A review of the New Hampshire primary

A team of reporters for CNN had a recap of the New Hampshire primary and how it came to be that the two outsiders won. It explains why Chris Christie zeroed in on Marco Rubio in the last debate and savaged him, rather than aiming for the frontrunner Donald Trump. It is true that Christie was competing to win the ‘establishment ‘ candidate slot that Rubio seemed to be holding on to but there was apparently more to it than that, that it was also motivated by a desire for revenge.
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Presidential pensions

Currently a US president gets a pension of $200,000 per year as well as funding for office space and custodial staff. Zaid Jilani writes about the origin of presidential pensions. He said that there had always been some concern about needing to enable former presidents to live in dignity and engage in acts that benefit the country without having to sell themselves to earn money.
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The people who can’t sleep

I had a distant uncle who said that he suffered from chronic insomnia. When I asked him once what he did all night, he said that he just lay in bed and let his thoughts wander and dozed off from time to time for very short periods. But this did not seem to cause him to be irritable or absent-minded or show any of the symptoms that the rest of us may display on those occasions when we have not slept well. He was as fully functional as anyone else.
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Marco Rubio doesn’t even believe his own robotic line

Marco Rubio got heaped with ridicule for his robotic repetition during the last Republican debate of the same line, that president Obama knows exactly what he is doing when he sets about destroying America. When asked about it later, he doubled down, saying that he said it because he truly believed it and that he would continue saying it. What he did not address was that the criticism was about the almost verbatim robotic repetition, not that he was simply making the same point again.
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Will ‘Hillary-only Feminism’ carry the day in New Hampshire?

With the New Hampshire primary today, the contest on the Democratic side has turned quite nasty. Hillary Clinton has clearly been shaken by her hair’s breadth escape out of Iowa. With Bernie Sanders having a lead in New Hampshire and closing the gap in polls nationally, she has clearly decided that she needs to pull out all the stops to avoid an embarrassing defeat that will dent her carefully cultivated aura of inevitability.
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Who attends the primary debates?

At the last Republican debate, when he got booed for shushing Jeb Bush, Donald Trump turned on the audience and accused them of being special interests to whom the party had given most of the tickets and that that group did not like him because he did not need or want their money and thus they could not influence him. This made me curious as to how these audiences are picked. It clearly matters since the applause or boos that a candidate gets in response to answers can subtly influence the way that they are viewed by the TV audience and the media. In the last debate, for example, Marco Rubio got booed quite lustily, something that I had not seen before.
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The lead in Flint’s water and the corruption of science

In the story about the high levels of lead in the Flint, MI water supply, the scientists who first produced the measurements that indicated that there was a serious problem were from Virginia Tech University. I was intrigued by the fact that people so far away had to be called in to reveal this problem but did not follow up on why this was so.
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