The difference between Clinton and Sanders on Israel and AIPAC

AIPAC (American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee) is one of the key components of the Israel lobby in the US and plays a powerful force in elections, similar to the role that the NRA plays. It advocates for very hardline Israeli policies against the Palestinians and also against any nation that it or the Israeli government deems to be opposed to Israel. Needless to say, it vigorously opposed the nuclear deal between the P5+1 nations and Iran.
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A test of the power of boycotts

Some states, including Ohio, like to give tax breaks and other forms of subsidies to film companies to make their films there. The case that is made is that making the film in the state brings jobs and revenue that more than compensates for the giveaways, and in addition the state gets lots of free publicity and visibility. At one time, states seemed to be in a bidding war for film companies, much to the latter’s delight.
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Anti-vaxxers take aim at Mississippi

Mississippi is a poor state combined with a strong religious tradition and is usually at the bottom of the list when it comes to most measures of social well-being. But there is one area where it excels and that is in the vaccination rate where the rates are the highest in the nation. 99.7% of its kindergartners are fully vaccinated, compared with 94.5% nationwide. I discussed the reasons for this anomaly in a post last year. They achieved it by limiting exemptions from vaccination only under very strict conditions, unlike the much looser exemptions in other states.
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Important contraception case hearing today

The US Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on a very important case involving Obamacare, religion, and contraception. This case does not challenge the constitutionality of Obamacare itself, although the religious groups bringing the suit and its conservative backers had hoped it would. After the Supreme Court twice ruled earlier upholding the constitutionality of Obamacare, it turned down efforts to turn this into a third attempt.
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The “Rule of Three”

In watching Michael Moore’s film Where to Invade Next that I reviewed here, I was struck by a segment that he had on the role of women in Iceland. In 1980, that became the first country to democratically elect a woman as president of a republic (though not the first country to elect a woman as an executive head of state which happened in Sri Lanka when it elected a female prime minister twenty years earlier) and she went on to serve four consecutive terms. Every major political party in Iceland now requires a minimum of 40% of women members.
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Reactions to the Supreme Court nominee

President Obama has nominated Merrick Garland, the chief judge of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, to replace Antonin Scalia on the US Supreme Court. Garland seems to be a well-respected jurist, by all accounts not particularly ideological in any clearly identifiable way but instead someone who will bring a proper degree of thoughtfulness to the weighty matters the court deals with.
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Candidate favorability by gender

Jon Schwarz discusses the differences between how men and women view the remaining candidates. Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Ted Cruz all have net unfavorability ratings among both men and women. There seems to be no gender difference with Cruz in that men and women dislike him equally but women dislike Trump a lot more than men do, while men dislike Clinton a lot more than women do.
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