The Dish

Drum roll, please:

Romney senior adviser Ron Kaufman said Obama “demolished three senators” in Iowa and will “demolish” Clinton in New Hampshire, “so clearly having a senator against him is not a good idea.”

I guess it was worth a try.

The gadget we’ve all been waiting for:

Today at CES, Taser International introduced the Taser MPH — the first combination hand-held music player and Taser. The player, which has a 1-GB capacity that can hold about 150 songs, is embedded in a holster that slips on your belt. Feel the need to zap someone and you can unholster the Taser, use the built-in laser pointer to aim, and blam — a couple of darts carrying 50,000 volts hits your victim.

Hat tip: Poulos.

Tim Lee doesn’t see why he’s so unelectable.

The self-pitying, victimology of an old leftist like Gloria Steinem. It’s this kind of victim politics we have finally begun to move past: that anyone should vote for a candidate "because she is a woman" and "has no masculinity to prove". Clinton is comfortable aroound this kind of victimology. Obama transcends it.

Arianna nails it:

When it started, Clinton’s poll-tested candidacy came down to telling voters, "Whatever you like, that’s what I am."

But it turns out that, so far, what voters like is Obama. So now her sputtering campaign strategy has shifted to telling voters, "Whatever you don’t like, that’s what Obama is."

And so the questions are: will McCain beat Romney; and will Ron Paul beat Rudy Giuliani? Both questions seem harder to answer than Clinton-Obama.

The question to be asked is this: should women in public life be treated exactly the same as men? If so, is it not relevant to note that any male candidate who cried in public about the stresses of his campaign would essentially be finished? When we don’t hold her to that standard, are we being sexist or just humane? I mean, I have long felt her to be one of my least favorite national politicians, but I can still see she’s hurting, even if her bewilderment is inextricable from her sense of entitlement. I’m okay with politicians weeping occasionally in public. Churchill did it all the time.

On the other hand, I can see why Clinton can get frustrated. When she went tough on her opponents in the last debate, she was deemed "vicious" or "shrill" rather than simply aggressive. Maybe she can’t win either way. My own view is that on both occasions, weeping a little and snapping a little, she was at the very edge of certain emotions: infuriated and exasperated. I think it must be all the more exasperating to know, somewhere in her psyche, that he is winning it fairly and positively. There’s a small current of Salieri-Mozart syndrome going on here.

(Photo: Stan Honda/Getty.)

An economic conservative on Huckabee’s loopy ideas of food independence, among other things.

A useful look at a couple of falsehoods being peddled by anti-Obama forces.

In the midst of campaigning round the clock, Obama has also been quietly doing what he can to help the Bush administration urge calm in Kenya. Joe Klein has the details.