Category: The Dish

Sydney, Australia, after a hail-storm, 3.30 pm.

Gaithersburg, Maryland, 4 pm.

by David Weigel

Director George Romero, jumping for joy about the greenlighting of his newest zombie epic:

It has my sensibility, my sense of socioeconomic satire. And it has my zombies! They’re not rushing around — they’re gonna be moving slow.

by David Weigel

On first glance, this campaign site by James Hill, "the only Pirate and truly independent candidate" for Congress who "no bounty from any Person, Party, Organization or Corporation," is exactly what you’d expect. Equal parts stupid and crazy.

I would have your wife right in front of you. I would smoke the last of your glaucoma medication. Then I will surely drink your liquor cabinet dry. However, know this my friend. I will never break an oath to uphold the public trust. My affidavit will be signed in my own blood. A Pirates crimson mark, with real binding effects into my after life. Laugh if you will then ask yourself if you could do it.

Yeah, whatever. Not that impressive, in this era of "YouTubes of the Day," until you realize Hill is running for Congress in Iowa. Which is, relatively speaking, totally landlocked.

by Ana Marie Cox

Interested in a webcast of me debating Pluto’s demotion to non-planet status with Ann Althouse? Of course you are! Whole thing here. I think I get unusually indignant here.    

— Matthew Yglesias

UPDATE: Co-guest blogger David notes that Blogginghead.tv is ALWAYS boring and quotes Reason’s head rebel, Nick Gillespie: "The first time I saw that site, I thought I’d stumbled across a lost act of Waiting for Godot."

UPDATE: In case you were wondering, any level of indiganation over the demotion of Pluto to non-planet status is "unusual."

 

Gareth Keenan Invetigates (not a typo). A classic from the BBC’s "The Office." If you’re watching this at the office at lunchtime, you’ll understand.

by David Weigel

Israelis to their Knesset leadership: Drop dead.

The Israeli government came under increased pressure today with the publication of a newspaper poll showing that for the first time a majority want Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to resign over perceived failings in his handling of the war with Hizbullah.A poll in the mass-circulation Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper showed 63% want Mr Olmert to go.

The defence minister, Amir Peretz, appears even more vulnerable with 74% calling for his resignation, while 54% want the chief of staff, Lieutenant General Dan Halutz, to resign as well.

Who’s going to break it to the Israelis that their undermining of the prime minister is emboldening the enemy? Ken Mehlman to Tel Aviv, ASAP!

UPDATE: Philip Klein at the American Spectator makes a valid point:

That comparison makes some sense and I’ve personally never made the "don’t criticize the president during wartime" argument because I know that if I disagreed with the president, I wouldn’t want to be silent. But a crucial difference is that

Israel

is a parliamentary system in which elections can be held at any time. So, by calling for Olmert to go, there’s a better chance that a new government will be put in place. And that’s quite common. However, in the American form of government, barring an extraordinary set of circumstances, a president who gets elected is going to serve out a full four years. Only once has a president been forced to resign, and it had nothing to do with policy. So, by not just criticizing but villainizing the president, you’re just weakening someone who, like it or not, is going to be in power through the next election.

The dynamics of Israeli and American politics are different, sure, but not all criticism of the president is "villainizing." Long-term, honest public pressure can force an administration to make changes or change course on a failed policy. It works on domestic issues: witness the Porkbusters campaign, which has rapped the president and Congress without apologies in an effort to shame them into cutting spending. The American public has been clamoring for a change of course in Iraq for months now; I think the GOP could have done all of us a favor by responding and opening investigations into the conduct of war, instead of resorting to the "you’re undermining the president/troops" political attacks.

by David Weigel

A report from Alabama:

I’m a resident of Birmingham, Alabama; an acquaintance of Patricia Todd’s; and a longtime foot soldier for various Democratic Party causes down here (I worked my tail off for the Kerry campaign two years ago and am helping out one of our Democratic candidates for a statewide judicial race). I know quite a few people at various levels  of the state party organization, and your post on Patricia, particularly the implication that the state Democratic Party was involved in a comprehensive attempt to get her purged from the House seat she’d won fair and square, is inaccurate.

