The Dish – Page 534

A “Family” Of Four

Ari Weisbard discusses living in a two-couple, one-mortgage household:

While most people take for granted that dual-parent households usually have more resources to deal with life’s challenges than single parents, why stop there? By forming a household with friends who share our values, we realized we could build an even stronger system of support than we would have in separate homes. The model is not even new; it’s an echo of raising children with the support of an extended family, but with less drama, I expect.

Many nights, when one of us stumbles home from work exhausted from a hard day, someone else has already done the shopping and cooked a great homemade dinner. When a pipe burst this February, we all took turns bailing out the basement. Once the baby arrives, we look forward to being crucial reinforcements for each other during those first several nearly sleepless months and trading off so each couple can have date nights.

Living together with another couple also has made it easier to identify and counteract some of the sexist patterns that emerge in many households. Because we discuss chores as a group and work consciously together to establish our household norms and individual responsibilities, there’s less opportunity for traditional gender roles to establish themselves surreptitiously. …

Living together seems to be a great financial move so far. With four adults splitting the mortgage and other costs, it is easier for each of us to save more of our income, which will give us the financial freedom to pay for childcare or reduce our work hours later, when we need more time and money for our families. We can also more easily afford investments in the house itself, like installing solar panels or weather proofing the attic, which will reduce our carbon footprint and save us more money in the long run.

Beard Of The Week, Ctd

The Dish’s daddy beard from April follows up:

I thought you might enjoy our progress. Thanks!

Damn.

Previous BOTWs here.

Dissents Of The Day

Many readers are upset over this post and our Gaza coverage in general:

Over the last few days I noticed you keep saying Netanyahu called for revenge. I assume that is based on this NYT editorial. I refer you to this rebuttal in TNR. If you have any other sources for that claim, could you please post them? I would also like to note that you have repeatedly stated as fact that the Israeli authorities knew the teenagers were dead, but that’s pure speculation. All they could know for sure is that they were shot. You also state as fact that the kidnappers weren’t Hamas, which is again speculation (not to mention that Hamas both encouraged kidnapping beforehand and approved of this one, publicly).

I’ve been reading your blog for years and generally enjoy it, but I have to say you seem quite emotional when talking about Israel. Now I have to go take a shower because you made me defend Bibi.

No, I’m not. I’m referring to Netanyahu’s out-of-context quote from Israel’s national poet, Haim Nahman Bialik, in the wake of the discovery of the bodies of the three Israeli teens:

The passage he chose came from a poem that Bialik penned shortly after the 1903 Kishinev pogrom, in which dozens of Jews were murdered in what today is Moldova. The line Netanyahu quoted — “Such vengeance for blood of babe and maiden hath yet to be wrought by Satan…” — is often interpreted today as promoting or heralding a fierce revenge for murder.”

The full poem undermines that feeling – but Netanyahu quoted only the inflammatory phrase. Another reader:

I’m starting to worry about you when I read things like this:

But what alternative do they have exactly, if they [Hamas] wish to have any military capacity at all? Should they build clearly demarcated camps and barracks and munitions stores, where the IDF could just destroy them at will?

Seriously? Let’s back up a step. Why should Hamas have a military capacity and for what purpose? If they were responsibly governing their territory, they would have a military set up for defense of their borders and their people. Quiet would be met with quiet, and the IDF would have no cause to attack Gaza. That’s not what’s happening. Hamas takes every opportunity to smuggle in explosives, weapons, and rockets with the sole intent of attacking Israeli soldiers and civilians. I’m no lawyer, so I can’t say whether Hamas’ attacks from civilian areas and it’s situating of military facilities around and under civilian buildings is a war crime, but it shows a shocking indifference to the welfare of the people it claims to represent.

I’m just arguing that, given Israel’s designation of the whole area as a terror state, no military capacity, defensive or offensive, would be permitted by Israel and so concealment in urban areas makes a horrible kind of sense. I don’t defend it, with its awful consequences for civilians. But I can see why it’s there – and it’s too crude to say it’s there solely to get civilian casualties to put international pressure on Israel. That may be part of a horrifyingly cynical calculus, but it isn’t all of it. Another reader:

I am not a fan of Bibi, and I know that you don’t much like his government, as your current coverage of the conflict with Hamas clearly indicates. But you fail to cover some news items from the area that you willfully ignore.

