shadiahm 's List: politics

• "I don't know about you but I am feeling great!" she said at her first event in Ames. Working hard to grab the momentum, Clinton joked about the extremes to which she would go to win support, recalling a campaign appearance among farmers and ranchers in an arena that normally is the site of cattle auctions.

   

  "If you want to look inside my mouth to figure out whether you want to vote for me, that's fine, too," Clinton quipped. "Whatever it takes."

• In Barack Obama versus Hillary Clinton, we've basically got Kennedy-Nixon redux, and I mean that in the most negative possible sense for both of them -- a pair of superficial, posturing conservatives selling highly similar political packages using different emotional strategies. Obama is selling free trade and employer-based health care and an unclear Iraqi exit strategy using looks, charisma and optimism, while Hillary is selling much the same using hard, cold reality, "prose not poetry," managerial competence over "vision."
• a press that tells lies about her.
• After all these years in public life, the only time Hillary Clinton sheds a tear is when her own political career is on the line? I didn't notice her crying when kids started coming home from Fallujah in rubber bags because of a war she voted for.
• The crying incident was Hillary's own personal Checkers speech,

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• to feminists who wonder why a powerful woman such as Clinton cannot fight her own battles.

• The study counted 935 false statements in the two-year period. It found that in speeches, briefings, interviews and other venues, Bush and administration officials stated unequivocally on at least 532 occasions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or was trying to produce or obtain them or had links to al-Qaida or both.

• In the first primary state, her supporters -- backed by New Hampshire Democratic Party officials -- pressured poll workers to remove observers stationed by the Obama campaign.
• And in Iowa, the Clinton campaign -- with the help of the state's largest newspaper, the Des Moines Register, which endorsed her -- was discouraging students from returning from winter break to vote, even though their right to do so was legal, said Rick Hasen, who writes a respected election law blog.

• "And there is something about that; that Catholics were   once about to blow up Parliament. There is still something mysterious and   naughty about us. It is to our advantage. Catholics in this country are, in   reality, a fairly conformist group, but we are still seen as nonconformist.   Had Mr Blair become a Methodist, for example, I don't think there would have   been the same reaction."

• How much of our remorse do we have a right to dispense with, and how much exists in service to others, a check on our worst impulses?

• "Modern combat training conditions soldiers to act reflexively to stimuli," says Lt. Col. Peter Kilner, a professor of philosophy and ethics at West Point, "and this maximizes soldiers' lethality, but it does so by bypassing their moral autonomy. Soldiers are conditioned to act without considering the moral repercussions of their actions; they are enabled to kill without making the conscious decision to do so. If they are unable to justify to themselves the fact that they killed another human being, they will likely -- and understandably -- suffer enormous guilt. This guilt manifests itself as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and it has damaged the lives of thousands of men who performed their duty in combat."

• Thirty-four percent of voters said they hadn't changed their minds in the past month; Clinton topped Obama 48 percent to 31 percent among that group.

• Voting for Hillary would be like doing Frasier again on TV. Don't you want something fresh, new and creative?"

• Had Benazir been capable of thinking beyond family and faction she should have appointed him chairperson pending elections within the party. No such luck.
• Their problem is that, with Benazir dead, the only other alternative for them is General Ashraf Kiyani, head of the army. Nawaz Sharif is seen as a Saudi poodle and hence unreliable, though, given the US-Saudi alliance, poor Mr Sharif is puzzled as to why this should be the case. For his part, he is ready to do Washiongton's bidding but would prefer the Saudi King rather than Mr Musharraf to be the imperial message-boy.

• putting a symbol of corruption and Western meddling in other countries' domestic politics into a very violent an unstable situation. The results, to some degree, were predictable.
  

• Whole Foods Market, which recently expanded into Britain with a store in London's upmarket suburb of Kensington, has been discovered stocking tomatoes from one of the most notorious Florida sweatshop producers. Whole Foods ignored an appeal by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers to pay an extra penny a pound for its tomatoes.

   

  In a statement Whole Foods said it was "committed to supporting and promoting economically, environmentally, and socially sustainable agriculture" and supports "the right of all workers to be treated fairly and humanely."

• Yet, in December, members of Obama's official listserv received a message from the candidate that read:

  "The American people understand that new threats require flexible responses to keep them safe. They also insist that our responses to threats respect the Constitution and do not violate the basic tenets of our democracy. The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act includes provisions prohibiting the Department of Homeland Security's efforts from violating civil rights and civil liberties of U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents."

