The second New Hampshire representative in the Congress, U.S. Rep. Carol Shea-Porter, is endorsing Obama, having stayed on the fence for a while. The Union-Leader says:
Her backing may be a plus for Obama especially among women, who have strongly favored Clinton so far in the New Hampshire Democratic primary race, according to polls.
Less fifteen minutes than fifteen people:
If you really want to see the future, check out teenagers and twentysomethings. When they go to a party, they make sure they’re dressed for their close-up — because there will be photos, and those photos will end up online. In managing their Web presence, they understand the impact of logos, images, and fonts.
I guess it’s the merging of Facebook culture with reality TV culture. Which is to say: a grim prospect. Someone somewhere must appreciate the value of anonymity.
A useful Newsweek piece details his temper and intransigence:
Republican state Rep. Jeremy Hutchinson says Huckabee has an explosive temper. He recalls one heated conversation with Huckabee about a health bill Hutchinson didn’t want to support. Huckabee began screaming at him, and banged his fists on his desk so hard that "trinkets started falling off." …
Jim Hendren, the state’s Senate minority whip, says he gave up trying to debate issues with Huckabee. "It was like you became the enemy," he says. "There wasn’t ever a negotiation. It was, ‘It’s going to be my way or else’."
John Stossel interviews Ron Paul:
Ramesh explains. Intriguing, if not persuasive. Ramesh assumes that Giuliani’s poor showing in early states won’t affect his support in later ones. That’s a big assumption.
And one of those who inflicted it now says so in public. He also says it was necessary. But what we know of what the mentally challenged Zubaydah told us suggests it was largely garbage. Bart Gellman summarizes Ron Suskind’s reporting on the matter:
Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety — against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each…target." And so, Suskind writes, "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."
So if the guy who tortured Zubaydah says it was torture, will the president now admit it? And will the attorney-general initiate the prosecution of all those involved in an illegal war-crime? It’s called the rule of law, Mr Mukasey. And you are in office to enforce it.
The shoeblogger finds some other, less distressing fashion objects designed by Mr Blahnik. Pity they’re paddock boots.
Gladwell summarizes some of James Flynn’s findings:
Flynn then talked about what we’ve learned from studies of adoption and mixed-race children – and that evidence didn’t fit a genetic model, either. If I.Q. is innate, it shouldn’t make a difference whether it’s a mixed-race child’s mother or father who is black. But it does: children with a white mother and a black father have an eight-point I.Q. advantage over those with a black mother and a white father. And it shouldn’t make much of a difference where a mixed-race child is born. But, again, it does: the children fathered by black American G.I.s in postwar Germany and brought up by their German mothers have the same I.Q.s as the children of white American G.I.s and German mothers.
The difference, in that case, was not the fact of the children’s blackness, as a fundamentalist would say. It was the fact of their Germanness – of their being brought up in a different culture, under different circumstances. "The mind is much more like a muscle than we’ve ever realized," Flynn said. "It needs to get cognitive exercise. It’s not some piece of clay on which you put an indelible mark." The lesson to be drawn from black and white differences was the same as the lesson from the Netherlands years ago: I.Q. measures not just the quality of a person’s mind but the quality of the world that person lives in.
This seems indisputable to me. The question is whether race has any genetic salience with respect to IQ. And the further question is: if race as genetics and race as environment are hopelessly conflated, as they are in America, what can we actually do about it? Do we have another Lamarckian phenomenon here?
"I propose a limitation be put on how many squares of toilet paper can be used in any one sitting. Now, I don’t want to rob any law-abiding American of his or her God-given rights, but I think we are an industrious enough people that we can make it work with only one square per restroom visit, except, of course, on those pesky occasions where 2 to 3 could be required. When presenting this idea to my younger brother, whose judgment I trust implicitly, he proposed taking it one step further. I believe his quote was, ‘how ’bout just washing the one square out,’" – Sheryl Crow. Ewww. (Update: apparently, Crow was joking.)