Since the war with Gaza began – and that’s what it is, a war – Israel has permitted humanitarian aid to cross the border from Israel to Gaza. This includes medical supplies (including blood products), food, and fuel. Israel WARNS Gazans to get out of harm’s way before they strike. They have called off air strikes because of the apparent presence of non-combatants. You don’t mention any of this that I can see. Who ever heard of such a thing?! Can you imagine any other nation doing this?! Does the US drop leaflets on Afghanistan or Pakistan before going after Taliban fighters with drones? I doubt they ever even considered it.

Is it tragic that civilians are dying in Gaza? Of course. I may be naive, but I truly believe that if Hamas stopped firing rockets, Israel would stop the bombing raids. Why is it that in your eyes only Israel is not permitted to defend itself?! When I was in Israel last month, before the boys were kidnapped, rockets were falling on Southern Israel and Israel did nothing. I met some folks from Nitzan, a community in Southern Israel, who said that the rockets were landing almost daily, just south of their town and that they were very ticked at the government for doing nothing about it.

These folks were not your “Greater Israel” types. They just want to live in peace. But having rockets rain down on your neighborhood is unacceptable. I wouldn’t accept it and neither would you.

Unfiltered feedback from readers on our Facebook page.

The View From Your Window Contest: Winner #213

A reader writes:

You need wrong entries to start things off, right? So here’s one. But it does remind me of San Antonio de Escazu, Costa Rica, which probably means it’s time to go back.

Another thinks we’re timing the view again:

Totally stumped! But it’s GOTTA be either Rio or Buenos Aires because it’s the World Cup Finals weekend … no way it’s Germany! I gave up when I saw that Rio is too lush for the pic and Buenos Aries is too flat!

Another goes birding:

Seems to me those are Griffon vultures. And the topography looks like Spain, which is where most of the Griffon vultures live. After that, it’s time for darts and/or educated guesses. As this is the week that the St. Fermin Festival ends, I am going to say that the person who sent it in was in Pamplona and is now up in the Aragon hills (or could be farther up in the Pyrenees). So, let’s say a hill town outside of Huesca.

Here, by the way, is an Algerian bank note with Griffon vultures (some Spaniards getting eaten alive in the post-bubble housing market might think putting vultures on the money itself is overkill):

Another pings Africa:

Cape Town, South Africa. Between Atlantic and Table Mountain. I’m guessing the Clifton/Camps Bay Area.

Another:

Milwaukee … because that is clearly a keg on the roof of that house in the foreground.

Back to that “keg” in a little bit. Another gets the right country:

This is a wild guess and probably not even close, but it seems like Greece to me. No way to prove that, however.

Another helps out with proof by nailing the correct town:

Based on the rooftops, vegetation and topography, this looks like Greece, and that looks like the Panthessaliko arena way off in the distance. That would imply that this picture was taken from somewhere near Portaria, Greece, although the limited time I had for a rooftop search to match the details of the picture came up blank. So close, alas …

Another correct guesser:

Looking across to Makrinitsa, and the distant plains of Thessaly. Land of the centaurs, by the way …

Chini notes:

The hardest part of these Mediterranean views is distinguishing between the architecture of the countries. This week, for example, I’m guessing the heat map is gonna have quite a few entries from Spain as well as Greece. And if you were one of the unfortunate readers who did get bogged down in Spain, well, it was probably a pretty long weekend.

Yep, readers definitely put Spain (and Italy and California) on the map this week:

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And here’s a delicious pie chart:

Another reader nails the hotel and highlights what was, for most contestants, the essential clue to solving this week’s view:

This sure seemed like a Mediterranean hill town, and the birds meant it probably wasn’t too far from the sea. The rooftop solar installation has a “Sigma” logo on the side, and a little googling showed that belongs to a company that operates out of Volos, Greece. The last clue that cinched it was the grey slate that makes up many of the roof tiles and the chimneys in the photo. I had a hard time finding anything quite like it, but finally found some close matches in the area of Mt. Pelion, unsurprisingly very near Volos.

