Category: The Dish

Oxford, Mississippi, 7.40 am.

One take on Benedict XVI at Year Two.

Chuck Todd notices a fascinating contrast. Obama is running away from identity politics. An increasingly desperate Clinton is embracing it. One more way in which Clinton really does represent the past and Obama the future.

I might have written too soon. While Gordon Brown remains the heads-on favorite to succeed Tony Blair, there’s always a chance he won’t. One of his potential rivals is coping with a smear campaign – which is a good sign the succession isn’t settled yet. (In Britain, it’s decided by the party with the majority of seats in the House of Commons, if a prime minister quits between general elections.) If the unlikely happens, and some believe it will, Britain will have a 41 year-old prime minister, David Miliband, running against a 41 year-old rival, David Cameron. It might make reservations about Barack Obama’s age seem a little moot.

Outsourcing the war – in Iraq. Accountability? The U.S.?

The Great Debate continues.

A reader writes:

Andrew, it’s factually inaccurate to call Tennessee a white girls’ team (as you do in your Times article). Like Rutgers and all of the elite teams, they are majority-black. (I count three white players out of eleven in their team photo – and one of their starting five.) They have lighter skin and they straighten their hair, but that’s another story … that’s why Imus and co. were making their Jigaboos/Wannabes reference.

My terminology was too crude, and I was compressing the point too much, I guess, for a British readership. What I was reacting to was the video footage during the remarks when Imus was praising the Tenessee team just as a blonde, white woman was being hoist aloft. And the distinction he was making was a racial one – just not as stark as I made it out to be. Apologies and thanks for the correction.

In which we give Kim Jong Il $25 million as a carrot and he does, er, nothing.

It’s a Drudge classic. One quibble: our bees? In some cases, the more cell-phones the better:

With no criteria for what "improper" or "proper" could mean. Oh, and: I was just following orders, and keeping the paperwork moving on time. Gonzales explains himself here. I can’t believe it will hold up on Tuesday.