Republicans are nearing the finish, which could be a good or bad thing depending on who your candidate is. Mitt Romney is still in the lead after picking up wins in Illinois and Puerto Rico. It looks impossible for Rick Santorum to catch the former Massachusetts governor, who has nearly half of the delegates needed to secure the nomination.
Writing for The DailyBeast.com, Andrew Romano said the longer this campaign lasts, the more it hurts Romney. “Since 1976, no serious contender, Democrat or Republican, has watched his favorable ratings fall as low as Romney’s have in recent months. Or watched his unfavorable ratings climb as high. Or watched his overall numbers stay underwater – that is, more unfavorable than favorable – for so long.
“To defeat Barack Obama in November, Mitt Romney would have to make history by overcoming a larger favorability deficit than any other modern presidential candidate.”
And being a very wealthy Mormon isn’t helping much either.
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William Falk in The Week writes that it is possible to accurately calculate the cost of a war. Begin with $1.4 trillion spent, 6,390 Americans dead and 47,684 wounded. Add in 150,000 Iraqi and Afghans killed.
Falk’s says there is another statistic that has been overlooked – 31 percent of the 2 million Americans who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan are suffering from either PTSD, traumatic brain injury, or both. While most of these 600,000 are not violent, they endure things like depression and drug abuse.
There are those extreme cases, like Sgt. Robert Bales, who is accused of murdering 16 civilians.
“A tsunami of these kinds of cases” is coming, wrote Shad Meshad, a PTSD therapist.
“Being around someone with PTSD is like being around second-hand smoke,” Meshad said. “It adversely affects your health. We have to be concerned about caregivers for soldiers returning from combat and their families. I have been talking about a potential backlash of violence for years. You cannot expect to send our soldiers into extended, multiple combat deployments, and that not affect them, or the people they are connected to back at home.”
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Sgt. Bales was on his fourth tour of duty in a war zone, having served three tours in Iraq, where he suffered a traumatic brain injury and a foot injury. The very day before the civilian killings, he saw a fellow soldier’s leg blown off by a land mine. His civilian attorney, John Henry Browne, had said the soldier and his family had thought he was done fighting.
No one really knows what made Bales snap. The military response is that his mind buckled from the repeated tours of duty combined with stresses back home from marital and financial problems.
Michelle Caddell, a friend who grew up with Bales in Norwood, Ohio, said, “That’s not our Bobby. Something horrible, horrible had to have happened to him.”
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In a poll of likely voters, 36 percent said Bales should receive the death penalty if convicted of the killings, while 48 percent said he should not be executed.
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Health watch
• One out of five American teenagers are smokers and studies say that 80 percent of those will carry the addictive habit into adulthood. Surgeon General Regina Benjamin told USA Today that 1,200 people die every day in this country from smoking-related diseases. But for each death, two or more people under the age of 26 start smoking. “It’s a problem we have to solve,” Regina says.
• According to researchers at Harvard Medical School, a diet high in red meat can shorten your life expectancy,
The study of 120,000 people concluded that red meat increased the risk of death from cancer and heart problems more than previously thought.
Researchers analyzed data from 37,698 men between 1986 and 2008 and 83,644 women between 1980 and 2008.
Dr. Rosemary Leonard told the BBC that the scope of the study showed that health concerns linked to eating red meats were “very clear.”
She also said that there was an argument that people should avoid eating processed meats, such as ham and bacon, altogether.
In discussing the study, Dr. Walter Willett of Harvard said, “Individuals make their choices on the basis of many factors, health outcomes being one: religious beliefs, concerns about the environment, many things. But focusing in on health, it does appear that the data are quite strong.
“There’s no sharp cutoff. But when you get down to maybe one serving of meat or less per week, the risk gets pretty low. If you really want to go for the lowest possible, it does look like not consuming red meat at all, or a couple times a year, is where you’d want to be.”