A little more sleuthing showed that this week’s view was taken from the Hotel Karavos, Hajakou 15, Portaria 37011, Greece. I’m pretty sure it was taken from the center window on the 1st floor of the West side of the hotel. And now I *really* want to go to Greece. The views of the sea from Portaria are just stunning.

Our favorite GIF-making player nails the correct window:

There’s a Sigma solar hot water heater on the building’s roof across the road. Sigma is headquartered in Volos. I then matched up the visible soccer stadium, rock quarry (?), and forest on the mountainside in Google satellite images, then pinpointed Portaria. The window was harder. (Fun fact: the room is named after a flower. Which one, however, I do not know … )

Check out how methodically this reader zeroed in:

An image search on Sigma Solar eventually got me too a rendering of a Sigma labeled cylinder above a solar panel, crucially with a red “a” in the name. This Sigma was located out of Greece, which seemed to fit the geography of the picture better, so there I went. This Sigma was headquartered out of Volos, but that area seemed to close to the coast, so I moved on, looking again at soccer stadiums. I was looking for a decent-sized stadium, perhaps ringed by arches. When I got to Panthessalakio Stadium, I didn’t find arches, but it was ringed by a concrete frame with many openings, and it was located in Volos, so I began to think maybe this was it. Zooming in on Google Maps, I saw mountainous terrain, and a stadium on the edge of town with a major road turning to the left just past the stadium, and a view that wouldn’t include the surrounding coast. I knew I had the background, but how to isolate to a specific building?

The view seemed almost exactly perpendicular to the long facade of the stadium, so I headed due east. Surprisingly, many of the neighborhoods were predominated by either red or white roofs, but very few had a good mix of the two colors. Once I got to what I now know is Portaria, I began to see the right mix. I couple swoops into street view made me think this was generally the right area, so I went back to the satellite view, looking for a white building with chimneys near a red roof with a solar panel. I was pleasantly surprised to find not just a solar panel, but one with a highly reflective object and thick white cabling running to the side, next to a white roof that looked the part.

Street view quickly confirmed the white house was the foreground of my picture (Streetview voyeurism tells me that the solar panel was installed on the red roofed building sometime after July 2011).

Continuing in street view, the building on the opposite side of the street had four rooms with balconies with brown railings, one of which clearly had to be the source of the shot. Based on angles, the street lamp, wires, and other signs in street view, I felt pretty confident that it was one of the lower two balconies on the third floor, but which one? Given the excellence of other contest-goers, I clearly needed to step up my game to get the correct window. Going further down the street, I could see a sign on the building for Hotel Karavos. I started to look at pictures on various hotel review sites, and eventually came across a picture that I think almost definitely came from the same balcony, albeit from farther back and on a slightly different angle:

The extra view of the balcony itself showed that balcony itself went slightly further to the left (looking out) than the railing itself. Street view shows that one balcony ended flush with a divider, so it had to be the balcony on the right (facing the hotel).

This was a really fun one, thanks.

Bravo. Meanwhile, a previous winner gets her collage on:

I began by trying to identify the soaring flock of birds, but they appear to be a common and widespread European swift. Next I focused on the stadium that is vaguely visible on the flats at the base of hills (soccer weekend). That was not productive. I then searched for worked-stone roof tiles like those in the view and quit quickly found similar examples in villages clustered on the steep ridges above Volos, Greece. The Volos Olympic Stadium on the flats helped confirm I was in the right place. Searches of hotels eventually located views similar to that of the contest and Hotel Karavos.

The photograph was taken from one of the four balconies on the west face of the hotel. My uncertain guess is the lower and southern-most one. The steep slopes made judging window heights even more difficult than usual. This balcony seemed the most likely to include a number of clues. The balcony view had to include the top of a utility post visible in the lower right of the contest view, the tip of a neighboring roof corner on the right of the photograph midway, and the center post of the balcony railing that is left of center in the view. The most convincing clue was comparing a similar view taken from the only upper window on the western face with shutters which is located south of the balconies. The view from the shutter window appears close to that of the contest view but slightly higher. This would be consistent with the shutter window’s location in relation to the lower balcony (or more so than an upper balcony).

