The Dish

Jane Austen would get a rejection slip. Where’s the buzz? Another reader comments on my own nightmare experience:

I bought one of those first edition books with the pages out of order. Glad to hear you mention it, because it really perplexed me at the time. It’s sort of shocking to find that reputable publishers are paying this little attention. Even if your publishers didn’t notice, your readers did.

Yes, they couldn’t even recall them all effectively. But, hey, they’re just books. Why would a publisher care what’s written in them? Another reader writes:

In 1996, I self-published a book. It quickly became a "best seller," selling 3,000 copies in about a month.

So I got a big-time agent and she licensed the publishing rights for my book to one of the biggest New York book publishing companies.

I later found out that they NEVER read my book. They told me that they based their decision to publish my book on the title and cover design. The reason? When book salesmen go to the various booksellers, they only show their prospective buyers the COVERS of the books! (The salesmen don’t even carry the actual books with them, only the covers.)

If you’re sub-literate and need a few bucks, you know which industry to work for.

John Safran tries to pitch a movie about Mormon missionaries who do wheelies and take on Sin City. They’re fast; they’re furious … and they’re looking for souls. The trailer is Tagg-bait.

He spent an hour of his time yesterday in the Oval Office talking to the following:

Glenn Beck, Bill Bennett, Neal Boortz, Scott Hennon, Laura Ingraham, Lars Larson, Mark Levin, Michael Medved, Janet Parshall.

He needs to give these people a pep-talk? Or just the usual instructions?

A reader sent me the following two quotes from the Baghdad Bob of the Bush administration. Reading Hewitt or the adolescent gushing of Kathryn-Jean Lopez over Bill Bennett and Rush Limbaugh is a useful anthropological exercize. You see in both a form of tribalism that both mistake for analysis, of partisanship that both misplace for conservatism. And then there’s the simple wonder of how a human being can have lived through the past seven years and still write this:

The next president has got to chose a vice president as skilled as Cheney and a team as experienced as that which was around President Bush after 9/11 if only because the scale of the responsibility is so great and the need for clear thinking so profound. The people diseased with BDS will never get this, but the country is extraordinarily blessed to have had President Bush and Vice President Cheney and their senior aides during these first few years of a very long war. Reading Hayes’ book drives that point home again and again.

And this:

I will say on today’s show that I am confident about the course of the war and about the momentum in Iraq, as well of the president’s absolute commitment to doing right by the troops and his concern for every lost and wounded soldier and their families. President Bush’s command of the details and his broad view of the conflict is reassuring, and among my comments to him was the wish that he found more opportunities to engage in long interviews that would allow the American public to see that grasp and that commitment.

I think that was an invite for his show. The man works it.

"Ultimately, politics trumps all else. If the political stalemate goes on, even if the military progress continued, I don’t see how I could write another Op-Ed saying the same thing," – Michael O’Hanlon, walking back his surge optimism a little. You can read how the political process in Iraq is actually degenerating from its recent murderous, bitter lows here.

Bill, that is. Tom Edsall sums up what a lot of us have been observing:

Although little noticed, Obama has been challenging influential Democratic primary constituencies at a rate of about once a month, building what now is a significant record of dissent from key party factions. He has taken on civil rights groups, the National Education Association, and the powerful lobby opposed to any changes in Social Security benefits.

Appearing May 13 on ABC’s "This Week with George Stephanopoulos," Obama suggested that he is prepared to consider a major alteration of affirmative action policy to make it less racially based and more economically rooted:

"My daughters should probably be treated by any admissions officer as folks who are pretty advantaged," he said. "I think that we should take into account white kids who have been disadvantaged and have grown up in poverty and shown themselves to have what it takes to succeed."

In the same May 13 interview, Obama said he would consider raising both the retirement age and payroll taxes as part of a package to put Social Security on a stable fiscal basis. "Everything should be on the table," Obama said, although he rules out privatization.

A month later, in a June 7 talk at a Spartanburg, South Carolina Baptist Church, Obama pointedly challenged black men who abandon their children:

"There are a lot of men out there who need to stop acting like boys; who need to realize that responsibility does not end at conception; you need to know that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child but the courage to raise one,"

And in Philadelphia, at a July 5 National Education Association meeting, Obama endorsed merit pay — anathema to teachers’ unions. "If you excel at helping your students achieve success, your success will be valued and rewarded as well," Obama said, careful to add, "I want to work with teachers. I’m not going to do it to you, I’m going to do it with you."

Well, it’s a change election, like 1992. And Obama represents change for Democrats as well as the country.

Not an encouraging news round-up:

A Kurdish journalist, for example, was given 18 months in prison last year because his online writing criticized leaders of the Kurdish region in Iraq. A Saudi spent 13 days in jail for online writing that warned about the power of religious extremists in Saudi Arabia. And a Libyan journalist who wrote critical articles about Libyan officials for London-based Libyan opposition Web sites was mysteriously gunned down in 2005, activists said.

And a photo Glenn Reynolds will love.

Bloomberg’s nanny-state ratchets it up a notch.