Bruce Bartlett notes the massive short-term deficits that Paul Ryan proposes:
2012: $995 billion; 2013: $698 billion; 2014: $489 billion; 2015: $431 billion; 2016: $478 billion; 2017: $407 billion; 2018: $378 billion; 2019: $415 billion; 2020: $405 billion; and 2021: $391 billion.
Viewer discretion advised:
And it's spreading:
Taking a cue from Will Ferrell going Beardpocalypse all over Conan's face, Team Coco fans across the country are manning it up and shaving it off!
Jonathan Bernstein explains why the bin Laden killing re-kindled the torture debate:
One way to look at it is that torture, right now, clearly divides the parties; indeed, it’s probably the national security/foreign affairs issue that most clearly divides them. After all, attempts by some movement conservatives to claim a division over terrorism (with Barack Obama secretly on the side of the terrorists) is going to be pretty much a non-starter from now on, and the other phony divisions (such as the silly “exceptionalism” thing) never had much of a chance to begin with. Torture has the advantage of being a non-fictional difference between the parties.
Torture is illegal. That’s what I cannot wrap my head around here. In this morning’s WSJ, we have a former attorney general defending something clearly and indisputably illegal. The DOJ described the absurd reasoning of Bush’s OLC – that the technique of waterboarding displayed in Cambodia’s Museum of Torture is not torture as long as Americans do it – as deeply shoddy and unprofessional.
Matt Buchanan marvels at the dogs of war:
[D]id you know some of them have titanium fangs, designed to rip through enemy protective armor? That titanium grill runs $2,000 per tooth. The end result, US military dog trainer Alex Dunbar tells The Daily, is that being bitten is "like being stabbed four times at once with a bone crusher." Hard. Core.
Update: Ackerman brings the enthusiasm down to earth:
The only reason to have titanium teeth? Medical reasons, [K-9 trainer Jeff Franklin] says, like “if a dog breaks a tooth … it’s the same as a crown for a human.”
Brian Palmer looks to the history books:
The U.S. military has deployed canines for centuries, but never sent them into combat until about fifty years ago. Military dogs used to be trained for super-aggression. They were used as sentries and guard dogs, and were taught to distrust all humans but the handler. As a result, they couldn't function as part of a combat team, because they had a habit of biting other members of the unit. Modern war dogs are far more comfortable working with strangers, even those wearing intimidating commando outfits.
A reader recommends "War Dogs of the Pacific":
The documentary aired on PBS and some other channels a while back. It's very moving. Similar to the way that "Maus" made the Holocaust more real by making the main characters animals, it makes the U.S. war in the Pacific more real through the recounting of the heroics of these voiceless four-legged soldiers. Somehow they generate genuine empathy; make the incomprehensible-unless-you-were-there nature of combat more comprehensible than any human documentary ever has, for me at least. I'd guess it's because we have a self-protecting instinct against identifying with the horrors our fellow humans experienced, but don't have that same instinct for animals.
Fair warning: Many readers will cry.
A reader points to a "Today" show segment titled "Who's ‘cool’ after graduating from high school?" It's accompanied by some passages from a new book:
Geek, nerd, loser – these are labels that can be found in every high school in America. In "The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth," Alexandra Robbins looks at why some kids fit in and some kids don't, only to find that the kids most often on the outs at school may be the most successful after they graduate.
Another writes:
In high school I was friends with Terry Miller and can attest firsthand to the environment he describes in the original "It Gets Better" video.
Though I'm straight, several of my close friends in high school were gay and I feel very fortunate for how they helped me understand and accept myself. I remember all these terrific times when Terry came over to my Mom's house with a bevy of 12" remixes to sing and dance to; where he made helpful suggestions on my wardrobe and generally inspired me to feel like it was okay to be my authentic self – no matter how eccentric or colorful. He made celebrating life a literal expression, through engagement and creativity, with humor and savoir faire.
As Terry was suffering terribly through his high school years, he was helping me get through mine.
A new UN report says the world population may hit 10.1 billion by 2100. David Bloom worries about Africa:
Africa’s population today stands at 1 billion. According to the U.N., that number will increase to 2.2 billion by 2050 and 3.6 billion by 2100. … These facts are troubling because population growth is clustered with, and aggravates, other major problems. If you look at all countries in terms of income poverty, water poverty, and the Failed States Index , the 14 countries that rank high on all three, all but one are in Africa (Burkina Faso, Burundi, Central African Republic, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Malawi, Niger, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Uganda). And the average annual population growth rate of those countries is a whopping 2.6 percent.
The Economist's graph of select nations' population forecasts is above.
Andrew Romano sees Senator Jon Tester as a test case for Democrats:
When Tester arrived on Capitol Hill, coastal types were quick to call him a New Kind of Democrat, which had a nice ring to it. Unfortunately, they couldn’t agree on what kind of Democrat he was. Some pundits pegged him as a populist. Others saw him as a Western libertarian. One even floated the phrase “macho Dem.” But as his recent decisions have demonstrated, Tester is, at root, something rarer and riskier than all that: a rural politician in an overwhelmingly urban party. “My stances are shaped by where I come from,” he told me in March. “Folks out here face challenges that most people don’t realize.” And so the question that will define the next 18 months, for Tester and his party, is not only whether there’s room in rural America for Democrats; it’s whether there’s room in the Democratic Party for rural Americans.
J.F. at DiA predicts that any film about the SEAL raid won't show "the hours, days, weeks and months of painstaking, tedious analysis that actually led to Osama bin Laden's death:"
The worthwhile, boring, essential parts of war and life do not make good television. They do not even make good narrative: David Foster Wallace's posthumous novel tries to sanctify boredom (and if I ever manage to slog my way past page 56 I'll let you know if it succeeds; he's a great writer, but come on, I'm only human, I have my narrative needs too), but otherwise writers and filmmakers wisely steer clear of the subject. People standing around tables in offices sorting documents into files or making minute adjustments to photographs does not make for compelling reading or watching. But make no mistake, those people are the ones who put the SEALs in that compound.
The Dish 