Lily Salter's Blog, page 1006
August 25, 2015
This could be how Trump’s momentum ends: Why his flip-flop on self-funding undercuts his appeal
Like most people who own stock, Donald Trump's net worth has suffered in recent days. The Washington Post's rough back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that Trump has lost up to $4.5 million in the market during its current dip. It's not like that's going send him crawling into the poor house anytime soon. And the candidate himself is dealing with the dreary financial news the same way deals with everything: by trying to pick a fistfight with China, the very large country, "and Asia." https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/s... Despite having a very large net worth -- perhaps TEN BILLION DOLLARS, perhaps $2.9 billion -- much of Trump's worth, given that he's a real estate developer, rests in buildings and other illiquid assets. He claims that he's willing to spend over a billion dollars of his own money to self-fund his own campaign, but doing so could require him to cut deeper into his wealth than he might be comfortable with. It's much nicer when other people just donate money to you or your super PAC while you keep all of your own money. Trump is beginning to recognize this. It was reported over the weekend that in mid-July, Trump attended and briefly spoke at a fundraiser for the Make America Great Again PAC. (Three guesses whose candidacy that super PAC is intended to support.) Politico reports that "about 200 people packed into a private residence in Manhattan" to hear Trump speak and then, for whatever reason, pledge high-dollar donations to make him the most powerful human on earth. This in addition to the recent online fundraising drive he launched to fund his official campaign, in which he promised to match donor contributions. Trump has confirmed that he's accepting donations large and small. "I would even take big contributors, as long as they don’t expect anything," is how he put it to "Face the Nation" host John Dickerson. On Monday's "Fox & Friends," he said that he will accept big fat-cat donations "only if there’s no strings whatsoever attached. The only strings attached is I wanna make America great again." Who doesn't wanna Make America Great Again? The problem is that some of these big donors think the best way to Make America Great Again is to carve out a loophole in the tax code, for each of them, personally. Trump's best pitch against the systemic corruption dominating both parties is that he can't be bought, because he just has so, so, so much money. He knows how these crook donors work, he's been one of them, and so he's the best to weed it out by self-funding his own campaign. Trump's at his best when he's delivering this speil: admitting that he knows how to buy political favors, knows how to play the game, and knows how to end it. "Billionaires should run because they're the only ones that can't be bought" isn't the best direction for campaign finance reformers to look, but for the meantime, well, maybe. What Trump may be recognizing, now that he's beginning to think he might be able to win this thing, is that it would be prohibitively expensive to self-fund a primary and general election presidential campaign. The Democratic nominee and her (his?) backers will spend $1-2 billion dollars to win the presidency. Same with the Republican nominee. This is just what it costs now, and it's a lot of liquid assets for any one man. And if Trump were to win the nomination, he'd basically have to start doing any number of joint fundraisers with local, state, and national Republican parties. Anyone who says they won't be bought by large corporations, whether that's Trump or Bernie Sanders or whoever, hasn't competed in a modern presidential general election before as the representative of a major political party that expects to win. And if he won, he would need to run for reelection. How would he even fund that? Would he sell Trump Tower, America's Greatest Building? Even a political figure of such massive, bigly wealth such as Donald Trump can be, and would need to be, bought. That could blunt Trump's sharp message against the special interests and turn him into "any other politician."Like most people who own stock, Donald Trump's net worth has suffered in recent days. The Washington Post's rough back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that Trump has lost up to $4.5 million in the market during its current dip. It's not like that's going send him crawling into the poor house anytime soon. And the candidate himself is dealing with the dreary financial news the same way deals with everything: by trying to pick a fistfight with China, the very large country, "and Asia." https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/s... Despite having a very large net worth -- perhaps TEN BILLION DOLLARS, perhaps $2.9 billion -- much of Trump's worth, given that he's a real estate developer, rests in buildings and other illiquid assets. He claims that he's willing to spend over a billion dollars of his own money to self-fund his own campaign, but doing so could require him to cut deeper into his wealth than he might be comfortable with. It's much nicer when other people just donate money to you or your super PAC while you keep all of your own money. Trump is beginning to recognize this. It was reported over the weekend that in mid-July, Trump attended and briefly spoke at a fundraiser for the Make America Great Again PAC. (Three guesses whose candidacy that super PAC is intended to support.) Politico reports that "about 200 people packed into a private residence in Manhattan" to hear Trump speak and then, for whatever reason, pledge high-dollar donations to make him the most powerful human on earth. This in addition to the recent online fundraising drive he launched to fund his official campaign, in which he promised to match donor contributions. Trump has confirmed that he's accepting donations large and small. "I would even take big contributors, as long as they don’t expect anything," is how he put it to "Face the Nation" host John Dickerson. On Monday's "Fox & Friends," he said that he will accept big fat-cat donations "only if there’s no strings whatsoever attached. The only strings attached is I wanna make America great again." Who doesn't wanna Make America Great Again? The problem is that some of these big donors think the best way to Make America Great Again is to carve out a loophole in the tax code, for each of them, personally. Trump's best pitch against the systemic corruption dominating both parties is that he can't be bought, because he just has so, so, so much money. He knows how these crook donors work, he's been one of them, and so he's the best to weed it out by self-funding his own campaign. Trump's at his best when he's delivering this speil: admitting that he knows how to buy political favors, knows how to play the game, and knows how to end it. "Billionaires should run because they're the only ones that can't be bought" isn't the best direction for campaign finance reformers to look, but for the meantime, well, maybe. What Trump may be recognizing, now that he's beginning to think he might be able to win this thing, is that it would be prohibitively expensive to self-fund a primary and general election presidential campaign. The Democratic nominee and her (his?) backers will spend $1-2 billion dollars to win the presidency. Same with the Republican nominee. This is just what it costs now, and it's a lot of liquid assets for any one man. And if Trump were to win the nomination, he'd basically have to start doing any number of joint fundraisers with local, state, and national Republican parties. Anyone who says they won't be bought by large corporations, whether that's Trump or Bernie Sanders or whoever, hasn't competed in a modern presidential general election before as the representative of a major political party that expects to win. And if he won, he would need to run for reelection. How would he even fund that? Would he sell Trump Tower, America's Greatest Building? Even a political figure of such massive, bigly wealth such as Donald Trump can be, and would need to be, bought. That could blunt Trump's sharp message against the special interests and turn him into "any other politician."
The GOP’s austerity hawks are throwing away a golden opportunity (again)
The U.S. Congress should have gaveled in an emergency session yesterday to react on the latest twist in the capital markets. Failure to do so creates unnecessary pain and will damage American competitiveness for the next generation. I’m not talking about the stock market, which fell significantly at the opening bell, reversed most of its losses by midday and then slid at the close, finishing down over 580 points (or, to put it in more useful terms, 3.5 percent). Even if stocks dropped for the next week, the cable networks would freak out some more, but it’s not clear it would have much impact on any American without a personal valet. But the slide of the 10-year Treasury note over the past couple months represents a significant opportunity. Not that our blundering policymakers will capitalize on it by spending the free money investors want to give to them. First, let’s go over this madness about the stock market. Nobody should confuse the actual economy with the trading pit where mostly computer algorithms, at this point, buy and sell bets on companies. As Dean Baker points out, the stock market can experience wild swings upward when the economy is bad, or plummets downward when the economy is good. The markets mostly try to predict not the future economic path but trends for corporate profits, and they’re not necessarily even good at it. Moreover, only 13 percent of Americans own individual stocks. To the vast majority of people getting through their workdays, this is a non-event. To the extent that there’s any real-world activity causing the market volatility, it’s the bursting of the Chinese stock bubble, which happens to still be up significantly relative to last year. But a lot of new Chinese investors, many of them middle-class, rode the stock wave upwards with borrowed money. They’re in for some pain. Whether that will have any impact on the rather large Chinese economy is a different question. China does have to figure out how to safely move from a manufacturing to a consumer-driven economy while taking the air out of its stock and real estate bubbles, a tricky situation. The country is big enough that fears of an economic slowdown – which could simply mean growth below 7 percent, a number we in the U.S. would kill for – could have an impact internationally. But the biggest consequence of that in the United States can be seen in the 10-year Treasury note. Right now, the U.S. can borrow money for 10 years at around 2 percent – a staggeringly low number, made so by an increase in global demand for Treasury bonds. When the economic winds shake globally, investors lead a “flight to safety,” looking for any instrument that won’t lose money. And despite the tumult of the past decade, investors still see Treasury bonds as the safest investment in the world. What this means is that investors will hand over cash to the U.S. government with effectively no interest in real terms. That makes today the best time for Congress to borrow money since a period between spring 2012 and summer 2013. Congress wasted that chance, and they are poised to do the same with this gift horse staring them in the mouth. The flight to safety could stick around for a while. The market volatility index is at its highest point in seven years, and that could send traders to calmer waters. Plus, emerging markets like Brazil are being battered, precipitating cash flow out of those countries and, increasingly, into Treasuries. Meaning that the U.S. has time to make the major borrowing move that could change our economic position. Significant borrowing, to repair crumbling infrastructure like bridges and water systems, or upgrade the electrical grid and broadband capacity for the entire nation, would have a seriously stimulative impact on an economy that’s already showing some labor market success. It would help arrest the persistent demand deficit that has existed in our economy since the outset of the Great Recession. Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum posted a chart last week showing that federal spending since 2007 at all levels has been sharply below the average spending following recessions, which says everything you need to know about the sluggish recovery. The market upset will probably lead the Federal Reserve to back off raising interest rates in September, which will provide a short-term economic boost. But government spending when borrowing is cheap would sustain that boom, and is in fact the only real opportunity for economic growth in the near term. Plus, plowing that spending into investment in the future has tremendous payoffs over the long term. The money spent today will be even better than free down the road. The lack of government debt is a problem for the world, as Paul Krugman pointed out recently. Former White House economist Jared Bernstein goes further, explaining that budget deficits lead to smoother and stronger economic growth. Our deficit is falling fast, and the government not only can handle throwing a couple hundred billion at upgrading the basic structures that make the country go, but would benefit handsomely from it. Sadly, this is all wishful thinking with a Republican Congress that is itching to perpetuate a fight over government spending when the deadline for the next fiscal year’s budget ends next month. What makes economic sense and the course politicians end up taking have had no resemblance whatsoever over the last decade, if not much longer. So the gift investors are clamoring to bestow on us goes unaccepted, year after year. This actively harms our economic potential over the next several years. We can’t have nice things because we’re still governed by a backwards ideology that thinks the government should run the country like a family manages their budget. But if a family could borrow money for free and use it to make all kinds of improvements in their lives, they’d jump at the chance. If we ever want to make America great again, we have to get over this dysfunction and get out our checkbook.
