Friends and family say goodbye to Marines in the 3rd Battalion, 10th Marine Regiment, deploying to Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom November 3, 2009 at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Once in Afghanistan, the unit will fall under the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade -Afghanistan. Their mission will be to support combat operations as an artillery battalion. By Logan Mock-Bunting/Getty Images.
The latest news from Benedict's actual church:
A northeastern Pennsylvania priest has been removed from his duties after church officials say he accidentally displayed inappropriate pictures from his computer before Sunday Mass.
The Diocese of Scranton said the Rev. Edward Lyman was using his computer on Oct. 25 to project an informational DVD about the annual diocesan fundraiser when four photos were displayed. They featured what church officials describe as "minimally attired adult males."
Diocese spokesman William Genello said the photos were not pornographic, did not include minors and were not taken by the priest.
A reader writes:
Several years ago I would the read The Corner 4-5 times a day. But then it got boring and repetitive with repeating the same old arguments over and over again. Gradually I lost interest and now rarely read it. I am afraid that I am coming close to the same decision about The Daily Dish. Please, please, please drop your obsessive coverage of the Palin/Johnston non-story. It’s nothing but trailer trash gossip. It seems to matter only to you, and no matter how much you try to spin it as you-are-looking-into-something-important-while-the-MSM -ignores-it meme, it doesn’t convince me of anything but your over the top obsession with it. Palin is a pathological liar and I don’t believe her story of when she went into labor etc…but she said it just to dramatize her life and to give a story to the conservative press. I hope you have someone sane around you who can talk you out of this coverage before you start losing readers–and yes I am close to being done with you.
Sane, responsible people have been trying to talk me out of asking questions about Palin for more than a year. Ha! The one thing I have never cared about, I should add, is losing readers over my positions.
If I worried about such things, I would have stayed in the MSM. I’ve churned through a lot of readers over the years, and lost countless of them because of their dismay at my evolution or thinking out loud. I don’t care. My job is to get things right as best I can and to follow my own nose, even if it occasionally ends up bloody. Checking to see what is the respectable thing to say or think and worrying about one’s reputation is not my thing.
But you can go elsewhere for this in spades. God knows the Washington media is full of it. So go away if you don’t like it. My defense is simply that it interests me, and that Palin is the de facto leader of the right, alongside Glenn Beck, right now. She is about to embark on a massive p.r. offensive. At the same time, the father of her grandson is threatening to sue her for blocking his access to his child and offering any number of tantalizing clues about what he regards as a potential scandal. And we’re all supposed to ignore this … because it’s too tacky?
To repeat: screw that. This is the blogosphere. And please, please, please read someone else if you don’t like it.
A reader writes:
During the late 90’s I was serving in the US Air Force stationed at Clark AB, Philippines. I had heard stories about Filipinos eating dog meat but didn’t think much about it. During my second year there I had a girlfriend who lived off base. The apartment where she lived had this stray dog hanging around the place. We’d feed it scraps and she’d even let it stay in her room during rain storms. One day near Christmas time, I woke up to the horrible screeching of the little dog.
I ran out to see what was going on and I saw the neighbors laboring over a fire pit and a butchers table. They had just killed the dog and were skinning it. I reeled back in horror as I watched them processing the dog and happily chatting about the day’s events as if nothing was amiss . The smell really was putrid, even though I had been to several Filipino open air markets with all kinds of meat: snake, heads of chickens and pigs. I left the area upset and shaken up.
Later on during Christmas as I went to visit my girlfriend, one of the butchers came over and apologized for the trauma I witnessed. We set around and had a couple of beers and talked. To Filipinos, dog meat was only eaten during special holidays. They didn’t consider what they did as cruel and I began to understand their tradition, albeit I didn’t agree with it. It’s funny how many times I saw pigs or cows stuffed into tractor trailers and didn’t give them a thought. Perhaps we are vastly hypocritical in are dealings with the animal world.
Ezra Klein ruminates on NY-23 and David Axelrod's argument that the "Limbaughs and Becks of the world are basically hanging a 'Moderates need not apply' sign outside the Republican National Committee headquarters" by running Dede out of the race:
It's not so much that Republicans are mistaking the enthusiasm of a rump faction for the preferences of the electorate — the Republican Party tried to back Scozzafava, after all — as they're powerless to resist.
