The Dish

I’ll tell you one thing: the Clintons could never have this much fun.

Inimitable:

It’s a dark day in Washington. My generation will, I suspect, be the last human generation in either a very good way (we will transcend our limitations, we will live incredibly long lives, we will expand our moral imaginations, and in the process we will become something better than human) or in a very bad way (we will all be killed by nanite goo). So I hate the thought of any one of us biting the dust and missing the adventure to come, though of course that is as it must be.

My bet is on the nanite goo. Rex Wockner sends me this column as a tribute of sorts. Gay men responded to Ledger and not just because he was surpassingly handsome. He really inhabited a dark place many of us escaped from, and he evoked it with enormous restraint and integrity. The darkness clearly haunted him, but he turned it into a thing of beauty and redemption. For a while.

An even-handed treatment.

Heath Ledger had finished filming post-production.

It’s a YouTube sensation:

While cable news shows gorge on campaign sparring, Obama’s uplifting speech is absolutely dominating YouTube. The 34-minute address from Ebenezer Baptist Church is currently the fourth most viewed video in the world on YouTube, trailing two Britney Spears clips. Not only is that unusual traffic for a long political address – people also like it. On Tuesday, viewers voted it the second most "favorited" video in the world. It also drew the second highest number of incoming links, a key indicator of web interest that drives Google page rankings.

Some stills and scenes have leaked.

Here’s a rundown of the number of people killed per minute in the Rambo series:

Rambo: First Blood (1982): 0.01
Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985): 0.72
Rambo III (1988): 1.30
Rambo IV (2008): 2.59

No word alas on the amount of steroids used in production over the years.

Scott Horton detects a pattern.

Obama’s lead among African-Americans in South Carolina.