Tuesday Night Links

* Watching an hour of television takes 22 minutes off your life. Exercising only fifteen minutes a day adds three years to your life. Someday science will reverse those trends. Someday.

* Glenn Greenwald’s long piece on neverending horserace-style election coverage has the definitive cartoon on the logic of Obama’s reelection campaign.

*  Here’s a suggestion that would put an end to the scandals: abolish Division I football and basketball altogether, because they are hopelessly and irreparably corrupted by billion dollar television contracts and multimillion-dollar endorsement deals.

* Related.

Rutgers University forgave $100,000 of the football coach’s interest-free home loan last year. The women’s basketball coach got monthly golf and car allowances. Both collected bonuses without winning a championship.

Meanwhile, the history department took away professors’ desk phones to save money and shrank its doctoral program by 25 percent. After funding cuts by the deficit-strapped Legislature, New Jersey’s state university froze professors’ salaries, cut the use of photocopies for exams and jacked up student tuition, housing and other fees.

Rutgers also increased funding for sports. The 245-year-old school spent more money on athletics than any other public institution in the six biggest football conferences during the 2009-2010 fiscal year, based on data compiled by Bloomberg. More than 40 percent of sports revenue came from student fees and the university’s general fund.

* This is admittedly 90% guilt-by-association, but I’m much less confident about the wisdom of Stephen Colbert’s SuperPAC gag now that I know it was being run by Rick Perry’s new treasurer.

* More Rick Perry follies. And here’s the secret of the so-called “Texas miracle”: Texas didn’t have to slash state funding like every other state.