The Dish

A reader responds:

Oh dear, maybe I don’t want to see the wedding photos after all….

But speaking of Whitman and weddings, I wandered across this the other day.  It’s from Song of the Open Road.

Allons! the road is before us!
It is safe–I have tried it–my own feet have tried it well–be not detain’d!
Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten, and the book on the shelf unopen’d!
Let the tools remain in the workshop! let the money remain unearn’d!
Let the school stand! mind not the cry of the teacher!
Let the preacher preach in his pulpit! let the lawyer plead in the
court, and the judge expound the law.

Camerado, I give you my hand!
I give you my love more precious than money,
I give you myself before preaching or law;
Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?

Old Walt really speaks to me and to my own love (16 years together this week) and how it stands up all by itself, "before preaching or law".  Same-sex marriage is a good thing (and many thanks for fighting for it for so long). But I fear that when full federal marriage is finally available to all we’ll lose the small but glorious conceit that our love is truer than others because it exists and thrives in spite of the doings of preachers and law makers.

Mark Kleiman on Clinton.

The professional organizations for lawyers and psychologists are finally resisting the war crimes of the Bush administration:

The Bush Administration has finally achieved something unprecedented. The organized bar–with a vote just one short of unanimity–has declared one of Bush’s executive orders illegal and vowed to seek Congressional action to override it. And psychologists appear poised to join their legal colleagues in an equally harsh denunciation.

Vive la resistance. Scott’s post is worth reading in full. America is coming back.

A University of Michigan study seems to fly in the face of much evidence and reporting from Iraq in the past four years. I don’t know what to make of it, but here it is. Iraqpundit wants to know why this isn’t a bigger story. Maybe because it seems like such an outlier? Tom Bowler has more.

One reason the surge is "working" in bringing some peace to some areas in Iraq: there’s a truce between Shia soldiers who have infiltrated the Iraq military under US command and the Shia militias. Duh. Totten sees beneath the spin here:

I went inside the Tactical Operations Center and spoke to the Public Affairs Officer. "What can I help you with, Mike?" he said. "I want an on-the-record interview with Military Intelligence," I said. "Why?" he said. I told him what I had heard. "I can print rumor or fact," I said. He got me the interview.

Master Sergeant Jeffrey K. Tyler met with me privately. "It’s true," he said. "Many of the Iraqi Army soldiers here are supporters of JAM.” JAM is military shorthand for Jaysh al Mahdi, or Moqtada al Sadr’s radical Shia Mahdi Army militia.

"They aren’t in JAM cells necessarily, but they are sympathizers. They may let JAM guys through checkpoints, for example. They aren’t out kidnapping Sunnis or anything like that. They are sympathizers, not direct actors. Almost all the Iraqi Army soldiers here are Shias."

"Is their presence here the reason we aren’t getting mortared?" I said. "Because the Mahdi Army doesn’t want to blow up their own people?"

"We think that’s probably so," he said and nodded with confidence.

I didn’t hear that in the briefing when I first got there.

     

I bet he didn’t. Michael’s conclusion:

Nothing makes me more pessimistic about Iraq’s future prospects than this. The Mahdi Army is Iran’s major proxy in Iraq. It is, in effect, the Iraqi branch of Hezbollah.

And we’re training them.

An Indian child holds the Indian national flag on a beach in Mumbai, 15 August 2007, as India marks 60 years of Independence. India is celebrating its 60th anniversary of Independence from British rule. By Sajjad Hussain/AFP/Getty.

"I’ve never paid for private healthcare because I’m a socialist. Now I find you can get tummy tucks and cosmetic surgery on the NHS but not the drugs I need to stay alive. It is a scandal," – socialized medicine patient Tony Wilson. Hey: the drug was expensive.

Ambers sums it up:

Hillary Clinton reads recent political history materially; The country’s political cleavages are not artificial or contrived; they’re cut from basic differences in how to organize society. Democrats want to be proud of their identity as Democrats again; the central animating principle of her candidacy is that the country sufffers; that President Bush and the Republicans are to blame; that Hillary Clinton is the solution. Americans don’t hate government; they just hate when government doesn’t work. The Clintons know how to make government work; as president Hillary Clinton will recertify government. How does Clinton win news cycles?   When she’s attacked by Republicans or President Bush.

Obama wants to remind Democrats of the feeling they get when they’re at a ball game and the national anthem is played — a post (or pre) partisan, transhistorical patriotism that is then channeled into the political system as the ultimate expression of Democratic ideals. It’s a complex argument, easily and reductively characterized as "Obama versus the System." In the context of the primary, Obama is simultaneously addressing the Clinton dynastic ambition, the allure of a post-Clinton era for Democratic political elite and the nagging sense for many Democrats that the Clintons contributed to and were in some ways responsible for the downturn in Democratic fortunes after Bush v. Gore. How does Obama win news cycles? When everyone notices there is daylight between him and Clinton.

"But then I think we have to, with some degree of wisdom, come to the following perspective. We’re never, ever going to be able to totally control immigration to a country that is as large as ours, that has borders that are as diverse as the borders of the United States, and as a society that wants to be a country that values freedom — that values freedom of movement, freedom to do business.

If you were to totally control immigration into the United States, if you were to totally control the flow of people in the United States, you might very well destroy the economy of the United States because you’d have to inspect everything and everyone in every way possible. I don’t know that there’s any technological way to totally control it. There’s no doubt much better ways to get more of a reasonable degree of assurance about who’s coming in, to get more control over it, you’re never totally going to control it. So we just have to accept that if we want to be the kind of country that we are," – Rudy Giuliani, a decade ago.

"You expect me to talk?" Goldfinger.