Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 1123

Senate Democrats Release Vague Budget in Hopes You'll Forget About Paul Ryan

And now, the Senate Democrats' budget proposal — as revealed earlier today — in charts. It is … less detailed than the 91-page Republican House budget announced by Paul Ryan this morning, mostly because it's only intended to steal Ryan's thunder.

Sam Stein at the Huffington Post explains what Senate Budget Committee Chair Patty Murray outlined:

Her proposal calls for $975 billion in additional revenues through closing loopholes and ending tax expenditures. … [I]t calls for the continuation of current tax rates for middle and lower class Americans but does not specify whether current rates should be protected for high-end earners. …

On the spending side, Murray's budget looks for $493 billion in domestic cuts, $275 billion of which will come from health care savings. The aide said that those health care savings, which will also be determined by the Finance Committee, would be felt solely on the provider side and not among beneficiaries. Additionally, the budget calls for $240 billion in defense spending cuts and $242 billion in reduced interest payments.

So the breakdown of tax increases versus spending reductions looks like this.

The combination yields $1.95 trillion in deficit reduction, but Murray's plan also calls for $100 billion in new stimulus spending, bringing the total reduction to $1.85 trillion.

Breaking out the cuts by area:

It's worth noting that the largest piece of that pie, healthcare costs reductions, will be figured out later, apparently.

And, inspired by the Washington Post, here's a comparison of the Democratic and Republican plans.

This is what is known as politics as an attempt to "step on" your opponent's news cycle. Murray almost certainly released this data — incomplete, unspecific, apparently as part of an internally circulated 3-page memo — in the hopes that it would redirect a little of the media attention Paul Ryan is getting for his plan in another direction. Well, it worked; we're looking.

But, Sen. Murray — are you sure this is what you wanted us to see?

What's in a Pope's New Name?

There was no new pope today, but with the conclave underway there should be one soon—around Thursday, if the history of the vote is any indication. But what will his name be? All current names of possible frontrunners aside, The Economist looked back at the history of papal names bestowed upon the cardinals' selections. As you can see, "John" is the all-time favorite at the Vatican, though Benedict, the name of the the last pope, is also pretty popular. The rightmost side of the chart also gives the "implied probability"—via all those betting odds. Sergius is really not looking good, is what we're saying:

What's Wrong With Taylor Swift's Image?

Poor Taylor Swift may never want to be on the cover of another magazine again. Her Vanity Fair cover story pitted her against the Amy Poehler and Tina Fey loving Internet (which is basically all of us?) when she (kind of?) took a dig at the two comedians, who made a joke at her expense at the Golden Globes. Now it looks like magazines with her face on their covers don't actually sell that well. Why is that? 

Erik Maza reports for Women's Wear Daily that Swift, who has been ubiquitous on newsstands over the past year, does not have the sales numbers to necessarily justify her presence. A tweet from him puts it bleakly: 

More popular than Taylor Swift at newsstand: Zooey Deschanel, Posh Spice, MTV has-been, '50 Shades of Gray' sex tips wwd.us/Xompcr

— erik maza (@erik_maza) March 12, 2013

In most cases Swift didn't do terribly, she just also didn't drive magazine buyers wild. For instance: Her February 2012 Vogue cover sold 329,371 copies including digital sales—which was "a little above the six-month average that ended in June 2012" but far below Lady Gaga, who was the top seller that year (albeit on the monster September issue). In a more embarrassing case, Swift's November Glamour cover, which Maza said did "OK," fell behind Lauren Conrad's and Victoria Beckham's in the year. 

When it comes to Cosmopolitan, though, Swift was just a non-starter. Maza writes: "Swift flopped, with the issue the weakest in a year that underperformed overall — she sold a little over a million copies, or 20 percent below the six-month average that ended in December 2012." Zooey Deschanel, an actress who still has more indie than mainstream cred, did better than Swift in Cosmo sales — and Cosmo, one of the most successful magazines on the planet, caters to younger audiences. So what's wrong with Swift? One or two or all three of these things, perhaps:

Theory No. 1: Taylor Swift is overexposed.

Maza says "singers do well at the newsstand, just perhaps not those who have been overexposed." Even though Swift's album was one of the best sellers of  2012, there might be such a thing as too much Taylor. Perhaps the magazine-buying public feels they've learned enough about the "stuff she only tells her girlfriends," especially since even in interviews billed as revealing, she remains cagey. 

