Category: The Dish

"I have a bad feeling about this." Star Wars. Most of ’em.

A video clip from a British documentary about a group of young rugby lads: massive consumption of beer, and lots of nudity in pubs. Sounds about right. The video is R-rated. As are their antics.

It’s not all love. More trenchant criticism here.

Is Barack another out-of-touch Democratic Party egghead? And when was the last time we worried about that with a leading black politician?
 

Another reader submission in this thread:

Q: What do you get when you cross a neocon with a lemming?

A: Peace.

Or the next election. More neocon jokes here.

A National Interest interview with Rosemary Hollis, director of research at Chatham House (the Royal Institute of International Affairs). The British report on Iraq was just released last Saturday. It is as bleak as the US intelligence community’s. Money quote:

Well, I was in Iran just over a month ago, and I interviewed a number of people in and around the administration. The future of Iraq belongs to them. They believe they’re winning in Iraq and that America is losing, and it’s just a question of how soon the Americans give up and go home, or whether they will hold on. Now if they hold on, one must assume that part of the reason is to deny a victory to the Iranians, but how do you justify that to the soldiers on the ground? That it’s no longer about putting things right in Iraq? It’s about salvaging America’s reputation vis-à-vis Iran?

This Bill O’Reilly segment is interesting. He simply asserts that gay binational couples are more likely to be fraudulent than straight couples. What evidence does he have for this? None. Gay immigration advocates back exactly the same standards of proof and evidence of serious relationships for gay couples as straight ones. And most fraudulent would-be immigrants are far more reluctant to self-identify as gay than as straight. For good measure, some binational gay couples are also legally married in America, in Massachusetts. But their/my marriage license is regarded as toilet paper by the federal government. You can see the brick wall that Rachel Tiven’s arguments receive from O’Reilly. That brick wall is called homophobia, an assumption that gay relationships are worth less and mean less than straight ones. It’s so deep I doubt O’Reilly is even aware of it.

I linked to Patrick Ruffini’s panicked fear that Ron Paul may do very well in the Ames, Iowa straw poll. Among the reasons Patrick cited for Paul’s possible strength was the following:

His home base in Texas isn’t that far of a drive, and his people are motivated enough to come in from out of state for him.

A reader points out that it is 1,074 miles from Lake Jackson, TX to Ames, IA. 

Four years later:

"I am Shiite," Ali said. "My uncles and cousins were murdered by Saddam’s regime. I wanted desperately to get rid of him. But today, if Saddam’s feet appeared in front of me, I would fall to my knees and kiss them!"

(Photo of a Baghdad girl injured by the chaos unleashed by the US invasion by Ahmad al-Rubaye/Getty.)

A campaign to save David Vitter’s private parts. And an analysis of the costs of keeping prostitution illegal – from the Atlantic archives in 1977.