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The step is not as quick. The swing is not as crisp or as powerful. In the career of every great athlete, there comes a moment of profound reckoning: Should you continue when your skills have clearly diminished? If you can't be the absolute best anymore, should you settle for just being really, really good?

This week, beloved New York Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter announced that the 2014 season will be his last. Age and injuries have done what opponents rarely could: Stopped Jeter from excelling. And I imagine he faced a question that all renowned athletes eventually must ponder, from professionals like Jeter and NFL quarterback Peyton Manning, now in the waning days of his career, to Olympians like Michael Phelps: Should you retire at the top of your game or hang on for a few more tries?

Alfred Tennyson had an answer. In "Ulysses," the 20th century British poet with a beard worthy of the Boston Red Sox argued that we should keep going, keep pushing forward, even as twilight settles in. He was writing about a king, but it could have been a famous shortstop: "I am become a name;/For always roaming with a hungry heart/Much have I seen and known . . . and drunk delight of battle with my peers." Nothing is worse, Tennyson implied, than sitting in the stands when you could be out on the field: "How dull it is to pause, to make an end,/To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!"

The poet's big finish might just be enough to persuade Jeter to reconsider: "Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'/We are not now that strength which in old days/Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;/One equal temper of heroic hearts,/Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will/To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

In other words: Batter up.

Julia Keller is an author and critic. Her latest book is Bitter River.

You can read "Ulysses" in full at the Poetry Foundation.

[Editor's Note: This piece references plot points from the first season of House of Cards. If you've been waiting a year to binge-watch it, consider this your spoiler alert.]

When Netflix's groundbreaking online series House of Cards releases its second season to the world Friday — unleashing 13 new episodes about a wily congressman willing to kill to reach the vice presidency — fans will get more than another jolt of TV's most addictive political drama.

They'll also see a series that's redefining just how bad a television antihero can be.

The action centers on Oscar-winner Kevin Spacey's silky smooth Francis Underwood, a Democrat from South Carolina who blends velvety charm and mesmerizing menace like no other character on television.

In the show's second season, his measured, honey-coated drawl even makes a conversation about elevating a junior congresswoman into his old job somehow sound like a veiled threat and comforting promise all at once.

"What if I suggested that you could serve in leadership this term...to replace me as [House Majority] Whip?" Underwood coos to Jacqueline Sharp, a third-term Congresswoman from California played by Molly Parker (Deadwood; The Firm).

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In California's farm rich Central Valley, where President Obama meets Friday with farmers and others who are affected by the state's historic drought, Todd Allen nods towards a field of brown, baked dirt passing by the right side of his truck.

"Here's a plot of ground that I'm not going to be able to farm. That's 160 acres," he says.

Allen owns a farm about an hour's drive west of Fresno, where half of the country's produce is grown. Usually Allen's fields contain cantaloupe, cotton, tomato and wheat.

"But now because of the drought I'm going to have leave it fallow," he says.

Fallow. Or unplanted. Allen says he's going to have to do that with 450 of his 600 acres and that it could put him out of business.

The drought is forcing hundreds of thousands of acres in the Central Valley to go unplanted this year.

But many farmers, like Allen, aren't just blaming Mother Nature for that.

"Twenty to thirty percent of our water is gone because of a little fish," he says.

That little fish is the delta smelt. You've probably never heard of it. But in California, it's representative of a decades old clash over water allocation.

There's not a lot of water in California. And there are a lot of people who want it: environmentalists, farmers, city folk.

The delta smelt is one species, caught in the middle of the debate.

"It's a convenient boogeyman," says Adam Keats. "It's a scapegoat."

Keats, who's with the Center for Biological Diversity, says the smelt are a key part of a complex ecosystem. They live in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, where much of the Central Valley's water comes from.

They are als, on the endangered species list.

And that means some of the Delta's water that would go to farmers like Allen is instead, allocated to the fish.

The result is a farmer versus fish controversy that's been going on for years in the state. This year, that political fight has enticed Washington.

"How you can favor a fish over people, is something that people in my part of the world would never understand," said House Speaker John Boehner during a visit to California several weeks ago.

He was there to support a bill — introduced by California's House Republicans — that aims to get farmers more water by rolling back environmental laws like the ones that protect the smelt.

Senate Democrats countered this week, with a bill that would give money for drought relief, and allow more flexibility around those environmental laws without gutting them.

Neither is likely to become law. So why all of the effort?

"Politicians don't want to let a good crisis go to waste," says Tom Holyoke, a professor of water and politics at Fresno State University.

He says that's especially true with mid-term elections coming up. Just turn on the TV, where there are ads like this one from Republican Doug Ose, who's standing in the dried out bottom of Folsom Lake: "We're facing a real water crisis here in Sacramento. Where's our representatives?"

The ads illustrate just how much the drought is going to be a part of campaign season. Ose is trying to unseat a freshman House Democrat who just barely won in 2012.

Democrats are doing the same in vulnerable Republican districts, targeting the GOP legislation that puts farmer's needs first.

"Saying 'we should re-allocate water to my constituents' doesn't require a whole lot of courage and is really an act of opportunism," says Michael Hanneman, an agriculture and resource economics professor at UC Berkeley.

He says that type of grandstanding doesn't accomplish anything.

California Governor Jerry Brown would agree. He and some state lawmakers have been annoyed with Washington's involvement — particularly the Republican sponsored bill. Brown calls it unwelcome and divisive.

The state's key water users have made efforts to reconcile their differences. But Hanneman says lawmakers haven't made the difficult, far-ranging decisions that are needed.

"They have stayed away from it. And they have stayed away from it because it's a situation where there's going to be winners and losers. So they don't want to touch it," he said.

But he says, sooner or later, they're going to have to. Barring a miracle-March, this drought isn't going to go away.

The federal government on Friday issued guidelines for banks seeking to do business with the legal marijuana industry, stopping short of a blanket immunity for them, but strongly indicating that prosecutions for such crimes as money laundering would be unlikely.

NPR's Yuki Noguchi reports that the Department of Justice and Treasury Department on Friday sought to "clarify rules for banks trying to navigate the murky legal waters of the marijuana business. Murky, because pot is legal in a growing number of states, but remains illegal under federal law."

"In the absence of specific federal guidance, most banks had kept marijuana businesses at arms' length, denying them loans, checking or savings accounts. [That] meant, like the street-drug trade, many state-sanctioned pot-sellers were doing cash-only trade," Yuki says.

The banks have feared that federal regulators and law enforcement authorities would punish them for doing business even with state-licensed operations.

The Denver Post reports:

"In a joint statement, the U.S. Department of Justice and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a bureau of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, said the move gives 'greater financial transparency' to an industry that remains illegal in nearly every state."

"It also makes clear that banks would be helping law enforcement with 'information that is particularly valuable' in filing regular reports that offer insights about how marijuana businesses work."

'"Law enforcement will now have greater insight into marijuana business activity generally," FinCEN said in a news release, 'and will be able to focus on activity that presents high-priority concerns.'"