Is it time to turn back the clock on female suffrage? John Derbyshire explores.
The Atlantic published a similar story:
Ought Women to Learn the Alphabet?
That was from February. 1859. When did conservatives stop standing athwart history yelling "Stop!" to standing athwart history yelling "Rewind!"?
A reader writes:
"T-1000 was made of mushy steel."
Uhhh, technically T-1000 was made of a mimetic poly-alloy.
You're welcome.
Priceless moment in a recent interview:
RD: Okay, do you believe Jesus turned water into wine?
HH: Yes.
RD: You seriously do?
HH: Yes.
RD: You actually think that Jesus got water, and made all those molecules turn into wine?
HH: Yes.
RD: My God.
HH: Yes. My God, actually, not yours. But let me…
RD: I've realized the kind of person I'm dealing with now.
Mr Dawkins, with all due respect, you have no idea. At one point, he realizes that Hewitt's interview is like that of a "prosecuting attorney." If you begin with the premise that you are dealing with someone who is intellectually honest, instead of an apparatchik, you'll soon be disabused. Hewitt's gotcha questions on Dinesh D'Souza, the way he insinuates all sorts of accusations and smears into seemingly innocuous questions, is par for the course. Watching Dawkins slowly realize that his interlocutor is a propagandist and cross-questioner is wonderful. At one point, Dawkins blurts out:
I cannot believe that you’re doing more than just trying to score points.
And make money. Don't forget the money.
The former vice-president and war criminal again assails the president of the United States because he won an election pledging to reverse the dead-end policies of his discredited and incompetent predecessors. One can only concur with Marc Lynch:
Thanks, Dick Cheney – whenever I fret about Obama, you're there to buck me up and remind me of the alternative.
Adam Serwer adds:
The Obama administration raised troop levels in Afghanistan and increased drone strikes in the region (whether one agrees with those choices or not) — to the extent that they haven't implemented a new strategy, they've been following the one the Bush administration put in place for the past eight years give or take. So Cheney is basically admitting that the Bush administration strategy was itself "dithering," which doesn't seem to be a strong point from which to launch criticism.
Cheney claims the Bush administration conducted its own strategy review before they left office that had similar results, but that just seems to bolster my above point: The Bush administration implemented a strategy of "dithering" in Afghanistan for years, and now that he's out of office, Cheney wants to lecture the Obama administration on expediency.
There is also the chilling formula of Cheney speaking of torture as if it were merely a case of hurrying up legitimate and traditional interrogation.
Cheney should recall that the Republican nominee for president past time around believed that Cheney authorized torture, took the position that waterboarding was indisputably torture, and that the Bush administration had grotesquely violated American honor by embracing the tactics of police states and totalitarian regimes. If Cheney travels abroad (which is probably an unwise thing for a war criminal to do), he might understand the depth of the abyss he cast the US's reputation into.
Cheney is fighting against a narrative that will, in due course, cast him in history as one of the most criminal and incompetent officials in American history. It is logical for him to fight in this way, to lie about his record and to attack a sitting president in the vilest way possible while that president and the country remains at war. It is not logical for anyone else to take him the faintest bit seriously.
Except for this: For a former vice-president to do this in real time, and to use this kind of rhetoric, and play with these kinds of stakes – to warn, in fact, than any future terror attack will be blamed on the president, not al Qaeda, and used as partisan tool to get his own allies in power again to prevent justice being brought to him and his criminal cronies – well, it's as despicable as the rest of Cheney's record.
Which is saying something. I wondered if Cheney's record and legacy could get even worse after his eight years of thuggery and incompetence. He's proving every day that it can.
Maddow tweets that she doesn't "know if in US commentary there is a more beautiful writer than Ta-Nehisi Coates" and points to his recent post on obesity, class, and race. Hard to disagree:
When I lived in Brooklyn, the most depressing aspect of my day was the commute back home. The deeper the five train wended into Brooklyn, the blacker it became, and the blacker it became, the fatter it got. I was there among them–the blacker and fatter–and filled with a sort of shameful self-loathing at myself and my greater selves around me. One of the hardest thing about being black is coming up dead last in almost anything that matters. As a child, and a young adult, I was lucky. Segregation was a cocoon brimming with all the lovely variety of black life. But out in the world you come to see, in the words of Peggy Olson, that they have it all–and so much of it. Working on the richest island in the world, then training through Brooklyn, or watching the buses slog down 125th has become a kind of corporeal metaphor–the achievement gap of our failing bodies, a slow sickness as the racial chasm.
A reader writes:
The essence of Buchanan’s fantasy might appear in two words he so breezily flings into a laundry list of alleged societal woes: “rising crime.” After two decades of across-the-board falling crime in the country, these white Americans invariably spot “rising crime.” Count among them my own white mother, who would adore the Buchanan column and who always thinks crime rising to the point of disbelief in official statistics. When I think about it, it might be the essence of this illusory mindset.
“And, of course, my dad had an issue with it in the beginning for altogether different reasons. But he had said, ”You can talk to this Rachel Maddow lady all you want, and you can talk to the gay blogs, I don’t care, but stop talking to the Korean Christian conservative radio stations and newspapers. You know what this makes me look like.” He’s a Southern Baptist minister. My mom’s like, ”You’ve just gone crazy.” She says it all in Korean; it sounds a lot more violent in Korean. [Laughs.] There was a soldier in my unit who came up to me and said, ”Sir, you’ve been talking about gay shit on TV?”
And I was like, yeah, that’s what I was talking about — I was really wondering what he was going to say or what kind of commentary he was going to provide me as one of my soldiers. And he was like, ”That’s awesome shit. You need to get glamour shots and make-up and maybe you should get a cosmetologist….” I was like, you just stop right there because I have no idea what you’re talking about. That’s way too gay, how do you know all this stuff” – Daniel Choi, civil rights activist.
Manchester, New Hampshire, 11.15 am
Gallup declares:
The 9-point drop in the most recent quarter [for Barack Obama's job approval rating] is the largest Gallup has ever measured for an elected president between the second and third quarters of his term, dating back to 1953.
The usual crowd goes wild. But any brief perusal of the data reveal a few things.
The decline in early presidential popularity has been pretty consistent since the 1980s, as American politics became more ideological and partisan. But here's the thing: Reagan at this point was at 57 percent, headed to 51 percent in the fourth quarter. Clinton was at 48 percent. Those two were the last two successful two-term presidents, and they look very similar to Obama. The first Bush was headed up toward 69 percent, only to fail to win re-election. George W. Bush at this point was in the 70s headed to the high 80s, but that was obviously 9/11. Before 9/11, Bush was at 51 percent – not far off Obama right now. And he was not tackling the worst recession in memory, a stratospheric debt (he inherited a surplus) and two failed wars.
"I would like to congratulate you on your inaugural national conference. I believe most American Jews support Israel and want to see it thrive as a Jewish and democratic state. Like you, I believe ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by realizing the vision of two nation state living side by side in peace and security is in the best interests of Israel, the United States, the Palestinians and the region as a whole.
In my view, the discussion which the pro-Israel community of what best advances Israel's cause should be inclusive and broad enough to encompass a variety of views, provided it is conducted in a respectful and legitimate manner. Along the way, we may not agree on everything but I do believe that we must ensure that what unites us as Jews who are committed to Israel's future as a secure, Jewish, and democratic State is far greater than what separates us.
I wish the organizers and the participants much success in the upcoming conference," – Tzipi Livni, Israel's Leader of the Opposition.
The Dish 