Category: The Dish

It spreads to a trucking company in Switzerland. Or was it the other way round?

A tip: while running for Congress don’t speak at a party in honor of Hitler’s birthday.

(hat tip: Megan)

A critique from the Annenberg Center. I have to say, though, that if Jeremiah Wright’s words are to be the basis on which this election is decided, then John McCain’s words count too.

Above is one of Paul Rothemund’s origami sculptures. They are crafted out of folded DNA strands and photographed by an atomic-force microscope. 

Hilzoy looks at the legal complications a couple is facing because the husband has changed his sex after 25 years of marriage:

Imagine losing your kids because a court decides that your marriage, which was valid when you had them, is not valid any longer. Imagine further the joys of living in a state where it’s not clear what the legal status of your marriage after transition is: whether, in the eyes of the law, a man who has become a woman is (a) still a man, and therefore in a standard heterosexual marriage, appearances to the contrary, or (b) a woman, in which case your marriage might no longer be valid, and you might be liable at any time to lose custody rights over your kids, inheritance, the right to make decisions for your spouse if she becomes incapacitated, and so on.[…]

This is just grotesque. If you’re legally married, the status of your marriage should not be altered by taking hormones or having surgery. Neither should your custody rights, or your right to inherit.

Of course, that’s right. And yet it isn’t close to being true in 49 states.

Hope over fear – back in 2004. Now, it’s fear all the way. Hey, it works for the Clintons so it can’t be wrong, right?

In Jeremiah Wright’s own words from March last year:

Q: He knew you a long time before he responded to an altar call. What do you think moved him to do that?

A: I don’t know. I would like to — somebody said last week did you ever think one of your sermons would be used as a mantra in a Democratic convention speech and a title to a book of a presidential candidate? No, I did not. I think, okay, if I were a person caught up in ego I would say "my powerful preaching." I think it’s that he found a church that — and you know he checked out a lot of churches. And probably more the conversations we had outside of church, and outside of the sermons, than my preaching or worship experience –he found a church that was firmly committed to both arms of the cross. The personal spirituality, the personal piety, and the social action — that when the benediction was over, what are you doing?

As he mentions from time to time, the Free South Africa sign caught his attention. What’s a church on South Side Chicago? Most people don’t even know where Johannesburg is. They think it’s in Mississippi somewhere. Steve Biko? You’re talking about Steve Biko? Black consciousness movement? Who’s Nelson Mandela? Well, after Tutu and Mandela became media events — but here we were in the ’70s talking about it. That fascinated him, because the average church was talking about the pastor’s anniversary and chicken dinners and car washes. And here we are talking about the connectedness of the people of God across the globe. That intrigued him.

In his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today, Karl Rove remembers something that was done to John McCain in Vietnam:

Another McCain story, somewhat better known, is about the Vietnamese practice of torturing him by tying his head between his ankles with his arms behind him, and then leaving him for hours. The torture so badly busted up his shoulders that to this day Mr. McCain can’t raise his arms over his head. One night, a Vietnamese guard loosened his bonds, returning at the end of his watch to tighten them again so no one would notice.

This is what is called a "stress position." It was authorized, monitored and practised as a torture technique by this president, whose chief adviser at the time was Karl Rove. Rove even planned to run the 2006 Congressional campaign on the message of being tough enough on prisoners in American custody.

In the same op-ed, Rove refers warmly to McCain’s Bangladeshi adopted daughter – the same daughter his surrogates demonized in the 2000 campaign, by spreading rumors that McCain had a black illegitimate daughter.

Every now and again, one is shocked by the Big Lies and chutzpah that come out of a man as utterly indifferent to the truth as Rove. And then one realizes: this is what these people do for a living. They say anything to retain and wield power.

Wolfowitz concedes that it never occurred to anyone in the Bush administration that Saddam’s loyalists could mount an insurgency against the invasion. In his own words, the Bushies were "clueless." Well: at least he’s honest.

"It’s one of the mysteries of the blogosphere, why more people don’t simply pick up the phone once in a while," – Jeffrey Goldberg, acclimatizing fast. I’m trying to help:

I was telling Andrew about an on-line mugging I experienced at the hands of a person named Matt Haber, who is associated with the New York Observer, about which I have generally warm feelings, in part because it gave my book a great review, and we all know what such a review does for a person’s self-esteem, if not for a book’s actual sales. Andrew wasn’t impressed by my complaint. "Calling you an asshole is just the blogosphere’s way of saying hello," he said.