August 24, 2015
The New York Times sells out artists: Shallow data paints a too-rosy picture of “thriving” creative class in the digital age
Musicians, writers, and other creative folk are still scratching their heads over the cover story in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine: “The New Making It” -- packaged online as "The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn't" -- looked at how the Internet economy, instead of destroying creative careers, had redrawn them in “complicated and unexpected ways.” The story’s author, Steven Johnson, is an engaging writer, and the piece is told largely through statistics, which most readers assume to be beyond criticism. So why are so many people who work in the world of culture wondering why the article seemed to describe a best-of-all-worlds planet very different from the one they live on? The Times story tells readers that just about everything they’ve heard about the Internet’s cult of free – and the way it makes an artistic career difficult – is gloomy, nay-saying foolishness. USC professor Jonathan Taplin, who produced the films "Mean Streets” and “The Last Waltz,” for instance, is baffled to read “that Internet monopolies have actually been a boon to the average artist.” The story was told primarily through statistics – there are sidebars on a half-dozen young artists who demonstrate the new ways of making a living, but Johnson barely discusses specific creative figures in his story. (When I tried to understand the issue for my book "Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class," some of which originally ran on Salon, I combined figures with numerous interviews with artists in various genres. That seemed like the fair way to do it.) Because his story is told mostly through numbers, it’s impossible to get into its shallowness without talking in numbers as well. So how well do they stand up? In many cases, groups and observers who keep and assess figures on the careers of artists are not convinced by the stats Johnson uses. Melvin Gibbs, the jazz and funk bassist who serves as president of Content Creators Coalition, calls them “cooked numbers.” Another of these groups told The Times about the weakness of the figures before publication. Johnson refers approvingly to Future of Music Coalition, a D.C.-based think thank that collects and interprets research on the lives of musicians. FMC is known to some in the artists-rights movement as being optimistic and overly friendly with technology companies, which is mostly not fair. Either way, its research team – made up heavily of longtime musicians, including Kristin Thomson, who co-founded the Simple Machine label -- is very strong. And the group has a major complaint about the very basis of the story, stats which Johnson refer to as “The closest data set we have to a bird’s-eye-view of the culture industry,” from the Labor Department’s Occupational Employment Statistics. To Johnson, the numbers say that despite whatever digital disruption has wrought, more people are making careers as musicians now: “the market looks as if it is rewarding creative work, not undermining it, compared with the pre-Napster era.” The Times approached the FMC to fact-check the story, and the group pointed out that his numbers did not tell the story they seemed to be enlisted to tell. Here’s what they’ve posted since:
Alas, what ended up running was rather disappointing. NYT Magazine chose to publish without substantive change most of the things that we told them were either: a) not accurate or b) not verifiable because there is no industry consensus and the “facts” could really go either way. Steven Johnson’s article “The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t” frames itself as a data-driven response to concerns about the plight of creative workers in the digital age. But Johnson’s grasp of the limitations of the data he cites seems tenuous, and he ends up relying on some very dubious and all-too-familiar assumptions. In its sweeping dismissal of artists’ various concerns, the article reads as an exercise in gaslighting.Some of the statistical stuff is wonky and hard to explain succinctly. But one of the key objections comes from Johnson’s claim that more people are making their livings as musicians. But since the statistical categories were changed midstream to accommodate school teachers, the early numbers and the later numbers become an apples-to-oranges comparison: the numbers of working musicians, it appears, is not going up but down. The story also falls back on one of the most common tech-apologist clichés: That while musicians are making less money selling recordings, they are earning a lot of money on the road. It’s nice to think so. But while concert revenues are indeed up, bands rarely make a fortune touring – the big money goes to a few superstar acts, and enormous expenses for the musicians mean many groups just break even. Is a constant sequence of vans and Motel 6’s really a feasible way for a musician over the age of 25 to make a living? "I can’t stop touring because I will die,” surf-rock legend Dick Dale, who is raising money to cover his health problems, recently said. “Physically and literally, I will die." Johnson’s argument, which begins with the rantings of Metallica’s Lars Ulrich over Napster 15 years ago, relies on a straw man. “It's not that there is a creative apocalypse where no one creates,” Camper Van Beethoven musician and technology critic David Lowery told me. “It's that the digital age has crushed creator wages, and the preponderance of evidence indicates that it's parasitic middlemen (digital and analog) that are capturing the value.” Johnson also ignores the larger context and the way a creative economy works as an ecosystem. He makes a dismissive remark about “the glory days of Tower Records,” but Tower and places like it employed many people who went on to become important musicians: Peter Buck, Jeff Tweedy, Lucinda Williams, Alejandro Escovedo, Brian Burton (Danger Mouse), and numerous others worked at record story. Bookstores kept Patti Smith, Mary Gaitskill and Jonathan Lethem fed while they found their respective voices. Johnson's description of the publishing world -- which has reoriented around blockbusters and away from the midlist just as developed-world economies have undercut their middle class -- deserves its own critique. But is it really fair to say that independent bookstores are thriving because their numbers are slowly increasing? The U.S. lost about half of its indie bookstores from the mid-1990s to the dark, Amazon-shadowed days of the Great Recession, and Border’s is entirely gone now: The fact that the number is ticking back up hardly makes a success story. One more reason it’s worth looking at the world of culture as an environment: As rents in cities that have traditionally made creative life possible – especially collaborative creative life – jolts up by 10 percent or more a year, musicians, writers, actors, and others get forced out to make room for financiers and trustafarians. If I can extend the eco-system metaphor for a second: For most people working in film, music, television, or books, that is hardly sustainable. David Byrne has made this point about the one-percenting of American cities and its impact on culture quite eloquently; “The New Making It” does not even engage his argument indirectly. Is the environment for creative people all bad? Of course not. Is television better – maybe way better – than it used to be? Sure. Is digital technology the only villain here? Of course not. “If you want to know how musicians are faring, you have to ask musicians, preferably a whole lot of them,” the FMC retort concludes. “You’ll get different answers from different musicians, and they’ll all be correct in terms of their own experiences. But your overall understanding will better reflect the complexity of the landscape.” One thing you find if you talk to people who work in culture is that those lacking family money, tenure, or celebrity status are pushing up against very serious limits in the entrepreneurial, tech-mad, post-recession world. The Times story mocks these struggles rather than trying to understand them. Don’t believe the hype.Musicians, writers, and other creative folk are still scratching their heads over the cover story in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine: “The New Making It” -- packaged online as "The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn't" -- looked at how the Internet economy, instead of destroying creative careers, had redrawn them in “complicated and unexpected ways.” The story’s author, Steven Johnson, is an engaging writer, and the piece is told largely through statistics, which most readers assume to be beyond criticism. So why are so many people who work in the world of culture wondering why the article seemed to describe a best-of-all-worlds planet very different from the one they live on? The Times story tells readers that just about everything they’ve heard about the Internet’s cult of free – and the way it makes an artistic career difficult – is gloomy, nay-saying foolishness. USC professor Jonathan Taplin, who produced the films "Mean Streets” and “The Last Waltz,” for instance, is baffled to read “that Internet monopolies have actually been a boon to the average artist.” The story was told primarily through statistics – there are sidebars on a half-dozen young artists who demonstrate the new ways of making a living, but Johnson barely discusses specific creative figures in his story. (When I tried to understand the issue for my book "Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class," some of which originally ran on Salon, I combined figures with numerous interviews with artists in various genres. That seemed like the fair way to do it.) Because his story is told mostly through numbers, it’s impossible to get into its shallowness without talking in numbers as well. So how well do they stand up? In many cases, groups and observers who keep and assess figures on the careers of artists are not convinced by the stats Johnson uses. Melvin Gibbs, the jazz and funk bassist who serves as president of Content Creators Coalition, calls them “cooked numbers.” Another of these groups told The Times about the weakness of the figures before publication. Johnson refers approvingly to Future of Music Coalition, a D.C.-based think thank that collects and interprets research on the lives of musicians. FMC is known to some in the artists-rights movement as being optimistic and overly friendly with technology companies, which is mostly not fair. Either way, its research team – made up heavily of longtime musicians, including Kristin Thomson, who co-founded the Simple Machine label -- is very strong. And the group has a major complaint about the very basis of the story, stats which Johnson refer to as “The closest data set we have to a bird’s-eye-view of the culture industry,” from the Labor Department’s Occupational Employment Statistics. To Johnson, the numbers say that despite whatever digital disruption has wrought, more people are making careers as musicians now: “the market looks as if it is rewarding creative work, not undermining it, compared with the pre-Napster era.” The Times approached the FMC to fact-check the story, and the group pointed out that his numbers did not tell the story they seemed to be enlisted to tell. Here’s what they’ve posted since:
Alas, what ended up running was rather disappointing. NYT Magazine chose to publish without substantive change most of the things that we told them were either: a) not accurate or b) not verifiable because there is no industry consensus and the “facts” could really go either way. Steven Johnson’s article “The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t” frames itself as a data-driven response to concerns about the plight of creative workers in the digital age. But Johnson’s grasp of the limitations of the data he cites seems tenuous, and he ends up relying on some very dubious and all-too-familiar assumptions. In its sweeping dismissal of artists’ various concerns, the article reads as an exercise in gaslighting.Some of the statistical stuff is wonky and hard to explain succinctly. But one of the key objections comes from Johnson’s claim that more people are making their livings as musicians. But since the statistical categories were changed midstream to accommodate school teachers, the early numbers and the later numbers become an apples-to-oranges comparison: the numbers of working musicians, it appears, is not going up but down. The story also falls back on one of the most common tech-apologist clichés: That while musicians are making less money selling recordings, they are earning a lot of money on the road. It’s nice to think so. But while concert revenues are indeed up, bands rarely make a fortune touring – the big money goes to a few superstar acts, and enormous expenses for the musicians mean many groups just break even. Is a constant sequence of vans and Motel 6’s really a feasible way for a musician over the age of 25 to make a living? "I can’t stop touring because I will die,” surf-rock legend Dick Dale, who is raising money to cover his health problems, recently said. “Physically and literally, I will die." Johnson’s argument, which begins with the rantings of Metallica’s Lars Ulrich over Napster 15 years ago, relies on a straw man. “It's not that there is a creative apocalypse where no one creates,” Camper Van Beethoven musician and technology critic David Lowery told me. “It's that the digital age has crushed creator wages, and the preponderance of evidence indicates that it's parasitic middlemen (digital and analog) that are capturing the value.” Johnson also ignores the larger context and the way a creative economy works as an ecosystem. He makes a dismissive remark about “the glory days of Tower Records,” but Tower and places like it employed many people who went on to become important musicians: Peter Buck, Jeff Tweedy, Lucinda Williams, Alejandro Escovedo, Brian Burton (Danger Mouse), and numerous others worked at record story. Bookstores kept Patti Smith, Mary Gaitskill and Jonathan Lethem fed while they found their respective voices. Johnson's description of the publishing world -- which has reoriented around blockbusters and away from the midlist just as developed-world economies have undercut their middle class -- deserves its own critique. But is it really fair to say that independent bookstores are thriving because their numbers are slowly increasing? The U.S. lost about half of its indie bookstores from the mid-1990s to the dark, Amazon-shadowed days of the Great Recession, and Border’s is entirely gone now: The fact that the number is ticking back up hardly makes a success story. One more reason it’s worth looking at the world of culture as an environment: As rents in cities that have traditionally made creative life possible – especially collaborative creative life – jolts up by 10 percent or more a year, musicians, writers, actors, and others get forced out to make room for financiers and trustafarians. If I can extend the eco-system metaphor for a second: For most people working in film, music, television, or books, that is hardly sustainable. David Byrne has made this point about the one-percenting of American cities and its impact on culture quite eloquently; “The New Making It” does not even engage his argument indirectly. Is the environment for creative people all bad? Of course not. Is television better – maybe way better – than it used to be? Sure. Is digital technology the only villain here? Of course not. “If you want to know how musicians are faring, you have to ask musicians, preferably a whole lot of them,” the FMC retort concludes. “You’ll get different answers from different musicians, and they’ll all be correct in terms of their own experiences. But your overall understanding will better reflect the complexity of the landscape.” One thing you find if you talk to people who work in culture is that those lacking family money, tenure, or celebrity status are pushing up against very serious limits in the entrepreneurial, tech-mad, post-recession world. The Times story mocks these struggles rather than trying to understand them. Don’t believe the hype.
