Category: The Dish

October was the biggest month in the seven-and-a-bit-year history of the Daily Dish: around 3.5 million pageviews. And we’re at an all-time high Technorati ranking of 71. Thanks to you, Jessie, the interns, and the Atlantic.

A new feature allows you to watch in real time as Wikipedia evolves around the globe. One blogger response:

While I watched for several minutes, someone in India edited an entry on Ghandi, then someone else in the UK edited a page on Puerto Ricans living in the United States, and some very determined person in Mississippi, US, repeatedly edited a page about a British database computer programmer called Edgar F. Codd.

Watching paint dry has nothing on it.

Harder, pussy cat! Kill! Kill!

In a presidential campaign, a black man grooves with an out lesbian on national television.

What use are they if they exempt gas and oil concessions and sales?

A possible future Aussie prime minister is caught on tape picking ear-wax out of his ear and eating it. Eww. YouTube here, if you want to lose your lunch appetite.

You can just feel the mustache trying to make a come-back. And now it does, on the back of troubled prostates.

She’s shifting more resources to Iowa.

John Edwards is doing his party a favor, I’d say. This ad could be criticized for leveraging his wife’s illness and for the lack of any minorities among the "American people" cited. But it’s for Iowa, not the most ethnically diverse state in the country. And it has punch.

And what else do they do? They play the gender card. Her chief apparatchik, Mark Penn, said in the conference call today that

criticisms from Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and former Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) would backfire and that he was already "detecting some backlash," particularly among female voters.

Those female voters are saying, "Sen. Clinton needs our support now more than ever if we’re going to see this six-on-one to try to bring her down," Penn told those on the campaign call…

Gerald McEntee, AFSCME’s president, mentioned the debate during his endorsement speech, and took Penn’s and Mantz’s view of the results.

“Some of you may have seen last night’s debate,” McEntee said. “Six guys against Hillary, and I’d call that a fair fight. This is a strong woman.”

Gail Collins picks up the meme this morning:

Hillary Clinton stood on a stage for two hours Tuesday night, being yelled at by six men. Now this is what they mean by pressure… She took it all and came out the other end in one piece. She’s one tough woman. Kudos… [Y]ou do have to give her a few points for not letting the guys push her around.

Er: she did let the guys push her around, got rattled, and revealed the fact that her candidacy is pure calculation. No points. But, more importantly, this line of defense is deeply sexist. You can’t say that Clinton’s gender is irrelevant in the political campaign and then give her points for not fainting under the pressure of male criticism. Can you imagine anyone ever saying that Margaret Thatcher should have gotten points for withstanding the parliamentary barracking she got on a regular basis – because a woman isn’t expected to be able to stand up against a bunch of men? Please.

And then you realize that Clinton’s flacks don’t even believe in the ability of women to be involved in politics without apology, excuse or cheap and easy invocation of the female defense. They use feminism the way they use everything else: as a tool to gain personal power. What’s next? Congratulating her that she didn’t burst into tears? And can we please retire this hideous "Hillary" thing? She’s Senator Clinton. And she can’t play the gender card both ways.

(Photo: Mannie Garcia/Getty.)