Yearly Archives: 2012
Weight
Now the science is settled on food. According to a new study, “The Weight of the Nation”, to be shown on HBO, it’s largely the industrialized world’s fault you are fat. And it’s the government’s job to solve the problem. This is from the NY Times:
The films try to reorient conversations about obesity away solely from personal responsibility and toward a combination of environmental circumstances to explain why 70 percent of Americans are, according to federal statistics, either overweight or obese. While personal responsibility is an important piece, “you cannot say that all these people have lost all their willpower,” Mr. Hoffman said.
9/11 Defendants
Five 9/11 bad guys, including Sheik Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, were arraigned in a military court at Gitmo over the weekend. One of the defense attorneys wore an abaya and requested that women on the prosecution side do likewise to help her clients might avoid the occasion of sin. Another defense lawyer asked that his clients not be subject to strip search before entering the courtroom. The judge is thinking it over. As for the clients themselves? They prayed, refused to speak, and passed around a copy of The Economist magazine.
Women Wars
In his memoir, Dreams of My Father, Obama says that, as a young man, he took his white girlfriend to a play by a black playwright. After the play she complained that she couldn’t understand why black people were always angry. In the process of writing his own biography of the president, David Maraniss tracked down the girlfriend. She says she only attended one play with Obama and it wasn’t by a black playwright. Asked about this, Obama says he used composites in his book.
In this column about the Maraniss book, Byron York describes how Obama composited his own identity.
Another fictional female in Obama’s life is Julia, a government dependent cartoon gal appearing in a slide show created by the Obama election campaign.
Newt
Newt now says he’ll do everything he can to help Mitt get elected. That’s a switch from January when he implied Romney was a corporate looter. Gingrich has run up a campaign debt of $4.3 million.