Football, brain injuries and right-wing denial: The paranoid he-man propaganda that insists the game is safer than ever
Last week, I was asked to appear on "Outside the Lines," ESPN’s flagship news magazine, to discuss what football people tend to refer to, somewhat squeamishly, as “the Chris Borland situation.” Last March Borland, a star linebacker for the San Francisco 49ers, shocked the sports world by announcing that he was quitting the game after just one season, because he feared he might suffer brain damage if he continued to play. This was not exactly a far-fetched notion, given that the NFL itself had estimated—after years of denying any link between football and brain disease—that up to 30 percent of their former players would suffer from cognitive ailments such as Alzheimer’s and dementia. When I arrived at the studio, I was told I should be ready to discuss the “meaning” of the Chris Borland situation, which did not strike me as particularly elusive. When your employer announces in federal court documents that you have a one in three chance of being neurologically disabled in the course of doing your job, the smart money is on retiring. Still, I was excited to record the episode because "Outside the Lines" is easily the most intelligent and journalistically sophisticated show within the vast and ever-expanding kingdom of ESPN. The program eschews bombastic punditry and slavish promotion (cue the highlight porn) in favor of in-depth reporting and conversation. It came as something of a surprise, then, when I was informed, a few minutes before air-time, that the other guest on the show would be Daniel J. Flynn, the author of a 2013 book called “The War on Football: Saving America’s Game” and the sports editor at the right-wing website Breitbart.com. Flynn’s argument, obviously, is that football—and by extension masculine virtue—is under assault from the liberal media, greedy lawyers and doctors, and sissified citizens, all of whom have conspired to manufacture a Big Lie: that playing football is dangerous. In fact, football is safer than it’s ever been! Flynn makes at least one important point in his book—that the emergent medical research regarding the dangers of football are not yet fully understood, and thus shouldn’t be overstated. The rest is largely paranoid he-man propaganda, which conservative pundits use as a kind of literary ATM machine at this point. There’s no honest engagement with the complex and disturbing body of data that surrounds football circa 2015. Flynn’s narrative is sloppily jury-rigged to make football fans—especially those who are old white conservatives—feel like victims. But football fans aren’t victims. We’re the definitional opposite of victims. The beauty of being a football fan—and I was one for 40 years—is that you get to watch scads of thrilling violence from the safety of your own couch. For the most part, we’re protected even from having to confront the tragic results of that violence. Why? Because the players wear uniforms and helmets. Because brain injuries can’t really be seen. Because any player who gets seriously injured is removed from the viewer’s sight. Oh, and because there’s an entire media industry dedicated to promoting (and profiting by) the privileges and grievances of fandom. This is why we continue to view football as a magical kingdom where 270-pound supermen can smash into one another over and over and never get seriously injured. The folks at "Outside the Lines" know all this. In fact, the clip that ran right before Flynn and I went live—an in-depth interview with Borland—was one of the most thoughtful and moving pieces about football ever to air on ESPN. This is largely due to Borland himself. His concerns about the game are so humbly articulated and so obviously grounded in a basic human decency. “If you can’t make plays and make tackles and help the team win,” without putting your health at risk, he observed, “something’s wrong with the game, not the person making the plays.” So why did ESPN’s most intelligent show provide a guy like Daniel Flynn a platform for his agitprop? Most obviously, because conflict plays well on TV, and they wanted my opinions—as a vocal critic of the game—to clash with Flynn’s. The producers were probably also concerned about “balance.” If someone’s going to question the morality of football, we need that voice on the other side to defend it. News programs use the same logic when they invite climate deniers to comment on climate science. Or lobbyists hired by billionaires to hold forth on campaign finance reform, or income inequality. The pursuit of “objectivity” becomes the enabler of propaganda. In the case of football in particular, it’s worth noting that 99 percent of all coverage is promotional in nature. It feeds our passion for the game. Even the stories about various scandals aren’t aimed at questioning the inherent morality of football, but vilifying individual scapegoats who have tainted the game’s honor. And guys like Flynn serve as guardians of this status quo. The last thing they want is a candid discussion about the morality of America’s most popular sport. On the contrary, the whole idea is to disgorge talking points that reduce moral consideration to a brutish binary. You’re either fer football, or against it. It should come as no surprise that the conversation between Mr. Flynn and myself played out according to this script. Flynn insisted, over and over, that football is safer than it’s ever been. Why? Because players aren’t dying on the field, they’re simply getting concussed, which we should count as progress. This argument is dishonest on two levels. First, what the prevailing medical research actually suggests is that players at every level of the game are suffering thousands of sub-concussive hits over the course of a season, along with diagnosed concussions, and that these cumulative traumas are eventually causing dementia and other brain illnesses. Just because most fans never see players suffering from brain damage later in life, doesn’t mean the sport is safer. It means fans are more insulated from its dangers. But it’s also simply not true that football players aren’t dying. They are, mostly in high school. Over the past two seasons, eighteen players have died as a direct result of playing football, according to the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research at the University of North Carolina. Last September and October, three high school players died in a single week, a rash of deaths that led Time to publish a cover story with the picture of a player taken moments before his death, asking “Is Football Worth It?” To Flynn, none of this inconvenient data exists. In his world, football remains an ideal way to instill discipline and teamwork and valor, and anyone who attacks it is an enemy of these values. But the parents who won’t let their kids play football aren’t attacking anything. They’re trying to protect their kids, based on some pretty terrifying—if preliminary—research. These aren’t acts of war. They’re acts of conscience. There is one basic point on which Flynn and I agree. We both see football as a moral undertaking. To him, it’s what makes boys into men. But if you’re going to argue that football is a moral undertaking, then you have to take the bad with the good. Which means reckoning with football as it currently exists, not cooking up some Knute Rockne fantasy. It means reckoning with the nihilistic greed of the NFL and NCAA, the way our allegiance to football has distorted the academic mission of high schools and colleges, the way football siphons money from the public till to further enrich billionaire owners, the way football distorts our perceptions of gender and race, and the way it normalizes violence. In a radio interview that followed our televised discussion, Flynn actually described the risks of football as “bumps and bruises.” This is a laughable notion to anyone who saw Washington quarterback Robert Griffin III get pummeled the other night. He suffered six brain traumas in the space of half an hour and left the field with “a concussion.” But I thought about Flynn’s blithe dismissal even more the day after our squabble, when I received a note from the mother of a seventeen-year-old boy who suffered a traumatic brain injury playing the game. “He is severely disabled for life,” she wrote. “Football is not worth losing a son. I don’t watch anymore.”Last week, I was asked to appear on "Outside the Lines," ESPN’s flagship news magazine, to discuss what football people tend to refer to, somewhat squeamishly, as “the Chris Borland situation.” Last March Borland, a star linebacker for the San Francisco 49ers, shocked the sports world by announcing that he was quitting the game after just one season, because he feared he might suffer brain damage if he continued to play. This was not exactly a far-fetched notion, given that the NFL itself had estimated—after years of denying any link between football and brain disease—that up to 30 percent of their former players would suffer from cognitive ailments such as Alzheimer’s and dementia. When I arrived at the studio, I was told I should be ready to discuss the “meaning” of the Chris Borland situation, which did not strike me as particularly elusive. When your employer announces in federal court documents that you have a one in three chance of being neurologically disabled in the course of doing your job, the smart money is on retiring. Still, I was excited to record the episode because "Outside the Lines" is easily the most intelligent and journalistically sophisticated show within the vast and ever-expanding kingdom of ESPN. The program eschews bombastic punditry and slavish promotion (cue the highlight porn) in favor of in-depth reporting and conversation. It came as something of a surprise, then, when I was informed, a few minutes before air-time, that the other guest on the show would be Daniel J. Flynn, the author of a 2013 book called “The War on Football: Saving America’s Game” and the sports editor at the right-wing website Breitbart.com. Flynn’s argument, obviously, is that football—and by extension masculine virtue—is under assault from the liberal media, greedy lawyers and doctors, and sissified citizens, all of whom have conspired to manufacture a Big Lie: that playing football is dangerous. In fact, football is safer than it’s ever been! Flynn makes at least one important point in his book—that the emergent medical research regarding the dangers of football are not yet fully understood, and thus shouldn’t be overstated. The rest is largely paranoid he-man propaganda, which conservative pundits use as a kind of literary ATM machine at this point. There’s no honest engagement with the complex and disturbing body of data that surrounds football circa 2015. Flynn’s narrative is sloppily jury-rigged to make football fans—especially those who are old white conservatives—feel like victims. But football fans aren’t victims. We’re the definitional opposite of victims. The beauty of being a football fan—and I was one for 40 years—is that you get to watch scads of thrilling violence from the safety of your own couch. For the most part, we’re protected even from having to confront the tragic results of that violence. Why? Because the players wear uniforms and helmets. Because brain injuries can’t really be seen. Because any player who gets seriously injured is removed from the viewer’s sight. Oh, and because there’s an entire media industry dedicated to promoting (and profiting by) the privileges and grievances of fandom. This is why we continue to view football as a magical kingdom where 270-pound supermen can smash into one another over and over and never get seriously injured. The folks at "Outside the Lines" know all this. In fact, the clip that ran right before Flynn and I went live—an in-depth interview with Borland—was one of the most thoughtful and moving pieces about football ever to air on ESPN. This is largely due to Borland himself. His concerns about the game are so humbly articulated and so obviously grounded in a basic human decency. “If you can’t make plays and make tackles and help the team win,” without putting your health at risk, he observed, “something’s wrong with the game, not the person making the plays.” So why did ESPN’s most intelligent show provide a guy like Daniel Flynn a platform for his agitprop? Most obviously, because conflict plays well on TV, and they wanted my opinions—as a vocal critic of the game—to clash