All of which suggests that the right historical analogue may not be Ronald Reagan but Barry Goldwater. And though Goldwater's campaign led to Reagan's later rise, it also led to a historic pickup for the Democrats and the creation of Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, PBS, food stamps, welfare …
I'm not sure we're not getting way ahead of ourselves. It would be silly to extrapolate an entire political era from one congressional off-year election – to the advantage of any party. We just don't know if in a few months' time anyone will even remember today.
“I would like to take a huge step in my own life. Andy Rollman, I’d like to ask you: Will you marry me?” – Andy Hertzberg, interrupting his testimony at a DC council hearing. Video here.
A funny but somewhat disturbing viral video exploring the moral calculus of money for murder.
A reader writes:
I think, as I suspect that you do, that Mr. Scarborough is off on this. After all, if this were, "an opportunity to stick it to an incompetent GOP Establishment", there would be associated with it attacks on the Bush-Cheney legacy, a recognition that Reagan and Bush actually increased deficits, and a rejection of the sort of populist, conspiracism which drove the "Contract with America" crowd to office, and hence, to the record profligacy of the Bush Jr. years.
Instead, what we see is a glorifying of those people who most embody these patterns of thought (like Glenn Beck) within the Republican, now re-branded as big c "Conservative", ethos.
For all their rhetoric and puffed-up pride, this is little more than what Boehner and the Republican leadership claimed to be necessary after the Democratic victories of 2008; a re-branding in nothing but name and a purging of moderate elements for not "fighting hard enough". To these true believers, failure is never the result of rejection by society; it is the result of betrayal, indiscipline, and the shadowy, nefarious plotting of the global, cosmopolitan cabal of Jews, gays, non-Anglos, and effete, back-stabbing, white intellectuals.
This derangement has proceeded so far that, in the words of Dick Armey himself, to place the welfare of one's district before the dictates of the Party's Glorious Social Revolution is to be "parochial"! Such views are hardly the makeup of a return to small, locally-interested government. For Mr. Scarborough to ignore such central aspects of this movement in his analysis of its motives and nature reduces his statements regarding it, in truth, to little more than propaganda.
Nate Silver makes an interesting point:
The Democratic brand is marginal in about half the country, but the Republican brand is radioactive in about two-thirds of it. The biggest story of the cycle is that a non-Republican conservative, Doug Hoffman, might win. Counterfactual: if Hoffman had in fact been the Republican nominee in NY-23 all along, would he be in the same strong position that he finds himself in today? Methinks not: it would have been easier for Owens — who isn't much of a Democrat — to identify himself as the moderate in the race.
A reader writes:
The post from the North Country native was a wild oversimplification of the district. I went to school in the district and worked the state senate special election last year which put in a Democrat. This area is not Palin country. I live in Virginia now, "Real Virginia"…I know Palin country. There is an "us vs them" mentality in Upstate NY, but it's more about wanting to be represented by someone who is one of them–someone with blue-collar values. This is not a front line in the culture wars. There is a reason the GOP establishment chose a pro-choice, pro-marriage, pro-union, candidate. Mark it down, Owens will come out the victor when the polls close tonight.
I'll be gobsmacked if he does. Another writes:
I grew up in Rouses Point, New York, on the shores of Lake Champlain and arguably in one of the nicest little villages in the country. The economy, while not entirely dependent on the state and federal governments, does need their help. A victory for Hoffman would remove an advocate for the region and in its place stick a repulsive ideologue whose commitment to the cause of the conservative appears to outweigh any obligation he has to best serve the people who send him to Washington.
Thus imagine how sick I feel when I see leading Democrats write and say that a victory for Hoffman would be a victory for Democrats. These Congresspeople we elect to Washington are still servants of the People in their districts, whether political operatives wish to see it that way or not. And Doug Hoffman wants nothing of it, only wishing to push his ideological conservatism and the national agenda of the likes of Beck, Limbaugh, and crew.
The Dish 