The Dish

Everyone loves The Onion:

No one has panned the Onion News Network. Of course not. America has inexhaustible reserves of good will for the homespun Onion, which started as a print weekly in Wisconsin in 1988, as it does for no other national comedy institution except maybe Mark Twain. “The Simpsons” is past its prime. “The Daily Show” is admired but partisan. And each incarnation of “Saturday Night Live” bugs its audience in a new way. The Onion, though, is like overwork or pizza. It’s your patriotic duty to not not like it.

A map:

Researchers extracted the dateline from about 72,000 wire-service news stories from 1994 to 1998 and modified a standard map of the Lower 48 US states (above) to show the size of the states in proportion to the frequency of their appearance in those datelines.

Michelle Cottle has some very juicy details from within the Clinton camp. Man, Mark Penn sounds like a douche.

"If Barack Obama or anyone else really cares to know what I think, I will simplify it all down to this. The landmark political fact of our time is the replacement of our middle-class republic by a plutocracy. If some candidate has a scheme to reverse this trend, they’ve got my vote, whether they prefer Courvoisier or beer bongs spiked with cough syrup. I don’t care whether they enjoy my books, or would rather have every scrap of paper bearing my writing loaded into a C-47 and dumped into Lake Michigan. If it will help restore the land of relative equality I was born in, I’ll fly the plane myself," – Thomas A. Frank, Wall Street Journal.

A really fascinating dialogue among two brutally honest writers. Loury basically admits he’s for Clinton out of boomer loyalty and identity. I wonder if this election, whatever else it is about, will ultimately be about a generational shift.

Washington, DC, 2.42 pm.

A new magazine:

Meatpaper isn’t really about meat, it’s about “the idea of meat,” the editors explained in the first issue last fall. “Half the people who pick up Meatpaper assume it’s some kind of vegan hate letter addressed to their salami sandwich. The other half wonder if we’re subsidized by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. That’s how we know we’re on to something.”

Do they all need to come out to dispel stereotypes?

When you’re selling culture war and global conflict, the actual Jesus can be a little unsettling:

Driscoll put this bluntly in his sermon "Death by Love" at the 2006 Resurgence theology conference (available at TheResurgence.com). According to Driscoll, "real men" avoid the church because it projects a "Richard Simmons, hippie, queer Christ" that "is no one to live for [and] is no one to die for." Driscoll explains, "Jesus was not a long-haired … effeminate-looking dude"; rather, he had "callused hands and big biceps." This is the sort of Christ men are drawn to—what Driscoll calls "Ultimate Fighting Jesus."

A blog devoted to true stories, told in one sentence. Lynn Viehl’s thoughts on the concept here.

(Hat tip: Frank Wilson)