with Flynn’s. The producers were probably also concerned about “balance.” If someone’s going to question the morality of football, we need that voice on the other side to defend it. News programs use the same logic when they invite climate deniers to comment on climate science. Or lobbyists hired by billionaires to hold forth on campaign finance reform, or income inequality. The pursuit of “objectivity” becomes the enabler of propaganda. In the case of football in particular, it’s worth noting that 99 percent of all coverage is promotional in nature. It feeds our passion for the game. Even the stories about various scandals aren’t aimed at questioning the inherent morality of football, but vilifying individual scapegoats who have tainted the game’s honor. And guys like Flynn serve as guardians of this status quo. The last thing they want is a candid discussion about the morality of America’s most popular sport. On the contrary, the whole idea is to disgorge talking points that reduce moral consideration to a brutish binary. You’re either fer football, or against it. It should come as no surprise that the conversation between Mr. Flynn and myself played out according to this script. Flynn insisted, over and over, that football is safer than it’s ever been. Why? Because players aren’t dying on the field, they’re simply getting concussed, which we should count as progress. This argument is dishonest on two levels. First, what the prevailing medical research actually suggests is that players at every level of the game are suffering thousands of sub-concussive hits over the course of a season, along with diagnosed concussions, and that these cumulative traumas are eventually causing dementia and other brain illnesses. Just because most fans never see players suffering from brain damage later in life, doesn’t mean the sport is safer. It means fans are more insulated from its dangers. But it’s also simply not true that football players aren’t dying. They are, mostly in high school. Over the past two seasons, eighteen players have died as a direct result of playing football, according to the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research at the University of North Carolina. Last September and October, three high school players died in a single week, a rash of deaths that led Time to publish a cover story with the picture of a player taken moments before his death, asking “Is Football Worth It?” To Flynn, none of this inconvenient data exists. In his world, football remains an ideal way to instill discipline and teamwork and valor, and anyone who attacks it is an enemy of these values. But the parents who won’t let their kids play football aren’t attacking anything. They’re trying to protect their kids, based on some pretty terrifying—if preliminary—research. These aren’t acts of war. They’re acts of conscience. There is one basic point on which Flynn and I agree. We both see football as a moral undertaking. To him, it’s what makes boys into men. But if you’re going to argue that football is a moral undertaking, then you have to take the bad with the good. Which means reckoning with football as it currently exists, not cooking up some Knute Rockne fantasy. It means reckoning with the nihilistic greed of the NFL and NCAA, the way our allegiance to football has distorted the academic mission of high schools and colleges, the way football siphons money from the public till to further enrich billionaire owners, the way football distorts our perceptions of gender and race, and the way it normalizes violence. In a radio interview that followed our televised discussion, Flynn actually described the risks of football as “bumps and bruises.” This is a laughable notion to anyone who saw Washington quarterback Robert Griffin III get pummeled the other night. He suffered six brain traumas in the space of half an hour and left the field with “a concussion.” But I thought about Flynn’s blithe dismissal even more the day after our squabble, when I received a note from the mother of a seventeen-year-old boy who suffered a traumatic brain injury playing the game. “He is severely disabled for life,” she wrote. “Football is not worth losing a son. I don’t watch anymore.”Last week, I was asked to appear on "Outside the Lines," ESPN’s flagship news magazine, to discuss what football people tend to refer to, somewhat squeamishly, as “the Chris Borland situation.” Last March Borland, a star linebacker for the San Francisco 49ers, shocked the sports world by announcing that he was quitting the game after just one season, because he feared he might suffer brain damage if he continued to play. This was not exactly a far-fetched notion, given that the NFL itself had estimated—after years of denying any link between football and brain disease—that up to 30 percent of their former players would suffer from cognitive ailments such as Alzheimer’s and dementia. When I arrived at the studio, I was told I should be ready to discuss the “meaning” of the Chris Borland situation, which did not strike me as particularly elusive. When your employer announces in federal court documents that you have a one in three chance of being neurologically disabled in the course of doing your job, the smart money is on retiring. Still, I was excited to record the episode because "Outside the Lines" is easily the most intelligent and journalistically sophisticated show within the vast and ever-expanding kingdom of ESPN. The program eschews bombastic punditry and slavish promotion (cue the highlight porn) in favor of in-depth reporting and conversation. It came as something of a surprise, then, when I was informed, a few minutes before air-time, that the other guest on the show would be Daniel J. Flynn, the author of a 2013 book called “The War on Football: Saving America’s Game” and the sports editor at the right-wing website Breitbart.com. Flynn’s argument, obviously, is that football—and by extension masculine virtue—is under assault from the liberal media, greedy lawyers and doctors, and sissified citizens, all of whom have conspired to manufacture a Big Lie: that playing football is dangerous. In fact, football is safer than it’s ever been! Flynn makes at least one important point in his book—that the emergent medical research regarding the dangers of football are not yet fully understood, and thus shouldn’t be overstated. The rest is largely paranoid he-man propaganda, which conservative pundits use as a kind of literary ATM machine at this point. There’s no honest engagement with the complex and disturbing body of data that surrounds football circa 2015. Flynn’s narrative is sloppily jury-rigged to make football fans—especially those who are old white conservatives—feel like victims. But football fans aren’t victims. We’re the definitional opposite of victims. The beauty of being a football fan—and I was one for 40 years—is that you get to watch scads of thrilling violence from the safety of your own couch. For the most part, we’re protected even from having to confront the tragic results of that violence. Why? Because the players wear uniforms and helmets. Because brain injuries can’t really be seen. Because any player who gets seriously injured is removed from the viewer’s sight. Oh, and because there’s an entire media industry dedicated to promoting (and profiting by) the privileges and grievances of fandom. This is why we continue to view football as a magical kingdom where 270-pound supermen can smash into one another over and over and never get seriously injured. The folks at "Outside the Lines" know all this. In fact, the clip that ran right before Flynn and I went live—an in-depth interview with Borland—was one of the most thoughtful and moving pieces about football ever to air on ESPN. This is largely due to Borland himself. His concerns about the game are so humbly articulated and so obviously grounded in a basic human decency. “If you can’t make plays and make tackles and help the team win,” without putting your health at risk, he observed, “something’s wrong with the game, not the person making the plays.” So why did ESPN’s most intelligent show provide a guy like Daniel Flynn a platform for his agitprop? Most obviously, because conflict plays well on TV, and they wanted my opinions—as a vocal critic of the game—to clash with Flynn’s. The producers were probably also concerned about “balance.” If someone’s going to question the morality of football, we need that voice on the other side to defend it. News programs use the same logic when they invite climate deniers to comment on climate science. Or lobbyists hired by billionaires to hold forth on campaign finance reform, or income inequality. The pursuit of “objectivity” becomes the enabler of propaganda. In the case of football in particular, it’s worth noting that 99 percent of all coverage is promotional in nature. It feeds our passion for the game. Even the stories about various scandals aren’t aimed at questioning the inherent morality of football, but vilifying individual scapegoats who have tainted the game’s honor. And guys like Flynn serve as guardians of this status quo. The last thing they want is a candid discussion about the morality of America’s most popular sport. On the contrary, the whole idea is to disgorge talking points that reduce moral consideration to a brutish binary. You’re either fer football, or against it. It should come as no surprise that the conversation between Mr. Flynn and myself played out according to this script. Flynn insisted, over and over, that football is safer than it’s ever been. Why? Because players aren’t dying on the field, they’re simply getting concussed, which we should count as progress. This argument is dishonest on two levels. First, what the prevailing medical research actually suggests is that players at every level of the game are suffering thousands of sub-concussive hits over the course of a season, along with diagnosed concussions, and that these cumulative traumas are eventually causing dementia and other brain illnesses. Just because most fans never see players suffering from brain damage later in life, doesn’t mean the sport is safer. It means fans are more insulated from its dangers. But it’s also simply not true that football players aren’t dying. They are, mostly in high school. Over the past two seasons, eighteen players have died as a direct result of playing football, according to the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research at the University of North Carolina. Last September and October, three high school players died in a single week, a rash of deaths that led Time to publish a cover story with the picture of a player taken moments before his death, asking “Is Football Worth It?” To Flynn, none of this inconvenient data exists. In his world, football remains an ideal way to instill discipline and teamwork and valor, and anyone who attacks it is an enemy of these values. But the parents who won’t let their kids play football aren’t attacking anything. They’re trying to protect their kids, based on some pretty terrifying—if preliminary—research. These aren’t acts of war. They’re acts of conscience. There is one basic point on which Flynn and I agree. We both see football as a moral undertaking. To him, it’s what makes boys into men. But if you’re going to argue that football is a moral undertaking, then you have to take the bad with the good. Which means reckoning with football as it currently exists, not cooking up some Knute Rockne fantasy. It means reckoning with the nihilistic greed of the NFL and NCAA, the way our allegiance to football has distorted the academic mission of high schools and colleges, the way football siphons money from the public till to further enrich billionaire owners, the way football distorts our perceptions of gender and race, and the way it normalizes violence. In a radio interview that followed our televised discussion, Flynn actually described the risks of football as “bumps and bruises.” This is a laughable notion to anyone who saw Washington quarterback Robert Griffin III get pummeled the other night. He suffered six brain traumas in the space of half an hour and left the field with “a concussion.” But I thought about Flynn’s blithe dismissal even more the day after our squabble, when I received a note from the mother of a seventeen-year-old boy who suffered a traumatic brain injury playing the game. “He is severely disabled for life,” she wrote. “Football is not worth losing a son. I don’t watch anymore.”
