The Dish

I can’t help but warm to this mom and her nine-year-old loose in Manhattan:

"No, I did not give him a cell phone. Didn’t want to lose it. And no, I didn’t trail him, like a mommy private eye. I trusted him to figure out that he should take the Lexington Avenue subway down, and the 34th Street crosstown bus home. If he couldn’t do that, I trusted him to ask a stranger. And then I even trusted that stranger not to think, "Gee, I was about to catch my train home, but now I think I’ll abduct this adorable child instead." Long story short: My son got home, ecstatic with independence."

When I was a kid, my mom would throw me out of the house in the summer in the morning and ask merely that I made it home by dusk (which in England could be pretty late in mid-summer). Of course, I lived in rural suburbia, not New York City. But I feel bad for kids unable to experience risk and freedom the way I did.

Denton dumps Wonkette.

Like all the other Republican machers. The reasons are obvious: she’s easier to beat; she will be unable to withdraw from Iraq in any meaningful way; she will sustain the red-blue cultural politics that have kept Republicans in the narrow majority for a generation.

Is that really what Michael O’Hanlon’s best argument is?

Novak’s column on Clinton’s dysfunctional internal politics makes for fascinating reading. Money quote:

Just how much money Clinton owes Penn could cause major difficulties. If not repaid promptly, would it constitute an illegal financial contribution? Because the British WPP owns Burson-Marsteller, would that debt constitute an illegal foreign contribution?

538 looks at the polling data of these two jolts to the Obama campaign. Interestingly, the two incidents that Clinton pounced on damaged both Clinton and Obama equally – and their main effect has been to solidify Republicans behind McCain. And this makes sense: the kind of political-cultural warfare this represents is pure Rovism. It’s designed to help Republicans. Which may be all that the Clintons will accomplish with this.

There comes a point at which the victims of Rove become the purveyors of Rove, in which you look from man to pig and from pig to man and cannot eventually tell the difference.

For the third time in a week, I have had to cancel a speaking engagement, this time scheduled for tomorrow in Little Rock, Arkansas, because of poor health. I’m sorry to let people down – really sorry. Alas, I’ve had a nasty bronchial infection that has made it tough to get out of bed much for a week. It’s not my AIDS flarin’, but there really is no margin for imperfect health in a 24/7 bloggiverse. On the mend now, but not soon enough.

It wouldn’t be that hard to put our fiscal house in order, if we actually wanted to tackle entitlements. George Will offers a useful reminder:

In 1935, when Congress enacted Social Security, protracted retirement was a luxury enjoyed by a tiny sliver of the population. Back then, Congress did its arithmetic ruthlessly: When it set the retirement age at 65, the life expectancy of an adult American male was 65. If in 1935 Congress had indexed the retirement age to life expectancy, today’s retirement age would be 75.

The boomers will have none of it, I guess. The rest of us won’t have much of a choice.

This brought me up short:

Bush and his administration, by contrast, have had no such qualms about their Catholic connections. At times, they’ve even seemed to brandish them for political purposes. Even before he got to the White House, Bush and his political guru Karl Rove invited Catholic intellectuals to Texas to instruct the candidate on the church’s social teachings. In January 2001, Bush’s first public outing as president in the nation’s capital was a dinner with Washington’s then-archbishop, Theodore McCarrick. A few months later, Rove (an Episcopalian) asked former White House Catholic adviser Deal Hudson to find a priest to bless his West Wing office.

Next thing you know, we’ll see Hillary Clinton attend church on Sunday.

Paris, France, 3.30 pm.