Now I want to know how the stone roof tiles are made and perhaps reused.

Here’s the Dish own collage of your best entries:

One of those readers adds:

Of interest to me is that Volos is the home of the mythical hero Jason (of Argonauts and Golden Fleece fame) but also of real-life composer musician Vangelis whose work on film scores such as Chariots of Fire and Blade Runner is well known.

This week’s winner is an 11-contest veteran from our vaunted list of previous guessers of difficult contests:

The most obvious landmark, the stadium way off in the background, wasn’t familiar, so searching for that right away wasn’t too helpful. Googling around for “sigma solar water heater” and doing some quick logo vetting narrowed it down to Greece rather than California or Spain. “Stadium Greece” was a fairly unhelpful Google Image search for the first few pages due to the prevalence of pictures of the Panathenaic Stadium, until I just happened upon the right one — in Volos, which is also the home of Sigma.

The mountains looked right, so I figured out roughly where it was on the map and zoomed in on anything looking like a square or large intersection (visible on the right edge of the image, 1/3 of the way up). On the second try, I found the building with the teapot sign (a tea shop), and from there it was a simple matter of turning around in Street View and looking up.

It’s Hotel Karavos, in Portaria, about 12km from Volos (39.389338,23.00066, for the picky). Due to the pole in the bottom right corner of the image, I’m guessing it’s… I don’t even know how you’d number the floors. Window is circled:

From the view’s submitter:

The picture was taken from the window of Room 202 of Hotel Karavos, in the mountain village of Portaria, Greece. This is one of the little towns on the western side of Mt. Pelion, looking down to the city of Volos, part of which can be seen in the distance on the left of the contest picture.

The whole region is very beautiful, with quaint villages on the mountain slopes and beautiful beaches just a short drive away on either side of the peninsula. My wife and I spent there three days exploring the area together with two friends of ours, a couple who got married this Saturday – the same day the photo appeared in the contest!

I’ve also attached another picture with a wider panorama of Volos, taken from the town of Makrinitsa, very close to Portaria:

(Archive: Text|Gallery)

The View From Your Obamacare, Ctd

A reader revives the thread with a new perspective:

For three days straight, a crew of two men has performed significant physical labor around our residence – drilling through brick and mortar, removing debris, and so much more. The toll on these guys’ bodies is beyond comprehension to a sedentary writer-type, who obsessively exercises to keep limber and burn calories and maintain a semblance of muscle tone.

For three days, one of the men complained regularly about his back pain. (Which certainly wouldn’t have been helped by carrying away our cast iron wood stove, lifting it onto the truck, off-loading it at the shop.) With a groan, he sat down to write up the final invoice. By now fully aware of his problem, I murmured sympathetically. He replied, “I had an MRI done a couple of years ago. It’s a disk. I need surgery.” I cranked up the sympathy. “I can’t afford it,” he continued matter-of-factly, “on my income. Not until I get my health insurance.”

I very nearly said something like, “Isn’t it great that it’s actually possible through the Affordable Care Act?” and was tempted to explain that next enrollment period comes up later this year.

I’m fairly well informed on the process; my husband’s workplace arranged for him to become a certified ACA advisor. All winter long he came home from the office with heart-warming news of how real, uninsured people were at least accessing what was previously unobtainable.

But, stifled solely by the crewman’s demographic characteristics, I said not a word. I could just tell this was not a fellow who would look favorably on Obamacare. And I didn’t want to introduce controversy or politics into what had been a pleasant temporary relationship.

Shortly before leaving, he spotted the framed photograph of me standing with President Obama, taken when he was a little-known candidate roaming through my First-in-the-Nation primary state. And his recognition prompted a rude comment that made me wish he’d had been as reticent about the president as I had been about the ACA.

When he and his cohort departed, I started to cry. Our entire exchange represented everything most depressing about perceptions of Obama and the intent of the law he – and the Congress, even if only a portion of it – brought into being. For the good of people like the man who needs back surgery to continue in his job, but can’t afford it. And who, until recently, wouldn’t have had a hope of getting insured.

Most of the time I do Know Hope. I’m hard-wired that way. But today there’s a terrible disconnect in my optimism.

