The Dish

A blast of pure derision from the essential Colbert King.

Gjilan, Kosovo, 12.15 pm.

A pitch-perfect editorial. The younger generation gets it.

My own rambling thoughts on the dangers – political and constitutional – of a two-headed executive can be read here. Today, Garry Wills provides a deeper analysis, one that goes back to the Founders and their legitimate worries about accountability without a, ahem, unitary executive. He fears that Bill Clinton could become Hillary’s Dick Cheney – but worse, in fact, since at least Cheney was on the ballot and in some sense accountable to the public directly. Money quote:

No other vice president in our history has taken on so many presidential prerogatives, with so few checks. He is an example of the very thing James Wilson was trying to prevent by having one locus of authority in the executive. The attempt to escape single responsibility was perfectly exemplified when his counsel argued that Mr. Cheney was not subject to executive rules because he was also part of the legislature.

We have seen in this campaign how former President Clinton rushes to the defense of presidential candidate Clinton. Will that pattern of protection be continued into the new presidency, with not only his defending her but also her defending whatever he might do in his energetic way while she’s in office? It seems likely. And at a time when we should be trying to return to the single-executive system the Constitution prescribes, it does not seem to be a good idea to put another co-president in the White House.

Can we all agree on that?

Why not swear-words? An exploration of the possibilities.

I would have lost it. He didn’t. His coolness and good humor under fire have not gotten enough attention. Here’s a good take on it.

Ross, Marc and Matt talk it over in the humming, throbbing intellectually tumescent world of the seventh floor Atlantic library.

A reader writes:   

I intended to vote for Obama this morning and my husband for Hillary. But on the way to the polling place, my five year old daughter asked who we were voting for. I said, "Mommy is voting for a nice man named Barack Obama and Daddy is voting for a nice woman named Hillary Clinton." She replied, "But I thought only men were presidents."  It was a punch to the gut.  So I took her in with me and let her push the button on the electronic screen for Hillary. (My husband ended up switching and voting for Obama at the last minute so it all evened out.) You can call me a racist if you want, but I don’t want any one else’s daughter to say the same thing to her mother in four years.

Artist Thomas Briggs uses mathematics to create complex webs of color and form. Using tools more commonly applied to computational fluid dynamics, Briggs builds high resolution drawing-like images. The works seen here are reduced over 99 percent.

More after the fold.

An Oregon court finds that the views of a 12-year-old boy are a "fact necessary to the determination" of whether he should be circumcised. That’s a start.