Category: The Dish

Siri Carpenter reports on subconscious bias.

Matt makes an obvious point about the imbalance between the Wright-Obama conflation and the Parsley-Hagee-McCain nexus:

A certain number of clueless liberals are going to wonder why this isn’t nearly as big a deal as Reverend Wright, so in case you don’t get it the difference is that anti-Muslim bigotry is a fairly mainstream and popular sentiment in the United States so associating with the Daniel Pipes’ and Rod Parsley’s of the world is only a problem in the actual, substantive sense of indicating that McCain’s foreign policy views are bad and dangerous, not in the freak show "this’ll hurt in November in Pennsylvania" sense.

The same goes for the anti-gay stuff. Beating up on minorities is always less politically toxic than beating up on majorities. In democracies, anyway. Atwater, Morris and Rove just did the math.

Lawrence, Kansas, 10.52 am.

Poulos argues against the unity ticket:

Though the polls do reflect a possibility (because of her negative campaigning) that at least some current Clinton supporters are likely to consider McCain in the general election, Democrats have a clear choice to make. Either they can reward the woman who chased voters from her own party in the ironic hope of retaining them, or they can grant their nominee the full use of his natural power to make another winning decision – this time, the decision about the person best suited to join him on the ticket. What new fabricated formality must Obama satisfy to earn their trust? What hoop is left to jump through? That Clinton has even caused these questions to be raised reflects the profundity of damage she has already done to her party and its assured nominee. On the campaign trail or in office, what more might come from this calculating aggrandiser, long accustomed to thinking of herself in co-presidential terms, should be left to Democrats’ most fertile imaginations.

Lawrence Kaplan on John McCain.

"Pennsylvania was an election of people thinking about yesterday, North Carolina was sort of a future vote, that that is a vote for the future, you know a tomorrow type vote, a tomorrow type electorate," – Chuck Todd.

You catch them doing this.

A reader writes:

Officers already pretty much have sabbaticals. If you want to make Field Grade rank, you pretty much have to get a Master’s Degree and the military is already VERY generous with letting their officers go and get them. I know officers that have gone to Ivy League schools for their Master’s in pretty much any subject they want. My boss went to Columbia and lived with his family at Fort Hamilton while he did it. Another officer I worked with went to the Kennedy School of Government. I ran into another officer friend of mine who went to the Naval Post Grad school for his Master’s in Electrical Engineering and was only required to pay two years back.

No, the people that this is really aimed at are the enlisted folk. Now that I have 19 years, 11 months in the military and am getting ready to retire in a month, its too late for me, but I am glad they are thinking about it. It was very difficult to get into a degree program while on active duty, and I would have loved to get into one, but as a linguist, I was way too busy. I really could have used two years off to finish my Bachelor’s and been that much better a sailor.

Priceless:

From 538:

[The Clintons] have 17 field offices open in the six remaining primary states: seven in Oregon, five in Kentucky, four in West Virginia, one in Montana, and none in South Dakota or Puerto Rico. Obama, by contrast, has 44 field offices open: 17 in Oregon, 10 in West Virginia, seven in each of Kentucky and Montana, three in South Dakota, and none in Puerto Rico.