The Dish

"I thank God for helping me keep the faith, even when I didn’t believe," – Jennifer Hudson, accepting her Oscar tonight.

The Dixie Republicans have lost the fiscally conservative, independent vote. It may take a while before they win our trust again. Frank Luntz explains:

My polls show that Democrats now hold a perceived advantage with voters not just on reducing deficits and balancing the budget but on an issue long seen as a GOP strength: ending wasteful spending. That alone should jar Republicans into taking a fresh approach.

It has’t so far. They seem far more concerned to shore up the battle against abortion and gay marriage.

Meridian Hill Park in Washington D.C., this afternoon.

Another blogger piles onto the irrelevance of the Human Rights Campaign. Why is HRC more closet-friendly than much of "conservative" corporate America? Money quote:

If current trends continue, gays and lesbians may well be the test case that proves that employment nondiscrimination laws aren’t really necessary at all — take any sufficiently developed capitalist economy, free it from public or private coercion, and the profit motive may just be enough to end discrimination all by itself.

When I made that point in Virtually Normal, I got the usual brickbats. But a decade later, with HRC’s beloved Employment Non-Discrimination Act still in limbo and marriage rights already here in one state, and all-but reality in several others, it doesn’t look so outrageous. Some news reports say that ENDA and the hideous extension of the "hate" crimes law could pass in this session. I also hear that some HRC figures don’t want these bills to pass too soon because they think they can use them against Republicans in 2008. Are they that cynical? My own sense is that HRC will be reluctant to move on ENDA and hate crimes because success omn these decades-long goals would leave them with nothing much else to do. And they just built a vast multi-million dollar office complex!   

From Dina Martina.

Not a pretty picture.

Canaan, New York, 6.30 am.

Is that the best Hillary can manage in Hollywood? My take on the Geffen-Dowd hand grenade here. Arianna piles on here:

After a while, I came to dread the mention of her name, because it usually meant I would hear no more on any other topic that day. Looking back, I would be hard pressed to say whether it was conservatives or liberals who minded her more intensely. But the feeling they had in common was, "Anybody but her." And only in that way, I’m afraid, is she any more of a "uniter, not a divider" than the act she’d like to follow.

(Photo: Robert Sullivan/AFP/Getty.)

Put Sy Hersh’s new piece next to this report from the Sunday Times and start worrying. Dick Cheney is an unhinged and dangerous figure. The damage he has already done to this country’s interests and war effort is already incalculable. But he may not be done yet.

A quick pre-Oscar review. I watched the movie on DVD last night. (I think I’ve officially stopped going to the movies. I can’t stand movie theaters any more or the people who go to them.) Babel was a better movie than "The Queen" and "The Departed," although those two were also better than many Oscar winners in recent years. The reason? Its relentless realism, its contemporary relevance, the originality of a movie much of which is unintelligible (did Gibson start this trend?), and its performances, primarily Rinko Kikuchi’s. The small and large tragedies of human miscommunication in a globalized world – this is one of  the great themes of our time, and it was explored with subtlety, urgency, and depth. It was the first movie depiction of a circuit party that did any justice to the experience (and it was in a straight club in Japan). I doubt it will win – because it’s much too much like last year’s winer, "Crash." But I was expecting some dreary p.c. Pitt/Blanchett vehicle. Man, was I wrong.