Month: August 2012

Despite the US team's recent gold in London, Noah Davis believes it's "a team in decline."

How can America regain the lead as women's soccer world power? The core of the team remains strong, posting an 88-6-10 record under coach Pia Sundhage, but the Olympics revealed a squad whose wins had more to do with hustle and some favorable calls than superior skill. A viable league is the only way to cultivate future dominance.

Easier said than done, notes Davis – particularly after the WUSA crumbled in 2003, taking with it $100 million in investment. Newer offshoot leagues are pioneering a more cautious approach:

The W-League and WSPL Elite have different models, but they both focus on grassroots efforts to drive interest. Women sign autographs after the games and spend time with the fans that support them. They appear at community events. It's all part of the plan. "You have to develop local heroes or heroines. You have to let people know where you play, and get a solid reputation behind you. And then you have to build from there," [WPSL founder Jerry] Zanelli said. "The Boston Breakers have done a great job of that. They sold out every game, no matter what. But you don't have to be Division 1 to attract people. You just have to play good soccer."

(Photo of midfielder Megan Rapinoe, who plays for W-League's Seattle Sounders Women's team. By Flickr user evildan2)

Fallows' insight:

Romney is very strong as a debater but has also shown two repeated weaknesses: a thin command of policy details, and an awkwardness when taken by surprise.

When the subject is one he’s prepared for, he rarely falters. When it’s not, or when an exchange goes on longer or in a different direction than expected, many of his ad-libbed responses turn out to be mistakes ("I’ll bet you $10,000!"). Thus the Romney team has the impossible challenge of trying to imagine every question or attack line that might come up in debates with Obama, while the Obama team tries to imagine what Romney’s might have missed. This kind of chess game is always part of debate preparation, but it is unusually important this year, because the gap between Romney at his best and at his worst is so wide.

Reyhan Harmanci interviewed a former Google employee who was tasked with scanning the company's services for content such as beheadings, suicides, and the darkest kinds of porn:

One of the most shocking parts of my job was working on porn issues. Child porn is the biggest thing for internet companies. By law you have to take it down in 24 hours upon notice and report it to federal authorities. No one wanted to do it within Google. I dealt with all the products that Google owned. If anyone were to use them for child porn, I’d have to look at it. So maybe like 15,000 images a day. Google Images, Picasa, Orkut, Google search, etc.

I had no one to talk to. I couldn’t bring it home to my girlfriend because I didn’t want to burden her with this bullshit. For seven, eight, nine months, I was looking at this kind of stuff and thinking I was fine, but it was putting me in a really dark place. Google got someone from a federal agency to talk to me, and that’s when it occurred to me that I needed therapy. She showed me photos of seemingly innocuous activities (kind of like a modified Rorschach test) and asked me for my first visceral reaction. I was like, "That’s fucked up!" It was just a father and a child.

(Image: Screenshot of a YouTube beheading after removal)

Not much, judging by the statistics:

[A]fter two years of combat in Kandahar and Helmand, those provinces still account for an outsize proportion of Afghan insurgent violence.

Nor is violence is down significantly in Afghanistan as a whole. [Marine General John Allen, the commander of the war,] speaking to Pentagon reporters on Thursday, said the overall insurgent violence in the country has dipped three percent from this time last year — a figure he conceded "may not be statistically significant." The previous year, ISAF said that insurgent attacks remained basically level with summer 2010 levels — when the full complement of surge troops arrived in Afghanistan. The purpose of the surge was to reverse the momentum of the Taliban in order to hand over a stable Afghanistan to the Afghan government. If measured by the rate of insurgent activity, the surge at most dented the Taliban’s momentum.

In his final film column for the LA Times, Patrick Goldstein assesses of the current state of Hollywood:

When it comes to marketing an expensive movie, brand familiarity is the name of the game. The majority of this year's top 25 grossing films are sequels, remakes, reboots or rereleases, and films based on familiar characters from books and comics. There are some exceptions — Pixar built its brand on new ideas, and we just had a blast of irreverent comic fresh air from Seth MacFarlane's "Ted." And soon it will be Oscar season, when audiences will hopefully have a fair number of distinctive new films to choose from. But many of today's most gifted filmmakers — notably Sam Raimi, J.J. Abrams and Joss Whedon — have spent too much time working on studio plantations, putting their talents to use on sequels and reboots of familiar material.

Harry Enten sees the next two weeks as pivotal:

[T]here is no guarantee that Romney will jump into the lead following the Republican National Convention. On the other hand, even a 1-point boost for Romney nationally would bring this race to near parity. A small bounce would also suggest the electorate is not static and will shift allegiances under the right circumstances.

No shift would portend very bad news for Romney. The explanatory power of polls jumps considerably after the conventions. If Obama still leads by 1.5 points once the convention dust has settled, it's difficult for me to envisage how Obama will lose. Conventions are typically the one campaign event that can have big effect on the state of the race.

Earlier Dish on convention bounces here.