• Despite the scepticism of many US journalists permanently stationed in Iraq, television and newspaper newsrooms in New York and Washington (in London they are more sceptical) have largely bought into the idea that "the surge" – the wider deployment of 30,000 extra US troops since February 2006 – has succeeded.
• But any true assessment of the happiness or misery of Iraqis must use a less crude index than the number of dead and injured. It must ask if people have been driven from their houses, and if they can return. It must say whether they have a job and, if they do not, whether they stand a chance of getting one. It has to explain why so few of the 3.2 million people who are refugees in Syria and Jordan, or inside Iraq, are coming back.
• "The problem," complained one American correspondent in Baghdad, "is that newsrooms back home have two mindsets – 'War Rages' and 'Peace Dawns' – and not a lot in between."
• The "surge" – the 30,000 extra US troops implementing a new security plan in Baghdad – has helped to make Baghdad safer. In effect, they have frozen into place the Shia victory of 2006. The city is broken up into enclaves sealed off by concrete walls with only one entrance and exit.
• "People say things are better than they were," says Zanab Jafar, a well-educated Shia woman living in al-Hamraa, west Baghdad, "but what they mean is that they are better than [during] the bloodbath of 2006. The situation is still terrible."

• Baghdad still feels and looks like a city at war. There are checkpoints everywhere. "You seldom see young girls walking in the streets, or in restaurants," adds Zanab Jafar, "because their families are terrified they will be kidnapped, so they send private cars to pick them up directly from school." New shops open, but they are always in the heart of districts controlled by a single community because nobody wants to venture far from their home to shop.

  For all the talk of Baghdad being safer, it remains an extraordinarily dangerous place. One Western security company is still asking $3,000 to pick a man up at the airport and drive him six miles to his hotel in central Baghdad. The number of dead bodies being picked up by the police every morning in the capital is down to three or four when once it was 50 or 60.
• "About twice as many people are being killed as the government admits."
• The picture Bush evoked is similar to that often seen in Hollywood Westerns when outraged townsfolk and farmers, driven beyond endurance by the crimes of a corrupt sheriff or saloon owner and their bandit followers, rise in revolt. In reality, in Iraq the exact opposite has happened. The Awakening Council members of today are the "terrorists" of yesterday.
• Iraq remains a great sump of human degradation and poverty, unaffected by the "surge". It was not a government critic but the civilian spokesman for the Baghdad security plan, Tahseen Sheikhly, who pointed out this week that the city is drowning in sewage because of blocked and broken pipes and drains. In one part of the city, the sewage has formed a lake so large that it can be seen "as a big black spot on Google Earth".
• But for millions of Iraqis like Bassim, the war has robbed them of their homes, their jobs and often their lives. It has brought them nothing but misery and ended their hopes of happiness. It has destroyed Iraq.

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• the Illinois senator started in Janesville, where he delivered a rebuke to free-trade policies of the Bill Clinton and George Bush eras that sounded a little like a speech Feingold might have delivered.

• Why don't we have a written constitution? 

   

   Essentially because the country has been too stable for too long. The   governing elites of many European nations, such as France and Germany, have   been forced to draw up constitutions in response to popular revolt or war.

• Why is the idea being floated now? 

   

   It is a natural follow-on from the proposed constitutional reforms announced   by Gordon Brown as one of his first acts in Downing Street. He explained   that he wanted to develop a "more open 21st-century British democracy   which better serves the British people". As well as the British Bill of   Rights, he suggested giving Parliament the right to approve any decision to   send British troops to war and surrendering the prime minister's power to   appoint judges and approve bishops. Such proposals would be small beer,   however, compared with any move to write the country's first constitution.
• Nick Herbert, the shadow Justice   Secretary, was equally sceptical. "The last thing Britain needs, with   2,000 years of history behind us, is more of New Labour's blind   constitutional vandalism," he said.

