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 big wins by Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in the New Hampshire primary send an unambiguous signal that the voters have had it up to here with the establishment and the control that the oligarchy have over the political process. It is thus no surprise that the media are saying that last night’s results will ‘stun America’.
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Former Daily Show correspondent Samantha Bee debuted her new weekly late night talk show Full Frontal and her opening monologue on the state of the current political race was a smash, utterly hilarious.
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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 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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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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In an earlier post, I wondered why it was that people seemed to take an instinctive and visceral dislike to Ted Cruz and various theories were proposed. But now there is another possible explanation.
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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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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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On Bill Maher’s show, the feminist icon Gloria Steinem was speculating about why young people, and young women in particular, were so solidly behind Bernie Sanders instead of Hillary Clinton and she said something that surprised me.
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