“Text neck” is a thing: 5 frightening maladies of the digital era
Face it, we’re all addicted to our electronic devices. You might know a few lonely holdouts, determined to stay detached and live off the grid, but their numbers are diminishing. Most of us are living in an ever more wired world, dependent on instantaneous communication and information, and at a panicky loss when we can’t find our smartphones. No one wants to hear it, but we’re paying a steep price for this behavior. Our tech habits are laying ruin to our physical and mental health and abilities. Being aware of the possible pitfalls is your first line of defense against premature aging, aches and diminished brain capacity. That and unplugging more often. Here are five digital maladies you should be aware of. 1. Text Neck You see them everywhere. Teenagers, middle-aged commuters, grocery shoppers of all ages, hunched over small objects they gaze at like little miracles, their necks jutting forward and down at an oddly excruciating angle. And they just stay there, seemingly frozen, unaware. These are the legions of people giving themselves “text neck,” a thoroughly modern condition that can lay ruin to one's neck and spine. People are hunched over smartphones, engrossed in text conversations, checking Facebook, returning emails, Instagramming photos, unaware that they are putting immense strain on their necks and spines that will plague them for a lifetime. The head is heavy under the best of circumstances, a weighty 12-pound object to support. Your neck and spine work tirelessly to hold it up it and are well set up to do so. Or they were, until smartphones came along and gave everyone incentive to cock their heads forward at an unnatural angle, for hours on end. As the Washington Post explains it: … as the neck bends forward and down, the weight on the cervical spine begins to increase. At a 15-degree angle, this weight is about 27 pounds, at 30 degrees it’s 40 pounds, at 45 degrees it’s 49 pounds, and at 60 degrees it’s 60 pounds. That’s the burden that comes with staring at a smartphone — the way millions do for hours every day, according to research published by Kenneth Hansraj in the National Library of Medicine. The study will appear next month in Surgical Technology International. Over time, researchers say, this poor posture, sometimes called “text neck,” can lead to early wear-and-tear on the spine, degeneration and even surgery.60 pounds!!! For perspective, that’s like carrying an 8-year-old around your neck for four hours a day. The problem is especially profound for young people, Dr. Hansraj told the Post, who may unwittingly and unconsciously be ushering in a lifetime of spinal pain. Some ways he recommends to fight it: Look down at your device with your eyes. No need to bend your neck. Exercise: Move your head from left to right several times. Use your hands to provide resistance and push your head against them, first forward and then backward. Stand in a doorway with your arms extended and push your chest forward to strengthen “the muscles of good posture,” Hansraj said. 2. Hearing Loss This is depressing. Hearing loss is not just for the elderly anymore. Most of us are very likely to have diminished hearing at younger and younger ages. If you’re not already having trouble hearing normal everyday speech, that day is probably coming, and sooner than you think. That is, unless you have actively and extraordinarily protected your hearing for basically your entire life. Early and pervasive hearing loss isn’t solely a result of our digital devices, it's also a product of the everyday noise we all consider normal, but is actually at a decibel level that does damage: leaf blowers, lawn mowers, sirens, screeching subway trains, hair dryers, loud rock concerts, car alarms, even overly loud sound systems at restaurants and movies, and certain kid’s toys can all be, well, deafening. All of these loud noises set our fragile eardrums vibrating and if sustained enough and loud enough can damage the whole irreplaceable apparatus. But the widespread use of portable music devices is pushing this epidemic into the stratosphere. According to the New York Times, “a national study in 2006 by the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association found that among users of portable music devices, 35 percent of adults and up to 59 percent of teenagers reported listening at loud volumes.” Earbuds are potentially worse than headphones, but if whatever you are using is piping things in at a volume sufficient to drown out background noise, you might want to start learning sign language now. Hearing damage is cumulative and irreversible. Carry around some ear plugs anyway, and turn down the volume. 3. Brain Scramble What constant digital media use does to our brains is a big, seemingly speculative topic. But science is beginning to catch up, and it’s not pretty. Simply put, overuse of smartphones makes us less productive, less rested, more likely to forget things, and in a word, dumber. Lots of people spend their days at their computer and their nights checking their phones, returning texts and emails. This, according to a recentstudy conducted by University of Florida, Michigan State University and University of Washington, robs people of the crucial ability to recharge in their off hours. Productivity, not to mention mental health, are both diminished. Checking multiple devices and screens throughout the day has also perpetuated the idea that people have become better multitaskers, more able to flit between tasks, refocus quickly and get more things done, all thanks to the miracles of technology. Dream on. According to researchers, constant multitasking whittles away our ability to concentrate for sustained periods of time, kind of a prerequisite for meaningful accomplishments. Eventually, even when all the screens are shut off, our concentration is shot. “The people we talk with continually said, look, when I really have to concentrate, I turn off everything and I am laser-focused,” Stanford University professor Clifford Nass told NPR. “And unfortunately, they've developed habits of mind that make it impossible for them to be laser-focused. They're suckers for irrelevancy. They just can't keep on-task.” Read books any more? I barely do, though I do read voluminously online. It turns out I’m paying a cognitive and possible psychological toll for that. Reading on a screen is simply not as beneficial as reading in print. One study in 2014, “found that readers of a short mystery story on a Kindle were significantly worse at remembering the order of events than those who read the same story in paperback,” according to Rachel Grate at Mic. And the more you read digitally, the harder it gets to do a deep dive into an actual book. The other benefits of reading include increased empathy, decreased stress and better sleeping. Both are significantly enhanced by reading print as opposed to digital. Much has also been written about the destructive impact of the blue light emitted by digital devices on circadian rhythms, the body’s biological clock, resulting in poorer sleep and the resulting panoply of physical and mental health problems. Your inability to detach from devices will also both affect and infect the people around you, friends, work peers and family. When we lose the crucial ability to detach, everyone’s overall mental health and well-being suffers. Parenting experts have pointed out that children are scarred by having parents who are unavailable because they are constantly on their phones. So, if not for yourself, at least unplug for the sake of others you care about. Read more here. 4. Computer Face Okay, enough about the brain. Spending inordinate amounts of time in front of a computer is ruining people’s looks! Your looks! Seriously, if that doesn’t convince you to take more screen breaks, we don’t know what will. Cosmetic surgeons are reporting that more women are developing the dreaded “computer face,” a combination of permanent frown lines, wrinkles around the eyes from squinting, jowls (jowls!) and double necks from looking down for long periods of time. "If you spend most of the time looking down then the neck muscles shorten and go saggy, eventually giving you a second neck,” cosmetic surgeon Michael Prager told the Daily Mail. And because when people work and are under stress they frequently wear serious or even grumpy expressions on their faces, those lines are becoming permanently etched on younger faces. The solution: Get up, stretch your neck, change your expression, move your screen to eye level. And Botox, of course, according to plastic surgeons, anyway. No word yet on the longterm effects of the dreaded “selfie face,” but it can’t be good. 5. Computer Vision Syndrome The bad news, perhaps unsurprising, is that sitting in front of a computer screen hour after hour, week after week, year after year as many jobs require you to do can cause pain and discomfort to the eyes, blurred vision and headaches. The good news is that eye doctors have yet to find that Computer Vision Syndrome causes permanent eye damage. And there is something you can do if you are experiencing the negative consequences of sitting in front of a computer screen too much, besides getting up and doing something else, like forever, which might not be an option. A lot of this eye strain can be eliminated by making changes in your work environment. The Scheie Eye Institute at Penn Medical Center says, “Reducing glare and harsh reflections on the computer screen by modifying the lighting in the room, closing window shades, changing the contrast or brightness of the screen, or attaching a filter or hood to the monitor,” will all help. They also recommend:
“Moving the computer screen to improve the comfort of the eyes. The screen should be at or just beyond an arm's length away (about 20 to 26 inches) to give the eyes a comfortable focusing distance. The screen should also stand straight in front of the face instead of off to the side to ease eyestrain. The center of the monitor should be about four to eight inches lower than the eyes to allow the neck to relax and to lessen the exposed surface area of the eye, which will reduce dryness and itching.”You're probably ready for a break from the screen right about now.
