Category: The Dish

Tony Blair’s expiration date just got moved up a jot. The Tories now have an eight percent lead over Labour. Blair now has exactly Bush’s approval rating: 31 percent. Money quote from a Labour parliamentary rebel: "We have been eyeball to eyeball, and the prime minister has blinked."

Everyone knows that Gordon Brown will be fighting the next election as Labour leader. And so the next few months become an interminable series of internecine Labour spats, uncertainty, and Machiaveliian maneuvring. That can only help the opposition, now calmly united by the pleasant but, until now largely vacuous, leadership of David Cameron. It seems to me that Blair’s chances for pushing through real reform of pensions and the health service are all but lost. He should quit now, give Brown a chance to prove himself, and give the Brits a year or two to measure the comparative qualities of Brown and Cameron as future prime ministers. Two recent prime ministers hung on to office, past an obvious chance to get out while the going was reasonably good: James Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher. Both regretted their inability to walk away from Number 10. Blair should heed that history and go soon. Like before the summer.

(Photo: Luke MacGregor/AP.)

The faculty vote down Gallaudet’s new president, Jane Fernandes. Money quote:

Fernandes, 49, said she is caught in a cultural debate. "There’s a kind of perfect deaf person," said Fernandes, who described that as someone who is born deaf to deaf parents, learns ASL at home, attends deaf schools, marries a deaf person and has deaf children. "People like that will remain the core of the university."
Fernandes is married to a retired Gallaudet professor who can hear. So can the couple’s two children. Some people who were deaf at birth can learn to speak through intensive speech therapy.

First, a student uprising. Then a faculty revolt. Identity politics is clearly far from over.

My essay on the subject is currently the most emailed piece on Time.com. Thanks for your many emails. Keep them coming. I’ll address several critical points in the next few days. 800 words is the start of a conversation, not the end of one.

(Photo of Tim and Beverly LaHaye by Thomas Michael Alleman for Time.)

The debate over the relationship between tax cuts and spending increases continues here.

Yes, my corporate overlords have now added them. Most bloggers know what they are; and most experienced blog-readers do as well. For those who don’t: they’re basically a way for you, the reader, to see what other blogs are saying or not saying about various posts on this site. If you click on the "Trackbacks" doohickey beneath each item, you’ll get a fresh page with the item and various responses from various blogs. It’s like a comments section, with the entry-barrier of being a blogger yourself. If you want to follow a controversy or discussion raised in a post, click the trackbacks link (the number attached to it represents the number of links), and follow your nose. If you’re a blogger and want to attract readers to your site, linking helps bring my readers to your site – so link away and join the fun. Win-win. We’re doing it as an experiment. But it’s another little connecting thread between the MSM and the blogosphere. May the conversation blossom.

He says he didn’t approve of the inflammatory, partisan copy on the jacket of his book, "The Party of Death," that completely conflates such a "party" with the Democrats. He "didn’t much like it," he says.

King’s College, London, just out put their latest PDF report on rates of imprisonment in the world. The rates are given as the number of prison inmates per 100,000 people in the population at large. It’s pretty staggering that by far the highest rates of imprisonment occur in the U.S. The U.S. rate is 724 for every 100,000 people – up from 505 in 1992. Of major countries, the only close competitor is Russia with 581, and Cuba at 487. Iran and Israel, to give examples of countries with internal conflict, clock in at 206 and 209 respectively. Most major U.S. allies are in the 130 range or lower. I’m not sure what any of this proves. But this much we can say: the land of the free is also the land of the unfree. Millions of them. Texas, by the way, has an imprisonment rate of well over 1,000. There’s no country on the planet – no dictatorship on earth – as confortable with locking people up as the state of Texas. The detention policies of the current administration may be more understandable in this context.

A rugby-playing reader writes:

Thanks for the Bingham Cup mention in your blog Mr. Sullivan. However, there are some niggling points to, well, point out. First, tournament play is broken down to 20 minute halves (from league-standard 40 minute halves) and, as a veteran of the 2004 Cup, the cumulative amount of playing time for most teams will exceed three hours not 90 minutes.
There will also be lots of beer during the matches, if the UK/Ireland teams have anything to say about hospitality.

Ah, yes. The memories of seven years in high school rugby come flooding back.

More reporting on Africa’s greatest nightmare – from Beliefnet.

"As Weitz’s film, ["American Dreamz] implies, we now live in a country that has a government of incompetence and prevarication. And we know it. No rational person ever completely believes any government, but now we sense, almost like a physical chill, a gap between the administration and the country. We feel that our lives are in the hands of a government that, day by day, speech by speech, is more and more feeble, myopic, and mendacious. The country seems schizoid: on one side, the tremendous power of the government; on the other side, us. This condition seems the base of the cartoon here – the president floundering in the middle of a smarmy television show, trying to bridge the gap – and it gives this modest picture a scary sting," – Stanley Kauffman, The New Republic.