Theory No. 2: Taylor Swift is not sexy enough.

Is she just too innocent for Cosmo readers, who are used to blaring headlines about sex rather than veiled metaphors? Scarlett Johansson, a starlet who banks on sex appeal, was the top seller for Cosmo's year, followed by Twilight's Ashley Greene. While the Twilight connection might have propelled Greene into that spot, the Greene cover also featured a cover line about Fifty Shades of Grey. Swift's just said "LATE NIGHT SEX." 

Theory No. 3: Taylor Swift's relationships are hurting her marketability.

Sure, they make for sweet pop songs. But Glamour editor Cindi Leive attributes Swift's failures at the magazine stand perhaps to her failures in love: "There may have been a little hiccup for her right around the 1-D relationship." Maza points out that "1-D" refers to One Direction and thereby refers to Harry Styles. Do magazine buyers actually react to Swift's covers based on the guy she's dating? The girl can't catch a break. That said, Leive believes she'll bounce back. Doesn't she always? 

Meet George P. Bush, the Latest Bush to Run for Office

George Prescott Bush — the 36-year-old son of former Florida governor and current book peddler Jeb Bush, and thus nephew of former President George W. Bush — announced his run for Texas land commissioner on Tuesday afternoon, making him the latest (and youngest) Bush to set his eyes on political office. The announcement is not exactly a surprise: it follows recent reports that "P." (as the nickname goes) was considering a run for the state-level office, which is up for a vote in 2014, plus Bush comes from a deeply political family. He's clearly prepared himself for the role, too: an attorney by trade, George P. Bush currently manages a Fort Worth, Texas investment firm and sits on the board of a conservative political action committee. That said, it's still too far out to determine whether Bush stands a chance of victory.

Then again, this isn't all about "P." himself. It's also about his family. By running for land commissioner, Bush is drawing attention to himself at the exact moment that his father, Jeb, is trying to alter the policy positions of the GOP. Of course, zoning and other land policies administered by Texas's land commissioner don't come close to igniting the same passionate debate that immigration reform does. (Jeb Bush would know.) But it's not unthinkable that George P. would be tasked with answering for his father's plans to remake the GOP's stance on immigration, in the same way Jeb Bush has been forced to address — however unfairly — the legacy of his brother's presidency. With George P., the weight of his father's career could be even stronger, since his mother, Columba Bush, was born and grew up in Mexico, whose migrant population the GOP is struggling to address. 

Admittedly, that's still a far way out. But George P., being a Bush, isn't just running for office; he's laying the groundwork for a career in politics. Even Uncle Dubya's failed run for Congress at age 32 presaged a move to Washington, D.C., where he helped with his father's campaign for the White House before returning home to Texas... to run the Texas Rangers — and then run for governor. And "P." seems to have learned from W.'s mistake — he's setting his sights lower than W. did for his first run, even if land goes a long way in Texas. Now seems the time for "P." to understand where he stands not just within his party, but within his family, and on the issues his father continues to wrestle with.

The Hypocrisy of Schmooze

President Obama's biggest problem used to be that he wasn't schmoozing with Congress. His biggest problem now is that he's schmoozing with Congress. Obama met with Senate Democrats on Capitol Hill Tuesday; he'll return to meet with House Republicans and Democrats Wednesday, after lunching with Paul Ryan and supping with a dozen Republican senators last week. What a dummy! Some drinks and dinners won't overcome a decades-long ideological battle over the size and role of government! Who gave him such terrible advice? The very same reporters who were demanding he get snacks with senators in the first place, obviously.

Obama is discovering that "Charm has its limits," The Washington Post's Dana Milbank writes Tuesday. After White House press secretary Jay Carney was snippy to reporters, Milbank explains, "It was a caution to those swept away by the notion that an entirely new and amiable Obama White House has suddenly emerged: Charm is hard." And White House aides are being nicer to Republicans and reporters, but there's only so much that can do, Milbank continues:

The charm offensive — both toward lawmakers and reporters — is a welcome development. Republicans who have been the targets of Obama’s attention report sincerity and warm feelings.

But the meals and the House (and Senate) calls don’t necessarily mean things will change in the capital.

Yet not so long ago it was Milbank who suggested some schmoozing could do a lot to fix things. In a February 19 column, Milbank wrote that Obama was too busy scolding Congress to make a deal, that he hadn't even talked to deficit-cutting-plan heroes Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson in a year and a half. In a January 14 column, actually, Milbank said the talk of the town was that Obama wasn't schmoozing enough. A press conference in which Obama attacked Republicans' refusal to raise taxes was "a reminder of why Obama isn't noted for his interpersonal warmth — a topic Jackie Calmes of the New York Times asked him to address when she mentioned the criticism that he and his staff are insular and that he doesn’t socialize," Milbank said. "It's tempting to wonder whether Obama could achieve more if he could establish personal connections with Republicans on Capitol Hill." Milbank noted Obama addressed that very question in his press conference:

“I like a good party,” the president informed her after attesting to his “friendly guy” status. “Really what’s gone on in terms of some of the paralysis here in Washington, or difficulties in negotiations, just have to do with some very stark differences in terms of policy.”

That may be true, but until recent years, sharp disagreements were smoothed by personal ties.

You know who else now thinks schmoozing has its limits? The New York Times' Jackie Calmes, the reporter who asked Obama if he wasn't schmoozing enough. "In President's Outreach to G.O.P., Past Failures Loom" is the headline Tuesday, in which Calmes reports that just after the election, Obama invited five Republicans to the White House for a screening of Lincoln. All five Republicans turned him down — even though other guests included director Steve Spielberg, screenwriter Tony Kushner, and actors Daniel Day-Lewis, Tommy Lee Jones, Sally Field, and James Spader. They couldn't even come to the White House to meet some uncontroversial Hollywood people. This is what the White House expected. An anonymous White House aide said of the schmoozing to National Journal's Ron Fournier, "I hope you all (in the media) are happy because we're doing it for you." And they're not even happy Obama took the advice.

Milbank says that "until recent years," schmoozing helped fix the big divides in Congress. Many people make this claim. The reason the date is vague is because they're unable to pinpoint a moment when opposing parties were actually nice to each other. Was it the Clinton impeachment? Iran-Contra? Watergate? Let's go back to a quaint-sounding year: 1937. There was turmoil in Europe. We were in the Great Depression. Sounds like a good time for congressional comity, right? Yet when you search the Associated Press photo archives for "filibuster," one of the oldest results is the image at right, from November 19, 1937. Texas Sen. Tom Connally was filibustering an anti-lynching bill, so Missouri Sen. Clark put up this sign. Connally was furious that Clark would dare remind everyone of the monsters he was defending. "Protest," Connally said, according to the AP caption, "against the Senate being made the sewer for the vaporings of the senator from Missouri." The bill failed. By the way, they were both Democrats.

Just a Few Facebook Likes Can Reveal Sexual Orientation

Discovered: Your Facebook likes can indicate your sexuality; being frustrated can make you seek out violent video games; HIV, if controlled, presents no greater risk of death; ancient humans suffered from heart disease, just like us.

Facebook likes can indicate sexuality. The things you like on Facebook can paint a fairly accurate picture of who you are, according to a University of Cambridge researcher who created the Facebook app myPersonality. Some of these are obvious ("most fans of the satirical, Fox News–mocking show 'The Colbert Report,' are Democrats"); some, however, are not. A program written to mine the data collected by myPersonality on 58,000 users "correctly identified gay men 88 percent of the time, even though less than 5 percent of them had liked things explicitly related to sexual orientation." The findings, though clearly valuable to marketers, pose a striking existential question: are we nothing more than a list of likes and dislikes? [Science News]

Frustration can make you seek out violent video games. The urge to steal and cheat isn't accepted in the social order, so do video games — and the worlds into which their players can escape — offer a kind of refuge from the frustration over society's rules? "Denying people the opportunity to engage in these taboo behaviors may lead them to seek out violent video games as a way of managing their frustration," an Ohio State researcher reported in a recent paper, which offered violent video games as a final response to a survey, rather than studying actual gameplay. He was quick to warn that such a dynamic can be self-fulfilling rather than relieving: "While people may turn to violent video games as a way to manage their feelings of frustration, the video games may actually enhance negative emotions." [Psychological Science]

HIV, if controlled, presents no greater risk of death. Has HIV finally become so manageable that it presents no real risk of early mortality? Negating the ill effects of the virus depends on a strict regiment of medicine, a doctor at University College London showed in a study of HIV-positive men and women. But when done correctly, "patients with undetectable viral loads and near-normal levels of immune cells on state-of-the art antiretroviral therapy (ART) can expect to have about the same risk of death as people without HIV." To be sure, managing HIV is not the same thing as curing it — but such studies show that medicine, and the visibility of HIV-positive individuals has come a long way since the virus began to proliferate toward the end of the twentieth century. [AIDS]

Ancient humans suffered from heart disease, just like us. Heart disease, usually depicted with computer-generated imagery of plaque-encrusted arteries, is often thought to be a fairly new condition, accelerated by our taste for fatty foods. But researchers at the University of Missouri-Kansas City say that ancient humans suffered from heart problems, too: "A significant cross-section of mummies, from all cultures and timeframes, had calcified plaque in artery walls — most frequently the aorta but also in the neck's carotid artery — hinting at atherosclerosis, a major cause of heart attack." So, you should still think twice about ordering that basket of fries. But by no means is the risk of arterial plaque (resulting from such indulgences, or other things) a new threat to human life. [New Scientist]

Everything We Know About the Great Celebrity Hack of 2013... Is Overrated

In case you missed the most boring hack in the history of hacking — unless you're worried about the terms of Kim Kardashian's mortgage (it's 30 years!) — allow us to get you up to speed: On Monday afternoon TMZ reported the release of financial information for a number of celebrities — Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Paris Hilton, Jay-Z and Beyoncé, and, somewhat incongruously, the chief of the Los Angeles Police Department. TMZ didn't identify the site, but Russia Today did, and it's called Exposed.SU.

Before you go clicking through, we'll save you the effort: What you'll find is boring. It's mostly credit reports for celebrities. Statements of bill payments. Mortgages. Car loans. You will learn that Jay-Z and Beyoncé are rich! Paris Hilton is less rich, and four times had her Bank of America card lost or stolen! Hillary Clinton used to live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Washington, D.C.! Eric Holder has a mortgage! The site does include Social Security numbers and dates of birth, so if you ever wanted to open a credit card as Ashton Kutcher, I suppose it could be helpful in that sense. Otherwise: eh.

So who's behind it? The code doesn't offer much of a clue. The site, hosted with CloudFlare, was registered on March 6, 2013, using the .su top-level domain, which was originally reserved for the former Soviet Union. It's a weird choice, to be sure, perhaps meant to suggest that the hacked is Russian. Other evidence belies that, like the inclusion of LAPD Chief Charlie Beck, whose information page is tagged with #YouCantCornerTheDorner, a reference to deceased fugitive Chris Dorner. The case was prominent, but it's hard to believe a Russian hacker is that incensed enough about it to access Beck's information. The pages don't offer much else in the way of hints — simple HTML, using images loading directly from external hosts.

The best clue may lie in what was provided. Each person's full name, Social Security number, date of birth, and previous addresses are shown — data that exists within the credit reports themselves. That suggests that the hack quite possibly originated with some agency that provides names, dates of birth, and Social Security numbers, perhaps even a credit agency of some sort. There's not much offered from the reports themselves; they're from a range of agencies and appear to have been generated over the weekend.

One last bit of disappointment: Russia Today tried calling Beyoncé at one of the numbers given. It reached her management office. It's almost as though celebrities are smart enough to shiled personal information as much as possible. Nonetheless, you should still definitely see if Hillary Clinton still lives at that 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue address. Feel free to just hop over the fence.

How Your Papal Conclave News Gets Made

Earlier today I wrote that I like it when papal elections come around because they seem to provide a context for reporting about the Catholic Church that's more sophisticated than is usual, in the American media anyway.

But I have been and remain deeply skeptical of coverage that attempts to divine what's happening inside the minds of the cardinals in their pre-conclave meetings, for a lot of reasons. Can it possibly be believed that these TV and newspaper reporters, being dropped by parachute into Vatican City, hanging around near (but never really among) the cardinal electors, can in a few days time make friends and forge alliances with sources that are likely to deliver them credible news despite the massive gag order that is always imposed on the Vatican during an election season?

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I Skyped Jason Horowitz, an old colleague of mine who's been dispatched to the Vatican by The Washington Post, and who worked a while back in the New York Times' Rome bureau, for some perspective. And immediately we got onto the topic of the foreign press' reliance on Italian media to drive their stories forward.

"They are our only door, it often feels like," he said.

He assured me that the on-the-ground press operation at the Vatican is determined almost entirely by the Italian press, for whom the Vatican is a constant topic whether a pope is being elected or not, and who massively influence the narrative that's being fed back to us by our own media who are descending on the Vatican now. And given the expectations of American news consumers like me, that's problematic.

"First of all, it simply goes back to: it's Italy, so everything is politics, and because the papers themselves were basically historically the mouthpieces of political parties or closely affiliated with political parties in Italy, the Vatican coverage often got wrapped up in that. So the papers that supported the old Christian Democrats that controlled Italy for a long time, the Christian Democrats were close to the Vatican, so you had those papers constantly defending the Vatican."

"Then you had the parties that wanted to take power away from the Christian Democrats, the communist parties and left-leaning parties, and they wanted to discredit the Vatican.

"It's not that neat anymore but it's critical for understanding where they're coming from, if not where they are right now."

The legacy of that Christian-Democratic strain is seen in the sober, straight-ahead accounts of most Italian newspapers.

"A lot of the Vatican reporters, and the ones who frankly don't break much news, I'm not entirely clear what they do because they are basically apologists," Horowitz told me. "They defend the Vatican. They even go after the better—or the more sensational, there's a fine line there in the Italian press—the better Italian papers for publishing these stories."

Then there are the reporters who are breaking news left and right—right or wrong.

"There are the people who work for major Italian newspapers like say La Repubblica but who are not sourced, and you don't have the feeling that they actually know anything. They have the big story about the contents of this dossier prepared by these three cardinals investigating Vatileaks. The idea that this reporter who is not considered very well sourced had seen this dossier herself made no sense. It might be true but the sourcing was so thin and nonexistent that nobody really knew what to make of it. Because there is no sourcing the only thing that matters is the byline and this reporter is not considered a heavyweight."

But being sourced isn't necessarily a reliable indicator of the truth of the reports either.

"Forever the Vatican has had these turf wars among themselves and the only way they could do politics was in the Italian press, so they and the reporters use each other. And it's just been this very symbiotic relationship between the two, the Vatican officials need the Italian reporters to be willing to do anything to win their internal fights. And it helps the reporters because they get news."

So it's a question of looking at the byline. Who's breaking news that clearly required real sources that also turns out to come true? Right now, the guy getting all the leaks that seem to be credible, Horowitz said, seems to be Andrea Tornielli of La Stampa.

"He's the reason we have a media blackout, because he was getting live feeds from cardinals inside these supposedly secret meetings. He's attacked by the other Vatican reporters for breaking news, because they say that there is a sacred oath and you're violating it."

Nevermind them, though, because their reports aren't being picked up in the American media anyway. There's not enough in them. The problem is whether the American media knows whether to pick the good guys from the bad guys when they're translating a big newsbreak from the Italian papers. You have to know the bylines to follow, Horowitz said.

"What separates them is, you know they are connected because the things that they write actually become true. It's not that you ever see like 'Pope Benedict told me in an interview' or even 'Secretary of State Bertoni told me in an interview.' It's always the equivalent of a well-placed Vatican official or a high ranking cardinal, but all cardinals are high ranking so everyone gets to claim the same sourcing.

"So the guys who are writing really high-level stuff, which is actually very small-ball in a way because it is at the very small height of the curia but it takes on great weight too—these guys, I don't know who their sources are but often they turn out to be right."

I asked Horowitz what the major American outlets were getting on their own, or how heavy is their dependence on the story-lines originating in the Italian press.

"I would call it total," Horowitz said.

Among the exceptions, Horowitz didn't particularly stress any mainstream American media.

"There are a couple of Americans who are independently sourced and who are quite frankly great. John Allen at The National Catholic Reporter is as good as anyone I think, and he's actually better in a way because he has American journalistic standards that he has to adhere to and does. So he's just frankly very impressive. There's a guy named John Thavis who is an old reporter for the Catholic News Service and he's out on his own now and has written a book."

But they're not the ones that seem to be driving the news we're seeing here in mainstream outlets.

"All the kind of story-lines that people are writing right now, for instance, have essentially come down to: it's an American-German axis, with some Italians basically that are not in the curia, that is an axis against the curia cardinals who are aligned with the Brazilian candidate. You look at the American coverage and that is all over the place.

"And the reason that's all over the place is a couple of Italian reporters, because nobly knows anything. It's these few Italian guys who are getting something, now the question is who are they getting it from? To me it's clearly, they're being given this information for a reason, it's not because these sources just want to get something off their chest. They're playing, as always, politics through the Italian press, only now it's really high stakes because the papal election is happening.

