Category: The Dish

Norm Geras studies a sentence from Michael Burleigh’s review of Torture Team by Philippe Sands.

A reader proposes:

Maybe your logic about a unity ticket is right, but you are thinking of the wrong person:  If Obama wants a unity ticket without any of the baggage, he picks Bayh. Her national co-chair.  Senator from the Midwest with foreign policy credentials and executive experience.  From a red state.  New generation, just like Obama. Well-respected, good-looking, twin sons, no skeletons.  White voters like him. Downsides:  Dems might lose the Senate seat, and Bayh would have trouble with the “attack dog” role.  But if a unity ticket is what Dems want, without the Clinton baggage, he’s the most obvious choice.  The chattering class will know what it means.

Some creationists are denied the right to offer a masters degree in science. Yes, they believe the earth was created in six days and wanted to bestow upon such loopiness the legitimacy of science. And this occurred in Texas. One is grateful for small mercies, I guess.

Ezra Klein highlights a few grafs from Nathanael Johnson’s article on milk pasteurization.

Some pretty stunning art from computer programming:

(Hat tip: Swimming Freestyle.)

The 538 blog says Obama will win by double digits. At (almost!) the end of this primary season, I can proudly say I have no idea.

Whatever it takes:

"That’s the kind of thing those people that aren’t for us say. You know, they think we’re dumber’n we are. I know, cuz I grew up in a place like this, and I figured out that people are just as smart here as anywhere else. But they ain’t figured it out yet."

"I suspect present conditions are also nearly rock-bottom for Obama, though it’s a mistake ever to underestimate how much slime a Clinton can excrete," – Dave Weigel, Reason.

A reader writes:

As a liberal regular reader who has grown to know and love you (in the online sense of the word), your Obama/Clinton article makes me wonder if you have lost your marbles. It is no wonder that you are fixated on death lately.

There are two obvious choices for Obama’s VP slot- Richardson and Edwards. Richardson boosts the West, and Edwards could swing Virginia and possibly North Carolina. Clinton on the ticket changes nothing, and kills the Democrats down-ticket. Perhaps that is what you are hoping for, in your moderate sub-conscious, that while you want Obama, you fear Obama with a Dem super-majority.

I am a registered Dem, so I will vote for whoever is the nominee, but an Obama/Clinton ticket is damn close to an oxymoron. You must know that, right?

I can’t say I want an Obama-Clinton ticket; I don’t. But I felt it worth airing how it could work, if Obama is left no other option.

A blogger in Jakarta asks: will famine follow? Given the nature of the regime, how do we know what the real human cost is?