Month: May 2012

Friedersdorf sounds unnerved by the NYT's report that Obama is straddling the line:

He is a hawk. It's terrifying that isn't clear to everyone, because it suggests the neoconservative desire for even more foreign wars is skewing the way that Americans conceive of hawkishness and dovishness. It suggests we're defining "warmonger" down. … President Obama escalated a major war and sent tens of thousands more troops to fight it, even as he joined in regime change in a different country, ordered drone strikes in at least three others, and sent commandos into Pakistan, a list of aggressive actions that isn't even exhaustive.

But he got us out of Iraq, and has avoided a potentially disastrous war with Iran, so far. Obama is what he said he was in his Nobel Acceptance speech: a Niebuhrian.

(Photo: US President Barack Obama greets troops during a visit to Bagram Air Field on May 1, 2012 in Afghanistan. Obama signed a US-Afghanistan strategic partnership agreement during his unannounced visit to the country. By Mandel Ngan/AFP/GettyImages)

"We cannot know the whole truth, which belongs to God alone, but our task nevertheless is to seek to know what is true. And if we offend gravely enough against what we know to be true, as by failing badly enough to deal affectionately and responsibly with our land and our neighbors, truth will retaliate with ugliness, poverty, and disease. The crisis of this line of thought is the realization that we are at once limited and unendingly responsible for what we know and do…

To hear of a thousand deaths in war is terrible, and we “know” that it is. But as it registers on our hearts, it is not more terrible than one death fully imagined. The economic hardship of one farm family, if they are our neighbors, affects us more painfully than pages of statistics on the decline of the farm population. I can be heartstruck by grief and a kind of compassion at the sight of one gulley (and by shame if I caused it myself), but, conservationist though I am, I am not nearly so upset by an accounting of the tons of plowland sediment borne by the Mississippi River. Wallace Stevens wrote that "Imagination applied to the whole world is vapid in comparison to imagination applied to a detail" — and that appears to have the force of truth.

It is a horrible fact that we can read in the daily paper, without interrupting our breakfast, numerical reckonings of death and destruction that ought to break our hearts or scare us out of our wits. This brings us to an entirely practical question:  Can we—and, if we can, how can we—make actual in our minds the sometimes urgent things we say we know? This obviously cannot be accomplished by a technological breakthrough, nor can it be accomplished by a big thought. Perhaps it cannot be accomplished at all," – Wendell E. Berry.

(Photo: a child killed during conflict in Gaza last year. Getty Images.)

Josh Marshall checks in on the state of the presidential race:

 

Marshall notes that state polls tend to lag national polls. Along the same lines, Kornacki punctures a common style of election analysis:

There’s an assumption that Romney is automatically facing an uphill battle in just about every state that Obama carried in 2008. And since Obama’s overall poll numbers are still decent (he leads Romney by 3.3 points in Real Clear Politics’ national average), he is (not surprisingly) still ahead in most of the states that he carried in ’08, which makes it seem like Romney faces an extra-heavy lift in getting to 270. But it’s almost all an illusion.

As Mark Blumenthal noted today, if Romney overtakes Obama in the national horserace, the swing states will follow. Granted, it will take a bigger national swing to flip some states than others (a one-point Romney edge nationally probably won’t bring Pennsylvania into his column, for instance), but the Electoral College will almost certainly take care of itself if Romney is the national winner.

Buzz Bissinger writes at the intersection of two popular Dish threads:

If the vast majority of major college football programs made money, the argument to ban football might be a more precarious one. But too many of them don't—to the detriment of academic budgets at all too many schools. According to the NCAA, 43% of the 120 schools in the Football Bowl Subdivision lost money on their programs. …

There are the medical dangers of football in general caused by head trauma over repetitive hits. There is the false concept of the football student-athlete that the NCAA endlessly tries to sell, when any major college player will tell you that the demands of the game, a year-round commitment, makes the student half of the equation secondary and superfluous. There are the scandals that have beset programs in the desperate pursuit of winning—the University of Southern California, Ohio State University, University of Miami and Penn State University among others.

For me, the NYT story about Ray Easterling's widow, Mary Anne, is one of the more haunting about pro-football's devastating impact on long-term mental health:

No adverse aftereffects surfaced through the 1980s. Ray’s engaging personality, discipline and diligence proved a good formula in the financial services field. What followed was a downward spiral during which he flipped to being argumentative and forgetful, as if a personality transplant were mixed in with the two dozen orthopedic operations he endured. 

