The Dish

"And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier," – Greg Mankiw, fighting back against the class-warriors.

Bush sticks to an unpopular position, however uncomfortable it might make him.

Somehow, my heart is not breaking.

A majority of these reasons apply to me.

I sure did:

VDH makes the usual case about how weak soft power is when confronting fundamentalist religious regimes like Iran’s. He’s right – so far as he goes. But what he fails to grasp is that, under Bush and Cheney, the West has not only much less soft power thanks to the U.S.’s abandonment of humane treatment of military detainees, but the collapse in hard power is even steeper. It’s the crumpled paper tiger of the US military in Iraq that is fueling Iranian aggression. The grind of the under-manned and under-planned Iraq occupation has destroyed the U.S.’s credible hard power in the Middle East. With this deft, disgusting game with British sailors, Iran’s regime is reminding us of two things: that we have no real soft power left among our allies, and that our hard power is being slowly degraded and humiliated in Iraq. All of this is a direct consequence of the Bush administration’s grotesque incompetence these past six years. They are worse than Carter; and the American people were smart enough to dump him after four years. The truth is: Bush and Cheney, for all their bluster, have actually weakened the United States internationally and strengthened the hand of our most dangerous enemies. They are our Chamberlain. We await a Churchill.

Yes, her first quarter is big. But she’s the obvious front-runner, her husband is the last Democratic president and he’s fundraising for her as if he’s trying to settle another sexual harassment suit. Besides, the headline $36 million, as Hotline’s Marc Ambinder reports, is only $26 million. Moreover, much of that might have come from early big donors, who are running out fast. There’s another shoe to fall as well:

Some Clinton supporters will crap bricks when they learn that Sen. Barack Obama raised more than $21 million dollars — maybe more. Obama’s spokesman, Robert Gibbs, declined to confirm that fact, but other Dem fundraisers who talk regularly with Obama’s fundraisers say that Obama’s sum will come close to Clinton’s sum — at least for the money raised into primary accounts.

Others will worry that $26M is as good as it gets for Clinton, especially since high dollar fundraising tends to drop off after the first quarter. For the rest of the year, Clinton will rely more and more on aggressive and costly direct mail, low dollar events, and internet appeals.

When Clinton is asking Drudge to help her, you know she’s a little rattled. Marc has the clincher questions:

How much of HRC’s money came from major donors? (Answer: about $20M) Are there big donors left to tap? Did her internet fundraising bear fruit? How will this be spun internally? Does Bill Clinton think this number is good?

I wonder.

(Photo: Mannie Garcia/Getty.)

A reader writes:

Yesterday morning during the reading of the Passion at the Palm Sunday Mass, I got a terrible feeling. When I was a child and listened to the Passion and heard about the torture, it seemed incredibly foreign. I was an American, after all, and we never dreamed of torturing people suspected of a crime, nor did we – unlike those we were taught to demonize – torture political prisoners. Now the flogging that Christ endured seems cruel (especially since Pilate considered him innocent) but at least straight-forward compared to the sleep-deprivation, sexual humiliation and other psychological tortures that are now done in our name.

How can we Americans of middle age have seen our country change so drastically?

They re-elected him.

McCain did it. With the small help of "100 American soldiers, with three Blackhawk helicopters, and two Apache gunships overhead."

Here’s a story of a painfully young victim of a dangerous, ubiquitous drug – far more toxic in high doses than, say, marijuana. But he bought it from a neighborhood store.