Face it, we’re all addicted to our electronic devices. You might know a few lonely holdouts, determined to stay detached and live off the grid, but their numbers are diminishing. Most of us are living in an ever more wired world, dependent on instantaneous communication and information, and at a panicky loss when we can’t find our smartphones. No one wants to hear it, but we’re paying a steep price for this behavior. Our tech habits are laying ruin to our physical and mental health and abilities. Being aware of the possible pitfalls is your first line of defense against premature aging, aches and diminished brain capacity. That and unplugging more often. Here are five digital maladies you should be aware of. 1. Text Neck You see them everywhere. Teenagers, middle-aged commuters, grocery shoppers of all ages, hunched over small objects they gaze at like little miracles, their necks jutting forward and down at an oddly excruciating angle. And they just stay there, seemingly frozen, unaware. These are the legions of people giving themselves “text neck,” a thoroughly modern condition that can lay ruin to one's neck and spine. People are hunched over smartphones, engrossed in text conversations, checking Facebook, returning emails, Instagramming photos, unaware that they are putting immense strain on their necks and spines that will plague them for a lifetime. The head is heavy under the best of circumstances, a weighty 12-pound object to support. Your neck and spine work tirelessly to hold it up it and are well set up to do so. Or they were, until smartphones came along and gave everyone incentive to cock their heads forward at an unnatural angle, for hours on end. As the Washington Post explains it: … as the neck bends forward and down, the weight on the cervical spine begins to increase. At a 15-degree angle, this weight is about 27 pounds, at 30 degrees it’s 40 pounds, at 45 degrees it’s 49 pounds, and at 60 degrees it’s 60 pounds. That’s the burden that comes with staring at a smartphone — the way millions do for hours every day, according to research published by Kenneth Hansraj in the National Library of Medicine. The study will appear next month in Surgical Technology International. Over time, researchers say, this poor posture, sometimes called “text neck,” can lead to early wear-and-tear on the spine, degeneration and even surgery.60 pounds!!! For perspective, that’s like carrying an 8-year-old around your neck for four hours a day. The problem is especially profound for young people, Dr. Hansraj told the Post, who may unwittingly and unconsciously be ushering in a lifetime of spinal pain. Some ways he recommends to fight it: Look down at your device with your eyes. No need to bend your neck. Exercise: Move your head from left to right several times. Use your hands to provide resistance and push your head against them, first forward and then backward. Stand in a doorway with your arms extended and push your chest forward to strengthen “the muscles of good posture,” Hansraj said. 2. Hearing Loss This is depressing. Hearing loss is not just for the elderly anymore. Most of us are very likely to have diminished hearing at younger and younger ages. If you’re not already having trouble hearing normal everyday speech, that day is probably coming, and sooner than you think. That is, unless you have actively and extraordinarily protected your hearing for basically your entire life. Early and pervasive hearing loss isn’t solely a result of our digital devices, it's also a product of the everyday noise we all consider normal, but is actually at a decibel level that does damage: leaf blowers, lawn mowers, sirens, screeching subway trains, hair dryers, loud rock concerts, car alarms, even overly loud sound systems at restaurants and movies, and certain kid’s toys can all be, well, deafening. All of these loud noises set our fragile eardrums vibrating and if sustained enough and loud enough can damage the whole irreplaceable apparatus. But the widespread use of portable music devices is pushing this epidemic into the stratosphere. According to the New York Times, “a national study in 2006 by the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association found that among users of portable music devices, 35 percent of adults and up to 59 percent of teenagers reported listening at loud volumes.” Earbuds are potentially worse than headphones, but if whatever you are using is piping things in at a volume sufficient to drown out background noise, you might want to start learning sign language now. Hearing damage is cumulative and irreversible. Carry around some ear plugs anyway, and turn down the volume. 3. Brain Scramble What constant digital media use does to our brains is a big, seemingly speculative topic. But science is beginning to catch up, and it’s not pretty. Simply put, overuse of smartphones makes us less productive, less rested, more likely to forget things, and in a word, dumber. Lots of people spend their days at their computer and their nights checking their phones, returning texts and emails. This, according to a recentstudy conducted by University of Florida, Michigan State University and University of Washington, robs people of the crucial ability to recharge in their off hours. Productivity, not to mention mental health, are both diminished. Checking multiple devices and screens throughout the day has also perpetuated the idea that people have become better multitaskers, more able to flit between tasks, refocus quickly and get more things done, all thanks to the miracles of technology. Dream on. According to researchers, constant multitasking whittles away our ability to concentrate for sustained periods of time, kind of a prerequisite for meaningful accomplishments. Eventually, even when all the screens are shut off, our concentration is shot. “The people we talk with continually said, look, when I really have to concentrate, I turn off everything and I am laser-focused,” Stanford University professor Clifford Nass told NPR. “And unfortunately, they've developed habits of mind that make it impossible for them to be laser-focused. They're suckers for irrelevancy. They just can't keep on-task.” Read books any more? I barely do, though I do read voluminously online. It turns out I’m paying a cognitive and possible psychological toll for that. Reading on a screen is simply not as beneficial as reading in print. One study in 2014, “found that readers of a short mystery story on a Kindle were significantly worse at remembering the order of events than those who read the same story in paperback,” according to Rachel Grate at Mic. And the more you read digitally, the harder it gets to do a deep dive into an actual book. The other benefits of reading include increased empathy, decreased stress and better sleeping. Both are significantly enhanced by reading print as opposed to digital. Much has also been written about the destructive impact of the blue light emitted by digital devices on circadian rhythms, the body’s biological clock, resulting in poorer sleep and the resulting panoply of physical and mental health problems. Your inability to detach from devices will also both affect and infect the people around you, friends, work peers and family. When we lose the crucial ability to detach, everyone’s overall mental health and well-being suffers. Parenting experts have pointed out that children are scarred by having parents who are unavailable because they are constantly on their phones. So, if not for yourself, at least unplug for the sake of others you care about. Read more here. 4. Computer Face Okay, enough about the brain. Spending inordinate amounts of time in front of a computer is ruining people’s looks! Your looks! Seriously, if that doesn’t convince you to take more screen breaks, we don’t know what will. Cosmetic surgeons are reporting that more women are developing the dreaded “computer face,” a combination of permanent frown lines, wrinkles around the eyes from squinting, jowls (jowls!) and double necks from looking down for long periods of time. "If you spend most of the time looking down then the neck muscles shorten and go saggy, eventually giving you a second neck,” cosmetic surgeon Michael Prager told the Daily Mail. And because when people work and are under stress they frequently wear serious or even grumpy expressions on their faces, those lines are becoming permanently etched on younger faces. The solution: Get up, stretch your neck, change your expression, move your screen to eye level. And Botox, of course, according to plastic surgeons, anyway. No word yet on the longterm effects of the dreaded “selfie face,” but it can’t be good. 5. Computer Vision Syndrome The bad news, perhaps unsurprising, is that sitting in front of a computer screen hour after hour, week after week, year after year as many jobs require you to do can cause pain and discomfort to the eyes, blurred vision and headaches. The good news is that eye doctors have yet to find that Computer Vision Syndrome causes permanent eye damage. And there is something you can do if you are experiencing the negative consequences of sitting in front of a computer screen too much, besides getting up and doing something else, like forever, which might not be an option. A lot of this eye strain can be eliminated by making changes in your work environment. The Scheie Eye Institute at Penn Medical Center says, “Reducing glare and harsh reflections on the computer screen by modifying the lighting in the room, closing window shades, changing the contrast or brightness of the screen, or attaching a filter or hood to the monitor,” will all help. They also recommend:
“Moving the computer screen to improve the comfort of the eyes. The screen should be at or just beyond an arm's length away (about 20 to 26 inches) to give the eyes a comfortable focusing distance. The screen should also stand straight in front of the face instead of off to the side to ease eyestrain. The center of the monitor should be about four to eight inches lower than the eyes to allow the neck to relax and to lessen the exposed surface area of the eye, which will reduce dryness and itching.”You're probably ready for a break from the screen right about now.
Jeb is the worst, part infinity: Bush says “anchor babies” remark is “frankly more related to Asian people”
Jeb Bush said today that he has no worries that his use of the offensive "anchor baby" term would harm his ability to win the Hispanic vote, because he thinks it's actually "more related to Asian people." During his obligatory visit to the U.S.-Mexico border as one of 17 Republicans vying for the GOP presidential nomination, Bush once again found himself at the center of a controversy surrounding his use of the derogatory reference to the U.S. born children of undocumented immigrants. Bush attempted to clarify that when he said "anchor babies" during a radio interview last week, he meant Asians who come in and "take advantage" of birthright citizenship not Hispanics. Bush blamed Hillary Clinton's campaign for suggesting the term is derogatory, calling the controversy "ludicrous." Bush, who's wife is a Mexican immigrant, claimed that "frankly, it's more related to Asian people coming into our country, having children, in that organized effort taking advantage of a noble concept, which is birthright citizenship" and said he wasn't worried that his use of the term would impact his relationship with Hispanic voters:
What I was talking about was the specific case of fraud being committed where there's organized efforts—and frankly it's more related to Asian people—coming into our country, having children, in that organized efforts, taking advantage of a noble concept, which is birthright citizenship. I support the 14th amendment. Nothing I've said should be viewed as derogatory toward immigrants at all.Bush then called for people to "step back and chill out" on political correctness, decrying that he had been unfairly taken out of context: Clinton's campaign immediately blasted Bush's clarification, tweeting that "whether he meant Latinos, Asians, or other immigrants he's just WRONG." (h/t Gawker)Jeb Bush said today that he has no worries that his use of the offensive "anchor baby" term would harm his ability to win the Hispanic vote, because he thinks it's actually "more related to Asian people." During his obligatory visit to the U.S.-Mexico border as one of 17 Republicans vying for the GOP presidential nomination, Bush once again found himself at the center of a controversy surrounding his use of the derogatory reference to the U.S. born children of undocumented immigrants. Bush attempted to clarify that when he said "anchor babies" during a radio interview last week, he meant Asians who come in and "take advantage" of birthright citizenship not Hispanics. Bush blamed Hillary Clinton's campaign for suggesting the term is derogatory, calling the controversy "ludicrous." Bush, who's wife is a Mexican immigrant, claimed that "frankly, it's more related to Asian people coming into our country, having children, in that organized effort taking advantage of a noble concept, which is birthright citizenship" and said he wasn't worried that his use of the term would impact his relationship with Hispanic voters:
What I was talking about was the specific case of fraud being committed where there's organized efforts—and frankly it's more related to Asian people—coming into our country, having children, in that organized efforts, taking advantage of a noble concept, which is birthright citizenship. I support the 14th amendment. Nothing I've said should be viewed as derogatory toward immigrants at all.Bush then called for people to "step back and chill out" on political correctness, decrying that he had been unfairly taken out of context: Clinton's campaign immediately blasted Bush's clarification, tweeting that "whether he meant Latinos, Asians, or other immigrants he's just WRONG." (h/t Gawker)
Scott Walker is just begging you to notice him: Now he wants Obama to cancel Chinese leader’s visit
Republican presidential frontrunner and pacesetter Donald Trump blamed today's massive global stock sell-off on China's slumping economy this morning, so naturally, this afternoon, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker called on President Barack Obama to cancel an upcoming state visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping. Minutes after the opening bell today, the Dow Jones industrial average plunged 1,089 points before rebounding only to eventually close 588 points down as China's Shanghai composite index saw an 8.5 percent drop. In an apparent rush to one-up both Donald Trump's warning of an impending Chinese caused U.S. economic depression and Gov. Chris Christie's attempt to pin the sell-off to President Obama, Walker, whose 2016 campaign has faltered in recent weeks, added his own political analysis -- calling on Obama to spurn the leader of an economic and geopolitical powerhouse:
Americans are struggling to cope with the fall in today’s markets driven in part by China’s slowing economy and the fact that they actively manipulate their economy. Rather than honoring Chinese President Xi Jinping with an official state visit next month, President Obama should focus on holding China accountable over its increasing attempts to undermine U.S. interests.Walker said it was time for the Obama administration to hold China “accountable” for recent cyberattacks on the U.S. office of personnel management, rumored to have come from the country. Walker also cited China's "persistent persecution of Christians," before demanding that President Obama cancel next month's planned visit. “There’s serious work to be done rather than pomp and circumstance,” Walker said: [embedtweet id=635902042553339904]
Anatomy of a Hillary Clinton pseudo-scandal: How Republicans and their media lackeys are trying to manufacture her downfall
Many years ago when political blogging was in its infancy, I coined the phrase "Cokie's Law," which referred to a specific comment by pundit Cokie Roberts about the Lewinsky scandal that illustrated the precise way the beltway media excused their propensity for cheap gossip and scandalmongering. In discussing whether or not Hillary Clinton had actually blamed her husband's childhood for his philandering, Roberts said:
"At this point it doesn't much matter whether she said it or not because it's become part of the culture. I was at the beauty parlor yesterday and this was all anyone was talking about."Cokie's Law is the axiom that says the press can pass judgement about anything once it's "out there" regardless of whether or not what's "out there" is true. This allows them to skip doing boring rebuttals of the facts at hand and instead hold forth at length about how it bears on the subject's "judgement" and the "appearance" of wrongdoing without ever proving that what they did was wrong. You see, if the person being discussed were "competent," it wouldn't be "out there" in the first place, so even if it is based upon entirely specious speculation, it's his or her own fault for inspiring people to speculate so speciously. It all goes back to their "character," which nobody is more equipped to analyze and dissect than celebrity political reporters and pundits. And even if the charges are patently false, they are always far too complicated to rebut in detail; and, anyway, the other side says something different (aka "he said/she said), so who's really to say what's true and what isn't? It's still the responsibility of the target of those charges because he or she shouldn't have allowed him or herself to be in a position where someone could make false charges in the first place. This is where we are with Clinton's email pseudo-scandal from yesterday morning's "Meet the Press":
CHUCK TODD: Let me bring in the panel. Jon Ralston, the "lawyerly" answer there from Howard Dean [who said that in Clinton's public responses to the email controversy she sounded too much like a lawyer]. I thought was an interesting way... Every defense they've sounded off, that's what it sounds like. A lawyer, not a political consultant.
JON RALSTON: I guess what I thought from the beginning on that, I thought that was terrible for her that Governor Dean said that. But Chuck, "it depends on what the definition of classified is," I think is what people out there in real America are thinking. Even if it wasn't classified, why did she have to do this? Was there sensitive information on there? Why did she have that on an insecure server? This is not, as Governor Dean said, a purely media-manufactured story. Sure, the media's been all over it. But it's her handling of it. You know, someone should've given her this advice before that appearance in, by the way, Nevada, where she's at-- Here's the first thing you shouldn't do Hillary, joke about it. Don't joke about it, because people, even if they don't understand all the nuances, they know it's serious. So don't say, "Wipe it with a cloth," because you know in this world now, it's going to go viral right away, which of course it did.
CHUCK TODD: Amy is there a competency thing about this? You know, I had somebody email me and they go, "You know what, I don't think it's a big deal, but jeez, if she can't handle this mess, what does it say about her managerial expertise as president?"
AMY WALTER: Well, it goes to the heart of what her campaign message is, is I'm one of you, and I'm going to fight for you. But the reality is, and this is where the campaign still has its biggest problem, is explaining why on earth she set up a separate server in the first place. Normal people don't do that. Normal people who work in the government know what they have to do. So that just distances her even more, and it sets up this sense that she is--
CHUCK TODD: Special. Elite.
AMY WALTER: --she's special, she's elite, she's--
CHUCK TODD: Doesn't play by the rules.
AMY WALTER: And that to me is the bigger problem here.As for the "elite, special" charge, that's just cheap armchair psychoanalysis of both Clinton and the electorate. It's not political analysis; it's beltway parlor games, and it's not really worth discussing. Both Job Ralston and Amy Walter are excellent reporters and analysts but there's something about Clinton that turns all of them in to Cokie Roberts on the Sunday shows. But let's dispense with the rest of this right now, because it's not hard to do. First of all, the issue does depend on what the definition of classified is. If that's what the American people are thinking, then bravo, because the fact is that none of the emails that have been flagged were classified when she handled them. Various departments are looking at them now and reportedly deciding that maybe they should have been. That's really it, as far as the "classified documents" issue is concerned, and the press shouldn't be dismissive of that fact. As for whether she should have had a separate email server, well -- she did and that's that. They'll be arguing about whether that was a good decision forever, but it no more speaks to her competence than it speaks to the competence of Colin Powell, who also used a personal email for his official correspondence and deleted all of them when he left. Or Jeb Bush, for that matter, who also had a personal server. It was obviously considered an innocuous procedure at the time, but if Clinton had been clairvoyant, as they apparently believe she should have been, she would have seen into the future, known that congressional Republicans would hold nine separate investigations into a bogus scandal called "Benghazi," and would have seen that they would throw everything at the wall -- and the one thing that would stick was her use of a private email server. It's fair to assume that, had she known all that, she would have done something differently to avoid the "appearance" of wrongdoing. But what's important to note in all this that nothing that happened on that email server appears to have been corrupt, unethical, illegal or dangerous. It's all smoke, no fire. And that's the point. The smoke obscures the truth and makes everything vague and formless, leaving only an impression of being under siege. One of the major effects of the patented "Clinton Scandal" that's become a fixture of political conversation over the past two decades is the helplessness in engenders in Democrats who feel like they are swimming in quicksand trying to make sense of the whole thing. They know it's not a real scandal, and yet the press is blatantly aroused by the opportunity to speculate wildly about "what it all means" while the Republicans smugly repeat their talking points with robotic military precision. But again, that's the point. It's even got a name: "Clinton Fatigue," which Charles Krauthammer, among others, declared was already in full effect many months ago:
Hillary Clinton is running on two things: gender and name. Gender is not to be underestimated. It will make her the Democratic nominee. The name is equally valuable. It evokes the warm memory of the golden 1990s, a decade of peace and prosperity during our holiday from history.
Now breaking through, however, is a stark reminder of the underside of that Clinton decade: the chicanery, the sleaze, the dodging, the parsing, the wordplay. It’s a dual legacy that Hillary Clinton cannot escape and that will be a permanent drag on her candidacy.
You can feel it. It’s a recurrence of an old ailment. It was bound to set in, but not this soon. What you’re feeling now is Early Onset Clinton Fatigue. The CDC is recommending elaborate precautions. Forget it. The only known cure is Elizabeth Warren.You know that Charles Krauthammer only has the best interests of the Democratic party at heart, right? You can almost hear him laughing maniacally as he wrote that. I know many Democrats, would have loved to see Elizabeth Warren run, and many women, including yours truly, especially would have been thrilled to see two such formidable women leaders go head to head on the campaign trail. And Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden are welcome to join in too, as is any other Democrats who wants to try his or her hand. This is democracy and nobody's automatically entitled to be president. But there are millions of Democrats who also really don't like the idea that Republicans are manipulating the system to choose their own rival and neither do they care for the media deciding who should be running on a Democratic ticket. And that's very much what's going on here. The Benghazi investigations are a joke, but they are providing the GOP with a excuse to go nosing around in Clinton's business in a way that gives them access to information they can dribble out over time to create the atmosphere I describe. The political press is, as usual, helping to do their dirty work for them. They are Ahab's obsessively chasing their white whale with visions of pulitzers dancing in their heads. The pundits all assumed that President Clinton would have to resign in 1998, but they underestimated the people they were dealing with. I'm not talking about the Clintons. I'm talking about the American people -- who, unlike the beltway elites who get nervous at the sound of a loud noise, tend to respond to this political gambit with a stubborn insistence that they should be the ones to make these judgements and choose their own leaders. Democratic primary voters may very well decide they don't want Clinton as the nominee for president. But it's highly doubtful they want a bunch of beltway elites and Republicans telling them they can't have her. Indeed, unlike the establishment, it tends to energize them to do the opposite. Just ask Newt Gingrich who lost his Speakership when he bet the House in 1998 on Clinton being vanquished by Ken Starr. Many years ago when political blogging was in its infancy, I coined the phrase "Cokie's Law," which referred to a specific comment by pundit Cokie Roberts about the Lewinsky scandal that illustrated the precise way the beltway media excused their propensity for cheap gossip and scandalmongering. In discussing whether or not Hillary Clinton had actually blamed her husband's childhood for his philandering, Roberts said:
"At this point it doesn't much matter whether she said it or not because it's become part of the culture. I was at the beauty parlor yesterday and this was all anyone was talking about."Cokie's Law is the axiom that says the press can pass judgement about anything once it's "out there" regardless of whether or not what's "out there" is true. This allows them to skip doing boring rebuttals of the facts at hand and instead hold forth at length about how it bears on the subject's "judgement" and the "appearance" of wrongdoing without ever proving that what they did was wrong. You see, if the person being discussed were "competent," it wouldn't be "out there" in the first place, so even if it is based upon entirely specious speculation, it's his or her own fault for inspiring people to speculate so speciously. It all goes back to their "character," which nobody is more equipped to analyze and dissect than celebrity political reporters and pundits. And even if the charges are patently false, they are always far too complicated to rebut in detail; and, anyway, the other side says something different (aka "he said/she said), so who's really to say what's true and what isn't? It's still the responsibility of the target of those charges because he or she shouldn't have allowed him or herself to be in a position where someone could make false charges in the first place. This is where we are with Clinton's email pseudo-scandal from yesterday morning's "Meet the Press":
CHUCK TODD: Let me bring in the panel. Jon Ralston, the "lawyerly" answer there from Howard Dean [who said that in Clinton's public responses to the email controversy she sounded too much like a lawyer]. I thought was an interesting way... Every defense they've sounded off, that's what it sounds like. A lawyer, not a political consultant.
