All posts by Jay Pinho

About Jay Pinho

Jay is a data journalist and political junkie. He currently writes about domestic politics, foreign affairs, and journalism and continues to make painstakingly slow progress in amateur photography. He would very much like you to check out SCOTUSMap.com and SCOTUSSearch.com if you have the chance.

“A personable middle-aged man.”

Humor, Politics, , , ,

That’s the sensible description of Barack Obama, as written by China’s state-run Xinhua:

Barack Obama, a personable middle-aged man, inaugurated as the first African-American president of the United States four years ago with an ambitious oath — “Yes, we can.”

However, when Obama swore in for a second term as the country’s top leader on Monday, a man with eyebags, black spots and white hair stepped on the stage.

The article ends on a gloomy note:

Apparently, sad moments overwhelmed happy ones in Obama’s first term, as the number of things he can’t do is far beyond those he can. Even his own doctor admitted that President Obama now looks eight years older than four years ago.

Whether the next four years could be easier for him remains a mystery, but it is for sure that Obama, buried in unstopping affairs at home and abroad, could never be any younger.

In which I (utterly fail to) conquer my flying anxiety

Humor, Miscellaneous, , , ,

My latest post for Full Stop is now online. An excerpt here:

It is probably most accurate to characterize my flying preparations as a mutual fund of sorts, constituted of various types of investments all designed to hedge against utter desolation (a fiery nosedive into a mountainside) and achieve modest returns (a safe landing). Recently, for example, I put off watching The Wire mid-flight in favor of lighter fare to calm my frayed nerves, and I swear Sebastian Edwards’ book on Latin American populists spawned vicious air pockets every time I opened its pages.

Small decisions, too, attain cosmic significance when followed seconds later by a slight shudder of the cabin. Was the weather better when I’d paused Bridesmaids, or is the only way to ensure smooth sailing to watch the entire film at 4x speed? These are not questions to be taken lightly, for upon their successful resolution rests the fate of hundreds of passengers, as well as the ability to understand a damn thing Kristen Wiig is saying at that rate. And no matter which airline I fly, I continue to cringe at the deliberately ominous abstraction of the announcement, “We’ll be on the ground shortly.”

Back from Internet hell

Miscellaneous, , , ,
Courtesy of Colossal (http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2013/01/brooding-cityscapes-painted-with-oil-by-jeremy-mann).
Courtesy of Jeremy Mann and Colossal (http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2013/01/brooding-cityscapes-painted-with-oil-by-jeremy-mann).

For an Internet addict like myself, the last couple weeks have been difficult. Access to foreign sites in mainland China is frustrating at best and infuriating at worst. Specifically, aside from the usual litany of blocked social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, for example), even the New York Times is blocked, and virtually every other foreign site (including Google) takes five times as long to load as it does in the States. Baidu, meanwhile, appears instantly. Ergh.

I just got back to New York yesterday. But during my winter vacation, I’ve been doing some thinking about how to make The First Casualty a better and funner (yes, I have decided that is a word) blog and Internet destination in 2013. Within the next few weeks and months I’m planning to roll out some new — and, hopefully, interesting — ideas for the blog: new contributors, additional features, and so on. Of course, I’ll be continuing the current features and contributors (depending on their availability) as well.

Additionally, I hope to introduce more original content this year. Much of what I posted last year were links to, and excerpts of, other pieces I found illuminating or provocative. I’ll continue to do so this year, but with an added emphasis on producing more original writing — including longform essays and posts — to provide what is hopefully a useful and unique variant to the cacophony of voices on the Web.

Anyway, I’m open to suggestions. Please comment and question liberally. And thank you for continuing to read.

The permanent Republican victory

Politics, , , , , , , , ,

Frank Rich cautions against premature liberal gloating of coming triumphs, demographic or otherwise:

What’s more, the right thinks long-term, and if you look at the long-term, the whole ugly “fiscal cliff” standoff was a win-win for conservatives, no matter what their passing defeats in this week’s deal. The more Washington looks dysfunctional, the more it sows dissatisfaction with the very idea of a Federal government. Yes, Democrats and the White House can argue that polls show that the Republicans would be getting most of the blameif Congress couldn’t reach agreement on the “fiscal cliff.” But that’s short-term liberal wishful thinking. Long-term, this intractable dispute has undermined Americans’ faith in government, period, and the voters’ plague-on-all-your-houses view of Washington is overall a resounding ideological win for a party that wants to dismantle government, the GOP. The conservative movement is no more dead after its 2012 defeat than it was after the Goldwater debacle of 1964.

Silver lining? Social issues, at least, seem to be a winning hand for the Dems:

John Roberts is as political a Chief Justice as I’ve seen — political in the sense of wanting to be well-regarded by mainstream public opinion and posterity. He’s no Scalia-Thomas-Bork right-wing bull in the china shop. Much as I welcomed his upholding of Obamacare, his logic was so tortured that I shared the view of conservative critics that he was holding a finger to the wind and cynically trying to be on the right side of history. His remarks about  the nation’s fiscal impasse are content-free and gratuitous — and irrelevant to his constitutional role — but they do reflect his own desire to maintain a noble public image. It was, one might say, a Howard Schulz PR move. If nothing else, this Chief Justice’s continued obsession with his own profile may bode well for the future of same-sex marriage: Hard to imagine that Roberts will thwart a civil rights breakthrough now enthusiastically supported by an overwhelming majority of the young and even not-so-young Americans who will write the history of the Roberts Court.

Related articles

Returning the favor to Bibi

Politics, , , , ,

Alan Berger thinks President Obama should pay Israel a visit just ahead of the nation’s January 22 elections:

A politician is expected to reward friends and punish whoever dares to cross him. So Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s barely veiled backing for Mitt Romney not only bent the unwritten rule requiring Israeli leaders to preserve a posture of immaculate neutrality in US elections; it meant that Obama owes the Israeli pol some sort of payback.

If Obama’s past performances can be taken as a reliable guide, there is little chance he would retaliate against Netanyahu by meddling in the Israeli election scheduled for Jan. 22. But he should. Not for the petty motive of settling scores with Netanyahu, but to safeguard the true long-term interests of Israelis, Americans, and all the peoples of the Middle East…

Considering that a new party to the right of Netanyahu’s Likud is polling 12 to 14 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, that Likud’s own list is now dominated by radicals impatient with democratic restraint, and that Israel’s centrist and left-leaning parties seem to be in steep decline, an Obama speech could hardly be expected to enable someone other than Netanyahu to form the next government. In Israel’s parliamentary system, however, the shape and disposition of a government is often determined in the bargaining, balancing, and bribing with ministerial portfolios that go under the rubric of forming a coalition. And the right sort of speech from Obama could have a crucial effect on the post-election process of deal-making.