Category: The Dish

Marc Ambinder tackles the arguments of Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei.

He sure didn’t come from the ghetto.

"For half a century, right-wing populism has been the most successful political force in America, aided greatly by the tendency of liberals to fall into the competing claims of identity groups. Obama is a black candidate who can tell Americans of all races to move beyond race. As such, he is uniquely positioned to put an end to this era, and uniquely vulnerable to becoming its latest victim," – George Packer, New Yorker.

This isn’t my tradition, and I fear many also disdain it, but the photograph alone speaks to me at least of what Christianity really does and can mean. It’s from a born-again blog called Ragamuffin Soul, sent to me by David Kuo. Money quote from one of the musicians who was playing on stage:

I’m in verse 2 and I look to my left and am hit like a blind side pick and roll.
Swaying on the front row was a guy I later learned was named Matt.
Standing in front of him was another guy named Jefferson.
It was a moment that stands out above all else in my 11 years of leading worship.
You see Matt and Jefferson were worshipping God, together.
Literally.
Jefferson has severe cerebral palsy.  He has little, if any control over his body.
Matt was standing behind Jefferson.
Holding Jefferson.
20 minutes.
Dancing with Jefferson and singing at the top of his lungs.
Jefferson was singing too.  I think could hear him.
And it was the most beautiful song I have ever heard.

Here it is, Easter in an image:

Gallup’s latest: McCain, Clinton and Obama, all basically neck-and-neck whichever way you slice it.

A tissue-engineering group has created functional blood vessels and cardiac tissue by "using a ‘printer’ that dispenses cells instead of ink":

What makes this work different from that done in most other tissue-engineering labs is that Forgacs’s team does everything without a scaffold — they don’t start with an object shaped like the tissue or organ they are aiming to create, but instead plan to print the whole thing from scratch, from the vasculature up. This should make it easier to print any type of organ, they say, as they don’t have to develop different scaffolds for each tissue type.

Ella’s "Angel Eyes." About as eternal as it gets:

""She misspoke about the exit from the plane," – Howard Wolfson on Clinton’s lie or poor memory about Tuzla.

That word "misspoke" is such a weasel Clinton word. You can say you genuinely forgot, or got muddled up. But Clinton cannot ever admit a mistake or confess a deliberate exaggeration. It was the same way in which Bill Clinton could never actually say that anything he did was ever wrong. At most it was always "inappropriate."

In this respect alone, in their pathological incapacity to actually concede error – real error – the Clintons really are running for a third Bush term.

If you live in Pennsylvania, today is the last day you can change your registration for the Democratic primary.

"He almost seemed to celebrate,
The bodies fell,
His shoulders swayed…"

– Stanley Kurtz, apparently accusing Jeremiah Wright of "almost seeming" to celebrate the Islamist massacre of 9/11.

"Now I asked the Lord, what should our response be in light of such an unthinkable act … I was stuck in Newark, New Jersey. No flights were leaving La Guardia, JFK, or Newark Airport.  On the day that the FAA opened up the airports to bring into the destinations of cities those flights that had been diverted because of the hijacking, a scare in New York close all three regional airports and I couldn’t even get her for Mr. Radford’s father’s funeral.  And I asked God, "What should our response be?

I saw pictures of the incredible. People jumping from the 110th floor; people jumping from the roof because the stair wells and elevators above the 89th floor were gone– no more. Black people, jumping to a certain death; people holding hands jumping; people on fire jumping. And I asked the Lord, "What should our response be?" I read what the people of faith felt in 551BC. But this is a different time, this is a different enemy, a different world,  a different terror. This is a different reality," – Jeremiah Wright, on his response to the massacre, in his now infamous 9/11 sermon.

There is plenty to criticize in that sermon. But saying that Wright "almost seemed to celebrate" the agonizing, terrifying deaths of 3,000 Americans is not one of them.