The Dish

Shanghai, China, 3.40 pm.

All the toxins, less addictive:

"I’m convinced that there’s very little we can do on the toxicant side," Zeller said. "But imagine a world, however many decades from now, in which the cigarette remains as deadly and toxic as it is today, but it’s not addictive because there’s no nicotine in it."

From a public health perspective, Zeller thinks that the lack of the main addictive agent in cigarettes would do more for reducing the overall population susceptibility to the dangers of smoking than any amount of biotech tinkering could do in reducing the carcinogens in tobacco.

A reader makes an often overlooked point about Obama:

Obama isn’t the first credible African-American candidate so much as he’s the first credible Hawaiian candidate.  Everything that’s essential and appealing about him is Hawaiian in character, and reflects his years growing up there.  People in Hawaii don’t fixate on race, because everyone is mixed race, individually or by marriage, and they don’t think in terms of political party, because that’s at best a secondary characteristic; and above all, they don’t think in terms of traditional left/right, red/blue polarities– those are for the mainland.  Hawaii is a place where conservative evangelical Christians are Asian and Polynesian, and the secular liberals are white and not quite local; where "black" isn’t even a common category, because African-Americans are so rare; where liberal Democrats revere military service, largely because a lot of Hawaii’s political leaders are veterans of the legendary all-Japanese 442nd Infantry, starting with Medal of Honor winner Dan Inoyue. In Hawaii, ideological stances are looked at with huge skepticism, because they imply pretension and putting on airs– or as it’s said there, "Hey brah, no act!"

The key to understanding Obama isn’t race, or Kennedy, or any of that: the key is Hawaii.

A twitter marriage proposal.

As the bribes to keep the Sunnis pacified come unraveled, the other shoe may be dropping: the potential , long anticipated intra-Shiite civil war in the South. Meanwhile the Sunni "good guys" that we are bribing to defeat Jihadists in Anbar are behaving like … Iraqis:

The security that has been achieved here is fragile, the result of harsh tactics recalling the rule of Saddam Hussein…Even as they work alongside U.S. forces, Zobaie’s men admit they have beaten and tortured suspects to force confessions and exact revenge.

His men, he added, abuse suspects because "they don’t surrender easily. They don’t confess. They say: ‘I am innocent. I haven’t done anything.’ They start to defend themselves."

Iraq’s eternal return to torture and brutality may be resuming its usual pace after a pause. The difference now is that America has now also done some of the torturing itself and is now paying others to do the same. Every occupier of Iraq will get a little Saddamism in his bloodstream after a while. Apart from rising levels of violence, the entrenchment of Iranian power across most of the country, no lee-way to draw down surge troops, and scant sign of serious national reconciliation, the surge is a success. Oh, and oil is over $100 a barrel for the foreseeable future. It’s only in situations like these that a president like Bush can say:

“I have vowed in the past, and I will vow so long as I’m president, to make sure that those lives were not lost in vain; that, in fact, there is a outcome that will merit the sacrifice that civilian and military alike have made; that our strategy going forward will be aimed at making sure that we achieve victory."

(Photo: Sabah Arar/AFP/Getty.)

When even Tayor Marsh says she blew it. The Bosnia lie is a microcosm of the experience exaggeration on which the entire rationale of her candidacy lies. Clinton does have one solid substantive executive experience and the result of it was that she effectively killed universal healthcare for well over a decade. And she has one transcendent legislative judgment call, Iraq, and it was catastrophically wrong. This is her record on the kind of big issues that define a presidency. Everything else is her husband, and her familiarity. And her life has been one very long series of networking and diligent study and good intentions and excellent constituency work. She could not inspire a rugby team to a piss-up. In ordinary times, she’d make a B – Angela Merkel with some serious credibility issues. And these are not ordinary times.

(Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty.)

Fred returns to familiar territory.

A district in India implements an unusual exchange program:

The results are impressive: 139 men have undergone vasectomies in the district since the incentive of a firearms permit was introduced a month ago, compared with only eight in 2007.

This seems extreme:

Let’s stop brutalizing our kids with years of drills on the proper formation of a cursive capital "S"—handwriting is a historical blip in the long history of writing technologies, and it’s time to consign to the trash heap this artificial way of making letters, along with clay tablets, smoke signals, and other arcane technologies.

And in fact, new research is showing is usefulness.

Watch him get testy when confronted with his own record on gay equality – going after a college student. And accusing her of "re-writing history." The facts are these: under Bill Clinton the rate of discharges of gay people from the military doubled; under Bill Clinton, the Defense Of Marriage Act did not only simply enshrine the pre-existing right of some states not to recognize the civil marriages of other states – as he misleadingly states – but barred all of us gay couples from any rights on a federal level; Bill Clinton cited the Defense of Marriage Act in re-election campaign ads in the South. Even now, he claims that repealing DOMA would lead to more persecution of gays, because more states would allegedly pass anti-gay constitutional amendments. But there are very very few left that could do more to stigmatize gay couples than currently do. And he still resists any defense of gay equality in substance seeing it entirely, as he did in office, as a matter of partisan positioning.

Just as he left any mention of any gay people and any gay appointees out of his interminable autobiography, he still will not stand up for gay equality when confronted by the next generation. Anyway, check it out for yourself: