Kevin Seifert on Matthew Stafford

Kevin Seifert writes about how the Detroit Lion's choice to draft Matthew Stafford three years ago was controversial at the time, but panned out:  

Was it just three years ago when we were all arguing about who the Detroit Lions should select with the No. 1 overall pick of the 2009 draft? The Lions narrowed their options to Georgia quarterback Matthew Stafford, Baylor offensive lineman Jason Smith and Wake Forest linebacker Aaron Curry.  

Curry was the choice of Lions fans wary of highly-drafted quarterbacks and desperately hoping for an improved defense.  

Traditionalists wanted to draft Smith to replace what seemed to be an aging Jeff Backus.  

The Lions, as it turned out, were sold on Stafford for months before the draft and negotiated with Smith and Curry only to aid their leverage with Stafford's agent.  

I was reminded of those times this week when the St. Louis Rams, who drafted Smith No. 2 overall, demoted him to second-team right tackle. Curry, drafted No. 4 by the Seattle Seahawks, moved to the Oakland Raiders last season and is sidelined for the moment by a knee injury he reportedly sought stem-cell treatment for.  

Stafford, I'm told, threw for 5,038 yards and 41 touchdowns last season.  

To be clear, there weren't many people arguing from a public perspective that Stafford was the slam-dunk choice, myself included. It's hard to argue with it now.

Stafford so far has only played one full season, so it is still too early to tell exactly how his career will pan out.  However, he has a young and talented receiver corp that includes Calvin Johnson, probably the best wide receiver in the game.  His health is still a concern, since in this year's preseason he already injured his hand with a broken blood vessel.  Luckily, doctors say that he will be ready to play by the start of the regular season.

I'm cautiously optimistic with the Lion's future, especially if their running game and secondary improves, which it must if they wish to make a strong run to the post-season.

CIA and Hollywood's Propagandic Collusion

Glenn Greenwald writes about the disturbing relationship between a CIA spokesperson Marie Harf and New York Times intelligence reporter Mark Mazetti.  Fellow NYT columnist Maureen Dowd wrote a piece that mentioned the collusion between the CIA and filmmakers working on a film that details the killing of Osama Bin Laden, and Harf was worried that the information implicating the CIA's relationship with the film would look poorly on the agency.  She contacted Mazetti, who then forwarded her the as-of-then unpublished column without consent or knowledge from the paper or Dowd, for her to review, but asked her to delete the email, since it seems he does have some sense of shame.  

While the media and the government often have a relationship that is too friendly to allow the media to properly act as a adversarial fourth estate, the new levels of collusion between filmmakers Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal (the director and screenwriter for "The Hurt Locker," respectively) and the CIA are disturbing, especially since the film was originally scheduled to be released in October, just before the presidential election.  As Judicial Watch has reported:

According to a June 15, 2011, email from Benjamin Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications, to then Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Doug Wilson, then-CIA Director of Public Affairs George Little, and Deputy White House Press Secretary Jaime Smith, the Obama White House was intent on “trying to have visibility into the UBL (Usama bin Laden) projects.”

Compare the treatment of Laura Poitras, a documentarian whose last two films, "My Country, My Country" and "The Oath," have been critical of the United States foreign policy.  She is routinely harassed at airports when she enters the country, questioned by the TSA and FBI agents, and has her electronic equipment seized without a warrant.

This is all par for the course.  Instead of making Washington more transparent, and therefore more accountable as he promised, Obama and his administration have rewarded people who give favorable treatment to the administration with access, sometimes to classified information, while punishing whistle- blowers with harassment and sometimes even prosecution.

Now imagine if this would have happened sometime in 2006, when Bush was still in the White House.  I can almost guarantee that Democrats and liberals would be up in arms about this sort of corruption.  But now that it is their man as the commander-in-chief, most could not care at all.

Back-in-America Links

• The Vatican is running a debt.
• Popehat defends the humanities.
• Juan Cole on how the media treats white perpetrators of mass violence differently than "Arab Terrorists."
• The Mellon Foundation backs area studies at UW-Madison.  My department is afloat for at least another few years.
• Now this is the story all about how/my life got flipped, turned upside down/And I'd like to take minute and sit right there/I'll tell you why I am in Guantanamo watching The Fresh Prince of Bel-air.
• Are human poachers causing a selective pressure that favors intelligence in the gorilla population?
• Finally, my friend looks at the similarity between food and the human body.