Category: The Dish

The top ten spiritual moments on American Idol.

One can understand why the White House is reluctant to use the word "amnesty" to describe their immigration proposal. But I’m amazed they haven’t been as linguistically innovative here as they have in other areas. The solution is simple. This isn’t "amnesty". It’s an "enhanced immigration technique."

No GOP presidential candidates will be at Falwell’s funeral – and only a junior fellow from the White House (whose job it is to stroke the Christianist base.) Politics can be callous sometimes, can’t it? I mean, judging from their public statements, Falwell was close to a saint.

Not as easy as it might seem, but NASA is gearing itself up for tackling it:

We cannot expect astronauts to spend three years in a spacecraft and not have sex – of some kind. Probably with each other, and likely in more than one combination. Sex in space presents a number of challenges beyond tangible matters like zero gravity or awkward enclosures. In fact, the physics should be the least of NASA’s concerns.

It’s the touchy-feely bit that the agency will need to consider seriously. Blindly applying Earth-bound standards that astronauts cannot follow under space-voyage conditions will only lead to guilt and shame. What happens if one person in the spaceship makes a romantic overture, only to be rebuffed? What happens if an astronaut in a relationship back home falls in love with another member of the mission? What to do — send a breakup text message from Mars?

How do you handle love, sex, romance, heartbreak, jealousy, hurt, unrequited longing, crushes, loneliness and twitterpation when you’re 18 months away from Earth and perhaps unsure whether you’ll make it back?

And what happens to the lube?

"Maybe I should wait a couple weeks and see if it changes," Mr. McCain said of Mr. Romney’s position on immigration this week. "Maybe he can get out his small varmint gun and drive those Guatemalans off his yard." Heh.

Matt Yglesias cheers for his team. But I’m not sure I agree that

the members of the progressive coalition have much less in common with each other than do the members of the conservative coalition.

Right now, the internecine spats on the right are far deeper, nastier and stranger than anything on the left. Or maybe I’m looking at it from a skewed perspective.

Are Romney’s handsome looks an under-rated asset? Up against an increasingly frail McCain, maybe.

A reader writes:

Funny you write that you got an earful down in Orange County. So did I last week when I was up in Napa and the Central Valley – and I bet what I heard, from two local farmers, was the diametric opposite of what you heard in Newport Beach.  One held up a fancy white peach to me and said: "Today, you can buy this for about 35 cents in the Safeway. If I were paying my fieldworkers a regular minimum wage and benefits to care for and harvest that peach, it would cost you about $1.50. These people ought to think about that before they start raging against the immigration bill."

He’s right of course, these workers contribute to the wealth and prosperity of the rest of us quite directly – they fill water in our restaurants, wash our cars, trim our lawns, harvest our produce. What irritates me about this entire debate is how these workers are demonized and abused. It’s sickening, really – it brings out the worst in people, and increasingly it brings out sickening racism. We need to remember that these "illegal immigrants" are first and foremost fellow human beings, and then that they’re here doing a lot of things we don’t want to dirty our hands with. We can choose to expell them or to put all sorts of limitations on their stay with us, but we should do it while treating them with dignity and maintaining a sense of justice and fairness. I wonder if all those Bible-thumpers in the anti-immigration crowd have ever taken out the good book and read Leviticus 19:33-34? It’s the Lord speaking, incidentally.

(Photo: David McNew/Getty.)

Brian Sorgatz posts the 911 phone call of the sky-high Dearborn police officer who believes that he’s ‘overdosed’ on marijuana brownies with his wife, thinks hes already dead, and hey, what’s the score of the Redwings game? As dramatic comedic dialogue, it’s hard to beat. No charges were brought – even though the pot he used was stolen from someone who was charged. You want to listen to a high, paranoid off-duty cop in your lunch break? Oh, all right then.

A reader writes:

Great job on Torture/Reyonlds. It’s why he is my least favorite commentator around – he can never argue a position straightforwardly or honestly. At least with Michelle Malkin or John Hinderaker, for example – or even the NRO types – you know exactly what they believe, because they say it.

But Reynolds constantly tries to preserve credibility by arguing that he opposes X but then spending all his time attacking and mocking anti-X advocates and promoting pro-X views.

He does that with global warming specifically and all political issues generally. Even though it was a small example, the most vivid case I ever saw of it was with the Jerome Armstrong/astrology mini-"scandal." The day that emerged, Reynolds did more than any other person to give that story visibility – he literally linked to one post after the next from right-wing bloggers pushing the Armstrong story, but then he inserted into the middle of a post, as a fleeting dependent clause, some sort of dismissive claim that he didn’t really think the whole thing was a big deal, then proceeded again to link to more and more items about it.

That way, the same person who did more to bring publicity to the story would, if you made the point, say: "Oh, no –  I made clear I didn’t think the story was a big deal." It’s the most dishonest and cowardly way possible for engaging in public debate – pretending to have one position and then doing everything possible to promote its opposite.

Just baffling. We all have a different blogging styles and, to be fair to Instapundit, his brief, often opaque one-liners can be misleading. But a long look at his archives will reveal the pattern my reader detects. Make your own mind up. My own view is that he holds consistently libertarian views, unless they offend the Republican base, in which case he stays quiet or targets base enemies. Maybe if he weren’t so talented, smart and sharp, these things would  not matter to many readers. But after a while, you feel like you’re being taken for a spin, not a journey. Thousands of others, it should be noted, strongly disagree – and vote with their mouse-clicks.