Uses Of Photoshop 10 Biggest Food Network Foodgasms Of 2009 25 Funniest Sketches Of The 2000s Most Memorable Amateur Music Videos Of The 2000s And, of course: Top 20 Internet Lists Of 2009
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 6 am
Here they come:
Hundreds of billions moving into trillions. Dramatic, history-making
numbers. But where is the economic logic behind a stimulus package that
doesn’t fully click in for a number of years? How is every stimulus
dollar spent actually going to stimulate? Why bailouts to institutions
that only hoard the money? How is vast government spending
simultaneously a kind of prudence that...
A friend worried out loud to me the other day, “I spent the last seven months doing this [job] and I have nothing to show for it. If I had known I would have spent seven months and gotten nothing, you can bet I would have done something a lot more fun.”
Ten years ago I wrote this post about the decade that ends today.
The oughts (the “uh-ohs”?) were a tough decade on a...
Assorted links:1. The greatest strength of America is the people who want to live there — its diversity and immigration.2. 25 minute video presentation from Michael Clemens on why we should support immigration of all forms, and debunking the myths around illegal immigration.3. Best photos of 2009 from the LA Times.4. How to prevent a sneeze if you feel one coming on.5. A restaurant that...
(Perhaps the best posts this year were penned by readers, and the most illuminating, gripping and emotional posts were related to late-term abortion, in the wake of the assassination of the abortion doctor George Tiller. I’ve never seen the power of this medium so clearly and up-close: one personal account caused a stream of others. How could old-school reporting have found all these women?...
Just when you think it cannot get battier, National Review chooses this moment in time to defend the Crusades. Of course, murdering Muslims is fine and dandy, but, er …:
Of course there were attacks on several Jewish communities along the
Rhine associated with the First Crusade. However, these were not
committed by one of the main groups, but by several bands of German
stragglers. It is...
That’s what Karzai is claiming:
“The delegation concluded that a unit of international forces
descended from a plane Sunday night into Ghazi Khan Village in Narang
district of the eastern province of Kunar and took 10 people from three
homes, eight of them school students in grades six, nine and 10, one of
them a guest, the rest from the same family, and shot them dead,” said
a...
Assorted links:
1. The greatest strength of America is the people who want to live there — its diversity and immigration.
2. 25 minute video presentation from Michael Clemens on why we should support immigration of all forms, and debunking the myths around illegal immigration.
3. Best photos of 2009 from the LA Times.
4. How to prevent a sneeze if you feel one coming on.
5. A restaurant...
Rex Wockner has the details.
A question worth asking.
Jeep as instrument: (Hat tip: LikeCool)
A reader writes:
Your cultural hangover seems to extend to embracing unfortunate aspects of British nonsense as well:
`Let the jury consider their verdict,’ the King said, for about the twentieth time that day. `No, no!’ said the Queen. `Sentence first – verdict afterwards.’
Obama has already proved he’s not Bush, otherwise he would be clubbing down the press and political...
“As a Christian organization, Focus on the Family Action encourages pro-family policies. As such, we respect the desire of the Ugandan people to shield their nation from the promotion of homosexuality as morally equivalent to one-man, one-woman marriage. That said, the purpose of laws is to make societies safer, and there is legitimate concern that the legislation being debated in Uganda will...
(I joined the gay rights movement publicly in 1989 with a cover story for TNR, making the case for marriage equality. I had been out for a while, and made the same case in the Advocate a year earlier, but that was my first foray into public advocacy for civil rights for gay people. Looking back, I am in shock and disbelief at the progress we have made. In much of the modern world, the argument is...
A reader writes:
This sentence stood out to me especially: “What Obama is doing is trying to cement this new liberal era in
the conservative institutional structure of American government.’
The key words here in that sentence for me is “conservative
institutional structure.” This essential nature of American government
is something that I don’t believe that the...
John Cole and ED Kain cannot get their head around my call for Napolitano to be fired. It may be a cultural hangover from my British youth but in my view, when government reveals itself as incompetent in tracing potential terrorists, even when basically handed them on a plate, someone needs to take the fall. That person need not be directly personally responsible for the mistake, but since the...
Here’s an interesting idea that does not rely on government but can put pressure on the big four banks that just robbed us blind, threw so many out of work and are now refusing to make loans to people who need them: take your money out of the big banks and place it in community banks, ones that were not responsible for the meltdown. You can find local alternatives here. Just because...
Self-explanatory:
My column assesses the impact of Obama after a year of political struggle, awful choices, and grinding, if as yet unacknowledged, success:
As with most attempts to judge Obama, a little perspective helps. So let’s review, shall we? This is the biggest single piece of social legislation in 40 years. The Congressional Budget Office predicts it will indeed insure 30m people.
And this is only...
I have no real claim to movie judgment, and have been forced into cine-cramming in the last few years by my movie-obsessed other half and a close friend whose tolerance for various forms of 1970s camp and cult far exceeds my own. But I did enjoy three movies this year more than most. By far the funniest was “The Hangover,” a genuinely goofy male movie that almost equaled Pineapple...
MMMMMmmmm.
There are reports of their fleeing Tehran, now besieged by bussed-in pro-Khamenei fundamentalists, and reports of their being placed under arrest. The regime is clearly trying to have them killed:
Taghi Karroubi said guards assigned to his father, Mehdi Karroubi,
stopped providing security for him Monday, apparently on police orders.
The measure means that the elder Karroubi cannot go outside...
An interesting glimpse into the genius of anger that is Larry Kramer:
Who is the enemy now? Not that old standby, the medical Establishment,
which gave him a liver and thus his life. Nor his insurance company;
Kramer gratefully pays almost nothing for the thousands of dollars’
worth of anti-viral and anti-rejection drugs delivered monthly to his
door. As for homophobia, it may now be too diffuse...
Make of this what you will:
Iranian Supreme National Security Council has ordered a complete check-up of the jet which is on standby to fly Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his family to Russia should the situation in Iran spiral out of control. The order, to the Pasdaran Revolutionary Guard Corps, was dated on Sunday, 27 December, the second day of recent unrests in Iran. The...
Worst Logo Ever: 402,400 page views
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Death Panels Without the Panels: 91,709 page views
To Our Readers:...
Just released on the web: the full scene of that astonishing moment when a group of baseej is surrounded by the crowd, and disarmed. If this doesn’t unnerve Ahmadi, what will? And it makes a new and ante-upping move by the regime more likely:
Kristol is chomping at the bit for a waterboarding.
For most products and services, most of the time, people sign up for the Cheapest Reliable Alternative Plan. If everything appears to be the same, then of course they’re going to pick the cheapest one that’s good enough.In the face of this understandable strategy, you have a few choices:You can be cheapest (difficult to sustain).You can be more reliable (great if you can figure this...
Tucson, Arizona, 4.25 pm
Yes, Palin can’t even handle a friendly sit-down with the last surviving reality-based cable news outlet. Here’s the sad program note: Sarah Palin signs copies of her book, Going Rogue: An American Life at Joseph Beth Booksellers in Cincinnati. BookTV visits the bookstore and records Gov. Palin’s opening remarks, talks to attendees in line at the signing, and discusses the...