Category: The Dish

The British Medical Journal produces a superb, exhaustively sourced debate between two medical experts. Pro here; anti here.

Two for one:

It flashed through my mind that Michelle Obama would be the most graceful, stylish first lady since Jacqueline Kennedy.

And she’s fierce! Michelle in combat goes straight for the jugular. There’s none of that bitter, self-pitying feminazi irony that Hillary indulges in — as in her smugly caustic reference in the recent CNN debate to the onerous "impediments" that women face. (Oh, right — men are to blame for the privileged Wellesley and Yale Law grad having failed her D.C. bar exam.)

Jim Manzi tries again.

From the Sentinel Review in Ontario, Canada:

In an article in Monday’s newspaper, there may have been a misperception about why a Woodstock man is going to Afghanistan on a voluntary mission. Kevin DeClark is going to Afghanistan to gain life experience to become a police officer when he returns, not to shoot guns and blow things up.

The Sentinel-Review apologizes for any embarrassment this may have caused.

More gems here.

Digital processing decodes Bill Murray’s final whisper in Sophia Coppola’s beautiful film. Spoiler alert:

Hat tip: Avenues.

Some cool philosophical accessories for sale here. They beat Che Guevara.

A reader writes:

"Lounge singer"?  You have no idea.

That is Lucero (formerly Lucerito), the Mexican Britney Spears. She began her career at age 10 as a character on the Mexican equivalent of the Mickey Mouse Club television program, and has released more than 60 recordings and acted in more than ten full-length films and soap operas. Like Madonna, she’s transformed her image from cutesy child celebrity to teen sex idol to interpreter of traditional Mariachi-style ballads like the one she sang on that YouTube clip.  She’s currently married to another Mexican celebrity, Mijares.

Imagine a grown-up, less racy Britney Spears performing a ballad in honor of the icon of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the Mexico City basilica, and now you know what effect that video really has.

In two words – winging it. Loved this:

At lunch, when I asked him who influences his thinking on foreign affairs, he mentioned Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, and Frank Gaffney, a neoconservative and the founder of a research group called the Center for Security Policy. This is like taking travel advice from Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, but the governor seemed unaware of the incongruity. When I pressed him, he mentioned he had once ‘‘visited’’ with Richard Haass, the middle-of-the-road president of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Ross makes a useful distinction between being qualified for the presidency and being prepared for it. I guess if you put Gaffney in the Pentagon and Haass at State, you’d have a pretty good successor to the incoherence of the Bush administration. But hey, he’s a believer! What else do you want?

This map echoes Greenspan. Kuwait was worth rescuing, wasn’t it?:

God, I’m glad I didn’t sit through that one. I gave myself a flu-pass. But here’s the potted blogreax: Wolcott:

The glossiest domino is Mitt Romney, of course, who does himself no favors by getting testily anal about how much time he’s being alloted, though he’s a portrait in deportment compared to Alan Keyes, who seems to have stored up a pissload of anger, resentment, and righteous petulance until the right camera opportunity came along for maximum martyred posturing.

Ambers:

Romney and Huckabee were like two cultivars of fine Iowa maize.

Best line – Thompson’s on the moderator:

I am not sure how these other candidates plan to defeat al-Qaeda when they can’t even take on Carolyn Washburn. The format of this debate was more of a joke than a Mike Huckabee foreign policy answer.

Oh, and breaking news: K-Lo thinks Romney won! No word yet on who Hewitt thought did best. You’ll just have to wait for that one.