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Vegetarian-Vegan-Bodybuilding-Info/Flickr

My mom likes to tell a story about how, after coming over for dinner to our vegetarian household, a woman from the neighborhood earnestly asked her how she had managed to persuade my dad to eat vegetables. Apparently this woman had the worst time interesting her husband in salad. Okay. So, just for fun, let's leave aside the troubling question of why exactly this lady's marriage involved this weird infantilization and turn to the much more hilarious matter: Seriously, why didn't this dude like veggies?

According to a new study published in the Journal of Consumer Research, it's probably because men don't consider them manly. For reals:

In a number of experiments that looked at metaphors and certain foods, like meat and milk, the authors found that people rated meat as more masculine than vegetables. They also found that meat generated more masculine words when people discussed it, and that people viewed male meat eaters as being more masculine than non-meat eaters.

Another rad finding was that in most languages that have genders, meat is masculine.

As a solution, the study's authors suggest that "reshaping soy burgers to make them resemble beef or giving them grill marks might help cautious men make the transition." See, ladies with veggie-hating husbands? It's that easy.

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Dave Hoefler/Flickr

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has stretched his recall election lead over Democrat Tom Barrett to six percentage points, according to a new poll by Marquette University's Law School. Walker leads 50 percent to 44 percent among likely voters, an increase of five points from Marquette's last poll nearly a month ago.

The poll, Marquette's first since the May 8 Democratic primary, finds voter enthusiasm for the recall highest among Republicans, even though it was progressives and Democrats who triggered the recall election. An overwhelming majority—91 percent—of GOPers surveyed said they're "absolutely certain" to vote in the June 5 election; 8 in 10 Democrats and independents said the same. In addition, 6 in 10 GOP respondents said they'd tried to convince another person to vote in the recall, while just over 5 in 10 Democrats said the same. Democrats, however, are more likely to have been contacted by a campaign than Republicans.

Charles Franklin, Marquette Law School's poll director, said in a statement that a key takeaway is that Republicans hold the crucial edge in voter enthusiasm with the June 5 election weeks away. "In a close election with so few undecided voters," he said, "enthusiasm, turnout, and campaign contact with voters may make the difference."

The poll also found that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney were deadlocked in Wisconsin, 46-46. Last month, Obama held a four point lead over Romney, 49-45.

The Marquette poll surveyed 704 registered voters in Wisconsin. The margin of error for the survey was about 4 percent.

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The USS Carl Vinson arrives at Pearl Harbor. Flickr/US Navy

Adam Serwer is filling in while Kevin is on vacation.

Last year the Obama administration secretly imprisoned Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, an alleged member of the Somali militant group Al Shabab, on an aircraft carrier and interrogated him for two months before bringing him to the US and indicting him. No one was very happy about that decision. It made Republicans in Congress mad because they want Obama to add more prisoners to Gitmo and keep Muslims accused of terrorism out of civilian courts, and it frustrated civil libertarians and human rights groups who argued the administration had detained Warsame illegally.

Republicans, worried that Obama might prosecute more suspected terrorists in civilian court, crafted the latest defense authorization bill to ensure they're notified within five days the next time someone is detained on a Navy ship for months. The administration has threatened to veto the defense bill over that provision, saying it would "unnecessarily complicate and potentially compromise military operations and detention practices."

This is basically where civil liberties are in the Obama era: legislators are only interested in forcing detention policy to the right, and occasionally the Obama administration's desire to avoid restrictions on executive power results in more favorable (but far from ideal) outcomes for people accused of terrorism. Obama's veto threats are notoriously insincere, and preventing the administration from using the "Gitmo at Sea" option seems likely to result in more legally questionable proxy detentions of American citizens by foreign security forces with reputations for abusing those they detain. 

It's not much of a choice, and it probably won't get any better if the White House changes hands in November. Republicans will lose their newfound interest in keeping an eye on whatever the executive branch is doing, and the Democrats will have largely squandered whatever credibility they have to oversee a Republican president by acquiescing to the Obama administration's continuity with much of the Bush platform on national security. 

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On the vast list of right-wing conspiracy theories about President Obama—he's Malcolm X's illegitimate son; he was photoshopped into the iconic Situation Room photo; his memoir was ghost-written by Bill Ayers; he's people!—this new bit of muckraking from conspiracy cauldron WorldNetDaily deserves a place of honor on the mantle.

According to Jack Cashill, "an Emmy-award winning independent writer and producer with a Ph.D. in American Studies from Purdue," President Obama didn't simply have Bill Ayers ghost-write his memoir—he had someone ghost-write love letters to his college girlfriend too:

In a recent Vanity Fair excerpt, [David] Maraniss reprints two extended excerpts from one of those letters. I believe that these letters were volunteered to Maraniss to impress the kind of people who read the New York Times.

If so, the Times took the bait. Reporter Adam Hirsch gushes over the young Obama's "literary sensibility" and his "ironic, literary mind." Although regretting that Obama’s “authenticity” has not made him a transformative figure, Hirsch remains "certain" that Obama “has it in him to produce the best post-presidential memoir ever – if he is willing to let that unguarded early voice speak again."

What Hirsch refuses to question is whether that "unguarded early voice" is Obama's own.

Among other things, Cashill wonders why Maraniss hasn't produced original copies of the love letters: "In 1982-1983, when the Vanity Fair letters were written, college students did not use word processors. If they typed, they did so on a typewriter. The odds are that this letter, if an original, was not typed." And why, he asks, were Obama's letters so erudite and coherent when his other writing reveal him to be a bumbling nincompoop?

Nowhere in "Dreams" is there any mention of T.S. Eliot, Münzer or Yeats, or any of the themes in this letter that so excited Adam Hirsch. As Obama tells it, he and his pals "discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy." This I can believe.

Totally missing from "Dreams," too, are the more exotic words in the letter to McNear: ecstatic, mechanistic, asexual, stoical, moribund, reactionary, fertility, dichotomy, irreconcilable, ambivalence, plus "hazard" and "counter" used as verbs, as in "I will hazard these statements" and "Counter him with Yeats and Pound."

Cashill's argument is, of course, foolproof. One small quibble, though: If Dreams from my Father was—as WorldNetDaily has already established—ghost-written, we can hardly use that as an example of Obama's sub-par writing standards. The plot thickens.

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