Month: March 2012

First he's hot, then he's cool:

Jesse Singal watches the above clip while thinking about Romney:

Sure, Obama doesn’t quite come across as Just Some Guy, but have you ever seen Romney look anywhere close to this natural? Does he ever come across as someone who is simply shooting the breeze about a subject he enjoys? No, and it matters in an election, because of course there’s something to all the old dumb Bush cowboy stuff, in the sense that voters need to feel a sense of connection to a candidate. 

A reader adds:

I think Obama is having fun these days. After Santorum calls him a snob and Romney tries to boost his Average Joe sportsfan cred by talking about his NASCAR owner friends, Obama brings in a sports journalist known as the Sportsguy (can't make this up) and enthusiastically and effortlessly talks about the three major American sports, while dropping names and lingo and playfully bragging about his own game (like the cross-over he did on Chris Paul). Obama the sportsfan is nothing new, but still – he is absolutely toying with his opponents here.

More clips from the interview here.

A reader updates us on the latest state to pass and sign historic legislation:

I understand the politics of New Jersey are interesting, but it's quite interesting in Maryland, too.  Today at 5 pm, Governor O'Malley will sign off on a gay marriage bill.  It will no doubt be challenged on the ballot in November, of course. But as of this afternoon, the eighth domino will fall.  Two of my best friends had a church service in Kentucky, a civil service in DC, and after today, will finally be allowed to have a proper marriage in their home state.  And another anniversary to remember, but still.

The earliest nuptials could begin in Maryland is January 1, 2013. Laura Laing has more on the fight ahead.

A photoshopped fantasy land:

Todd VanDerWerff says it doesn't make economic sense:

The problem HBO (and the other premium cable channels) faces is that it’s boxed in by its need to be in bed with cable companies. The easiest solution to the problem posed in the Oatmeal cartoon is simply to make HBO Go available to anyone who wants it, for a monthly fee that would probably be slightly larger than what the monthly fee for the TV network is (to offset any costs lost from cable providers). The problem is that if the network does this, it will be seen as declaring war on the very providers who keep it coming into people’s homes. Even though it seems, to a generation raised on the Internet, like everybody watches stuff on the Internet all of the time, the vast majority of Americans still consume their entertainment on TV. Without the cable companies beaming HBO into those people’s homes, the network loses subscriber fees, which robs it of the ability to program anything beyond cheap movies.

Alyssa nods.

Sabato's Crystal Ball analyzes the next week of races:

Our guesstimate of Romney’s delegate edge — 49 over Santorum — comes almost entirely from Virginia. Subtract out Virginia, and Super Tuesday becomes essentially a draw. Obviously, Romney will do very well in Massachusetts, where he served as governor, and in neighboring Vermont — both of which are Democratic states whose Republicans aren’t particularly religious or conservative compared with other states. Ohio, which will be the key state in Super Tuesday press coverage and which we project Romney will win quite narrowly, is in almost any event likely to be relatively even in delegates, much like Michigan was.

Harry Enten calculates that the delegate allocation rules in the states voting next Tuesday will give Romney a major delegate bump. My view is that if Romney loses Ohio to Santorum, whatever the delegate result, he's a zombie nominee.

The Free Syrian Army appears [NYT] to be retreating from Baba Amr, the most-beseiged neighborhood in that most-beseiged city, potentially setting the stage for mass violence as Assad tries to retake control. Shashank Joshi thinks turning the area into a bloodbath won't quell the uprising:

Homs will not decide the fate of the country. It is not a last-ditch battle. Far from being a lone revolutionary bridgehead, it is only the most prominent symptom of a malaise afflicting huge parts of Syria. The city's destruction will probably harden national resistance, which has surpassed in scale and breadth that which took place in the 1970s and 1980s. It will shatter what little hopes were left of a political settlement.

Daniel Serwer pins his hopes on UN envoy Kofi Annan:

We should not expect Annan to get past Bashar’s defenses easily or quickly.  As fallacious as the claims may be, he will have to listen and appear to appreciate them.  Then, he needs to try to internationalize the situation as much as possible, by getting Arab League and UN monitors back into Syria to prevent renewed violence once a ceasefire is in place.  He also needs to maintain his credibility with the Russians, so that he can talk with them about how their interests in port access and arms sales might be better served by a future, democratically-validated regime than by a declining Assad.

Anne Applebaum wants the opposition and foreign supporters to start publicly discussing the endgame. Emily Parker finds shockingly little social media coverage of Syria's plight. 

The Cannabis Closet

A reader writes:

I know the Cannabis Closet discussion hasn't been up for awhile, but in light of your recent posts about the Obama war on medical marijuana, I thought you might find this interesting.

Six months ago, my husband got a job on a Department of Energy site working for a private contractor. He then had to apply for a low-level security clearance – not because his job actually requires it, but because it's necessary in order to go to certain areas of the site. The form he had to fill out was incredibly long and detailed, and of course included questions about previous drug use. My husband has never been a serious user; he doesn't even like pot that much, and he's never tried other illegal drugs. But, like most people we know, he smoked pot occasionally in college and in the few years following. He hasn't smoked in years, and he would never go to work high. He had to pass a drug test to get this job, and he's subject to random drug tests as long as he's employed there. 

So when he came to the security questions on drug use, he had an important choice: lie, or give some version of the truth. I encouraged him to lie, so did some of his colleagues who have gone through the process and did the same.

My husband decided to tell the truth, for three main reasons: he's almost constitutionally incapable of lying; he thinks it's important that the government knows that people working for them have gotten high, because it is completely ridiculous to stigmatize it; and, of course, Obama has admitted to smoking weed and he has a pretty high security clearance, so how are they going to deny it to my lowly husband? 

He sent in the form awhile ago, and last week got back an additional questionnaire asking for impossible details: first and last day of use, frequency of use, amount used, locations where use occurred, etc. It's clearly a generic form that gets sent to everyone who admits to drug use on the original form, but he had already given most of this information the first time around. It is crazy that pot is treated on the same level as heroin or meth, and that alcohol and prescription drugs are not asked about.

We'll see what happens with all of this, and I'm nervous that my husband's honesty could cause him to not get this clearance and potentially lose his job. Meanwhile, it seems like many (most?) people confronted with forms like this simply lie, because the chances of getting caught are close to nothing, and the government completely overreacts at the slightest mention of weed. Maybe I'm overly anxious and this will pass without incident, but it just got me thinking about our ridiculous drug laws.

And I'd be curious to see if other readers have had similar experiences, because Dish readers are a smart, educated, pot-smoking bunch who seem to have knowledge about everything!

We are also curious.  Hundreds of Dish readers over that past three years have submitted stories to the Cannabis Closet, but here's a chance for anyone to contribute in a quick and simple way: answer the yes/no questions in the Urtak survey embedded above. No registration is required and all responses are completely anonymous.

"Look, I have worn a garbage bag for rain gear myself," – Mitt Romney, who mocked a group of NASCAR fans for wearing cheap plastic ponchos on Sunday. 

A must-read on Breitbart:

This is where it becomes difficult to honor the Roman injunction to speak no ill of the dead. It’s difficult for me to assess Breitbart’s impact upon American media and American politics as anything other than poisonous. When one of the leading media figures of the day achieves his success by his giddy disdain for truth and fairness—when one of our leading political figures offers to his admirers a politics inflamed by rage and devoid of ideas—how to withhold a profoundly negative judgment on his life and career? Especially when that career was so representative of his times?