The Dish

A reader writes:

You wrote, "I think what we're seeing in Arizona is a glimpse of a possible Republican future: a police state directed against dark-skinned immigrants, legal and illegal."

I'm sorry, but this is truly too much.  Hatred and vitriol, such as calling opponents' policies racist, is supposed to be on the decline in the Obama era.  Did you not get the message?  This kind of over-the-top bullshit really weakens the appeal of reading your blog. And it is wrong on substance as well.  Where do you find Republicans against legal immigration?  Are all illegal immigrants really "dark-skinned?" Are we to do nothing about controlling our borders for fear of being labeled racist?

Another writes:

I have very mixed feelings about the Arizona anti-illegal-immigrant laws, but the comparison to the Nazi's "show me your papers" smacks of Godwin's law of citing Hitler in arguments. Arizona is trying to deal with real problems, created by people who broke existing, serious, democratically-created laws.

Laws of the type which virtually every country in the world has in place, for good reason. These immigrants knew they were breaking US law when they entered the country. Comparisons to fascist states is ridiculous. By any conservative reading of the situation, what Arizona is trying to do is true crime fighting, not persecuting an ethnic minority.

Another:

You wrote: "It was the same attitude toward terror suspects. I do not believe that torture would have occurred in this country if the victims had been white."

I believe the evidence is pretty strong that John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban, was likely tortured while in U.S. custody. His sad story has been largely forgotten, but he was actually one of the first victims of the "get tough" campaign by Rumsfeld, et al.

Yes, Lindh was almost certainly tortured and at the very least degraded and abused. But he was the first captive the US got its hands on. If more white Americans had been sent to Gitmo under orders from the president without due process, I think things would have developed differently. Reifying "the worst of the worst" made due process impossible and torture more palatable to the public. As for Godwin's law, I did not mention Hitler; I mentioned a police state. A police state is one where any cop can pull you aside for any reason and demand papers. If you don't have them, you're guilty till proven innocent. The overwhelming majority of those "reasonably suspected" of being illegal immigrants will be Mexican. What we have here, regardless of how it came about (and I agree the Feds have a terrible record in policing the Southern border), this is a police state directed at a minority, innocent and guilty. That's the reality.

It's socialism, after all.

Andrew Halcro checks in on the Palin legacy in Alaska:

Palin conned Alaskans into thinking she could bluff three of the worlds largest oil & gas companies into building the most expensive private sector project in the history of the United States. […] Three years later, AGIA is an unqualified failure. Even former supporters say the plan will fail and the state has wasted three years chasing a wild goose that many of us warned about when this bad trip began back in March of 2007.

The current governor is scrambling to get the project on track. Just a few days ago, on Facebook, Palin was still touting the pipeline as part of her political resume. And why not? In her mind, it's already up and running. And it's only what's in her mind that matters, innit?

A dramatic scene from the suburban animal kingdom.

You may recall that Andrew Sprung cast doubt on David Brooks' assertion in a recent column that a new book by Stephen Rose showed that  "over the last 10 years, 60 percent of Americans made more than $100,000 in at least one of those years, and 40 percent had incomes that high for at least three." David responded with a direct quote from the book:

"Another way to look at incomes over many years is to see how often people experienced high and low incomes. Indeed, fully 60 percent of adults had at least one year in which their incomes were at least $100,000" (p. 119)

Sprung recanted, not having a copy of the book in front of him. Now he does have a copy of the book in front of him. The sentence above is of course accurate. Then it gets interesting …

God bless the British media. When a Labour minister didn't show up for a lunchtime talk-show yesterday, the producers put Peppa The Pig in his chair for the debate. Worse, this is no ordinary pig, and had already decided not to back Labour at a campaign event for kids, to Lord Mandelson's dismay:

As Guido notes, Peppa is now more popular than Elvis among the children of Britain. (Suspicious Minds a popular lullaby? Who knew?). This is no minor slight.

And other things you really shouldn't tweet when you're the wife of the Speaker of the House of Commons and running for office.

The best debunking of the fear-mongering about a hung parliament after the May 6 election comes, of course, from Alex Massie, with a great roundup of proportional representation across the globe. Money quote:

The Tories' arguments – or at least the ones they are choosing to deploy – suggest that calamity is the inevitable consequence of a hung parliament and/or proportional representation. This, unfortunately, is poppycock.

I'd like David Cameron to be the next Prime Minister but I'd prefer it if he became so without insulting everyone's intelligence along the way.

Nate Silver also has a compelling new model (serious nerd alert) that tries to predict parliamentary seats from the share of the vote. The traditional way of doing this assumes a uniform national swing toward or away from one party or another, and then translates that into seats. But if you do not see a uniform swing, but one that could provide a major fillip for the Lib-Dems in some areas, a strong Tory showing in others, then all sorts of things become possible, including a point at which Labour sinks beneath the waves. In almost all Nate's scenarios, Labour does worse and the Lib-Dems do better in parliamentary seats.

A team of young gymnasts take Simon Cowell's breath away.