The Dish

If you try to access the latest episode of South Park online, you get the message above.

I know I'm a broken record, but the two-part 200th episode was about as close to genius – and hardcore fan-pandering – as you can get. Hennifer Lopez, Mr Hat, Mephesto and Stan Tenorman: what more could you ask for? Well: you could ask for a reprise of South Park's pioneering decision not to pander to idiotic Islamist threats by treating the figure of Mohammed the way they treat every other religious icon. And that's what Matt and Trey delivered.

They had done it before with no problem. In 2001, they'd already run an episode with the Super Best Friends, Jesus, Buddha, Moses, Muhammed, and Seaman – pronounced SeamAAAn – portraying Muhammed with no fuss or complaints. Then after 9/11, when all media should have been even more insistent on not caving to Jihadist thugs, Comedy Central forbade a reprise in a subsequent episode. Viacom looked really stupid, but that's hardly unusual.

Then the last two weeks. In the first part of the 200th episode, South Park went to hilarious lengths to have Muhammed but cloaked in various disguises – a U-Haul van, a bear mascot, Santa Claus. But any actual depiction,as in 2001, was covered with a block of black with the word "censored" on it. In some ways, this act of censorship wasn't too big a deal. It actually helped illuminate the unique intolerance of Sunni Islam among world religions today. SP has long had Jesus and Satan, they have ridiculed Mormonism, eviscerated Scientology, mocked Catholicism and showed the Buddha actually doing lines of coke. None of the adherents of these other faiths have threatened to kill Matt and Trey, but, of course, some Sunni Islamists did so.

So what does Comedy Central do? They wussed out even further. They bleeped even mentions of the name of Muhammed spoken by characters:

A spokesman for Comedy Central confirmed that the network had added more bleeps to the episode than were in the cut delivered by South Park Studios, and that it was not giving permission for the episode to run on the studio’s Web site.

To which there is only one response:

Fuck you, whales!

"The combination of state insurance (which protects creditors) with limited liability (which protects shareholders) creates a financial doomsday machine… A large part of the activity of the financial sector seems to be a machine to transfer income and wealth from outsiders to insiders, while increasing the fragility of the economy as a whole," – Martin Wolf.

Meet the woman who will likely be the next senator from Arizona Nevada.

Iain Dale, a Tory partisan, warns the Tory and Labour tabloids of demonizing Clegg:

I don't want Nick Clegg to win. I don't want him to be Prime Minister. But he is not the devil incarnate. He's a nice guy, doing a fair job of leading his party. I do not agree with many of his policies. I think many of them are misguided. But I am happy to accept that he believes they will be best for the country. I am happy to debate them with him or any other LibDem and that's what politics and this election should be about. It should be about debating ideas, arguing about policy. It shouldn't be about this sudden urge to denigrate Nick Clegg as a person. It will backfire on those who promulgate these attacks because most people can see with their own eyes that he is a transparently decent individual.

Massie agrees.

Doesn't this sound familiar? The attempted – and failed – smearing of a rising star of "new politics"?

Think of the last US presidential election. It featured very established party leaders vying for the same familiar positions. Giuliani, McCain, Romney and Huckabee were all familiar faces – and the most familiar won. Clinton was the established incumbent for the Democrats. But the mood in the country – after two disastrous wars, a spending binge, a deficit crisis, and a Wall Street collapse – was for more radical change. A new person emerged, Barack Obama, part of the two-party system but somehow able to transcend it. Ditto, in some respects, the delusional Palin, who seemed to come from nowhere to galvanize the GOP base.

America's system actually resists this kind of insurgency more effectively than Britain's. The primaries exposed every aspect of Obama for months, pushing him through a grueling democratic inspection. Palin nearly got away with it, by emerging late in the campaign with a press so scared of the red states it never truly exposed her deranged fantasies. But Britain's campaign lasts only three weeks. If the phenomenon of the new hope – Clegg – emerges during such a shortt campaign, and does so through the extremely powerful medium of television, there is very little time to burst the bubble before May 6.

