The Dish

I’ve heard you. Many of you want the links to open in a new window as they once did. We’re on it. We’ve fixed the RSS feed, I hope. If you have any more suggestions for the new site, I’m always eager to hear them. Many more incremental changes are in the works: e.g. the Atlantic has bought me a subscription to Getty Images (which the whole Atlantic site shares as well). I’ll now get to pick the photos myself, rather than relying on ones already selected by photo editors. Yay! And thanks for showing up in such large numbers in the new home. The traffic data show no loss in readership from the transition at all (even an increase), which surprised me. They also show that 83 percent of the readers yesterday came directly to the site. Obviously, many of you bookmark http://www.andrewsullivan.com. It remains the best and simplest way to find the blog. Thanks again for making this blog part of your day.

Dizzy yet? This time, it’s campaign finance. Back in 2002, he backed McCain-style reform. Now: Not so much. Money quote from The Hill:

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who strongly criticized campaign-finance regulations in a private meeting with House conservatives last week, once touted dramatic restructuring measures such as taxing political contributions and placing spending limits on federal campaigns.

Romney makes John Kerry look immoveable.

This time on taxes. He was an inclusive, secular politician who could see the benefits of balanced budgets, even occasionally at the expense of tax cuts. Now, he’s a supply-side Christianist crusading against gay relationships. But that’s what the base demands. So that’s what the base will get.

David Bernstein wonders why Bush hasn’t appointed more judges friendly to liberty. Has he been in a coma the last six years?

It’s almost a Monty Python skit. After under-oath testimony of FBI agents reporting beatings of detainees, an investigation was initiated. There were no beatings. How do we know? You know the drill:

Col Bassett carried out 20 interviews with suspects and witnesses, but not with detainees, the Southern Command said, according to AP. "He talked to all the parties he felt he needed to get information about the allegations that were made," a Southern Command spokesman told AP.

In the words of Principal Skinner, "Now, let’s have no more curiosity about this bizarre cover-up."

Do we have a helicopter problem in Iraq? It doesn’t look good:

The latest helicopter casualty, an Apache, "exploded in a ball of fire" on Friday, according to witnesses.

"That’s unlikely to happen due to small arms fire," [Kiowa Warrior pilot ME] says, "and the odds of hitting an Apache heads on with an unguided RPG [rocket-propelled grenade] are pretty slim."

The fuel cells are crashworthy, and unless they are hit by something like an API (armor piercing incendiary – like a .50 cal or higher) shell, I don’t think they are going to explode. Hitting munitions onboard isn’t likely to make a fireball either. But the explosion of a SAM hitting it might look like a fireball.

January 23 was a bad day for neophyte blogger, Jay Carney, Time magazine’s Washington bureau chief. But, hey, the MSM isn’t quite used to the higher standards of the blogosphere. But they’re getting there.

A reader writes:

I appreciate the recent rugby focus of the blog. I grew up in a "rugby family," which in the U.S. is not so normal. Not only did my father play, my mother did as well. Explaining to friends that my mother lost her voice for two months because she got elbowed in the throat during a rugby game was just one of the interesting tales I got to tell my friends.

Most of all, I remember how wonderful I was treated as a child by the rugby players and their families. There weren’t a lot us kids at the games but we always felt like part of the crew. And falling asleep while listening to members of the visiting Australian team singing bawdy songs in the living room was always grand (what’s the one where you hold your tongue while singing?). I have nothing but fond memories of growing up that way. Although I never played myself, my brother did, and my father just barely gave it up after numerous knew surgeries. He would’ve played until he was 80 if he could have.

Mine was a rugby home too. My dad was always AWOL on Saturdays, captaining or playing for the town team. But I didn’t really find running for my life in a muddy bog once a week my idea of fun. And I kinda liked my ears as they were. My dad’s got plastered halfway round his head by the time he was my age – and his nose was broken a few times as well.

I asked re: Whitman:

Why are young gay students not being taught about their extraordinary cultural inheritance?

A college professor writes:

The seminal book on this was published in 1991 by one of the preeminent senior scholars in American literature, Michael Moon, Emory University. The book was called Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporiality in Leaves of Grass (Harvard Univ. Press).

There are any number of other scholars working on gay Whitman. For example, one of the best Whitman scholars is Michael Warner, who is also known for having been instrumental in the development of "queer theory." You can’t seriously do Whitman in an American university today without articulating his patriotism with his homosexuality. Whenever I teach him, it is in this vein. My classes read, for example, "Scented Herbage of My Breast" alongside his ode to Lincoln, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d." I’ll be doing that pairing in two classes this spring, in my Survey of American Literature, 1865 to Present, and in a seminar on the 1890s. But I’m hardly original in this regard.

(Photo: Thomas McVety.)