Category: The Dish

They have been allegedly rounded up, disrobed and in shackles at a disused race course and a technical college. God knows what will be done to them. One can only hope that Christians will lead the campaign against this vicious attack on non-violent religious freedom.

This is surely becoming an atrocity that renders every regime that deals with Burma and supports this barbarism outside the boundaries of the civilized world. Threatening a boycott of the Beijing Olympics does not seem to me unreasonable, unless the Chinese really do tell the junta to stop the killing.

Science finds some strange resemblances between graduate students and a certain kind of unsavory insect.

Is it a big deal? You’d think so with stories in the NYT and Salon and a potential crippling division in the GOP next year. Giuliani has tried pushing back. How serious is it? NRO, Hewitt and Reynolds have all studiously avoided comment. I guess it’s serious.

Worse than we knew:

The fact is that people inside the Giuliani campaign are appalled at the number of times their candidate has felt compelled to interrupt public appearances to take calls from his wife. The estimate from those in a position to know is that he has taken such calls more than 40 times in the middle of speeches, conferences and presentations to large donors. "If it’s a stunt, it’s not one coming from him," says one Giuliani staffer. "It’s an ongoing problem that he won’t take advice on."

That’s just what we need, isn’t it? Another president with ongoing problems he won’t take advice on. As Mark Shea notes:

Boy, I sure am glad that a sane normal person like Giuliani is representing the Mainstream of the GOP and not a contemptible nut like Ron Paul.

Ahem.

"I believe President Bush is going to order airstrikes [on Iran] before he leaves office," – Norman Podhoretz, on CSPAN yesterday. NPod made an error in his Commentary article, pointed out by one of the many readers of that neoconservative journal who were taken aback by his proposal to bomb Iran:

As an example of Britain’s tepid response to Iran’s taking captive several of its sailors back in March, Norman Podhoretz quotes the public reaction of Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt to a photograph of one of the prisoners with a cigarette in his mouth: “This [smoking] sends completely the wrong message to our young people.” But this little anecdote cannot be used as evidence of Western weakness in the face of Iranian aggression. The quotation was fabricated as part of an April Fools’ joke in the London Guardian.

NPod’s response:

If the remark I attributed to Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt was fabricated as an April Fools’ joke by the London Guardian, surely that would have been obvious to the other British papers that quoted it. Still, if Mr. Ford is right, which I doubt, I for one would welcome it as a sign that while the British may be down, they’re not so flat as all that.

It took me five minutes to find the following on Google:

On April 1 this column alleged that Patricia Hewitt had said, of a TV appearance by Leading Seaman Faye Turney, that ‘it was deplorable that the woman hostage should be shown smoking. This sends completely the wrong message to our young people.’

This was quoted by other newspapers and even mentioned on Have I Got News For You. I am happy to offer Miss Hewitt my apologies for setting this fictitious hare running but suggest that she looks again at the date.

There are two options: NPod cannot use the Internet or NPod cannot concede an error. They are not mutually exclusive.

Denzel Washington on what the Bush-Cheney detention policy has done to America:

Jon Rauch sees much to admire in the newly responsible senator from Delaware:

While other Democrats talk Iraq, health care, and change, Biden talks Iraq, Iraq, and Iraq. At a press conference this month on the steps of Iowa’s Capitol in Des Moines, he seized the occasion of an endorsement by the state’s House majority leader to proclaim, "I know how to make America safer!"

He continued, "Immediately begin to draw down American combat troops…. Immediately give the troops all the protection they need while we’re drawing them down." So far, just like Clintama. But then he veered sharply off Hillarack. "Make sure you recognize a fundamental flaw in the strategy," he said, "and that is, there will not be a central government in Iraq, out of Baghdad, capable of governing that country in anyone’s lifetime standing out in front of this Capitol. You must change the policy to put in place a federal, decentralized Iraq, giving the warring factions breathing room to establish their own security [and] control over the fabric of their daily lives."

For a year and a half, Biden (along with Leslie H. Gelb, a former president of the Council on Foreign Relations) has advocated devolving power to autonomous regions in Iraq. The presidential campaign has brought the plan into sharper focus — and, as Biden argues, into sharper contrast with what he plausibly regards as the wishful thinking prevalent in both parties.

(Photo: Alex Wong/Getty.)

Beyond parody.

The right-wing blogosphere adores the faggot-baiting Coulter. Only Rush and Malkin are in her league.