If the British system operated in the US, McCain may well have been the Republican nominee in 2000 and Dean the Democratic nominee in 2004. If you think of Perot in 1992, you can easily see that the peak of his anti-incumbent popularity lasted much longer than three weeks before he came crashing down to earth.

It's still a very long shot. But my gut tells me that the Liberal Democrats might even win this election outright. If they do, Americans will have to absorb the fact that Britain is becoming more liberal, and that its foreign policy may be moving sharply away from the US alliance toward European integration. Clegg is the most passionately pro-EU candidate for office in decades. Which is why today's foreign policy debate will indeed be crucial. (Check in for live-blogging at 3.30 pm.)

(Photo: Nick Clegg by Peter MacDiarmid/Getty.)

Matt Steinglass referees the financial reform politicking:

If we don't see a deal very soon, it indicates one of three things. First, the Republican concerns may be more substantial than previously reported, in which case someone with more expertise than Mr McConnell needs to explain what they are. Bob Corker, for example, has illuminated some of his party's specific grievances, but even he sounds optimistic. Second, Republicans may still be testing to see whether killing a Democratic bill by painting it as too friendly to Wall Street is a politically viable option. This seems less likely now, as Mr McConnell has toned down his "back to the drawing board" rhetoric. Finally, Republicans may be trying to figure out what sort of face-saving public concession from Democrats would be sufficient for Mr McConnell to cast a bill as a Republican victory over the administration. If that is the case, perhaps Democrats can help them along by offering to publicly growl "Foiled again!" Or whatever it takes.

A full round-up of polling, commentary, video and silly persons here. Why Gordon Brown is losing this election even more dramatically than David Cameron here. And a classic American quote today that suggests some elements of tea-party populism mirror the Lib-Dem surge in Britain:

Independents and Democrats at the Cocoa Beach Pier on Wednesday were more welcoming. They said an outsider candidacy by Mr. Crist might give Floridians a way to protest partisan politics. “People are upset with the whole system, and we need more than two parties,” said David Steranko, 39, a registered independent and Internet marketer of vacation packages. “I would really like to see our government stop bickering so much and work on our problems more.”

Any hint of incumbency these days is death. In Britain it has affected both established parties.

P.S. I’ll be live-blogging the foreign policy debate – which is now crucial for David Cameron to seize back the lead. Tune in at 3.30 pm.

Afghan journalist Najibullah Quraishi ventures into a dark underworld:

[I]n the midst of war and endemic poverty, an ancient tradition–banned when the Taliban were in power–has re-emerged across the country. It's called Bacha Bazi, translated literally as "boy play." Hundreds of boys, some as young as eleven, street orphans or boys bought from poor families by former warlords and powerful businessmen, are dressed in woman's clothes, taught to sing and dance for the entertainment of male audiences, and then sold to the highest bidder or traded among the men for sex.

Full Frontline documentary here.

Olivia Judson compiles the evidence:

[O]ne long-term study of more than 6,500 people in northern California found that those who were fat around the middle at age 40 were more likely to succumb to dementia in their 70s. A long-term study in Sweden found that, compared to thinner people, those who were overweight in their 40s experienced a more rapid, and more pronounced, decline in brain function over the next several decades.

A reader writes:

Are we still playing this game? If so, here are Alanis Morissette's "humps."

Another writes:

To me this cover of "Wonderwall" by the The Mike Flowers Pops is the classic example. The video actually got significant airplay on MuchMusic up here in Canada when it came out, which was around the time of the original.

Another:

I can hold my silence no longer. Of all the genre-shifting covers, I have never heard anything more impressive than Bruce Lash's bossa nova-style cover of the penultimately poppy "Psycho Killer" by Talking Heads.

Another:

Ray LaMontagne doing Gnarls Barkley and Jamie Cullum doing Pharrell’s "Frontin’" (using his piano for percussion too—just absolutely sick).

Another:

Not the creation of a random language generator, I promise: Apocalyptica – Four Finnish cellists who have a whole album of Metallica covers.