The Dish

How to become an empire without ever fully realizing it. (Hat tip: Matt.)

A blog dedicated to photoshop mishaps. South Park already did this to Britney.

Ezra on all the presidential candidates entertaining the idea of an Olympic boycott:

…this Olympics idea is the worst of both worlds. It’s a high profile snub that will piss off the Chinese without actually exerting any real pressure on them. Why bother?

Amen.

From the newly released May issue, Jonathan Rauch’s take on McCain and conservatism:

…some of what [McCain’s] detractors view as inconsistencies display a distinctly Burkean logic. McCain opposes gay marriage but also voted against a federal constitutional amendment to ban it. Inconsistent? Not if you think that marriage is best handled by the states, which have handled it since Colonial times, or that there is nothing conservative about preemptively amending the Constitution to end-run the Supreme Court, a stratagem future liberals could have all kinds of fun with.

McCain voted against Bush’s big tax cuts, but now says he supports extending them rather than risking damage to the economy. Flip-flop?

Not if you believe, as Burkeans often do, that sudden and large policy changes deserve skepticism, but that when a policy becomes well established and woven into everyday life, as the tax cuts have, continuity should get the benefit of the doubt.

In the face of resistance from Bush and his own party, McCain fought heroically for a law restraining harsh treatment of terror-war detainees, yet more recently he voted against legislation imposing on the Central Intelligence Agency the same stringent ban on coercive interrogation that the U.S. Army observes. Hypocrisy? Not if you believe that brutal interrogation methods should be illegal, but that holding the CIA to the military’s white-glove constraints, even in emergencies, goes too far the other way.

American Footprints says Pakistan is going to hell.

I share Scott Esposito’s befuddlement over this concept:

According to Sara Nelson, the editor in chief of Publishers Weekly, "Since there seems to be a blurring of lines between fiction and reality on TV, in books, in politics even, it stands to reason that a fictional character could write a book that actually gets published. It strikes me as one of those ideas that’s so bad it’s good."

Nikolas Gvosdev argues convincingly that other nations are ducking responsibility for Sudan and Zimbabwe by blaming Beijing.

A reader writes:

I don’t have anything witty to say about that passage you posted, other than it made me furious for about five minutes. This whole primary is turning into just bad theater with actors that aren’t sure when they are supposed to leave the stage and an audience made up of people that bought matinee tickets and were somehow upgraded to the evening performance.

Another adds:

You’ve got it all wrong. She’s, like, a total bitch. And that is why we love her.

And another:

Jeez, don’t assume it’s just gay men. She’s also hugely popular among lesbians too. Spread some of that disdain around!

Like wars, plagues can still affect those caught up in them years after the first wave of crisis is over. The psychological toll, post-traumatic stress, the need for escape, the sudden loss of purpose, and sheer exhaustion can take even the strongest men and women by surprise. These are our walking wounded; and sometimes, as David France memorably shows here, they fall.

A brief history of the condom.