Not that the truth is much more flattering, but this categorically is not an anti-gay crusade on the part of Todd’s opponents. Rather, this has to do with the fact that the 54th House District had long been held by African-American representatives but was won by a white woman, and one man, Joe Reed, decided he didn’t like it.

Dr. Reed is, as the New York Times article states, highly influential in the state Democratic Party, but by no means do his various opinions reflect the official stance of the  party as a whole. In fact, one of the top three state Party officials testified at the Democratic subcommittee hearing that the obscure finance-report-filing rule hadn’t been complied with by ANY candidate in years, so there was no point in arbitrarily invoking it now. But Joe Reed’s going to do what Joe Reed’s going to do, and so now we’re stuck in the current situation.

None of this is to say that Dr. Reed and Gaynelle Hendricks’s supporters haven’t behaved abominably, because they have. And again, Reed’s influence in the state party apparatus is considerable. But your post gives the heavy implication that the entire state party is somehow anti-gay and that the effort to deny Patricia her seat is official policy, and that simply isn’t the case.

I hope you’ll post a correction or a clarification of this either on Hit & Run or on Sullivan’s blog, because we here in Alabama have to take enough crap as it is from Democrats and Republicans alike in the rest of the country about being backward and hate-filled; we don’t need inaccurate reports from "outsiders" making matters worse. Again, the truth of this matter is not something I’m the least bit proud of either, but it is not completely as you have described it.

I’ve corrected the post to make it clear the official Democratic party isn’t in charge. This stuff gets lost in translation.

by David Weigel

Alabama was set to elect its first openly gay state representative this fall, after  Patricia Todd won the primary for a safe Birmingham seat the GOP wasn’t even contesting. But Todd is being knocked out of the race by… quick, guess. An injunction by Roy Moore? Pat Robertson’s glutamine-powered mindwaves? No, by an enemy in her own Democratic party.

On Thursday, a Democratic Party subcommittee heard a challenge to Ms. Todd’s candidacy on the ground that she had violated a rule that, by party officials’ own admission, has not been enforced in nearly 20 years. The subcommittee voted to disqualify both Ms. Todd and her runoff opponent, a black businesswoman named Gaynell Hendricks, because neither had complied with the rule.
…
When Ms. Todd and Ms. Hendricks wound up in a runoff, things got nasty, by both sides’ reckoning. Anonymous fliers circulated calling Ms. Todd a “confessed lesbian” and applying racial slurs to Ms. Hendricks. The two primary opponents who threw their support to Ms. Todd woke to find signs in their yards accusing them of being “Uncle Toms,” said one of them, Charlie L. Williams.

The district’s voters stood athwart this wave of bigotry and shouted "stop!" One of their fellow Democrats was shouting something else entirely.

(Cross-posted at Hit and Run.)

by David Weigel

North Carolina perma-candidate Vernon Robinson – who prefers to be known as "the black Jesse Helms" – is ramping up his attacks on Rep. Brad Miller (D) by writing eliminationist parodies of 1960s TV show themes. I’m really quite serious. Robinson earned a little fame this year with an ad portraying modern America, with its Mes’kins and homosexers, as the Twilight Zone. Andrew blogged that the ad seemed to shoot straight out of "Michelle Malkin’s id."

Well, whose id wants to take responsibility for this?

Come and here me tell about a politician named Brad
He gave illegal aliens everything we had
Gave ’em Social Security and drivers’ licenses too
Free, health care, free lawyers, free lunches at the school
Well the next thing you know old Brad’s a congressman
With all the sneaky aliens eating from his hand
Sugar Daddy Miller’s what they call him in DC
Givin’ them the taxes he stole from you and me

All this in a Democratic seat so safe it’s not ranked in the top 50 most competitive races by National Journal. Pity.