"’Obama by double digits’ in N.C.: Predicted by a blogger using a sophisticated model that ignores … what’s been happening in the campaign. Like Rev. Wright. I predict this person is wrong!" – Mickey Kaus, Monday, who predicted that John Kerry would be humiliated by early defeat in the 2004 primary election and that 9/11 would be out of the headlines by Thanksgiving of the same year.
Category: Awards
Poseur Alert
"This piece — in its textual and sculptural forms — is meant to call into question the relationship between form and function as they converge on the body. The artwork exists as the verbal narrative you see above, as an installation that will take place in Green Hall, as a time-based performance, as a independent concept, as a myth and as a public discourse.
It creates an ambiguity that isolates the locus of ontology to an act of readership. An intentional ambiguity pervades both the act and the objects I produced in relation to it. The performance exists only as I chose to represent it. For me, the most poignant aspect of this representation — the part most meaningful in terms of its political agenda (and, incidentally, the aspect that has not been discussed thus far) — is the impossibility of accurately identifying the resulting blood. Because the miscarriages coincide with the expected date of menstruation (the 28th day of my cycle), it remains ambiguous whether the there was ever a fertilized ovum or not. The reality of the pregnancy, both for myself and for the audience, is a matter of reading," – Aliza Shvarts. Oy.
Poseur Alert
"You know, my dad took me out behind the cottage that my grandfather built on a little lake called Lake Winola outside of Scranton and taught me how to shoot when I was a little girl. You know, some people now continue to teach their children and their grandchildren. It’s part of culture. It’s part of a way of life. People enjoy hunting and shooting because it’s an important part of who they are. Not because they are bitter," – Senator Clinton, squeezing every last drop out of bitter-gate. Varmints, if you will.
Malkin Award Nominee
By Patrick
"[Y]ou have to understand the mindset of a lot of these feminists and women. They think they’re owed this — just like Obama supporters think they’re owed this. These women have paid their dues. They’ve been married two or three times; they’ve had two or three abortions; they’ve done everything that feminism asked them to do. They have cut men out of their lives; they have devoted themselves to causes and careers. And this — the candidacy of Hillary Clinton — is the culmination of all of these women’s efforts. And if it gets stolen from them [by] a rookie, radical black guy who can’t tell the time of day, they are going to be so miffed," – Rush Limbaugh.
Award glossary here.
Von Hoffmann Award Nominee
By Patrick
"[Obama] has just suffered too severe a blow with the white, progressive creative class that he needed to win [Iowa]. After five months of losing ground among this group, the vicious, deserved, and nearly blogosphere-wide criticism of Obama today seems like too much to overcome. It is the nail in the coffin for his campaign. He just can’t win the primary without those voters, and I don’t see how he gets them back now. It is ironic, really. During 2006 and early 2007, I always thought that the netroots would end up being the downfall of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. However, it turns out that losing the netroots has been the downfall of Barack Obama’s campaign…Hopefully, at the very least, the downfall of Obama’s campaign will serve as a warning to anyone else in the Democratic Party who wants to harness the activism of the netroots to win, but who distances him or herself from the netroots in order to look palatable to the establishment," –Chris Bowers, October 29, in response to the fallout over Mcclurkin.
Yglesias Award Nominee
"Today I endorse Barack Obama for president of the United States. I believe him to be a person of integrity, intelligence and genuine good will. I take him at his word that he wants to move the nation beyond its religious and racial divides and to return United States to that company of nations committed to human rights…
No doubt some of my friends will see this as a matter of party or intellectual treachery. I regret that and I respect their disagreement. But they will readily agree that as Republicans, we are first Americans. As Americans, we must voice our concerns for the well-being of our nation without partisanship when decisions that have been made endanger the body politic. Our president has involved our nation in a military engagement without sufficient justification or clear objective. In so doing, he has incurred both tragic loss of life and extraordinary debt jeopardizing the economy and the well-being of the average American citizen. In pursuit of these fatally flawed purposes, the office of the presidency, which it was once my privilege to defend in public office formally, has been distorted beyond its constitutional assignment. Today, I do no more than raise the defense of that important office anew, but as private citizen," – Douglas Kmiec, Slate.
To grasp the full integrity of this piece, check out Kmiec’s bio. This isn’t the first time that Kmiec has shown an open mind in this respect. He won an Yglesias Award nomination a month ago on the DIsh. What’s impressive to me is that he does not in any way recant his own theoconservative positions on marriage and abortion, while seeing that there is a lot at stake in this election, and a lot of competing issues to take into account.
Von Hoffmann Award Nominee
"The fact is that U.S. Marines will find more deadly weapons in the first hours of war than the U.N. did in three months," – Victor David Hanson, March 18, 2003. Yes, this is an old one, but this week’s five year anniversary makes it more relevant.
Von Hoffmann Correction?
A reader writes:
Cramer is RIGHT. The caller had an ACCOUNT at Bear Stearns. His question was, “should I take my money out?” Cramer’s answer was: “don’t be silly.” There’s no reason to do that. And Cramer was right about that. The caller doesn’t go down with BSC, if it goes bankrupt. He still owns what he owns. He would just have to move his portfolio over to Fidelity. Now, his portfolio is with JPMorganChase.
Cramer was NOT advising him to stay in BSC stock.
Von Hoffmann Award Nominee
A Dish award glossary can be found here.
Yglesias Award Nominee
"Whatever else he is, Obama is a smart man. His campaign shows that. So I doubt he would repeat Carter’s mistakes when the evidence shows that they failed the tests of both practicality and popularity. The current version of Carterism is too close to the original to be mistaken for something else. In this context, unlike most of my colleagues, I think Obama’s rhetoric of American unity is probably a better guide to his potential presidency than his liberal voting record," – John O’Sullivan, NRO.
The Dish 