Category: The Dish

Ambers talks about the orange among the apples – and Marc knows his fruit from his vegetables. Mark Blumenthal dissects the methodology. It really is an exciting prospect if McCain somehow wins.

Derb and me, together at last:

From Kimberley Strassel’s piece in the Dec. 14 Opinion Journal:

Paul rallies heave with voters waving placards and shouting “Liberty! Liberty!”

Are those supporters crazy, as some colleagues tell me?

Perhaps they are, to be shouting for liberty in 2007, after decades of swelling federal power and arrogance, of proliferating taxes, rules, and interests, of gushing transfers of wealth to politically connected elites from working- and middle-class grunts, of the college and teacher-union scams, of the metastasizing tort-law rackets, of ever more numerous yet ever more clueless intelligence agencies, of open borders and visas for people who hate us, of widening cracks in our sense of nationhood (“Press one for English …”), of speech codes and race lobbies and judicial impositions.

If those people are crazy, though, I want to be crazy with them. I’m for liberty, too. That’s why I’m for Ron Paul. And why do we have 75,000 soldiers in Germany?

I just lost my breakfast.

Pretty riveting and persuasive:

So, two weeks out from Iowa, here are the odds.

Rudy and Thompson each 20-1. John McCain 6-1. He has to win New Hampshire, and even if he wins there, he would be an underdog. Grass-roots conservatives do not like him and would prefer Huckabee.

Mitt Romney 3-2. If he wins Iowa, he is almost unstoppable. If he loses Iowa, he has to come back and beat McCain in New Hampshire. Then it would a Mitt-Mike race through Feb. 5.

And Huckabee? He has to win Iowa. If he does, he will be the favorite in South Carolina and for the nomination, as well.

A pretty fabulous YouTube mash-up:

Hat tip: Tube Junkie.

(Update: A reader writes: Just a quick correction – the Beatnix video isn’t a YouTube mashup, but came from the album Stairway to Heaven, released about a decade ago. (It’s actually a wonderful album that offers nothing but covers of "Stairway to Heaven," done in the styles of everyone from The Beatles (as we’ve seen), to Elvis, The Doors, the B-52s’ (Rock Lobster style), opera, and even the Andrews Sisters. Pretty wonderful stuff.)

Duffy prognosticates; the gamblers run.

Cell phones on airplanes? I’m with Bainbridge.

Fortune lists 101. Number 46:

Johnson & Johnson sues the American Red Cross for infringement of its trademarked red cross.

A pretty solid endorsement:

The study found that blogs were judged as moderately credible, but as more credible than any mainstream media or online source. Both reliance and motivations predicted blog credibility after controlling for demographics and political variables.

Study here.

I’d say this lowballs him:

If you want to buy the Drudge Report, offer him $10 million. If he’s even interested in selling, don’t be surprised if he counters with $15 million or more. But don’t pay a penny unless you lock the man in the fedora in to a long-term contract. Without him—and his sources—the site is worthless.

I know this now counts as a massive suck-up, but I think the man is a genius, easily the most gifted media entrepreneur of his generation. And I wrote that a very long time before it was cool.