Business ventures slid off the rails when Ray, for whom punctuality was a practiced virtue, appeared tardy for appointments. In many settings, he would blurt out offensive remarks, the filter in his brain no longer functioning at full tilt. Realizing this, he became disengaged, even from his mother, who died a month before he did. At family events, he would show up in running shorts when more formal attire was appropriate. Staring into space wistfully, Mary Ann said, "I didn’t feel like I was with the person that I married." …

On the morning of April 19, along with her husband’s lifeless body, Mary Ann discovered a note, written with his increasingly numb and quivering hands. It was addressed to her, sprinkled with "I love yous" and containing evidence that his faith had not wavered. Quoting from the letter, she said, "I’m ready to meet my Lord and savior."

The above screenshot is from a short video of Easterling not too long before his death. Chart by Tumblr user "interstices", who explains:

The BCS games have a huge payout to the teams while most of the bowls put together a rather modest payout.  The teams that play in the games don’t necessarily get rich in the process, in fact some schools and conferences actually lose money. … The distribution of household income in the United States in 2010 and the 2011-12 college football bowl game payouts are very similar for the lowest quintile: the 20 percent of the households and 20 percent of the bowl games account for just over three percent of the total.  At the other end the top 20 percent of households account for 50 percent of the income.  Meanwhile the top 20 percent of the bowl games account for about 68 percent of the payouts.

"Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. government has created or reconfigured at least 263 organizations to tackle some aspect of the war on terror. Thirty-three new building complexes have been built for the intelligence bureaucracies alone, occupying 17 million square feet – the equivalent of 22 U.S. Capitols or three Pentagons. The largest bureaucracy after the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs is now the Department of Homeland Security, which has a workforce of 230,000 people … We don't look like people who have won a war. We look like scared, fearful, losers," – Fareed Zakaria.

Ben Birnbaum profiles the embattled Palestinian prime minister:

Fayyad’s state-building project lies in jeopardy. Over the past few months, economic growth in the West Bank has slowed. Unemployment has ticked up. The P.A.’s deficit has soared. And any day, the Hamas-Fatah unity government could arrive, meaning the end of Fayyad’s tenure as prime minister. Yet Fayyad seems to be clinging to any rays of hope he can find. Palestinians, he argued, are beginning to believe in themselves even as they lose faith in everyone else. He also cited some “interesting polls” showing that the Israeli public is well to the left of its current government on final-status issues.

(Photo: A Palestinian youth kicks a flaming tire during clashes with Israeli soldiers outside the Ofer Prison close to the West Bank city of Ramallah, following a march in support of Palestinian prisoners of on hunger strike while being held in Israeli prisons, on May 7, 2012. Israel's Supreme Court rejected an appeal by two Palestinian prisoners who have been on hunger strike for 69 days in protest at being held without charge, their lawyer told AFP. There are some 1,600 Palestinian prisoners currently on hunger strike throughout Israeli jails. By Abbas Momani/AFP/GettyImages.)

A brief reminder from a family directly affected – unlike the vast majority of us:

Jacob Sullum's theory:

It's plausible that Obama, embarrassed by the proliferation of medical marijuana dispensaries on his watch, worried about Republican accusations that he is "soft on drugs," a charge perenially hurled at Democrats, even when there is very little evidence to back it up. Given his comparatively candid discussion of his own drug use in his memoir Dreams From My Father, Obama might have thought himself especially vulnerable to such criticism. Hence he let the drug warriors in the Justice Department do what drug warriors do. 

The other option is that the abuse of medical marijuana laws in, say, California and Colorado, has weakened his hand vis-a-vis the DEA. Both states have effectively legalized the drug for recreational use, with a fig-leaf over their juicy, sticky buds. I'm with Sullum and wish the DEA would back off. But I also wish some states had exercized more discretion and care in allowing for medical marijuana.

A reader updates us:

Delegates in Maine are unbound, so they can openly vote for Ron Paul on the 1st vote. Check this out, from over the weekend: "Ron Paul wins 21 of Maine's 24 Republican delegate spots". And this: "Ron Paul wins majority of Nevada delegates … 22 of the 25 Nevada delegates up for grabs" I thought Romney already won the nomination. Why is he losing delegates left and right?