JON RALSTON: I guess what I thought from the beginning on that, I thought that was terrible for her that Governor Dean said that. But Chuck, "it depends on what the definition of classified is," I think is what people out there in real America are thinking. Even if it wasn't classified, why did she have to do this? Was there sensitive information on there? Why did she have that on an insecure server? This is not, as Governor Dean said, a purely media-manufactured story. Sure, the media's been all over it. But it's her handling of it. You know, someone should've given her this advice before that appearance in, by the way, Nevada, where she's at-- Here's the first thing you shouldn't do Hillary, joke about it. Don't joke about it, because people, even if they don't understand all the nuances, they know it's serious. So don't say, "Wipe it with a cloth," because you know in this world now, it's going to go viral right away, which of course it did.
CHUCK TODD: Amy is there a competency thing about this? You know, I had somebody email me and they go, "You know what, I don't think it's a big deal, but jeez, if she can't handle this mess, what does it say about her managerial expertise as president?"
AMY WALTER: Well, it goes to the heart of what her campaign message is, is I'm one of you, and I'm going to fight for you. But the reality is, and this is where the campaign still has its biggest problem, is explaining why on earth she set up a separate server in the first place. Normal people don't do that. Normal people who work in the government know what they have to do. So that just distances her even more, and it sets up this sense that she is--
CHUCK TODD: Special. Elite.
AMY WALTER: --she's special, she's elite, she's--
CHUCK TODD: Doesn't play by the rules.
AMY WALTER: And that to me is the bigger problem here.As for the "elite, special" charge, that's just cheap armchair psychoanalysis of both Clinton and the electorate. It's not political analysis; it's beltway parlor games, and it's not really worth discussing. Both Job Ralston and Amy Walter are excellent reporters and analysts but there's something about Clinton that turns all of them in to Cokie Roberts on the Sunday shows. But let's dispense with the rest of this right now, because it's not hard to do. First of all, the issue does depend on what the definition of classified is. If that's what the American people are thinking, then bravo, because the fact is that none of the emails that have been flagged were classified when she handled them. Various departments are looking at them now and reportedly deciding that maybe they should have been. That's really it, as far as the "classified documents" issue is concerned, and the press shouldn't be dismissive of that fact. As for whether she should have had a separate email server, well -- she did and that's that. They'll be arguing about whether that was a good decision forever, but it no more speaks to her competence than it speaks to the competence of Colin Powell, who also used a personal email for his official correspondence and deleted all of them when he left. Or Jeb Bush, for that matter, who also had a personal server. It was obviously considered an innocuous procedure at the time, but if Clinton had been clairvoyant, as they apparently believe she should have been, she would have seen into the future, known that congressional Republicans would hold nine separate investigations into a bogus scandal called "Benghazi," and would have seen that they would throw everything at the wall -- and the one thing that would stick was her use of a private email server. It's fair to assume that, had she known all that, she would have done something differently to avoid the "appearance" of wrongdoing. But what's important to note in all this that nothing that happened on that email server appears to have been corrupt, unethical, illegal or dangerous. It's all smoke, no fire. And that's the point. The smoke obscures the truth and makes everything vague and formless, leaving only an impression of being under siege. One of the major effects of the patented "Clinton Scandal" that's become a fixture of political conversation over the past two decades is the helplessness in engenders in Democrats who feel like they are swimming in quicksand trying to make sense of the whole thing. They know it's not a real scandal, and yet the press is blatantly aroused by the opportunity to speculate wildly about "what it all means" while the Republicans smugly repeat their talking points with robotic military precision. But again, that's the point. It's even got a name: "Clinton Fatigue," which Charles Krauthammer, among others, declared was already in full effect many months ago:
Hillary Clinton is running on two things: gender and name. Gender is not to be underestimated. It will make her the Democratic nominee. The name is equally valuable. It evokes the warm memory of the golden 1990s, a decade of peace and prosperity during our holiday from history.
Now breaking through, however, is a stark reminder of the underside of that Clinton decade: the chicanery, the sleaze, the dodging, the parsing, the wordplay. It’s a dual legacy that Hillary Clinton cannot escape and that will be a permanent drag on her candidacy.
You can feel it. It’s a recurrence of an old ailment. It was bound to set in, but not this soon. What you’re feeling now is Early Onset Clinton Fatigue. The CDC is recommending elaborate precautions. Forget it. The only known cure is Elizabeth Warren.You know that Charles Krauthammer only has the best interests of the Democratic party at heart, right? You can almost hear him laughing maniacally as he wrote that. I know many Democrats, would have loved to see Elizabeth Warren run, and many women, including yours truly, especially would have been thrilled to see two such formidable women leaders go head to head on the campaign trail. And Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden are welcome to join in too, as is any other Democrats who wants to try his or her hand. This is democracy and nobody's automatically entitled to be president. But there are millions of Democrats who also really don't like the idea that Republicans are manipulating the system to choose their own rival and neither do they care for the media deciding who should be running on a Democratic ticket. And that's very much what's going on here. The Benghazi investigations are a joke, but they are providing the GOP with a excuse to go nosing around in Clinton's business in a way that gives them access to information they can dribble out over time to create the atmosphere I describe. The political press is, as usual, helping to do their dirty work for them. They are Ahab's obsessively chasing their white whale with visions of pulitzers dancing in their heads. The pundits all assumed that President Clinton would have to resign in 1998, but they underestimated the people they were dealing with. I'm not talking about the Clintons. I'm talking about the American people -- who, unlike the beltway elites who get nervous at the sound of a loud noise, tend to respond to this political gambit with a stubborn insistence that they should be the ones to make these judgements and choose their own leaders. Democratic primary voters may very well decide they don't want Clinton as the nominee for president. But it's highly doubtful they want a bunch of beltway elites and Republicans telling them they can't have her. Indeed, unlike the establishment, it tends to energize them to do the opposite. Just ask Newt Gingrich who lost his Speakership when he bet the House in 1998 on Clinton being vanquished by Ken Starr.
Tracy Morgan has married his longtime girlfriend
Fourteen months after the horrific car accident that left him severely injured and killed fellow passenger James McNair, Tracy Morgan seems well on the road to recovery. In October, the “Saturday Night Live” alum will return to host the show, marking his first major television appearance since the crash. And in a milestone of a more personal nature, People reports Morgan his longtime fiancee Megan Wollover tied the knot in an emotional ceremony Sunday night. In an interview with People back in June, Morgan told the magazine that he was undergoing intensive physical therapy in the hopes that he might eventually be able to walk down the aisle with his wife. “I don’t want to walk my wife down the aisle with a cane or in a wheelchair,” said Morgan, who suffered a traumatic brain injury in the accident as well as a broken leg and ribs. “So I had to go hard with the therapy… I had to get better. There was no ifs, ands or butts about it.” According to People, there was “not a cane in sight” at Sunday’s wedding, which took place in front of close friends and family. "After almost losing Tracy last year, I am so grateful to finally be married to the love of my life,” Wollover told People. "We have been through so much and our love is stronger for it.”Fourteen months after the horrific car accident that left him severely injured and killed fellow passenger James McNair, Tracy Morgan seems well on the road to recovery. In October, the “Saturday Night Live” alum will return to host the show, marking his first major television appearance since the crash. And in a milestone of a more personal nature, People reports Morgan his longtime fiancee Megan Wollover tied the knot in an emotional ceremony Sunday night. In an interview with People back in June, Morgan told the magazine that he was undergoing intensive physical therapy in the hopes that he might eventually be able to walk down the aisle with his wife. “I don’t want to walk my wife down the aisle with a cane or in a wheelchair,” said Morgan, who suffered a traumatic brain injury in the accident as well as a broken leg and ribs. “So I had to go hard with the therapy… I had to get better. There was no ifs, ands or butts about it.” According to People, there was “not a cane in sight” at Sunday’s wedding, which took place in front of close friends and family. "After almost losing Tracy last year, I am so grateful to finally be married to the love of my life,” Wollover told People. "We have been through so much and our love is stronger for it.”Fourteen months after the horrific car accident that left him severely injured and killed fellow passenger James McNair, Tracy Morgan seems well on the road to recovery. In October, the “Saturday Night Live” alum will return to host the show, marking his first major television appearance since the crash. And in a milestone of a more personal nature, People reports Morgan his longtime fiancee Megan Wollover tied the knot in an emotional ceremony Sunday night. In an interview with People back in June, Morgan told the magazine that he was undergoing intensive physical therapy in the hopes that he might eventually be able to walk down the aisle with his wife. “I don’t want to walk my wife down the aisle with a cane or in a wheelchair,” said Morgan, who suffered a traumatic brain injury in the accident as well as a broken leg and ribs. “So I had to go hard with the therapy… I had to get better. There was no ifs, ands or butts about it.” According to People, there was “not a cane in sight” at Sunday’s wedding, which took place in front of close friends and family. "After almost losing Tracy last year, I am so grateful to finally be married to the love of my life,” Wollover told People. "We have been through so much and our love is stronger for it.”Fourteen months after the horrific car accident that left him severely injured and killed fellow passenger James McNair, Tracy Morgan seems well on the road to recovery. In October, the “Saturday Night Live” alum will return to host the show, marking his first major television appearance since the crash. And in a milestone of a more personal nature, People reports Morgan his longtime fiancee Megan Wollover tied the knot in an emotional ceremony Sunday night. In an interview with People back in June, Morgan told the magazine that he was undergoing intensive physical therapy in the hopes that he might eventually be able to walk down the aisle with his wife. “I don’t want to walk my wife down the aisle with a cane or in a wheelchair,” said Morgan, who suffered a traumatic brain injury in the accident as well as a broken leg and ribs. “So I had to go hard with the therapy… I had to get better. There was no ifs, ands or butts about it.” According to People, there was “not a cane in sight” at Sunday’s wedding, which took place in front of close friends and family. "After almost losing Tracy last year, I am so grateful to finally be married to the love of my life,” Wollover told People. "We have been through so much and our love is stronger for it.”
