Category: The Dish

A reader writes:

You need to seriously examine Obama’s incredibly controversial stance on abortion for the election, considering the political implications it can have over galvanizing the Pro Life Community against the Pro Choice community and how it can affect the dialogue and debate in the run-up to the election.

How can Obama be somebody who "brings people together" when he blocked the Illinois BAIPA bill from even reaching the floor of the state senate (when it finally did reach the floor he voted against it twice). If he has a record of "bringing people together" for "the change we seek", surely his BAIPA stance denigrates it. This was during and after the crimes against humanity—which Jill Stanek, an Illinois nurse, brought to national attention—took place. It chills my blood. How can he (and his supporters like you) talk about a "new era" of American Politics, an end to the "Bush-Cheney Torture Regime", and still justify his staunch opposition to ban the practice of killing babies after they were "failed to be aborted" (in other words, "born"); all in the name for the "woman’s right to choose"?

John Zmirak wrote a few days ago that seamless web pro-lifers don’t have a candidate. I find Obama’s absolutist position on abortion out of sync with his usual temperateness.

News of the weird and Japanese.

Chait and Yglesias talk over the Internets.

Seth Grahame-Smith:

Are the conservatives right about the Clintons?  Will they do and say anything to get elected?

I don’t know.

All I know is…I’m through apologizing.

Even nerds can wear jewelry.

A memoir from Brian Paddick, formerly London’s police chief and now a candidate for mayor:

He had realised I was gay and wanted to sleep with me. I was petrified. I was 21 and a virgin. ‘All I want to do is sleep with you,’ Barry said. ‘We don’t even have to touch.’ His proposition brought a mixture of desire and absolute terror. Trembling, I nodded and we went to bed. After a while we fell asleep. Several hours later I woke up to find I wasn’t shaking any more; my desire overcame my fear. I had mixed feelings about this first sexual encounter. Everything I had learnt screamed that this was wrong – at the same time it felt instinctively right.

Somehow, I can’t imagine a candidate for a big city mayor in the US publishing such a book.

Radley Balko reports. Anonymous readers, er, comment.

A depressing look at the environmental costs of the polysilicon industry in China – the material used for solar panels.

It didn’t seem to work in Mississippi:

According to numbers shown on Fox News, Obama holds a solid 10 point lead over Hillary on who voters think is qualified to be "commander-in-chief," 53%-43%.

After her emotional meltdowns and absurd exaggeration of her role in Bosnia and Ireland and China, the risk of electing Hillary Clinton as commander-in-chief is beginning to sink in.

A twenty-point margin for Obama in Mississippi. I know it’s not a "big" state and we now know how seriously the Clintons take victories in heavily African-American primaries, but it is yet another state in which the freshman senator has taken on the might of the Clinton machine and won by a landslide. As usual, the classy Clinton congratulation call (this time, a written statement from Maggie Williams), and the inevitable mention of Pennsylvania. They always sink to the occasion, don’t they?

The racial polarization in the exit polls is depressing; but when you have Clinton surrogates like Geraldine Ferraro reveling in racist condescension and resentment, as she did today, I can understand a little. Then this:

Obama voters by and large would NOT be satisfied (55%) with Clinton as their nominee, while 7 and ten Clinton voters would NOT be satisfied (72%) with Obama as theirs.

So the candidate who has been in second place most of the race has supporters pickier than those of the candidate in first place. Entitlement, anyone? There is a great deal of anger toward Clinton among the Obama camp; but the contempt for Obama from the Clintonites is really something. This piece of Ferraro bile is particularly revealing:

Any time anybody does anything that in any way pulls this campaign down and says let’s address reality and the problems we’re facing in this world, you’re accused of being racist, so you have to shut up." 

Address reality? Like the Iraq war; and climate change; and healthcare? In what way is Obama not addressing reality in these areas? Or by reality does she mean the racist assumption that no black man can ever be a serious challenger for the presidency in America? Really, next time she should tell us how she really feels.

(Obama in Misissippi March 10 by Emmanuel Dunand/Getty.)