This has been the biggest surprise for the Democratic Party

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser.

Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

Frankly, not even Bernie Sanders thought this—Berniemania—would happen. “No, no, we didn’t,” he tells me, as I sit facing him in his Washington office, which is decorated with bottles of maple syrup. A plaque features Eugene Debs, five-time Socialist Party candidate for president. The notorious Sanders hair, to be honest, has been greatly exaggerated; it lies placidly, almost respectably across his ruddy scalp. And truthfully, the socialism rap has been blown out of proportion as well: Sanders accepts “democratic socialist” as an accurate descriptor of his philosophy, but he never sought it as an identity.

“The campaign is moving so fast the infrastructure can’t keep up,” Sanders confesses. “It sometimes reminds me of a military campaign, where the front line of the army is moving faster than the supply chain.” Since Berniemania began this summer, he and a small band of aides have been scrambling to turn it to their advantage.

You don’t often hear politicians admit that they didn’t expect to catch on. But Sanders and his team have a bracing habit of saying things politicians and their aides are not supposed to say—a minor violation of norms that reminds you how accustomed we are to being lied to in politics.

Another basic tenet of campaign spin is that consultants must never admit their candidate isn’t totally perfect, but Sanders’s people apparently missed that lesson as well.

Via: Business Insider

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The FDA just banned trans fats — here's what it means for you

In a move that experts say could prevent thousands of deaths every year, the US Food and Drug Administration has declared that trans fats are no longer considered safe in food.

The new rule released Tuesday, June 16 gives food companies three years to cut trans fats from the food supply. And while the use of these fats has already declined a lot in recent years, some companies are slacking on removing it from their products.

About 85% of artificial trans fat has already been removed from the food supply, as a result of an ongoing public health campaign including a requirement to put trans fat on nutrition labels, state and local bans of trans fats in restaurants, and lawsuits, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI).

The newly announced ban, then, is a means of "putting the last nail in the coffin," Jim O’Hara, director of health promotion policy at CSPI, told Business Insider.

Via: Business Insider

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The Obamacare Prediction of the Week

There’s been quite a buzz over Ryan Lizza’s New Yorker article in which MIT economist Jonathan Gruber claims that, although a modest number of Americans may see their health insurance policies change under Obamacare, only 3% of the population will be hurt financially by that change.

Of course, 3% is more than “none.” It’s also very different from another of Obama’s statements, that a typical family will save $2,500, which Obama “promised” repeatedly (with his fingers crossed, as it turns out).

Still, it’s nowhere near as bad as Obamacare’s critics — and many recent horror stories told by recipients of policy cancellations — would suggest. But is Gruber’s prediction correct?

Not being a number-crunching economist, I can’t tell you. What I can say is that these predictions of Gruber’s have been critiqued and described in a Business Insider article by Josh Barro as “garbage,” and that Barro is otherwise known as “Obama’s favorite conservative columnist,” whatever that might mean.

In most of the articles I’ve seen so far about these projections, Gruber is touted as having been the main architect of Romneycare. This is true. But it also makes it sound as though he might be a Republican, which is most definitely not the case. Gruber is an extremely partisan Democrat and not the least bit shy about it, as can be seen from this month-old Esquire interview with him.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that Gruber’s not correct about what he’s predicting. It just means, let’s say, that his loyalties lie on the side of Obamacare.

There’s another personal reason that Gruber might be eager to see Obamacare succeed: he not only was Romneycare’s architect, he was Obamacare’s architect as well. What’s more, he was instrumental in making sanguine predictions about how much money Obamacare would end up saving people, projections Congress relied on heavily in soothing its own anxieties and passing the bill. And so he is invested in validating his own past predictions as well.

Via: PJ Media

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