"What makes it easier now to see this is that the Italian newspapers, especially La Stampa, which has been very smart in all this, they have a website called Vatican Insider which basically gives all their reporting in English, so there's no longer this sort of mystery about what the Italians are doing.

"And the Americans who bemoan Italian newspapering ethics all the time, and they're right, but there's this osmosis that takes place and then they start reporting that there are these factions inside the Vatican, and one wants this and one wants that, and it's not attributed to these newspapers, so in a way they're not even being spun by the sources, they're taking the spin second-hand.

"Clearly a lot of us attribute but I do find especially the television networks, I find them asking me about these factions that they know about it. And I'm like, 'how do you know about it?' It's just the same couple of Italian reporters I read."

Even the best can be completely stymied by the difficult reporting conditions of the pope beat.

"John Allen was wrong about 2005 [when Pope Benedict was elected]. But he wasn't wrong in a, like, 'this is my prediction' kind of way. He was the guy who literally wrote the book on Ratzinger, and made an analysis based on what he knew and based on the people he knew in the church, that it was not the thing the church was going to do. He points out that he was wrong basically in every single interview he does. He doesn't need to do it but he does it because when you're wrong it sticks with you."

"With the Italian press, they drop grenades all the time—predictions, this is gonna happen, that is gonna happen—more than half the time it doesn't come true, but the way they view it is you have to go out and shake things up. You don't see the italians saying, "Well that newspaper, they were wrong last time."

"There was a front page piece in one of the newspapers here back in November or December saying with absolute certainty that Georg Gänswein, who is the pope's right-hand man, was going to get moved out and punished because of Vatileaks because it all happened right under his nose.

"I was talking to Sandro Magister, a great reporter, and he just told me, 'yeah, that's wrong.'"

(Magister is a well-respected reporter for the magazine L'espresso, which is tied to the Italian newspaper La Repubblica.)

"Magister knew he was actually being promoted, and now he's gonna literally go live with Benedict while at the same time maintaining this high post. And I said, 'well is there any kind of price to pay for being this wrong on the front page?' and he said, 'nobody expects you to be right all the time.' Which is—it's nice!"

It was Magister whose article from L'espresso, picked up in La Repubblica, has largely fed the speculation that Timothy Cardinal Dolan, Archbishop of the New York Archdiocese, is an early favorite. Which was lucky because I have a certain parochial interest in that story-line, which I had assumed was all dried up and motivated in the American media by too much rooting for the home team. I asked Horowitz what he thought there was in the Dolan speculation.

"I think there is something real there—because, going back to what I said before, you end up trusting the byline. And so Magister has shown to me that he knows what's going on. Every one of them has their cardinals, and his cardinals seem to know what's going on.

"He was telling me today that he actually thinks that Dolan—basically that there's a feeling that there is gonna be a move toward Dolan early, and that the problem won't be getting a good amount of votes for Dolan, it will be getting the 77 votes you need; getting past a certain threshold will be hard, getting enough votes to be taken seriously will be easy. But if he seems stuck at a certain point, and can't seem to go up, the feeling is, that's when you start going to safer options. But people he talks to think there will be an early push for Dolan.

"So now everyone's going to write that, but what's gonna happen is the networks are going to report that there is a huge move for Dolan inside the conclave. But maybe Magister's wrong, or maybe he is being spun, or maybe he's right."

And that, in a nutshell, is what's wrong with relying on even the most reliable reports.

The UFC Now Supports Gay Rights a Lot More Than the NFL

As the winter-long controversy about gay rights and pro sports continues, the fastest growing sport in America finally may be advancing where the most popular still cannot: The Ultimate Fighting Championship is coming out in support of gay marriage outside the ring, and preemptively accepting gay fighters inside.

Former light heavyweight champion Rashad Evans, one of UFC's most popular stars, signed on Monday to the brief urging the Supreme Court to legalize gay marriage filed by Chris Kluwe and Brendon Ayanbadejo, the football players turned outspoken gay rights' advocates from an NFL that's suddenly looking like an even more homophobic league than the one where guys perform jujitsu in a cage for a rabid fan base not exactly known for its progressive views on equality.

On top of that big step, Evans gave some extremely progressive comments to Outsports about his stance on gay marriage. "I am a heterosexual guy in a tough macho sport, which is exactly the reason I feel a duty to say I support gay marriage and gay rights," Evans said in a statement to Outsports' Jim Buzinski. "I have nothing to gain personally from supporting this issue, and that's the point. Society as a whole is better when there is equality, and I want to live in a country where everyone has the same rights because we all benefit from that."

