Category: The Dish

The state party proposes a 69-59 delegate split.

A really fun new time-waster blog:

Falindromes are fake palindromes. Although they cannot be read the same forwards and backwards (like their sister palindromes), their peculiar structure make them appear as if they can.

As in:

“I, a CD-ROM?!” ribbed a bearded Mordcai.

and

A-hah! A banana ban. Haha!

Ha! We haven’t had a reader contest in a long while, so I wonder if anyone can come up with a falidrome about the current election campaign. You send ’em; I’ll post the good ones.

A video:

"I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers;    
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!    
I have long dream’d of such a kind of man,
So surfeit-swell’d, so old, and so profane;    
But, being awak’d, I do despise my dream," – Henry V in Henry IV.

My take is here. Chait:

His denunciation of Rev. Wright today seems to be pretty much a bullseye. Why did he let the story hang out there so long without a response? I don’t know, but I do see a pattern here: Throughout the campaign, Obama has made very good tactical moves, but he’s made them slowly. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, has made a lot of mistakes, but she does grasp the 24-hour news cycle and she acts very quickly.

Joyner:

I’m not sure what more Obama could say, to be honest. He’ll be tarred somewhat for having spent 20 years in Wright’s congregation and touting him so heavily as his mentor. But this should stop the bleeding.

Crowley:

The one thing I wonder about is whether Obama showed enough passion. With the caveat that I did not see his initial opening statement, there was a certain coolness to his remarks…

The first big question now is whether Wright comes back at Obama, painfully prolonging the story. If he doesn’t, the press might be willing to let it peter out. So the second big question is how hard John McCain pushes it–and, finally,  whether Hillary dares pour some fuel on the fire.

Ambinder:

Obama has used the power of his rhetoric to end controversies before, and the campaign hopes now that Obama’s angry soundbites will now replace some of Wright’s more radical utterances on the cable news. The campaign won’t say whether, in their North Carolina tracking polls, they discovered any fall-off among white voters. The bet they’re making is that by extending the active phase of a story for at least one more day, they can prevent its long tail from influencing too many votes next Tuesday.

Reason sits down with Bob Barr.

People who believe in limited government, constitutional order and individual freedom still have somewhere to go in this election. If, somehow, the Clintons manage to wrestle the Democratic nomination from Obama, and if McCain really does continue what looks like a morphing into a neocon supply-sider budget-buster, then Barr will increasingly look like an option for a solid protest vote.

A graphic from a PEW report released yesterday:

It’s not just the young:

Perhaps the most striking change since 2004 has come among voters born between 1956 and 1976 — the members of Generation X and the later Baby Boomers. People in this age group tended to be more Republican during the 1990s, and the GOP still maintained a slight edge in partisan affiliation among Gen X and the late boomers in 2004 (47% identified with or leaned toward the GOP while 44% described themselves as Democrats or leaned Democratic).

Currently, 51% of voters in this age group affiliate with the Democratic Party or lean Democratic compared with 39% who describe themselves as Republicans or lean toward the GOP.

Good to know I’m not alone. Neither are you. This, by the way, is the fruit of an alleged political genius, turdblossom himself, a shamelessly effective tactician, but one of the worst political strategists in modern times. He has helped kill the Republican brand – and poison it for a generation.

Burger King flirts with a £85 Whopper. Fuck yeah. I’m so over all this arugula and brie.

(Hat tip: Baylen Linnekin).

The Brits are so good at this kind of thing:

That was a very impressive, clear and constructive re-framing of the core message of his candidacy; and a moment given to him by Wright. No one will ever be able to say that Obama threw his father-figure and pastor under the bus. We all know that the reverse happened. We also know that this clear repudiation of Wright’s toxic, indeed "ridiculous" views on AIDS, 9/11 and permanent immiseration of people of color could not have happened unless Wright had made it necessary. Skeptics may wonder whether Wright actually deliberately did Obama a favor. I doubt it. But a favor it unintentionally is.

Maybe God does bring good out of bad. Maybe these racial and cultural divides can help us understand how better to move beyond them. Cynics may scoff – and certainly will. They will parse every nuance and try to paint Obama as another cynical, positioning pol. I don’t believe it. He has more sincerity and integrity than the vast majority of politicians, more honesty, and more resilience in a very tough spot.

And today, we found that he can fight back, and take a stand, without calculation and in what is clearly a great amount of personal difficulty and political pain. It’s what anyone should want in a president. It makes me want to see him succeed more than ever. It’s why this country needs to see him succeed more than ever.