The Dish

A video from Goldfarb:

Crowley:

McCain’s again pushing the Obama-Ahmadinejad line. I think last week’s exchange was a short-term win for Obama, in that it drowned out Hillary and pitted him directly against George "30 Percent" Bush. But I think the McCain camp rightly senses this Ahmadinejad stuff is good for them over the longer term.

Perhaps. But the Obama response is a good one too:

"Nothing has changed with respect to my belief that strong countries and strong presidents talk to their enemies and talk to their adversaries.”

Note the use of strength to describe diplomacy. That’s an important gain for a reasoned discourse. Not all talk is for weenies. And self-confident super-powers do not hide in fear of their enemies.

Ezra on the politics of obesity:

Obviously, obesity isn’t something the government can reverse by fiat. But nor need public policy be arrayed so as to intensify the epidemic. Schools raise money through vending machines and exclusive deals with snack food companies. Corn production is subsidized to such an absurd degree that industry had to figure out a way to make it not-corn, so they could use it more, and so we got high fructose corn syrup and the heavily processed, nutritionally inadequate, dead cheap foods it tends to sweeten. In 2005, Congress passed a $286 billion highway bill — an enormous subsidy meant to make the country more drivable. No equivalent sum was spent to make our communities more walkable. In essence, we’re paying to make our country fatter, then paying even more to keep our alive as the health costs of obesity come due. It’s insane.

He then goes on to explain how you can, actually, reduce obesity by fiat.

(Photo: Matt Cardy/Getty.)

Reihan sings – yes, sings – about peak oil, and follows up with a song "noting that killing people on grounds of ethnicity is wrong" and that Americans should "eat more nuts (because they are rich in unsaturated fats)." Beats Archuleta by a mile. Writes his own shit.

One of the unsung stories of the war crimes of this administration has been the resistance to them by so many within the government, proof that Americans have not forgotten who they are, even if the president has:

One bureau memorandum spoke of “torture techniques” used by military interrogators. Agents described seeing things like inmates handcuffed in a fetal position for up to 24 hours, left to defecate on themselves, intimidated by dogs, made to wear women’s underwear and subjected to strobe lights and extreme heat and cold.

Karl Rove has called these techniques torture when practised by our enemies. But not when authorized by his boss?

Hilzoy digs through McCain’s record:

Short version: during the last four years (all I checked), McCain has supported basic appropriations for vets. However, when there are two competing proposals, he generally chooses the cheaper one, and often, when only one proposal to increase benefits is available, he opposes it. But, as Beutler says, this doesn’t seem to be because he is in general in favor of fiscal discipline: in 2006, in particular, he voted against several bills that actually tried not just to increase spending on vets, but to pay for it, in one case voting for an identical bill that was not paid for.

Should Obama pick Webb as a veep, this issue would become salient. Otherwise, not so much.

One out of eight high school Biology teachers continue to teach creationism. Oy.

I wonder why National Review listed this headline – "Black Statement Conflicts With Record" – with stories about the Obama campaign. It’s about McCain’s campaign. And it’s about Charlie Black. Sometimes you really can’t parody.

According to Gallup:

At least for now, [Obama] has expanded his position as the preferred candidate of men, young adults, and highly educated Democrats, and has erased Clinton’s advantages with most of her prior core constituency groups, including women, the less well-educated, and whites.

The walls can talk.