Month: January 2009

The Dish enters its ninth consecutive year as Best Blog in the Weblog Awards 2008. A record 900,000 votes were cast in all the categories, with the Dish getting 25,000 votes. You did it. I sure didn’t. And since you contribute such an enormous amount to the blog, in terms of feedback, emails, and links, it’s your award too. Congrats to all the other winners too – from Totten and Yon to Silver and Wonkette and all the others. It’s a very impressive roster.

A deep reserve of thanks to the Atlantic, especially James Bennet and David Bradley, who tolerate my enthusiasms with more equanimity than I deserve, to Jessie Roberts who helped evolve the Dish in 2007, to Patrick Appel who keeps the link cupboard fully stocked and gives me the sane and sober pushback I need, to the interns of the past two years, and, casting my mind back to the very beginning, to my old friend Robert Cameron, who created this blog many many years ago and nursed it in the five years of total independence so that it could become what it now is. We don’t rest on laurels here, so it’s time to go back to work. But once more with feeling:

Thanks!

Hugh Hewitt makes a suggestion. Am I hallucinating, or does this actually make sense?:

If President Obama oversees the payout of more than a trillion bucks and cannot point to anything but statistics to show for it in two years, he’ll have a political nightmare on his hands, and he’ll deserve it.  The enormous size of the stimulus is a never-before-seen-in-American-history splurge, and the Democrats thus far show no sign of treating it as other than a vast payout to their friends.

If President Obama was to demand the funding for and enabling legislation to kick start the construction of the dozens of new nuclear power plants this country needs, as well as the wind turbines envisioned by T. Boone Pickens and the grid expansion everyone knows is necessary, not only would he be creating thousands and thousands of great jobs, he’d be powering the U.S. up for a second American century.

At least among straight, burly and horny 17 year olds. A snapshot of cultural change in a high school principal’s office. Pretty funny too:

No, not Palin: the Catholic church. The sex abuse crisis – in which the Vatican became the de facto hub of an interational sexual criminal conspiracy in the 1960s and 1970s – had a special brutality in the frozen north:

The new suit contends that pedophile priests unsuited to serve anywhere else were dumped on Alaska and put in remote villages with little or no law enforcement, making it virtually impossible for anyone to report them. There was a calculated effort at the highest levels of the Jesuit order to "’dump’ these ‘problem priests’ in a location in which the priests could avoid detection and continued to sexually abuse countless Native children," the suit says.

Problem priests from seven Jesuit provinces in the United States as well as four other countries ended up in the rural villages, mostly in Western Alaska, Wall said. "They were specifically targeting the Athabascan and the Yup’ik cultures, because they wouldn’t talk," he said in a telephone interview Wednesday.

Nothing that new, but a reminder of how much evil the Vatican perpetrated for so long.

A reader writes:

I have to take exception to your equation of what’s happening in Gaza right now to neoconservatism.  Of course today’s bombing of the UN facility was a terrible and tragic mistake, and will do nothing to help move the peace process forward.  Of course the entire situation, the deaths of Palestinian civilians, the international outrage, in essence all of the negative results of the Gaza offensive, are sad and unfortunate.  Ultimately, what this comes back to, though, is the bottom-line question of what you would have Israel do?  Hamas will simply never be a reasonable player in the move toward a two-state solution.  Its charter calls for the destruction of Israel, and its stated attitude is that there is no need for a long-term truce, because it won’t be terribly long before Israel is in fact destroyed.

 

No other country on earth would be asked to stand still while its neighbor, bent on its destruction, continuously fires rockets at populated areas.  Removing Hamas from power is going to be ugly and cause tremendous collateral damage, but it’s an absolute pre-requisite for any hope of a lasting peace. 

He’s bragging on Fox. Two things: I’m not sure that Gerry Seib or I would think of ourselves as "liberal columnists." Gerry is a center-right columnist for the Wall Street Journal and … well, let’s just say that I would not have written "The Conservative Soul" if I thought of myself as a liberal (if a very different kind of conservative than the statist, interventionist, big-spending, torture-backing Christianism Kristol favors). Secondly:

They got some coffee in some styrofoam cups.

Actually, we didn’t actually get that. There was some water in a glass jug in the corner. I know Kristol is a fact-free zone, as the New York Times has discovered to its chagrin. But he could make his status-obsessed, narcissistic comments without making shit up.

Dolly Parton and a dancing Swedish corgi. My husband will love this one:

Mark Penn and Karen Hughes invite guests to an Inaugural Brunch.

Obama coopts the old McCain by severing him from the wack-job from Wasilla. More shrewd moves. If the GOP decides to be the pajama party of Palin and Wurzelbacher in response, Obama’s move will look shrewder still.