Update from a reader:

Allow me to bring your reader’s experience with a temporary worker in her home a bit closer to home. As a small business owner with a long-standing (since age 17) preexisting condition who has had to buy my own insurance, the ACA has been a godsend. We went from our premium costing nearly $2,000 a month for our family of four to $1,100/month with much better coverage. And now I’m about to enter a job transition where I might not have an income for a few months. The ACA has made that much easier. A major health crisis would be horrible obviously, but one happening if I didn’t have insurance, it’d be financially devastating. I now can know we are covered and can afford to be even in job transitions.

But my sister doesn’t see this. She complains constantly about Obama and the ACA – complaints that more often than not have no basis in fact. She works several part-time jobs and her income, just above minimum wage, is volatile. She refuses to even look for an insurance plan on our state’s very good exchange. I am fairly certain she would find one, with subsidies, that would cost her under $100/month for silver plan coverage, barely $30 for bronze, coverage that could make her life healthier and more financially secure. She has several pre-existing conditions herself and current health issues she really should take care of now.

And it breaks my heart she refuses to do so out of some misplaced anger based on “Fox News” lies. The Fox News Republicans have done a great disservice to this nation in so many ways.

(Photo by Yoon S. Byun/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

A Short-Lived Ceasefire

Hamas has fired 47 rockets since we suspended our strikes in Gaza at 9 am. As a result, we have resumed our operation against Hamas.

— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) July 15, 2014

A ceasefire in the Gaza war, proposed by Egypt, failed to take hold this morning after Hamas rejected it:

Israel’s security cabinet agreed to the terms of the deal after meeting early on Tuesday. … Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas also welcomed the terms Egypt had set forward. However, Hamas, which recently formed a temporary unity government with its rivals in Abbas’ more moderate Fatah political party, said that it wasn’t consulted in the drawing up of the terms of the ceasefire. In a statement on the website of its armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, Hamas said the Egyptian initiative was one of “bowing and submission” and “was not worth the ink it was written with.” With that statement lodged, rockets continued to fire from Gaza into Israel.

Hayes Brown interprets this development:

The rejection of the deal places a new burden on Hamas to maintain public support among Palestinians for its actions. Hamas’ approval ratings have jumped wildly since it first came to power in 2006, with an April poll from the Arab World for Research and Development showing that only 20 percent of Palestinians hold a positive view of the group’s governance efforts. In the face of international condemnation for rejecting a possible ceasefire, and the Israeli government sure to capitalize on its own willingness to hold fire, Hamas will have even further to go to reach what it sees as an acceptable outcome for an escalation it arguably didn’t want at this moment.

But Avi Issacharoff insinuates that the ceasefire was meant to be rejected:

Soon after the Egyptian proposal was published, one Hamas spokesman, Fawzi Barhoum, announced “there will be no truce unless the demands of the military wing, and of the Palestinian people, are met.” Did that represent Hamas’s rejection of the proposal? That’s not clear — and won’t be until the spokesmen of the military wing, who are leading this conflict with Israel, have stated their position. But sources in the Strip told this reporter late Monday that the military wing has decided not even to discuss the Egyptian proposal. These sources said that Hamas is fuming over the process by which the Egyptian terms were brought to its attention — via the media.

Indeed, the leaking of the proposal to the Egyptian media, the fact that it ignores Hamas’s demands, and the further fact that it includes a nod to Israel via its similarities to the 2012 terms, must seem suspicious indeed to Hamas. Could it be that Jerusalem and Cairo hatched this move together, in order to corner Hamas?

And Mya Guarnieri stresses that a ceasefire means something very different for Israelis and for Gazans:

Israel is willing to return to the status quo, a status quo that serves Israeli interests. Sure there is occasional rocket fire from Gaza but Israel has the Iron Dome and, in the sparsely populated south of the country, the rockets usually fall in open spaces. The occasional rocket from Gaza actually helps Israeli hawks strengthen their case for continuing the “occupation” of the West Bank (an “occupation” that, in the wake of Netanyahu’s recent remarks, should be understood as a de facto annexation). The Israeli right points to the rockets from Gaza and says, “Look, we withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and all we got is rocket fire!”

