Category: The Dish

Novak reports on some rumors that Obama could offer him the Justice Department if he pledges his delegates to the Illinois senator. I have no clue if this is true or not. But it does indicate that Obama is planning on fighting this all the way. Which is probably what he’ll have to do. And a grueling, long victory over the Clintons would be stellar training for the general.

For, er, white people.

The sperm variety, natch. A video!

A review of Serbian politics.

It’s a veiled criticism of Obama:

"He serves as chair of the most important committee in the United States Congress," Clinton said of [Charlie] Rangel. "He didn’t get there by leapfrogging. He got there by lots of hard work."

He can’t help himself, can he?

(Correction: I misread the piece and thought one Clinton meant the other. It was Hillary who said this, not Bill. My bad, although it kind of makes my point for me.)

A sobering look at the Democrats’ delegate math.

More reckless speculation – what’s the web for? – here and here.

McCain’s new ad.

Reihan has a beaut of a post on the NYT’s endorsement of Clinton. Here’s Ed Morrissey on their counter-productive embrace of McCain.

With Sesame Street now online, here is John Holt’s 1971 article on Sesame Street from The Atlantic’s archives (which are now free along with the rest of the magazine). Holt argued that the show’s teaching methods could be improved upon:

…teaching children to count is not a good way to introduce them to the world of numbers. It leads many of them to think that numbers are a kind of procession of mythical figures, dwarfs maybe, always walking in the same order, the first named One, the next Two, and so on. Even if they have been “taught” to “count” a group of objects by touching them in order, saying “one, two, three," they may not realize that the number is a way of talking about the quantity of objects before them. Later, they may think of all arithmetic as a set of complicated and mysterious ritual dances done by these number dwarfs, without rhyme or reason or connection with anything else. Much on Sesame Street would encourage such fancies. More often than not, numbers appear on the screen only as numerals, with nothing to show the quantities they represent.