The Dish

Brendan Loy makes an obvious point:

The truth is that Obama is speaking to black people, too — he’s speaking to everyone — and he is sending a very clear message: enough with the bullshit. Haven’t conservatives been waiting for a black leader to do that for, like, forever?

This is the promise of the Obama candidacy, encapsulated and made real. Obama is urging blacks to leave behind, once and for all, the politics of conspiratorial victimhood — the politics of Jeremiah Wright and, although Obama can’t afford politically to say so explicitly, of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton — and embrace the politics of unity and hope and, ultimately, self-empowerment.

It’s extremely depressing that the first major national black politician who takes on the victimology of Sharpton and Jackson is greeted by the right with the kind of cynicism you see at Malkin or the Corner or Reynolds. It reveals, I think, the deeper truth: the Republican right only wants a black Republican to do this. They are not as interested in getting beyond the racial question, in changing the hopes and dreams of black America, as they are in exploiting it for partisan advantage. Their response to the first major black candidate for president tackling the old racial politics? "We don’t believe him."

Brendan expresses dismay at Glenn Reynolds. But Reynolds voted against Harold Ford. There’s no black Democrat who could ever pass muster. Because they’re Democrats.

A reader observes:

The point has been made before, but we need a reminder.  Obama did not have a strong model of masculinity, a father figure to know intimately and revere, in his earliest years.  He yearned desperately for it; somehow, finding the patriarch would make him whole and normal in a way he thought others felt.   

So he found Wright a few decades ago.  But he’s flying blind.  If we’re lucky enough, and our fathers live long enough, we can see them for the humans they are. We don’t love them less, but in the process of maturing we begin to grow independent by seeing them with new eyes.  We separate, and in doing so, enter a new ambivalence about what the father-son role means as it transforms.  We might be watching a limnal process for Obama in real-time here.  The sad thing is that (and I believe Obama is sincere) I don’t think any of us could know the inner turmoil this causing Obama.  Sometimes its easy to forget how privileged those of us who know well the father-son dynamic are; its just too easy to yell "throw Wright under the bus."  Obama is human, too.

Clay Shirky contrasts using free time on the internet with spending it watching TV:

…if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

The state party proposes a 69-59 delegate split.

A really fun new time-waster blog:

Falindromes are fake palindromes. Although they cannot be read the same forwards and backwards (like their sister palindromes), their peculiar structure make them appear as if they can.

As in:

“I, a CD-ROM?!” ribbed a bearded Mordcai.

and

A-hah! A banana ban. Haha!

Ha! We haven’t had a reader contest in a long while, so I wonder if anyone can come up with a falidrome about the current election campaign. You send ’em; I’ll post the good ones.

A video:

"I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers;    
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!    
I have long dream’d of such a kind of man,
So surfeit-swell’d, so old, and so profane;    
But, being awak’d, I do despise my dream," – Henry V in Henry IV.

My take is here. Chait:

His denunciation of Rev. Wright today seems to be pretty much a bullseye. Why did he let the story hang out there so long without a response? I don’t know, but I do see a pattern here: Throughout the campaign, Obama has made very good tactical moves, but he’s made them slowly. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, has made a lot of mistakes, but she does grasp the 24-hour news cycle and she acts very quickly.

Joyner:

I’m not sure what more Obama could say, to be honest. He’ll be tarred somewhat for having spent 20 years in Wright’s congregation and touting him so heavily as his mentor. But this should stop the bleeding.

Crowley:

The one thing I wonder about is whether Obama showed enough passion. With the caveat that I did not see his initial opening statement, there was a certain coolness to his remarks…

The first big question now is whether Wright comes back at Obama, painfully prolonging the story. If he doesn’t, the press might be willing to let it peter out. So the second big question is how hard John McCain pushes it–and, finally,  whether Hillary dares pour some fuel on the fire.

Ambinder:

Obama has used the power of his rhetoric to end controversies before, and the campaign hopes now that Obama’s angry soundbites will now replace some of Wright’s more radical utterances on the cable news. The campaign won’t say whether, in their North Carolina tracking polls, they discovered any fall-off among white voters. The bet they’re making is that by extending the active phase of a story for at least one more day, they can prevent its long tail from influencing too many votes next Tuesday.

Reason sits down with Bob Barr.

People who believe in limited government, constitutional order and individual freedom still have somewhere to go in this election. If, somehow, the Clintons manage to wrestle the Democratic nomination from Obama, and if McCain really does continue what looks like a morphing into a neocon supply-sider budget-buster, then Barr will increasingly look like an option for a solid protest vote.