Returning to the status quo also means that Israel strikes Gaza from time to time and kills Palestinian civilians there and in the West Bank without garnering much scrutiny from the international media and, by extension, the international community. Returning to the status quo would also mean an end to the immediate damage to Israel’s image caused by the horrific photos and footage coming out of Gaza, and global protests against what Israel calls “Operation Protective Edge.”

An outraged Ali Abunimah argues that as long as Israel maintains its crippling siege on the strip, it is Israel, not Hamas, that is rejecting an end to the violence:

Already, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that “If Hamas rejects the ceasefire, we will have international legitimization to restore the needed quiet.” That is a euphemism to kill more people, on top of the almost 200 Israel has already killed, the vast majority of whom civilians, including dozens of children. This systematic targeting of civilians and civilian objects, in intense bombardments of Gaza has continued since 7 July. Media are likely to follow the Israeli spin instead of asking Israel why it is maintaining the collective punishment of 1.8 million Palestinians in Gaza and why it constantly violates ceasefire agreements. But the fact remains: it is Israel that has rejected reasonable ceasefire conditions that have always been on the table.

But whether or not the Israeli spin is justifiable, it will probably work. Mkhaimar Abusada expects Hamas to do a deal eventually, if only to save face:

“Hamas feels that that if it agrees to this, it hasn’t achieved anything more that it achieved in 2012. They feel they’ve done much better in this round of fighting…and so we should get a much better deal in order to end the fighting,” says Abusada, who studies the Islamic movement. At the same time, he notes, the price that Hamas will pay for continuing to refuse a cease-fire is high: It will annoy the Egyptians, lose points with war-weary Gazans, and could eat away at the international sympathy that has built up for Gaza amid the horrifying footage of a death and destruction. “Hamas has not made its final decision, and is engaging in its own internal dialogue now,” Abusada adds. “My hunch is that Hamas is going to accept the cease-fire, eventually, because to say no to the Egyptians will cost them too much.”

The Perry-Paul Debates

Picking up on the ongoing foreign policy feud between Rand Paul and Rick Perry, which the Dish alluded to yesterday, Larison excoriates Perry:

Perry’s argument is the usual hawkish combination of threat inflation, fear-mongering, lazy references to “isolationism,” and stale Reagan nostalgia. He talks about a “profound” threat to the U.S. and the entire world from a jihadist group when it is no such thing, and hopes that his readers will be so alarmed by this that they won’t pay attention to how shoddy his argument is. Perry is engaging in the same behavior that the former head of MI6 recently criticized: he is helping to give groups like the Islamic State the attention they crave, and he is grossly exaggerating the danger they pose to the U.S. and its allies. The governor’s analysis relies on blurring the differences between competing jihadist groups and their goals to frighten the public into assuming that any similar group that emerges represents a major security threat to the U.S.

Paul, on the other hand, could radically change the GOP’s foreign policy thinking, or so Cillizza believes:

What Paul is proposing is that he is the Republican candidate willing (and able) to handle the party’s long-delayed reckoning with the war in Iraq.

That conflict, premised on the false idea that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, has never been fully litigated within the GOP. … The back-and-forth op-eds between Paul and Perry make clear that the debate about Iraq, the mistakes made there and what it means for Republican foreign policy going forward will be a prominent feature of the 2016 Republican primary race. And, there is reason to believe that Paul’s position on Iraq is one shared by a relatively large number of Republicans. In a June New York Times/CBS News poll, 63 percent of self-identified Republicans said that the war in Iraq was not worth it.

But Kilgore expects the “isolationist” label to sink Paul in the end:

Paul’s gotten pretty good at turning what would seem to be “isolationist” positions into emblems of truculence, viz. his makeover of a long-time proposal to cut off assistance to the Palestinian Authority into a “Stand With Israel” posture. But for eons Republicans have ultimately measured their presidential candidates’ acceptability on foreign policy and national security in terms of their willingness either to kill foreigners or spend more money, if not both. No matter how much he dresses up his old man’s non-interventionism in camo patterns and how loudly he plays martial music, so long as Rand Paul opposes every opportunity to kill foreigners while calling for lower defense spending, the “isolationist” label will be a problem for him, as the ghosts of both the Cold War and the War On Terror haunt him. I suspect opponents more skillful than Rick Perry will at some point make that plain.

