The Dish

I stumbled across this piece in today’s USA Today and it may tell us more than any half-assed exit poll leaks about what to expect tonight:

When I moved from the South in 1957 to work on a Philadelphia newspaper, I was startled by the racial hostility. I saw the city’s first black baseball star, Richie Allen, booed viciously. I saw Frank Rizzo, a nightstick-toting police chief who arrested Black Panthers and photographed them nude , become its iconic mayor. I learned the city has its encrusted bailiwicks: the Irish river wards, Italian South Philly, huge swatches of black North Philly, leafy Chestnut Hill.That’s a microcosm of the state — a collection of duchies from the Rust Belt across the middle’s red-brick towns to Philly’s steel towers, each frozen in its past.

Pennsylvania has barely elected a black or a female politician to state-wide office. But you know what tends to count most: race. There’s a reason Pat Buchanan has warmed to Clinton.

For Earth Day, a series of satellite photos from around the world. The Great Salt Desert:

More here.

"We said that, in the American TV drama 24, Jack Bauer, the counter-terrorism agent, resorted to electrocution to extract information. You cannot extract information from someone who has been electrocuted because they are dead," – The Guardian.

You begin to glimpse the mindset of the far right reading a say-anything apparatchik like Hewitt:

We have Ann Coulter and Michael Savage. They have Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews.

Leave aside the idiotic right-left, us-them crapola. Are we really supposed to believe that Chris Matthews is equatable with Michael Savage? That Olbermann, however partisan and shrill he can be, is the equivalent of the fag-baiting, Hitler-equating bigot, Coulter?

Al Gore to save mankind with second film.

Paulites for McCain riff off P-Diddy, er, Benjamin Franklin.

Bradford Plumer explains highway bias in transportation policy:

Under current law, the federal government usually covers about 80-90 percent of the costs for a new highway project, compared with only 50 percent of the costs for a transit system. Local communities have to pick up most of the rest of the tab for public transportation, with state governments chipping in what’s left. Since doing that usually requires raising property taxes, most local governments just prefer to build highways.

Ponnuru on Derbyshire:

Look: Derbyshire knows zilch about Catholicism or Vatican II, has not carefully read anything the pope has said about relativism, and is not interested in doing any of the intellectual work required to remedy his ignorance. His posts make these points pretty clear. You can’t have a good-faith conversation with him on these topics, so don’t try.

Reading Derb on these matters, I find it very hard to think he’s writing in bad faith. In fact, he outs the fact that Ponnuru and K-Lo basically want Vatican II undone. As does this papacy, in certain critical respects, especially with respect to the capacity of Catholics to question some non-binding aspects of faith in order to understand it better. Of course, there are points at which reason must cede to faith. But one gets the very powerful sense from Benedict and his acolytes that he simply wants reason to submit to … him.

Poulos tackles The War On Doritos, the scourge of passive drinking, and other such vices. 

Bruce Bartlett:

The reality is that we are not going to see the biggest tax increase in history in 2011 because neither Congress nor the White House will allow it to happen, regardless of which party is in control. The choice is not between full extension of all the Bush tax cuts or a massive tax increase, but between extension of the Bush tax cuts and some other sort of tax cuts that would keep the tax burden from rising on the vast majority of taxpayers.