The Dish

Left-handed people, that is. There seems to be a strange decline in their prevalence toward the end of the nineteenth century, followed by a subsequent rise. Social engineering?

Check out the visual gimmicks publishing houses have used to piggyback on the success of Harris, Dawkins, Hitch et al.

NRO’s staff join Michael Ledeen at a Toby Keith concert. Heh.

One old trope was that we were spending far too much money on HIV research, compared with cancer, given its prevalence in the population. Understanding the science changes your perspective on this. Many of the techniques and insights acquired in the fight against HIV are extremely useful for understanding and mastering other diseases. And sometimes, the drugs developed worked for both. AZT was originally a cancer drug. In combination, it remains a tool against HIV. And now protease inhibitors are showing promise against cancer. It’s win-win.

Good news: it’s a lot less full than it was recently.

The mayor grows one. Kerfuffle! Fooferaw!

Drezner does an inventory of the reputations of those who worked for the current president (the worst in his lifetime, according to Alan Greenspan):

1) Those lucky few who will emerge with their reputation intact somehow. Examples: Bob Zoellick, Rob Portman, Ben Bernanke.

2) Those whose reputations acquired a stain that will be difficult to erase. Examples: Colin Powell (and his speech to the U.N.), Alan Greenspan (and his endorsement of the Bush tax cuts).

3) Those whose actions have led journalists to engage in psychoanalysis to figure out what the heck went wrong: Examples: Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld.

4) Those who have committed career suicide through repeated screw-ups. Examples: Paul Wolfowitz, Alberto Gonzales.

And the countless pundits (yours truly included) who were dumb enough at one point or other to give him the benefit of the doubt.

The mic sucked, as Marc notes. So did Obama’s presentation. He gave a pedestrian speech that he appeared to have barely read. The speech itself was poorly constructed, with a surprisingly interesting Lincoln quote tacked on too late to rescue it. Afterwards, the hacks were grilling his frontman on how these proposals dealt with the AMT, how they fit in with his methods for financing his healthcare plans, and so on. The fact-sheets we were promised didn’t materialize. I haven’t gone through the details. I like the idea of ridding the tax code of so much corporate welfare – one of the worst of so many bad things the Bush GOP has given us is an immensely more complex tax code, rigged by special interests to scam the rest of us. But the message was a mess; and much of it seemed to defend new tax breaks and credits, even as he was proposing simplification. I was bored. If I’m bored, and I’m paid not to be, what will be the response of the people Obama is trying to reach?

Leaving, however, I was struck by a simple fact. If Obama gets no further than his current rut (I suspect he’ll surpass it later in the fall), he will nonetheless have achieved something remarkable. Here is a credible, serious African-American candidate for president boring an audience on tax reform. The days of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton dominating African-American politics and visibility are gone. This is the game Obama has already changed. It is immensely good news for the future of race – and of African-Americans – in America. Boredom can be a good thing. And it was.

Apparently, this cracks them up in Denmark:

He can live with it. Matt wonders if this approach doesn’t actually help us forestall a nuclear Iran. Not so sure here. I’m obviously a skeptic of the last military resort against the Tehran regime – largely because I’ve yet to be convinced that it wouldn’t actually hurt our long-term interests in the war against Islamism. But that a nuclear Iran would be a terrible blow – not least to Iranians forced to live under a theocracy newly empowered by the Doomsday weapon – is indisputable.