Noting that both of the dueling op-eds referenced Reagan extensively, Beinart asks, “So what would a Reaganite strategy against ‘radical Islam’ look like?”:

Based on Reagan’s record, particularly in his first term, it would be expensive, indiscriminate, rhetorically aggressive, hostile to congressional oversight, and cautious about deploying U.S. troops. It would, in other words, be a mess. Reagan was lucky enough to take office after Richard Nixon had exploited the Sino-Soviet rift and stopped treating communism as a unified menace. Even so, Reagan turned nearly every third-world civil war into a showdown between East and West, dramatically escalating the brutality of these conflicts even though struggles in places like Angola and Nicaragua were ultimately irrelevant to the course of the Cold War.

In today’s Middle East, by contrast, the U.S. has not yet found its Nixon. Neither the Bush nor Obama administration has developed a strategy for exploiting the widening Sunni-Shiite divide, and hawks like Perry talk about “Islamic extremism” like pre-Nixon hawks talked about communism: as a unified threat. In this context, Reagan’s strategy of indiscriminate pressure against communism across the globe offers no guide at all. What would it mean in Iraq—the topic of Paul and Perry’s columns—where an Islamist, pro-Iranian Shiite regime is battling Sunni salafists?

The Impeachment Minority

About one third of Americans want to impeach Obama, which is “similar to attitudes towards the potential impeachment of President Bush in 2007”:

In 2007, 36% of Americans said that Bush had not abused his powers, while 39% say that same about Obama. Similarly, 32% say that Obama should be impeached and removed from office, while 34% said the same about Bush in 2007.

Perhaps predictably, these attitudes towards the impeachment of Bush and Obama differ significantly according to partisan affiliation. Most Democrats (54%) supported impeaching Bush in 2007, while 68% of Republicans today think that it would be justified to impeach Obama. Overall, 35% of Americans say that impeaching Obama would be justified, while 36% said the same in a 2007 USA Today/Gallup poll.

Allahpundit puts the poll in context:

See now why there’s so little appetite among pols, including and especially among Republican candidates for Senate, to back Palin up? Even among Republican voters, 36 percent oppose impeachment. How do you build political momentum for removing him when you’re starting in a hole that deep? The silver lining is that a near-majority of the public does think Obama’s exceeded the limits of his authority as president, 49/34, including an eye-popping split among indies of 52/25.

The Lives Saved By Tobacco Control

Kenneth Warner tallies them. He defines tobacco control as “all of the efforts of the private, voluntary, and public sectors to reduce the toll of smoking: trying to prevent kids from starting to smoke, helping smokers to quit, avoiding exposure to second-hand smoke, all of that combined”:

This January, some colleagues and I published a paper in JAMA that estimated the cumulative health effects of tobacco control. We found that between 1964 and 2012, eight million premature deaths were avoided as a result of tobacco control. We did not include second-hand smoke deaths, nor the years 2013 and 2014, so probably the best figure today would be about 10 million premature deaths avoided.

Tobacco control, broadly construed, accounts for fully 30 percent of the gain in adult life expectancy since 1964. Nothing—no medical intervention or any other public health development – has contributed anything close to that.

The Future Mega-Cities

You’ll find them in the developing world, according to a new UN report:

[B]y 2030, New York, Osaka, and Sao Paulo will no longer make the top 10, and Mexico City will barely hang on as the sole representative outside of Asia and Africa. This reflects the major shift driven by the urbanization in Asia and Africa, particularly in India (404 million projected new city dwellers by 2030), China (292 million), and Nigeria (212 million).

Reid Standish provides more details and the above GIF:

North America, Latin America, and Europe will remain the world’s most heavily urbanized regions but Africa and Asia will catch up in the decades beyond 2030. Africa and Asia are home to 90 percent of the world’s rural population. However, as more people urbanize, that figure will shrink dramatically. By 2050, 56 percent of Africans and 64 percent of Asians will live in cities. Asia will account for the largest growth in the sheer number of city dwellers, but Africa will urbanize at a faster rate.

In total, urbanization in Africa and Asia will add 2.5 billion people to the world’s cities.