The Dish

"Change starts by making sure a Democrat is in the White House. Change doesn’t end just because a Democrat is in the White House. It’s time to turn the page on the old way of doing business," – Barack Obama, yesterday, at the SEIU confab. Gallup has some encouraging data on this front. He’ll be talking taxes at lunchtime today. I’m going and will blog.

The Palestinian Authority – the moderates, remember? – celebrate.

A new review of my book from Monsters and Critics:

In the end, Sullivan is – if one only looks at existing conservative philosophies/theories – a Burkean conservative. If one wants to understand where Sullivan’s coming from, and where he’s most likely headed, one has to look at conservatism in America today from the perspective, not of a Reagan conservative, but of a Burkean one.

Megan tackles some economic revisionism.

I didn’t blog about it much because I couldn’t make a great deal of sense out of it. The blogosphere has a lot of chatter on the Israeli strike in Syria, much of it an attempt to clear up major MSM confusion. Arms Control Wonk sorts through the crap and offers a helpful time-line "outlining how two separate stories about a Syrian airstrike and Syria-DPRK nuclear cooperation merged into the big mess we have today." Blake Hounshell targets WaPo’s reporting, citing Joseph Cirincione’s response to a Glenn Kessler piece:

This story is nonsense.  The Washington Post story should have been headlined "White House Officials Try to Push North Korea-Syria Connection." This is a political story, not a threat story. The mainstream media seems to have learned nothing from the run-up to war in Iraq. It is a sad commentary on how selective leaks from administration officials who have repeatedly misled the press are still treated as if they were absolute truth. 

Once again, this appears to be the work of a small group of officials leaking cherry-picked, unvetted "intelligence" to key reporters in order to promote a preexisting political agenda. If this sounds like the run-up to the war in Iraq, it should.

Uh-oh. A helpful round-up here. The much-disputed Times of London piece is here. Israellycool does some backtracking – and clarifying – here. Clear now?

Patrick Ruffini has a bash. Money quote:

Because Romney’s strength is pretty much all out there right now, the risk of failure is greater. If there is any team in politics that can pull it off, Romney’s can. But the risk is enormous. If he loses New Hampshire, it’s over.

The closeness of the race leaves no margin for error for any of the candidates, and that includes Giuliani and Thompson. The only difference is that Romney starts out with insanely high expectations in these early contests.

A reader writes:

I’ve enjoyed the "View From Your Window" photos since you started posting them.  I feel yesterday’s pic from Mainz is the best so far: the straight street in shadows, devoid of people or cars; the perfect row of DPW barriers; the light coming from windows somewhere on the left reflecting on the street and the long building on the right–Edward Hopper would have had a field day painting this scene.

I say this as an art novice/ignoramus who happened to catch the Hopper exhibit at the MFA the last day it was in Boston.  Having never been to an honest-to-God exhibition before, I was overwhelmed.  It’s truly a once-in-a-lifetime event to stand a few feet or even inches from a comprehensive collection of a master’s life work.  Now when I look through a window down the street I take a moment to ask myself, "what would this look like if Hopper painted it?"  The shot from Mainz triggered just such a reaction in me, to the point where I spent five minutes staring at it.  (A great way to take a break, by the way.)

You can spend many more minutes virtually traveling the globe through the windows of Dish-readers across the planet here.

The NYT reverses one of the dumbest moves in the history of online journalism. This is not the benefit of hindsight. It was obvious at the time that this kind of gambit would never work for online opinion, and anyone with a pulse and a modem could see that, including many of the columnists themselves. In some ways, it was less a business decision, it seems to me, than a sheer assertion, by slightly desperate men, that somehow Times opiners merited a fee in a way no one else did – least of all those – shudder – bloggers. Two years ago, they could still assert that with a straight face, even if the rest of us were snickering. No longer. The NYT has some great columnists and some unreadable ones. But they are not a class apart. They are merely part of a much larger and better conversation than any Sulzberger could ever own. Welcome to the blogosphere, guys. It’s free.

(Photo: MoDo by Amy Sussman/Getty.)