The Dish

"I've been called a lot of things…but never, I mean never, could anyone make the mistake of calling me a Yankee fan. Well, check that, if you didn't know what the hell is going on in your own state maybe you could…" – Curt Schilling, responding to Martha Coakley's latest, awful gaffe.

The Republican party right now is largely bonkers. The Democratic party is a lily-livered hackfest of mediocrity. I remain of the view that Obama is the best thing going for this country. But between the insanity on the right and incoherence on the left, he is marooned in a lonely center. Maybe in the long run, this is a better place to be. Right now it is making governance close to impossible, at a moment when we need all hands on deck.

New York, New York, 7.41 am

Examining Brown's record, Boris Shor finds that the tea-partiers embracing Brown are actually embracing someone to the left of Dede Scozzafava, who was, according to Michelle Malkin, a "radical leftist." Brown even endorsed a public option in the Massachusetts universal health insurance plan.

I guess purity only goes so far. Remember that the next time they tell you that purism is all they care about.

A reader writes:

I was a very early supporter of Obama. I was living in New Hampshire two years ago. I signed up to go door-to-door to talk to people about his candidacy and in contrast to Hilary. I trudged through feet of snow in the week before the primary. I entered homes and had great discussions with my fellow residents. I went to Claremont, NH and shook Obama's hand. I rallied the night before the primary in Concord. He lost the state but I knew we were on the right side of history.

I'm with you in thinking that Obama is the best thing the Democrats have going for them right now. But I also think that in having the supermajority, they actually undercut him. They don't have to compromise and so they don't try to. Instead, what passes as legislation is a horrid mismash of corporate interests and traditional, not progressive, balms of the Democratic Party. I know this country can do much, much better. And I think Obama needs a less powerful Democratic party to make it happen, like Clinton did.

For all the reasons you cite about Coakley, I'm voting for Brown. But

let me add a few more.

I'm a split-the-ballot kind of guy. I don't think the dominance of the political system by one party is ever good for the country. Too much changes too quickly and without the necessary compromises to slow the pace and make it more realistic. We all agree that the GOP is a mess. But we also all agree that we need a stronger GOP. And despite the rhetoric, I can't think of a better candidate to help than Scott Brown. He's not perfect, but if he thinks he can go along with the national GOP and keep the seat in the next election, he's going to be out of a job. In voting for him, I hope he'll moderate that party. And that's what's funny to me about the rush of support he's getting from the Right. If a Republican from Massachusetts isn't a RINO to them, I don't know who is. It also helps that Brown has already voted for a health care plan with a public option. So to someone like Malkin who was ready to toss away a Congressional seat in NY for "purity", I now laugh at their support of Brown

My only hesitation in voting for Brown is how that vote will be spun by the mediots in the Beltway. Let me say emphatically that my vote for Brown isn't a vote against Obama. It's a vote against the Democratic Party, and hacks like Coakley, but also a vote to help moderate the GOP. One more New England Republican is necessary. Of all the places the GOP might find it's path again I hope it's from where it was born.

Mark Athitakis has a fun rant:

Lists are lazy criticism. The person making the list is rarely inclined (or given the opportunity) to expound at length about a work’s virtue except to say one likes it…Wacky, counterintuitive lists are lazier criticism….Publications strive so hard now to avoid that sort of behavior that second-level creativity is now itself a cliche: 20 Albums That You Think Suck But Are Really Great, 25 Bad Films That Have One Great Scene, 10 Books You Should Have Been Reading Instead of Reading the Ones You Did Read Thanks to Some Other List. Thoughtful contrarianism is an asset; knee-jerk contrarianism doesn’t move the peanut forward, intellectually speaking…

A reader writes:

The hidden meth battleground?  Hawaii.  It’s been a growing problem on the island since the mid ’80s, but in the last ten years it has detonated across the islands, especially on the President’s home island of Oahu.  My friend has been working on the issue since her post-graduate days, and there’s very little sign of it getting better.

Hawaii ranks 4th in the nation for meth-related drug offenses and 3rd for meth-related treatment admissions.  Most frightening, its use amongst 10th graders increased an astonishing 87% between 2005 and 2007.  In a state that can’t even afford to hold a runoff election for a congressional seat, it has been increasingly harder to confront the issue on a purely state level.

I went to college in Hawaii in 1997.  Weed by far and away was the recreational drug of choice for out of state college students.  But all of my friends who were local knew of at least one person who did “ice.”  What’s scary is that up until recently, the vast majority of meth was being imported from California and Mexico, via Mexican cartels.  Recently though, homegrown meth labs have been sprouting up like weeds.

Hawaii is often forgotten on the national stage because it is practically regarded as another country.  But as far as damage to a single state from a single drug, Hawaii sadly takes the lead.

The Hawaii Meth Project provides some pretty intense ads. The above image is taken from the “Faces Of Meth” series.

Commence time suck. Type in "gay marriage" and find:

Amount that the U.S. wedding industry would gain each year if gays wed at the same rate as straights: $17,000,000,000

Amount that U.S. divorce attorneys would gain if gays also divorced at the same rate: $1,900,000,000

Earlier this week Fallows called Google's decision to discontinue China's censorship laws a "significant" move. He later aired an assortment of emails from China. Nick Carr contends that the company's move was based more on prudence than principle:

If Google had not, as it revealed in its announcement, "detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China," there's no reason to believe it would have altered its policy of censoring search results to fit the wishes of the Chinese authorities. It was the attack, not a sudden burst of righteousness, that spurred Google’s action. Google's overriding business goal is to encourage us to devote more of our time and entrust more of our personal information to the

Internet, particularly to the online "computing cloud" that is

displacing the PC hard drive as the center of personal computing.

The more that we use the Net, the more Google learns about us, the more frequently it shows us its ads, and the more money it makes. In order to continue to expand the time people spend online, Google and other Internet companies have to make the Net feel like a safe, well-protected space. If our trust in the Web is undermined in any way, we’ll retreat from the network and seek out different ways to communicate, compute, and otherwise store and process data. The consequences for Google's business would be devastating.

Jeff Jarvis is less jaded:

I know some will say that Google wasn’t doing that well in China anyway (it controls 31% of the market); they’ll ascribe cynical motives. But I say: Name one other company that finally said “enough!” and put ethic, morals, and company standards over its lust for the Chinese market. Not Yahoo. Not Cisco. Not Nokia. Not Siemens. Not The New York Times Company. Google has.

Here is congressman Capuano from Cambridge, rejected in favor of the tired, useless hack, Coakley:

Yeah, the Democrats are a bunch of hapless, complacent, arrogant morons. I’m anguished by what they have done to Obama. But they reap what they sow.

Today on the Dish we focused on why Martha Coakley is doing so horribly in Massachusetts, particularly against an opponent as troubling as Scott Brown – supporter of torture and incoherent on economic policy (much like most of the GOP). E.D. Kain and Frum offered a counterbalance on Brown. Reader input here and here. Sam Stein explained why healthcare could be doomed if he wins. Andrew raged against the Dem machine.

The Dish collected more coverage of the Prop 8 trial and aired an email extolling the virtues of marriage. Emily Bazelon briefed us on the George Tiller case. Fallows and Megan updated us on Haiti. And we found remarkable figures showing Obama's bigger spending cuts than Bush.

In our ongoing meth discussion, a user from Illinois shared his experiences, a reader near Wasilla profiled the place, and a former soldier in the War on Drugs filled us in on the last administration. Also, could Andrew be the Manchurian blogger?

— C.B.