Category: The Dish

ABC News sides with AP.

I’m not an expert on this, but is there an obvious explanation for why Obama had a 7.5 percent advantage over Clinton in New Hampshire votes counted by hand and Clinton had a 5.5 percent advantage in votes counted by machine? I presume that it’s a function of differing locations, with the more urban Clinton districts relying more on machines. Is that the right inference?

"I was laughing because you know in that debate, obviously Sen. Edwards and Sen. Obama were kind of in the buddy system on the stage. And I was thinking whoever’s up against the Republican nominee in the election debates come the fall is not gonna have a buddy to fall back on. You know, you’re all by yourself. When you’re president, you’re there all by yourself," – Senator Clinton on her two rivals for the nomination. Notice another subtle use of the gender card. We really are headed back to the 1990s.

Thanks: over 400,000 page-views yesterday for the Dish: smashing all previous records. I’m also delighted to have a new Dish prepper, Patrick Appel, who replaces the irreplaceable Jessie Roberts who has returned to, yes, college. Welcome also to Ben Carlson, Conor Friedersdorf, Herschel Nachlis, and Sara Dabney Tisdale who joined the Dish team as Atlantic interns this week. They are this blog’s eyes and ears. After you guys, of course.

A reader writes:

Uh, no. Your original commenter had it closer to right. I got lots of nice degrees so I’m going to call this one, sorry. "Gravity" isn’t a law — that is "stuff falls" doesn’t quite cut it.  There is a "law of gravity" or more precisely a "law of universal gravitation" which can be expressed mathematically, basically saying, that there’s a force between two objects proportional to the products of constants associated with each object (their "gravitational masses"), divided by the square of the distance between their "centers of mass".  _That’s_ the law.  And you don’t really do much to prove it when you drop a penny to the floor unless you have super-super-bitchin’ measuring devices.  Mostly (not entirely) it’s been proven by astronomical observations, also with something called a torsion balance: go Google it.

"Evolution" doesn’t have a law because there’s just not a nice mathematical expression of it to call a law.

No matter how well you back up the theory — and lots and lots and lots of us no have been in labs doing biochemical directed evolution experiments so it’s backed up — it ain’t going to be a "law," because I can come along and ask you, so what’s the law? and all you can do is go, "uhh….uhhh…y’know, evolution."  It’s a complicated set of ideas not (yet, if ever) describable as a set of equations.  Indeed, as originally described, or commonly described in those science textbooks, it’s also wrong.  Bacteria, for example, can undergo some types of Lamarckian evolution — the giraffe stretches its neck — under conditions of nutrient starvation or infection with viruses.  And as Stephen Jay Gould and others pointed out it’s not quite right to separate environment and genetics the way the theory of natural selection invites us to.  But there’s a core set of ideas — a theory — about variation and selection and randomness, and it’s well validated.  It can’t (at least now) be a "law" no matter what you get in a lab: but it may well have more datapoints then, say, universal gravitation.

Fallows worries about the costs of fratricide.

James Poulos weighs the difference in the wake of the Ron Paul campaign.

George Neumayr is onto something:

Won’t Huckabee shatter the conservative coalition? That would be a little more persuasive if those saying this hadn’t shattered it themselves. The relative success of Ron Paul and Huckabee is not a cause of the coalition’s collapse but a reflection of it. An excessively Wilsonian foreign policy has divided defense conservatives; years of big spending has divided economic conservatives; and a tepid, stalling social conservatism has alienated moral ones.

Perhaps Huckabee can’t rebuild this coalition. But he isn’t likely to weaken it any more than have his critics, and he may even bring some long-disenchanted middle Americans into it.

A reader writes:

While I’m with you on the rejection-of-evolution-is-a-rejection-of-reason, the guy you quoted doesn’t know what he talking about. In any high school science textbook, evolution is indeed a theory, and gravity is indeed a law. 

Look up the difference of the scientific definitions of "law" and "theory."  Gravity is one, and evolution is the other.  That said, if it was thus far possible to prove evolution false, it would not be regarded even as a theory.  But it does not have the same status as gravity as a scientific principle.

Clinton can pull it off. She remains the GOP’s greatest hope:

I’m a 31-year-old gay guy living in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood. I went to grad school at Berkeley. And while I’m not as liberal as some people I know around here — that would take some doing — I remain solidly leftist on most major issues. (Maybe this is beside the point, but my parents are 60-year-old evangelical Christians in eastern Washington state, and they’re predictably thrilled about Huckabee’s candidacy. Meanwhile, my grandparents are pro-labor, FDR-and-JFK-loving Catholic Democrats in their mid-80s, and they’re both nuts about Clinton. So I guess my family is quintissentially American in its plurality and dysfunction.)

Last night, I was trying to figure out why I was so pissed off about the New Hampshire results. Actually, "pissed off" isn’t quite right — I was both angry and depressed. I really admired Clinton at one time, but for the past year or so, I’ve found her politics more and more repugnant. Her campaign strategies for the past month have been downright infuriating. And I find the prospect of any race between Clinton and a Republican to be grim beyond reckoning.

In fact, if it were a race between Clinton and McCain, this longtime Democrat would almost certainly break for McCain. The only way I’d vote for her, in fact, is to prevent someone like Huckabee or Romney from prolonging the disastrous Bush legacy. And that’s why this morning, for the first time in my life, I actually paid money to go see a politician speak. I’ll be at Obama’s rally in San Francisco next Wednesday, and I’ll be cheering like crazy.