Evans continued that his children factored into his public decision — and it's this part of his defense of gay marriage that may speak the most to pro athletes' impact on the culture at large: "I don't want them growing up in a society where they, or their friends, could be second class citizens based on which person they fall in love with or who they want to be happy with." But it was a conversation with one of Evans' gay friends that he said ultimately convinced him to speak out:

“I've never been a homophobe, never understood what that is all about. I knew some people who were gay and never cared about their sexuality. But at the same time, I didn't fully understand the issues around gay people until my friend BA started telling me about his full public support for gay marriage. We talked about the issue and I decided its not enough to not be against a minority, if you want things to go better for them you have to speak up with them. 

The macho-ness of the UFC may not exactly scream equality, but it's sure making more positive strides than the NFL of late. While Kluwe and Ayanbadejo have been some of the most prominent athletes speaking out for the cause in any sport, the football world still has some major issues to overcome, both from players and team executives. There's potentially good news on that front as well: The NFL says it's trying to crackdown on claims of job discrimination, and at least one of football's most recent embarrassments is making some progress: Chris Culliver, the San Francisco 49er who sparked an outrage for his homophobic comments at the Super Bowl, recently won praise from gay rights activists for his work with The Trevor Project, an LGBT organization he's been working with as part of his rehabilitation for those comments. 

But Evans has been winning praise around the blogosphere for what's being seen as a leadership role, rather than a reactionary one — especially for UFC, an organization with an occasionally spotty history when it comes to gay rights, and an increasing amount of influence on young people across the country. UFC fans and would-be fighters are one thing — big arms and backwoods don't always make for a gay-rights paradise — but the sport has faced intense criticism for public use of gay slurs by fighters, commentators, and executives as the league continued its meteoric rise to network-TV prominence in the last three years. UFC President Dana White, trumpeted as a kind of mad-genius sports executive for his mix of social-media savvy, marketing, and unapologetic quest for world sports domination, was at the center of the UFC's problems when he used a word that starts with "f" and ends with "t" on his video blog in 2009. The slur — the video for which has since been removed — began something of a turnaround for White, even as everyone from announcer Joe Rogen to the mega-star Rampage Jackson used the same word in public: 

Indeed, White and the UFC have been making very public strides to fight an image of homophobia, transforming a negative conversation about attitudes toward gay people in general into something of an open dialogue about gay fighters in the cage. In late 2011, White urged any gay fighter in the UFC to come out of the closet: "I'll tell you right now, if there was a gay fighter in UFC, I wish he would come out," White said a press conference. "I could care less if there's a gay fighter in the UFC. There probably is and there's probably more than one."

Since then, the UFC has signed an openly gay fighter. At the end of 2012, the organization started its first women's division at 135 pounds. The very first women's title fight was between inaugural champion Ronda Rousey and Liz Carmouche, a former Marine who also happens to be openly gay. The fight happened on February 23, and while Carmouche ended up losing, it remained a significant moment for her and for the sport, which has grown at an even faster clip since its national TV deal with Fox began last year. It was the first time a women fought in the UFC, and the first time an openly gay fighter of either gender has fought in the UFC — not that White thinks she'll be the last. 

Asked after the Rousey-Carmouche fight whether he could see a straight male fighter potentially refusing to fight a gay male fighter, White shot down the idea and promised retribution if a fighter were to ever utter outwardly homophobic biases again. "Most of the guys that are in this sport are really good people," he replied. "I honestly don't see a situation where that would happen, but if it did, I'd fix it." White even touched on the criticisms he and the company has faced in the past for their history of homophobia. "Some of our guys, and I have said some things that make it look like we're homophobes," White said. "But we're not, and we've apologized."

That's a lot more than can be said by or for the NFL, where teams might still be wondering in private if Manti Te'o is gay in anticipation of next month's rookie draft.

Americans Drink 44 Gallons of Soda Per Year

Today was going to be the last day before New York City's ban on large containers of soda would go into effect — until, that is, a judge on the New York Supreme Court halted the ban, after he determined that it would be impossible to fairly and effectively enforce. That doesn't mean the data underlying the ban — that we drink a lot of soda, that soda contains a lot of sugar, and that a lot of sugar is bad for you — are suddenly invalid. How much soda do we drink, by the way? According to an Associated Press report published on Monday, independent of