Category: The Dish

The nominee for attorney-general is an American. Which means that, in the core of his being, he opposes torture – and holds that the president has no right whatever to over-rule the laws against torture, as he has done. Mukasey even understands that what Bush has done can be understood within the context of the horrors of the Holocaust, of what Americans fought a long and good war to oppose and prevent. This is an extremely heartening development: that the new attorney-general may finally resist and roll back the putsch against the constitution and the rule of law perpetrated by this president, vice-president and their apparatchiks. Know hope. American can come back. We can win this war, without surrendering to the barbarism innovated by Dick Cheney and George W. Bush.

What else is Pelosi supposed to do?

Rick Perry sees the analogy.

As they grow older, they seem to sense their mortality and try to compensate:

Worker ants accurately gauge their life expectancy, regardless of their actual age, and take on riskier tasks as they feel their days ebbing away.

Mark Liberman assesses the candidates by speaking speed.

Overall, the Republican candidates are about 4% faster on average; but an unpaired t-test on the candidates’ rates suggests that this difference is not statistically significant. It’s perhaps worth noting, though, that stereotypes are not in general confirmed: John Edwards, despite his southern drawl, is around the 75% percentile of this bunch. Hillary Clinton, who as a woman should by stereotype be a faster talker than her male competitors, is below the median in this sample.

For one Bush appointee, it includes contraception.

A reader writes:

I live in the Eastern corridor of PA, just north of Philadelphia.  While there are a lot of republicans here, this is democrat country.  We (and our cousins on the other side of the state – recall Carville’s line about PA being Pitttsburgh and Philadelphia with Alabama in the middle) are the ones responsible for this state going blue in ’04.  Hillary needs exactly these types of voters to win the nomination. 

And I’ve got to tell you, there is NO passion for her here.  My evidence is purely anecdotal, but all my hard-core, we volunteered the last time around friends, are waiting to vote for Obama.

I can’t find a Hillary supporter.  And I’ve looked.

Rudy explains how he wasn’t really a Republican mayor of New York City:

"Every family has a black sheep," – Barack Obama’s response to the news that he is distantly related to Dick Cheney.

Walter Shapiro counts the ways.