The Dish

Well, let’s look on the bright side, shall we? From The American:

It is tempting to compare this growth to the rise of the American wine industry over the past two decades. And not just because cheese and wine are so tasty together. They are similar foods. Both harness the miracle of fermentation, the activity of bacteria on a simple commodity (milk or grape juice). Both are as much art as science, cherished for their unique capacity to speak of the land and the tradition in which they are born—what the cognoscenti call terroir.

Cheese and wine have traced similar paths to success. Both came to America with European immigrants seeking to recreate the traditional staples of their homelands. Both entered a long dark age of industrialization and standardization, and have spent decades repairing a devastated brand and fighting to capture a suspicious market against an overwhelming tide of high-quality European competition. To this day, the very expression “American cheese” elicits chuckles and images of convenient, individually wrapped slices and aerosolized whizzes.

Cheese 4What has been good for wine has been good for cheese. The rising wealth and strong dollar of the 1990s sent Americans flocking to Europe, returning with a new understanding and appreciation of continental eating.

Not exactly encouraging:

We legislated against natural gas after the OPEC embargoes. Then we pinned all our hopes on natural gas and built capacity like crazy people. Then all the nukes were canceled based on one accident, during which, by all accounts, the safety systems actually behaved the way they were supposed to, avoiding a truly calamitous event. Now sequestration is the answer. We keep regulating, legislating, and reacting to one-time events or one type of pollutant with short-term measures.

Many words may make it sound contrived
But somehow we’re alive

The survivors – Our heads bowed
The survivors – At memorials for other faces in the crowd

Teachers and artists
And Saturday girls
In suits or sequins
Or twinsets-and-pearls

If life is worth living,
It’s got to be run
As a means of giving,
Not as a race to be won
Many roads will run through many lives
But somehow we’ll arrive.

– "The Survivors", by Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe.

The new Rasmussen poll can’t be encouraging for her. The trend is looking brutal:

Clinton’s seven-point advantage is down from a ten-point lead in early November. In October, Clinton held a sixteen-point advantage over Obama. A month earlier, Clinton was ahead by twenty-three percentage points.

Opinion Dynamics sees the same:

A FOX News poll of likely New Hampshire Democratic voters finds that Clinton has the support of 30 percent followed by Obama at 23 percent. Edwards comes in third with 17 percent, Richardson receives the support of 12 percent.

Now imagine if Obama wins Iowa. New Hampshire happens very shortly thereafter. Independents can vote in either primary. I’ve always thought that Obama is an obvious New Hampshire candidate: an insurgent, a straight-talker, with far more independent appeal than Clinton. If Iowa and New Hampshire fall to him, black voters in South Carolina could realize he’s viable and flock from Clinton. If that happens, Mrs Inevitable is in big trouble. (I’d add that an Obama surge in New Hamsphire among Independents could finish off McCain – because, unlike 2000, they won’t be voting in the Republican primary.)

A reader writes:

This is David Kenner. I’m an American journalist living in Beirut who writes for NOW Lebanon. Broadly speaking, I’m in Mr. Smith’s "political camp" (supporting the pro-Western government, opposing Hezbollah). That said, Mr. Smith’s writing on Lebanon is atrocious, and the "facts" that he reported never happened, as anyone living in Beirut could tell you. Really, it’s not even a close call. If 4,000 – 5,000 Hezbollah gunmen deployed to Christian Beirut, the country would be descending to civil war. The idea that only Mr. Smith would have noticed this is absurd – somebody is feeding him fake news, and hoping he transmits it back to his readers in the States.

I actually criticized Smith from my blog, which covers Lebanese politics, in October. I suspect that is what he is responding to when he complains that people criticized him for calling Beirut’s southern suburbs a Hezbollah "stronghold."  Really, this sort of thing makes me very angry… Hezbollah does so much that is truly damaging to Lebanon, journalists shouldn’t let them off the hook by making up things that never happened.

Kenner’s response to the NRO spin can be read here. My summary of the charges here. The alleged factual inaccuracy – reporting 4,000 Hezbollah gunmen when they didn’t exist – dwarfs any alleged incident Beauchamp reported for TNR.

From the annals of punny local TV news:

What goes around, I guess … My take on the story they buried on a Friday afternoon can be read here. Kevin adds:

Well, we all make mistakes. Live and learn, eh? Whether the New Republic will be so charitable remains to be seen.

Insta-silence, natch. But he does manage to attack The New Republic again this morning!

Frank Miniter explains:

Many nonhunters think hunters are simply bloodthirsty. I dare any nonhunter who feels that way to go to a hunting club, lodge, or hunting show and meet hunters, or simply to read a hunting magazine. If they do they’ll find that hunters care deeply about our natural resources. I’m a bird-watcher, hiker, kayaker, wildlife photographer, and yes, hunter.

Another underlying myth about hunting is that if you don’t hunt, eat meat, or wear leather products you are somehow beyond reproach. This myth falls apart when you realize that every farmer-and this goes double for small organic farms-has to control wildlife populations lethally in order to have crops left to harvest. If farmers don’t use hunting to control deer, elk, geese, and other wildlife populations then those species propagate to the point and eat their crops. When you step back and look at the big picture you realize wildlife and humans are living in the same ecosystems. We’re all competing for the same resources. We have to balance our needs with those of the wildlife around us. This is why farmers need hunters and why even vegetarians owe hunters.

Dubuque, Iowa, 8.57 am.

A rip-off, of course. And the original was funnier and less inappopriate. And by a lesbian!