Category: The Dish

Hilzoy notices a strange obsession.

A young, blonde Icelandic woman writes about her recent trip to America:

During the last twenty-four hours I have probably experienced the greatest humiliation to which I have ever been subjected. During these last twenty-four hours I have been handcuffed and chained, denied the chance to sleep, been without food and drink and been confined to a place without anyone knowing my whereabouts, imprisoned. Now I am beginning to try to understand all this, rest and review the events which began as innocently as possible.

She was hoping to have a fun Christmas trip to New York City. Her treatment reads like a passage from Eastern European police states in the 1970s. Apparently, she had overstayed a visa in 1995 for three weeks. Leg chains? I guess we’re lucky she wasn’t hooded. This is Cheney’s America, after all.

She gets dirtier and dirtier.

Just when you thought the guy couldn’t get any creepier. Ron Paul gets unsolicited donations from wack-jobs. Mike Huckabee holds fundraisers in their homes. This week, no less.

Glenn Greenwald makes an obvious rejoinder to Dana Goldstein:

If one accepts Goldstein’s premise — that no decent person would ever support any pro-life politician regardless of other concerns — it is difficult to understand how her position is reconciled with support for Democrats generally, given that they have installed in one of their two most powerful positions — Senate Majority Leader — a fairly dogmatic pro-life politician in Harry Reid.

Soren Dayton looks at their history with the evangelical movement:

In both Republican and Baptist politics, Thompson represents the old conservative movement trying to keep power that it has in many ways already lost. Huckabee represents a new movement in American politics and American Protestantism. Who is winning? I refer you to the numbers.

That’s Omar’s metaphor for what needs to be done to return our Iraqi imperial province to some kind of normalcy:

Most people would say it’s impossible. No one could eat an elephant. Others would argue that one actually could eat an elephant—with patience, one bite at a time.

Maybe some Iraqis are now nibbling at the tail. If the politicians cannot accomplish it at a national level, the desire of ordinary Iraqis for some kind of sanity does seem to be gaining pace. It cannot substitute for national decisions, but it is a hopeful sign.

Could Mukasey have turned into something more disappointing? Horton:

So while the Justice Department’s number one was pleading to his own employees for clemency for corporate wrongdoers (a function normally accorded to high-priced lawyers in private practice), its number two to be was giving a series of carefully rehearsed and highly disingenuous answers to an oversight committee designed to shield those who have committed war crimes and to justify the continuing official use of torture—a crime under the laws of the United States and the laws of nations. And its powerful new national security division was busily obstructing a Congressional inquiry into the destruction of evidence sought by two federal judges—destruction in which a bevy of Bush Administration lawyers, including a former Attorney General, are now deeply linked.

A fascinating Fallows dispatch from China.

My fellow bloggers at the Atlantic form their very own McLaughlin Group. Ross bravely predicts that Clinton will be the Democratic nominee.