Editor’s Note: Happy Thanksgiving from the Media Consortium! This week, we aren’t stopping The Audit, The Pulse, The Diaspora, or The Mulch, but we are taking a bit of a break. Expect shorter blog posts, and The Diaspora and The Mulch will be posted on Wednesday afternoon, instead of their usual Thursday and Friday postings. We’ll return to our normal schedule next week.
by Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
Wednesday is the heaviest travel day of the year in the United States, as millions of Americans head home to celebrate Thanksgiving. Some of you are probably reading this dispatch on PDAs as you wait in an interminable line at airport security. Here’s some food for thought.
At Grist, food writer Michael Pollan officially declares himself a Rules Guy. Don’t worry, that doesn’t mean he won’t accept a Friday dinner invitation offered after noon on Wednesday. Pollan thinks that our healthy eating skills are passed down to us as part of food culture. In this era of drive-through windows and meal replacement bars, a lot of the old wisdom is falling by the wayside and Americans are finding themselves adrift in a sea of calories. On the eve of Thanksgiving, Pollan provides some helpful guidelines for avoiding the food coma:
[M]any ethnic traditions have their own memorable expressions for what amounts to the same recommendation. Many cultures, for examples, have grappled with the problem of food abundance and come up with different ways of proposing we stop eating before we’re completely full: the Japanese say “hara hachi bu” (“Eat until you are 4/5 full”); Germans advise eaters to “tie off the sack before it’s full.” And the prophet Mohammed recommended that a full belly should contain one-third food, one-third drink, and one-third air. My own Russian-Jewish grandfather used to say at the end of every meal, “I always like to leave the table a little bit hungry.”
But wait, there’s more!
Unions representing airline pilots and flight attendants are advising their members to avoid the the TSA’s new backscatter x-ray scans because of concerns about the long-term health effects of x-ray radiation. Crew members who refused scans have been subjected to new “enhanced” pat-down searches. This week, the TSA granted an exception to pilots, but not to flight attendants. As I reported for Working In These Times, all crew members go through the same FBI background check and fingerprinting process. “Don’t touch my junk!” has become a rallying cry for passengers, particularly white men, who are not accustomed to being asked to give up any part of their body’s autonomy for the greater good. Is it a coincidence that 95% of pilots are men and three-quarters of flight attendants are women? [Update: The TSA has relented. The agency announced Tuesday that flight attendants will now get the same exemption as pilots.
Adam Serwer argues in The American Prospect that it’s easy to demand tough security measures when the presumed targets are faceless Muslims in a distant country. When air travelers are asked to compromise their own privacy in the name of security, the tradeoff suddenly seems very different.
Employee health insurance deductibles are skyrocketing at Whole Foods and CEO John Mackey is trying to blame the increase on health care reform. “This is very important for everyone to understand: 100% of the increases in deductibles and out-of-pocket maximums in 2011 compared to 2010 are due to new federal mandates and regulations,” Mackey wrote in a corporate memo. In fact, as Josh Harkinson reports in Mother Jones, Mackey’s memo is pure, organic BS. The provisions in the Affordable Care Act that might increase costs won’t go into effect until 2014, so it’s hard to figure out how federal policies could be responsible. Health insurance costs were rising by about 5% per year, year after year, before the Affordable Care Act passed. The truth is that health insurance is getting more expensive because health care is getting more expensive. As Harkinson points out, one of the reasons that health care is getting more expensive is because corporations like Whole Foods are pushing more of their employees into part-time work to avoid covering them. Of course, when those workers get sick, someone has to pick up the cost of their care. So those who have insurance, including some of Whole Foods’ own employees, have to pay more to make up the difference.
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This diary has one purpose, and one only: to make clear something which has been completely lacking in the debate over Michigan & Florida and the debate over which delegates should count.
In 2005 the DNC decided, nearly unanimously, that extreme front-loading of the primaries was going to be a big problem. Similarly, the unnatural power of Iowa & New Hampshire needed to be mitigated, or all the other states would rebel. The problem with the plan that was hatched (which involved bumping up the Nevada caucus, etc) was that it had to be self enforced. The DNC couldn’t actually control when Idaho & North Dakota state parties decided to have caucuses, or when the state legislature of Florida states would set their primary.
So to enforce the plan, the DNC gave incentives & punishments. Strong strong incentives – to states that were willing to push back their dates – and stern warnings to states threatening to disrupt the balance.
Take Nebraska as an example: When Nebraska first floated our plan to have a caucus on Feb 9th (as opposed to our usual May primary), the DNC offered us something like 30% more delegates NOT to go through with it.
There was a very raucous & prolonged debate among the Nebraska Democratic Party Central Committee over what to do, and ultimately it came to a judgement call. The higher chance of have an influence on who won by going early, was more important to us than the chance to have extra delegates. Was it the right choice?
Well the Nebraska Caucuses were a huge hit, so perhaps it was. But on the other hand, those extra delegates are looking pretty good right now- and if our caucus was on say, March 21st, I bet we’d get some pretty sweet media attention. But that’s the point- we made a choice.
Other states made choices too: Kansas, North Dakota, Washington, Maine, and a lot more states besides… some states chose to give up some delegates to get to go earlier. Some states, like PA & NC decided to hold their regular late contests, and were awarded maximum delegates. Two states decided that going super early was worth the risk that they would loose all their delegates entirely (as they had been promised they would). Those states did get unprecedented media attention- much more than they would have received by voting on Super Tuesday- but they had their delegates stripped, as they knew they would.
But the fact remains that it was a choice made by the democratically elected state party in each state. For the Clinton campaign to argue that we should seat the Florida delegation would be like Obama to argue that he should get 10 more delegates from Nebraska. For Michigan to have a chance to redo their caucus at a later date, and have it count, would be like for Kansas to try to redo their caucus in May to get 20 more delegates too.
No hard numbers yet, but Obama wins Houlton by about 20 votes.
Obama wins Rockport, carrying 8 delegates to Hillary’s 3.
Obama takes Fryeburg 67 to 17
Obama takes York 414 to 225
Clinton takes Rumford 52 to 37
Clinton takes Dixfield 16 to 14
Clinton takes Mexico 27 16
Clinton takes Byron 1 to 0
Obama takes Hanover 6 to 2
Obama takes Gardiner 129 47 with 2 uncommitted
Clinton takes Old Orchard Beach 134 to 128
Obama takes Hampden 179 to 70
Obama takes Wilton 87 to 30
Obama takes Cape Elizabeth 550 to 217
Obama takes Deer Island 6 to 1
Obama takes Winterport 7 to 4
Obama takes Machiasport 2 delegates to 1O
Obama takes Ellsworth 184 to 100
Obama takes Bristol 7 to 2
Obama takes Bangor (District 15) 16 to 8
Obama takes Presque Isle 63 to 60
Obama takes Stonington 48 to 24
Obama takes Scarborough 401 to 283
Obama strikes back with a scathing response to the lies of the Clinton Campaign. The fact that Bill turned this into a racial thing still just steams me and his continuance to do so further diminishes my respect for him and his wife.
At the every least, we know that if Obama is attacked by the GOP he isn’t going to sit and take it.
