The Dish

This is a little cheesy but I loved every minute:

God bless Cleve Jones.

And know hope.

My bad. No one can complain about being fragged because they'd be dead. I meant hazed or harassed. But it makes that email all the more chilling. And, in my view, far too gloomy about the next generation, and far too dismissive of the professional caliber of straight soldiers. Of course they can handle it. And so will the gays. With honor and fortitude, as they have in the past, but from the end of the ban on, with honesty and respect as well.

Just not your own.

The Obama administration's gay spokesman, Joe Solmonese (who moonlights as the head of the 25 million member Human Rights Campaign) got a little, er, candid on CNN on Sunday. Here's his view of those 3,000 at the swanky black tie dinner on Saturday night as compared with those 75,000 (or thereabouts) in the streets the next day:

[P]erhaps the crowd at the dinner last night was a little bit more politically aware and had a better sense of maybe, you know, what's at stake and what needs to be done.

Perhaps. And perhaps they're so hungry for access, power and Washington inclusion they've forgotten who they're supposed to be working for. Remind them, will you?

Jonah Lehrer posts an article of his that was slated for the pages of the January Gourmet:

Most things in life become more automatic with time. This, after all, is the gift of experience – it allows us to pay less attention, so that we don’t have to think about maintaining our balance on a bicycle, or shifting gears in a car. But with cooking the opposite happens – the more time we spend in the kitchen the more we notice. The act is intensified, layered with new subtleties. The first time I cooked beef stew, I was merely obeying a recipe, counting off the minutes until the mirepoix was sweated and the meat was seared. But now I don’t need the clock – I’ve learned how to smell the dark sugar of cooked onions, how to see when the stew is viscous with the richness of bones. The dish is the same – beef bourguignon is too perfect to ever change – but my sense of it has become much richer.

This is the moral of the kitchen: even the most mundane rituals deserve our attention. And maybe they deserve it most of all. To cook is to insist that every hunger is a potential occasion, not just for something delicious (because deliciousness can be easily bought), but for that quality of experience that comes when the flame is on high and the last knob of butter is being whisked into the sauce. The tough meat is finally tender and there’s the pile of parsley, waiting to be sprinkled over the stew. It’s all so fleeting – the food will soon be eaten, the mess will be cleaned up tomorrow – but Virginia Woolf was right: “Of such moments the thing is made that endures.” We have taken a need and made a meal.

Oakeshott said some of this famously before:

Oakeshott contends that the essence of an accomplished practitioner’s skill cannot be conveyed to a neophyte through explicit technical instructions, but instead must be learned tacitly, during a period of intimate apprenticeship…

To offer a concrete example, the rationalist cook is oblivious to the years that the skilled chef has spent establishing intimate relationships with his ingredients and tools, and tries to get by in the kitchen solely with what he can glean from a cookbook. As a result, he botches most of the dishes he attempts. However, his repeated failures typically do not lead him to suspect that his fundamental method of proceeding might be faulty. Instead, each disappointment only spurs the rationalist to search for a new, improved, and even more “rational” book of recipes.

Despite that modus operandi being no more workable in political activity than it is in cooking, Oakeshott points out that rationalism has had its greatest influence in the arena of politics: “But what, at first sight, is remarkable, is that politics should have been earlier and more fully engulfed by the tidal wave [of rationalism] than any other human activity. The hold of Rationalism upon most departments of life has varied in its firmness during the last four centuries but in politics it has steadily increased and is stronger now than at any earlier time.”

"People in Muslim countries object to the self-interested, hypocritical, and threatening policies of the US, while at the same time they reject the extremism and violence of al Qaeda. They dislike both the US government and al Qaeda. We are both destructive in their eyes. We have both killed many innocents. We are both sources of hardship, danger, and instability in Muslim societies. If a way forward is to be found, it must begin with a genuine appreciation on the part of US officials of how Muslim citizens view the United States and its actions," – Brian Tamanaha.

She will vote the Baucus bill out of committee but is undecided on the final bill. Ezra Klein celebrates:

Health-care reform will now pass its fifth and final committee. It will have a high-profile Republican supporter in the Senate. There are compromises left to be made, and bad days left to be endured, but health-care reform has the votes. It has them in the House. It has them in the Senate. It looks to have enough of them, in fact, to overcome a filibuster. That is to say, it looks to have enough of them to actually become law.

More reax here.

Michael Fullilove and Fergus Hanson report:

[A] Lowy Institute poll released today in Australia has 85% of the adult population saying the Australia-United States alliance is very or fairly important for Australia’s security—up 22 points since 2007. This is the highest level of support recorded for the alliance since polling began five years ago and the first time that a majority of Australians have said that the alliance with the United States is “very important”. Trust in the United States has also risen: 83% of Australians now trust America “a great deal” or “somewhat” to act responsibly in the world, up 23 points since 2006.

Elaine Lafferty profiles her pick for the Peace Prize:

Dr. Sima Samar is a 52-year-old physician who was born and educated in Afghanistan, receiving her medical degree from Kabul University when it was one of the prestigious medical schools in the region. By 1984, under threats from the Communist regime that had seized the country, Dr. Samar and her family fled to Quetta, Pakistan. By 1989, Dr. Samar was so disturbed at the lack of health facilities for women and girls that she founded the Shuhada Organization and Shuhada Clinic.  […] Dr. Samar returned to Afghanistan in 2002. She was named deputy president under Hamid Karzai and later minister of women's affairs. Openly opposed to religious extremism and questioning Sharia law, Samar has noted that high incidence of bone fragility among Afghan women is due to an absence of sunlight because of the forced wearing of the burqa.

If Girl Talk made a movie:

(Hat tip: BF)