Category: The Dish

Greg Mankiw links to this hilarious but dead-on guide to the mortgage mess. 

S.V. Dáte explains why Florida probably won’t have a re-vote.

The Senate re-authorization of the president’s admirable and successful initiative to tackle the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa has now included the removal of the Jesse Helms ban on travel into the US of any HIV-positive foreigners. It’s up to Nancy Pelosi whether to insist in retaining this in the final bill. Here’s hoping she does. This is not a trivial matter.

It’s been extremely frustrating to see such progress in fighting both HIV and the stigma attached to the disease, while the US retains its anachronistic and stigmatizing ban on anyone with HIV coming into the country. HIV is not smallpox or the bubonic plague. Even China has now rescinded its ban because of international embarrassment around the Olympics. The US has effectively had to stop being an international conference destination for HIV and AIDS because of the irrational legislative hangover from the 1980s. Many Republicans support lifting the ban – Richard Lugar and Gordon Smith are the most prominent in the Senate. Like many people living with HIV, I’m immensely grateful that they see through the panic to the rational contours of a humane and sensible policy.

No major Western country has such a ban. No other illness is treated legislatively this way by the US in immigration and travel. The US, despite America’s pioneering work in developing treatments and unequaled generosity in helping Africa, now keeps company only with the following countries in this respect: Armenia, Brunei, Iraq, Qatar, South Korea, Libya, Moldova, Oman, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Sudan.

Is American really as hostile to people with HIV as Saudi Arabia? A critical factor in treating HIV and AIDS is reducing the stigma of the disease. How can the US do what it’s doing and remain a beacon for that stigma in the world community? It’s long past time that this formal government discrimination against people with HIV be brought to an end.

"Saying that Hillary has Executive Branch experience is like saying Yoko Ono was a Beatle," – Kos commenter, Jsn.

Paul Constant on his experiences with book thieves:

In my eight years working at an independent bookstore, I lost count of how many shoplifters I chased through the streets of Seattle while shouting “Drop the book!” I chased them down crowded pedestrian plazas in the afternoon, I chased them through alleys at night, I even chased one into a train tunnel. I chased a book thief to the waterfront, where he shouted, “Here are your fucking books!” and threw a half-dozen paperbacks, including Bomb the Suburbs and A People’s History of the United States, into Puget Sound, preferring to watch them slowly sink into the muck rather than hand them back to the bookseller they were stolen from. He had that ferocious, orgasmic gleam in his eye of somebody who was living in the climax of his own movie: I suppose he felt like he was liberating them somehow.

Want to know what a second Clinton White House would be like? Pretty much like the first and pretty much like the Clinton campaign: a bunch of extremely unpleasant people being extremely unpleasant to one another. Money quote:

“She hasn’t managed anything as complex as this before; that’s the problem with senators,” said James A. Thurber, a professor of government at American University who is an expert on presidential management. “She wasn’t as decisive as she should have been. And it’s a legitimate question to ask: Under great pressure from two different factions, can she make some hard decisions and move ahead? It seems to just fester. She doesn’t seem to know how to stop it or want to stop it.”

Look at the two campaigns. Which one is disciplined, inclusive, decent and dependent on grass-roots empowerment? And which one reminds you of Washington at its very, very worst?

Reading the email in-tray and absorbing the latest news from Wyoming and looking at the delegate totals and the popular vote, it seems clearer to me that we Obama supporters for the Democratic nomination need to chill a little. Under the rules everyone agreed to in advance, he’s winning the nomination. RCP has his delegates at 1588 to Clinton’s 1465. Counting only pledged delegates, his lead is even bigger. No one disputes this. Whatever the psychological games the Clintons are playing – largely a threat to sabotage the winner if they don’t get their way – this is the core reality. Even the Clintons’ big recent "wins" – Texas and Ohio – came after the much bigger Clinton leads of a few weeks previously were cut in half or to as little as 3 percent as the public engaged and assessed the two candidates. In the end, Obama won Texas in the delegate count – which is what this primary election depends on. And he gained support as the campaign proceeded, barring a last minute spasm of doubt and fear sown by the Clinton camp in Ohio. Since March 4, he has won more super-delegates than she has. It now seems that he won Texas as well, if you go by delegates. And what else are we supposed to go by?

I see no clear reason why the Michigan and Florida primaries should be re-done. Why should a party switch the rules halfway through a game? If Clinton were ahead by the amount Obama is, no one would give the argument for a re-do any credence. Just because the Clintons do not believe the rules ever apply to them, we don’t have to acquiesce to their self-serving arguments.

Obama has essentially won this thing already. He should use the next few weeks to demonstrate what a tough campaigner he can be; to broaden his appeal as he has done in every major primary as the campaign has gone on. The good news about the kitchen sink is that you can only throw it once. He just won Wyoming after being battered by a barrage of negativism and refusing to throw a much larger kitchen sink back. He should now focus on Mississippi. And on reality.

The Clintons just got into our heads. We need to get them out. Keep going; keep focused; remind people why only Obama can provide change in a way the Clintons never have and never will.

(Photo: Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty)

"I get it from both ends of the (political) spectrum. Last Thursday, I was on Air America. The host accused us of being nothing but a Trojan horse, concerned with nothing but trying to beat Hillary. Two hours later, I was on Laura Ingraham’s show, where I was told I wasn’t a real Republican… I told her she was the one who wasn’t a Republican, that she and others like her had given up the core of the party with this cultural/socialism kick they’ve been on; making personal decisions about people’s private lives, from the FCC’s ruling on Howard Stern to Congressional intrusion in the Terri Schiavo case. All she could say at that point was that I must be liberal because I teach at a university. But people like Laura Ingraham have basically paid for their houses and cars by feeding on the fear and division of the American people. Partisanship is not the end-all, be-all of our existence. Obama, at least, seems to recognize that," – Tony Campbell, Republicans for Obama.

It turns out that Bill Clinton was actually asked the very good question posed by Hilzoy here. His answer: "That’s politics." No, Mr president. It’s politics as you practice it.

And moving forward from that is partly what this primary election is about.

The public just re-elected the Socialist government that established equal rights for gay couples. The Vatican will be saddened. I’m saddened that that’s the case. Marriage equality is humane, socially constructive, culturally integrative and only fair in a civil society that seeks to treat its citizens equally.