Category: The Dish

Take it away, Michael Barone! Every presidential campaign logo since 1960.

(hat tip: Kottke)

"Poor, rural, working-class white folks in Appalachia didn’t vote for the rich urban former law professor senator from Chicago. They went for the rich urban former law professor senator born in Chicago instead. But since the vote went so overwhelmingly in one direction rather than the other, and rich urban former law professor senators with Chicago ties are otherwise largely interchangeable, there has to be another controlling factor here. I can’t think what it might be, though. Maybe it will come to me if I think about it," – John Scalzi. They were making a statement about feminism.

Marian Tupy looks at the contrasting lessons of Zimbabwe and Botswana. Economic and political progress in Africa is not a dream – if you trust the market and advance racial harmony.

Hilzoy responds to Jeralyn Merritt.

I’ve written an op-ed on the resilient Jesse Helms HIV immigration and visitor ban, still uniquely stigmatizing HIV in America’s legal system:

I am among the most privileged non-Americans with HIV. Others live in fear of being exposed; many have to hide their medications when entering the country for fear of being discovered by customs or immigration. Couples have been split up and torn apart. International conferences on HIV and AIDS have long avoided meeting in the United States because of the ban, which violates U.N. standards for member states.

This law has lasted so long because no domestic constituency lobbies for its repeal. Immigrants or visitors with HIV are often too afraid to speak up. The ban itself is also largely unenforceable — it’s impossible to take blood from all those coming to America, hold them until the results come through and then deport those who test positive. Enforcement occurs primarily when immigrants volunteer their HIV status — as I have — or apply for permanent residence. The result is not any actual prevention of HIV coming into the United States but discrimination against otherwise legal immigrants who are HIV-positive.

I’m hoping that repealing this 1980s hangover – currently included in the PEPFAR renewal – is now feasible. The bill simply takes the HIV visitor and tourist ban from legislation and places it, as with all other medical conditions, at the discretion of the secretary of Health and Human Services. It just makes HIV like any other disease – subject to rational scientific judgment, and not to the fears of two decades ago. Good Republicans – Gordon Smith and Richard Lugar – as well as Democrats – John Kerry mainly – are behind it. Alas, it now appears that this measure is in jeopardy on the Hill. One key senator is Tom Coburn, a doctor who must know that HIV does not deserve to be singled out for special discrimination in the law. If you’d like to contact his office to urge his support for removing the HIV ban, here’s the link. Please help.

Obviously, as I explain in the piece, this is personal to me. I’d like to have the ability to stay in America with my husband with security. Right now, it looks increasingly likely that I’ll have to relocate at some point to Europe. But I’m one of the most privileged. This is for others more helpless than I, and for everyone with HIV and their families struggling with the stigmas that still hinder effective action. We really can do better.

Krikorian despairs after Mississippi. Quinnipiac shows both Obama and Clinton beating McCain easily. Obama-scares in the Deep South went nowhere, as Larison explains:

The public mood is so bad and so hostile to the national GOP that drawing direct connections between their candidate and the national party, as they did constantly, seems to have done more to doom Davis’ chances than help them.  The ham-fisted attempt to link Childers to Obama (”Childers said nothing!”) gave off the scent of desperation, and rural Mississippians in the district who were already inclined to vote for one of their own against a ridiculous-looking suburban mayor weren’t buying it.

Powerline concedes:

The Republican nominee, whether we feel comfortable about it or not, isn’t necessarily seen as intimately associated with the Republican brand. Even so, I think that Republican nominee is running uphill.

What does this say about what Bush and Rove and Cheney have done to the brand? What does it say about those conservatives who cheered them on? But no worries: all of them are where they were, pretending they had nothing to do with it.

An Italian is jailed for ten days for … visiting his girlfriend.

There are rumors of an impending decision by California’s Supreme Court on the marriage equality case. Stay tuned. Whenever it rules, we could be in for a major civil rights struggle in the country’s most populous state.

Reality never bites, does it:

2:57 p.m., Yeager Airport, Charleston, W.Va.: A steep descent brings Clinton’s plane to Charleston’s hilltop airport. After an appropriate wait, she steps from the plane and pretends to wave to a crowd of supporters; in fact, she is waving to 10 photographers underneath the airplane’s wing. She pretends to spot an old friend in the crowd, points and gives another wave; in fact, she is waving at an aide she had been talking with on the plane minutes earlier.

John Aravosis loses it – in a good way – here.

"It’s almost like she’s the Al Sharpton of white people," – Chris Matthews.