Category: The Dish

A political parable – and one that tells us so much.

Joe Gandelman on the weird dynamic:

[McCain] will have to do what most candidates don’t do during elections: move more to the right to try and appease the hard-line conservatives.

Victor Hanson speculates:

For McCain to win in this current anti-incumbent, anti-Republican climate of war and economic uncertainty, everything will have to break right — the base will have to make a choice for the better, not the best, alternative and soon cool the rhetoric; the VP choice will have to be inspired; independents and moderates will have to be convinced that McCain’s unique life-story and national security fides trump all else; and he will have to wage an effective campaign, hope his opponents don’t, and trust that Iraq will continue to improve while the economy is stabilized.

Not too encouraging.

For many women, so much is in the head:

We have measured autonomic and brain activity during orgasms that women have produced by thought alone. During the thought orgasms, the magnitude of the increases in heart rate, blood pressure, pain threshold, pupil diameter, and brain regions are similar to those that we observe during vaginal or cervical self-stimulation-induced orgasms (Whipple et al., 1992). It is not surprising that in those cases of thought-induced orgasms, the specific genital sensory thalamic and cortical, and specific limb-motoric regions, are not activated.

Men just don’t have that option, I guess. More here.

Megan on Obama’s speech:

I’m watching his speech now, and it’s inspiring. But it’s also saddening, because deep down, I don’t believe that Obama is going to change Washington, eliminate lobbying, etc. I wish he wouldn’t tell me things that I can’t possibly believe–and moreover that I can’t really understand anyone believing. He might be the best president; he might even make Washington work a little better, though I kind of doubt it. But he isn’t going to transform American politics in the utopian way his speech implies. No one who has dried out behind the ears could reasonably believe that he has this power. So why is he saying he does?

No he will not transform politics. He won’t abolish our problems. He won’t eliminate our enemies. He won’t disappear partisanship. That’s not the point. He’s a decent, reasonable human being prepared to tackle these problems outside the depressing template of Morris-Rove politics. One way he can begin to do that is to bring a wave of support with him, to appeal beyond Washington to Americans who know this country is in a terrible mess and want to fix it. That’s what Reagan did. He wasn’t perfect. But we still remember the difference.

Obama has a 17 point lead.

The terrorist who was behind the mass murder of US Marines in Beirut in 1983 has been assassinated. This is a big deal:

Security officials in Lebanon said the man, Imad Mugniyah, who was believed to be behind attacks in 1983 on the United States Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut and the terrorist hijacking of a T.W.A. jetliner in 1985, died in a car bomb in Damascus, Syria, on Tuesday night. His organization may also have been involved in the bombing of the Khobar Towers military residence in Saudi Arabia in 1996, in which 17 Americans were killed.

It’s not your freedom Islamic fundamentalists want: it’s your roses.

Worth savoring one more time:

Man the lifeboats! The Clinton Titanic plows on.

It’s on now. Crowley:

I can’t imagine Hillary was happy to see Obama cap off his night with a juicy, barbed back-and-forth with McCain that will have everyone talking about a general-election dynamic between those two.

Here‘s McCain’s riff on Obama’s message and here’s Obama’s attack on McCain. McLovin it.