Month: March 2013

Rajiv Srinivasan claims that “our veterans today are in a far better place than they ever have been in any time in American history in terms of their healthcare and education benefits”:

There is a hawk-like manner in which our constituency — regardless of party affiliation — defends military benefits at seemingly all costs. For example, most of our pension and healthcare age targets were set in the 1950s when the life expectancy was significantly lower, as were healthcare costs. Yet to this day, military healthcare premiums haven’t risen since 1995 and a soldier who enlists at age 18 can still receive half his base pay for the rest of his life at age 38, during the prime of his working years.

My point is not necessarily that this is excessive; but simply that we can acknowledge that this country has made significant strides in veteran care where many previous generations of veterans have been forgotten. This certainly doesn’t mean the veteran social contract has been met. But rather, our societal focus must shift to areas that are often unable to be legislated—emotional stability; a sense of ownership in the community; a realization of purpose outside of the service.

Earlier Dish on veteran care here.

The link-sharing community has launched “Explain Like I’m 5”:

The series, an educational comedy, consists of three episodes based on one of Reddit’s user created forums (subreddits) of the same name, where users (Redditors) strive to answer each other’s questions on complex subjects as simply and straightforwardly as possible. “It was more inspired by the content in the thread posts than actually quoting them or using them directly,” Erik Martin, Reddit’s general manager, told The Verge in a phone interview.

Brian Merchant is a fan:

It is, I must say, rather adorable. It warmed even mine own cold, Internet-hardened heart. And it may prove to be a brilliant move for the property—Condé Nast has long prided itself for keeping its hands off the web’s most popular link dump, but it seems to have awoken to the notion there are tons of memes and whole subreddits ripe for the content-mining. Google ponied up the cash for the series (Reddit won’t say how much) and it debuted on YouTube.

They have also recorded episodes on existentialism and the volatility of the stock market.

Jessica Grose’s theory about why women still do the lion’s share of housecleaning:

I suspect that women are more driven to keep a clean house because they know they—before their male partners—will be judged for having a dirty one.

When I lived with two female roommates, I was much more of a slob. None of us was particularly responsible for the emotional tone of that apartment—no single one of us was more likely to be shunned for the state of our bathroom. But when I got married, the dust bunnies hopping across our floor started seeming like a personal affront. Although it was my husband’s father coming over, I was the one who insisted we clean. I was worried I would be judged for the beef jerky wrappers (on both aesthetic and gustatory grounds), despite the fact that my father-in-law has never once made a peep about the state of our abode. Somewhere lodged within me was the message that it was my responsibility.

Nate Cohn doubts the young Senator can win the youth vote:

Despite the big political risks, Paul’s libertarianism doesn’t offer the GOP many benefits in return. While some might interpret his strength among younger voters as a sign that the GOP could benefit from a more libertarian tone, 59 percent of young voters believe that the government “should do more.” Young voters are libertarian on cultural issues, but Paul is pro-life and against gay marriage. Even if young voters were libertarian on economic issues, the GOP’s small-government message attracts many of the same voters persuaded by economic libertarianism, without the cost of questionable ideas like ending the Fed. If Paul’s proposals for restraint abroad and marijuana at home would help Republicans, the party would be best served by attaching those proposals to a more traditional conservative, not Rand Paul.

Larison counters:

 The question isn’t whether a Republican candidate could win the Millennial vote, which seems unrealistic at this point, but whether there is someone in the party who stands a good chance of reducing the gap from 20+ points to something closer to 5 or 10. Would someone like Paul be able to reduce the gap? Maybe. Paul seems to be the only one who is interested in making the effort, and none of his possible 2016 rivals seems to have the first clue what Millennials prefer.

For Iraqis:

Tuesday marks the ten-year anniversary of the Iraq War, and while that war officially ended for the United States in December of 2011, life for Iraqi civilians — while better than it was at the bloody height of the insurgency — is still something short of peace. 4,573 Iraqi citizens were killed in 2012, up from 4,147 in 2011.

Just today:

Insurgents sent a bloody message on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion, carrying out a wave of bombings across the country Tuesday that killed at least 65 people in the deadliest day in Iraq this year. The nearly 20 attacks, most of them in and around Baghdad, demonstrated in stark terms how dangerously divided Iraq remains more than a year after American troops withdrew. More than 240 people were reported wounded. It was Iraq’s bloodiest day since Sept. 9, when an onslaught of bombings and shootings killed 92.

Iraqi police are no longer getting US training:

It was the last major non-military project of the war of choice the U.S. launched 10 years ago: an ambitious, expensive post-withdrawal effort to strengthen the Iraqi police. But quietly, the Obama administration has pulled the plug on the much-criticized training program, leaving some 400,000 Iraqi cops without U.S. mentorship.

The State Department confirms to Danger Room that it pulled its final adviser out of the project, called the Police Development Program, on March 1. The move kills the training effort less than two years after the Pentagon handed it over, and after State spent at least $700 million on it.

Nada Bokos, a CIA analyst in the lead-up to the war, recalls how, at “the CIA’s Iraq Branch in the Counterterrorism Center, we didn’t think Saddam had any substantial ties to al-Qaida”:

On Sunday, March 16, 2003, I watched Cheney on “Meet The Press” contradict our assessment publicly. “We know that he [Saddam] has a long-standing relationship with various terrorist groups,” Cheney said, “including the al-Qaeda organization.” I was basically watching Cheney field-test arguments that we would have to anticipate — and rebut — at CIA. Except instead of asking us questions behind closed doors, Cheney was asserting to the public as fact something that we found to be anything but. I found myself yelling at the TV like I was contesting a ref’s blown call in a football game.

Meanwhile, George Packer recalls reporting in Iraq and the friends he had in the country:

Spending a lot of time in Iraq did not make you more keenly aware of America’s larger strategic interests. It rendered you less likely to ask the essential questions about the inception of the war. It was in some ways a narrow, blinkered position. People who had no personal connection to Iraq, however well- or ill-informed, were readier to think that it was all inevitable—that the past decade was a footnote to the main event—that the tenth anniversary of the war would look exactly like this.