The Dish

By Patrick
An elephant paints a self-portrait:

By Patrick
Reihan Salam, my Atlantic colleague and erstwhile Dish guest blogger, sings away his troubles.

By Patrick
Since Mark Penn’s latest misstep, certain unions and bloggers have been calling for him leave the Clinton campaign. Some opinion from around the web:

Ezra Klein:

In 2000, George W. Bush dealt with these problems by insisting Karl Rove step down from his other companies in order to work on the campaign. Clinton has done nothing of the kind, leading to all sorts of huge conflicts of interest. It’s time for Clinton to make Penn step down. Either from her campaign, or from his other jobs.

Yglesias:

…if it’s time for anyone to go, I think it’s time for [Clinton] to go. And, of course, I do think it’s time for her to go. And Penn probably realizes that at this point nothing he does or doesn’t do is going to put her in the White House so he might as well start transitioning back to his real job. Hence meeting with the Colombians.

Publius:

It’s vital for Obama that Penn remain in his current spot. If he’s fired, the Clinton campaign might be forced to hire a competent strategist.

Update: Colombia does what Clinton won’t and fires Penn.

By Patrick
Politico looks over the Clinton tax returns. There is also the curious $15.4 million Bill Clinton earned from Ron Burkle; exactly what he did  for that money is not entirely clear. 

By Patrick
Larison outlines the potential downfalls of Bob Barr’s presidential run:

Despite the fact that both [Democratic and Republican party] nominees are broadly committed to maintaining much of the status quo, there are enough real differences on policy that third party critiques that focus on the “duopoly” will be much less effective this time.  Disgruntled progressives don’t want a repeat of 2000, and disaffected conservatives have to bear in the mind that any strong showing for a third party candidate backed by them will be used as a scapegoat for any McCain defeat.  The paradox for the antiwar right challenger remains: win enough votes, and you may actually pull antiwar support from the Democrat, thus electing the Republican against whom you are rebelling; win just enough votes that make the difference and throws the election to Obama, and McCain’s defeat will be pinned on the antiwar right rather than his own militarism and pro-amnesty views.  The latter will serve two purposes: it allows the interventionists to save face and fight another day (another reason why the 2008 outcome will probably not affect the strength of interventionists in the GOP), and it frees mainstream conservatives of any blame for their previous intransigence against McCain.  If the purpose of the protest candidacy is simply to provide an alternative and a voice for disaffected conservatives and libertarians, none of that matters.  However, if it is supposed to accomplish something more significant, I am not sure how it does that.

By Patrick
Congress holds a hearing about virtual worlds.

By Patrick
Charles C. Mann on copyright in the digital age:

Copyright should not impede artistic efforts to explain our times. Nor should we let it interfere with the relation between producers and consumers of art. Any work of art is a gift, at least in part — something done not purely from motives of calculation. Knowing this, people approach works of art in a more receptive state than they do, say, advertisements. The same people who would unhesitatingly copy Microsoft Word at their jobs, the novelist Neal Stephenson said to me recently, "would no more bootleg a good novel than they would jump the turnstile at an art museum." Stephenson, the author of The Diamond Age, a witty, imaginative science-fiction novel about pirating an electronic book, and the forthcoming Cryptonomicon, believes that in the long run this relationship of respect and trust is the only safeguard that works of art have. It is also the reason they are worth safeguarding. What will the act of reading be like if every time I open a book I must negotiate the terms under which I read it?

Minneapolis, Minnesota, 5.10 pm.

By Patrick
The fed goes hi-tech:

The federal government plans to escalate its eradication of marijuana plantations in the backwoods of national forests this year, beginning in California with the deployment of larger strike teams and the controversial launching of miniature, remote-controlled spy planes to outfox growers, a top Bush administration official said Thursday.

The SkySeer runs quietly and its tiny video camera can resolve whether a person is armed with a handgun from 250 feet in the air – high enough for the 4-foot-long craft to become invisible from the ground, according to its inventor, Sam De La Torres.

(Hat tip: Dominic Holden)