The Koch-funded dark money group, Americans For Prosperity, will air another ad in which former Obama voters give people permission to ditch the president:

The ad will air in all eleven battleground states with $6 million behind it. Dan Lothian reports that the group has some big plans for next week:

[Americans For Prosperity] plans to "essentially own the front page of YouTube" on Thursday, when Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney officially accepts the nomination in Tampa, according to Levi Russell the groups director of public affairs. The group is buying the large banner space at the top of YouTube’s main page. "We’ll be running a poll on how visitors feel about President Obama and they’ll have the ability to cycle through 3 of our most recent national TV spots," Russell said.

In other outside spending news, MoveOn.org, in typically crude fashion, raises the spectre of coat-hanger abortions in a new TV ad that "will begin running on cable nationwide and specifically on Oxygen network for a week, [and] stars actress Lisa Edelstein, best known for her role on the Fox primetime hit House":

Stepping back, Paul Steinhauser breaks down the completely different ad strategies from the two presidential campaigns:

"Chicago sees this contest as a seven-month run and Boston sees it as a three-month sprint," says Kantar Media/Campaign Media Analysis Group Vice President Elizabeth Wilner. … Obama campaign officials are very upfront about their strategy of taking to the airwaves early to get a jump on defining Romney. "From a messaging standpoint, Chicago is banking on its summertime swamping of Romney with ads about Bain Capital, outsourcing, tax returns, abortion and education, culminating in its pre-convention rollout of Bill Clinton's 30-second case for a second Obama term," says Wilner. "This wasn't just a hunch for them-it was a calculation made out of necessity given the GOP's overall ad spending advantage, which started snowballing in mid-July and is expected to get even bigger as we enter the fall."

But while pro-Romney super PACs like Restore Our Future, Crossroads, and Americans for Prosperity have blanketed the airwaves with spots critical of the president, the Romney campaign held a lot of their firepower in the early months of the general election. "Boston is betting on its use of the Olympics and GOP convention to start the rollout of Romney's biography, running mate and overall vision for America"

The campaigns only released web videos today. Team Obama has two notable ads, the first showing women-on-the-street in Ohio posing hypothetical policy questions to Romney/Ryan, and the other featuring Republican women who support the president:

Speaking of cross-party support, HRC and the Freedom To Marry campaign plan to air this TV ad starring San Diego Republican Mayor Jerry Sanders next week during the convention:

Ad War archive here.

David Brin contends that "self-righteous indignation" is a sort of "drug high":

We’ve all been in indignant snits, self-righteous furies. You go into the bathroom during one of these snits, and you look in the mirror and you have to admit, this feels great! "I am so much smarter and better than my enemies! And they are so wrong, and I am so right!" And if we were to recognize that self-righteous indignation is a bona fide drug high, and that yes, just like alcohol, some of us can engage in it on occasion — as a matter of fact, when I engage in it, I get into a real bender — but then say, "Enough." If we were to acknowledge this as a drug addiction, then it might weaken all the horrible addicts out there who have taken over politics in America, and allow especially conservatism to return to the genteel, calm, intellectual ways of Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley.

You can read Brin's talk on the subject at the National Institute for Drug and Addiction here.

A dead cow lies on parched grasslands near Eads, on the plains of eastern Colorado. Rancher Gary Wollert said it died of respiratory infection, which has affected many cattle in the area due to the wide temperature swings in this summer's heatwave and drought. While most cases have been cured with antibiotics, some have been fatal. More than half of high plains areas of eastern Colorado, Nebraska and Kansas are still in extreme or exceptional drought, despite recent lower temperatures, according to the University of Nebraska's Drought Monitor. The record-breaking drought, which has affected more than half of the continental United States, is expected to drive up food prices by 2013 due to lower crop harvests and the adverse effect on the nation's cattle industry. By John Moore/Getty Images.

Can someone explain how Romney’s birth certificate comments qualify as a “joke”? Crowd doesn’t laugh, they cheer. thkpr.gs/R7zZH6

— ThinkProgress (@thinkprogress) August 24, 2012

Sargent fumes over our latest Hewitt Award nomination:

Maybe this will get chalked up to Romney’s awkwardness and get dismissed, but it looks to me like a major mistake. Coming just after days spent debating Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” remark, this is again a reminder of the extreme voices in the GOP, which Romney has at times been slow to denounce. And it seems less than presidential, to put it mildly. 

Alyssa piles on:

That Romney thinks it’s funny to play into this mass delusion speaks either to his discomfort with humor, or a conviction that nasty pandering is the clearest road to a November victory. Either way, it reflects poorly on his character.

Weigel unspins the spin:

It’s a simple story. Romney made a joke that relies on a debunked conspiracy theory about the president — a theory especially popular with people who don’t like blacks and foreigners. Romney’s crowd cheered. He probably opened up a pre-convention worm-can that he didn’t mean to open. This, I think, is why we’re already seeing the comment spun away.