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• Now, many of President Sarkozy's supporters, and nominal allies, fear that the Sarko style may not be a style at all but an absence of style; a nouveau-riche vulgarité; a contempt for the importance of tradition; an arrogant belief that the office-holder is more important than the office.
• One pollster said that many voters are beginning to wonder whether the Sarkozy of last year's election campaign – energetic, can-do, plain-speaking – had been, quite simply, an "imposter".
• He wants to seem ordinary but at the same time, extraordinary. He wants to be a pragmatic, can-do politician with a pop-star lifestyle. He believes that this is the way to remain popular in a world in which politicians are doomed to seem mediocre, or powerless, or both. M. Sarkozy detests the suggestion that, in global terms, national politicians are often helpless to control events. He has an almost psychotic need to have an answer, and a policy, and an ideology, for everything.
• Across Europe, even across the Atlantic, the public mood is slowly turning against the tyranny of growth and markets in favour of softer, greener values.
• Contradictions have always been part of the Sarko package. What had once seemed refreshingly original, an ability to straddle the normal boundaries of party and ideology, is now beginning to look merely shallow: an adman's talent for hijacking and exploiting hot-button issues.
• By marginalising the Prime Minister, M. Fillon, President Sarkozy has made the presidency more powerful than ever. At the same time, he stands accused of weakening the sacred and symbolic power of the office, with his casual, and sometime thoughtless, behaviour.
• Since the creation of an executive presidency in 1958, it has been the job of the French prime minister to be unpopular and shield the reputation of the president. The hyperactive M. Sarkozy has reversed the roles. He is plunging in the polls; his calm, thoughtful Prime Minister, François Fillon, is rising. This is unprecedented in modern French politics.

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• At best, he's seen as another vague Reagan-esque avatar of Hallmarkian sentiments like optimism and hope. While Clinton, the designated valedictorian, reaches out for the ego and super-ego, he supposedly goes for the id. She might as well be promoting choral singing in the face of Beatlemania.
• Someone needs to tell her that there are better ways to signal conviction than by raising one's voice and drawing out the vowels, as in "I KNOW ..." and "I BELIEVE ..." The frozen smile has to go too, along with the metronymic nodding, which sometimes goes on long enough to suggest a placement within the autism spectrum.
• True, some people miss Bill, although the nostalgia was severely undercut by his anti-Obama rhetoric in South Carolina, or maybe they just miss the internet bubble he happened to preside over.
• But even more people find dynastic successions distasteful, especially when it's a dynasty that produced so little by way of concrete improvements in our lives. Whatever she does, the semiotics of her campaign boils down to two words -- "same old."
• An anti-war black president with an Arab-sounding name: See, we're not so bad after all, world!

• We, perhaps white people especially, look to him for atonement and redemption. All of us, of whatever race, want a fresh start. That's what "change" means right now: Get us out of here!

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• It's the rest of us that have taken what are very partial, imperfect findings and tried to organize a food supply around them, such as when we took all the fat out of the foods.
• But there are very few people left who think that dietary cholesterol is a problem. There is a link between saturated fat and cholesterol in the blood. There is a link between cholesterol in the blood and heart disease. But the proof that saturated fat leads to heart disease in a causal way is very tenuous.
• But the net result of that public health campaign was to essentially get people off of saturated fat or try to get them onto trans fats, and we've since learned that that was really bad advice because the link between trans fats and heart disease is the strongest link we have of any fat to heart disease. They told us butter is evil and margarine is good, and it turned out to be the opposite.
• I was surprised at how few scientists would defend this lipid hypothesis as the great answer to the questions of diet and health. Nevertheless, they move on because scientists don't stop and come out and say, "You know, we were really all wrong about that." They just keep moving forward. That's the way science should work. But there should be a big disclaimer saying, "Wait till we figure this all out before you change the way you eat and before the government issues proclamations."
• Food is under assault by industry and nutrition science, who think they can improve on the foods we've had for hundreds of thousands of years. My contention is, they can't.
• • This is where Ralph Nader should be working. We need him and some Nader Raiders to fix stuff like this!
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• It would be wonderful if some enterprising public interest lawyer decided to sue to restore the imitation rule.
• Our tendency has been to focus on the bad nutrients, because we do assume if you get sick, you did something wrong by eating a bad thing, but in fact, maybe you just didn't eat enough good things.
• so you can't just say, "This is beef." It's a very different food depending on what that cow or steer ate. A steer that was finished on grass is a completely different food than one that was finished on corn and industrial by-products in a feed lot. We don't pay enough attention to that.
• Soy isoflavones, and soy products in general, closely resemble estrogen in the body. It isn't really clear whether that's a good or bad thing.
• Novelty in biology is guilty until proven innocent. Mutations are novelties, and every now and then there's a great mutation that confers an advantage on the creature.

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