Category: The Dish

Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Bernhard Kouchner get jiggy with it. Background here.

A plea from Horton:

These emails will most likely help to demonstrate the meddling of Karl Rove and his staffers, like the celebrated "mini-Rove" Kyle Sampson, who went on to serve as Alberto Gonzales’s chief of staff before he was forced to resign, Monica Goodling and others, in internal affairs of the Department of Justice. Cross references in other documents already point to a substantial volume of communications on DOJ topics.

The emails are not only relevant to the U.S. attorneys investigation, but also to overtly political prosecutions, such as the Rove-directed prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don E. Siegelman.

I guess the right-wing blogosphere can’t protest an Egyptian’s treatment with any integrity any more. And the methods used – mere beating – are not "torture" according to the Wall Street Journal, Dick Cheney and Rudy Giuliani. But it’s still horrifying.

More worries: A feminist and a protectionist lament Clinton’s double-speak.

Time to get out of a defensive crouch. Reding seconds Ponnuru.

Who knows? Charles Franklin looks at the polls. Wide open.

He’s hedging his bets, I’d say. But can one ask what this means:

A Giuliani presidency would be drama-filled and certainly unpredictable in many ways. But there would be no going wobbly in the war. Period.

It seems to me that, at this point in the game, we really do need a president who can articulate a strategy against Jihadist terror that does not fall into some inane binary of "wobbly" vs "non-wobbly." What would non-wobbly mean? The argument for attacking Iran, for example, is an extremely difficult one – and a case could well be made that such an attack would actually set us back in the long war. The same can be said for the terrible p.r. effects of the torture and detention policies that Giuliani supports. And the even deeper toll on America’s reputation abroad if he were to be elected. Have we not learned from Iraq that simply having an aggressive posture does not translate to success unless we have thought through strategy and tactics and diplomacy very, very carefully? I see no evidence of such thought in Giuliani’s campaign – or, indeed, in any of the Republican campaigns so far. The recitation of "strength" does not make a person strong.

And bring Saddam to tears. Memo to Cheney’s thugs: this is how it’s done by Americans. And the results are much, much better.

Most voters don’t buy the Clinton faux-feminist spin.

An amazing online pictorial display of sixty-five household objects designed to look like female breastseses. Cocktail glasses, cooking ware, even mounted trophies, and the mouse above. Money quote:

I can, quite genuinely, understand why people look at one—or maybe even two, or three—of these items and dismiss them as "just a joke." If I wrote a post about just a frying pan that turns eggs into boobs, I’m certain even some truly feminist women and men would defend it as just a bit of harmless kitsch. It’s just a joke; what’s the big deal? I get that; I really do.

Which is why I went for critical mass.

Hilzoy writes:

I don’t know about you, but I think that anyone who uses this might as well put up a large sign saying: I don’t expect to have women over to my house, ever, for the rest of my natural life.

It’s just men, bloggers. They can’t help themselves. Ask Derb.