Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Your Morning News 4.23.08

Posted by Josh in Barack Obama, Death Penalty, Food Crisis, hillary clinton, Iraq, Pennsylvania, Your Morning News

After 6 weeks of campaigning, Hillary Clinton won the Pennsylvania primary last night by roughly 10 percentage points. Anyone who ever hoped that this primary might end soon (me) or ever (you) was proven sadly mistaken. Clinton won by increasing turnout among her core constituencies: poor whites, old whites, and catholic (whites). Just over 2 million people voted, which is more than 3 times the turnout of the most recent Pennsylvania presidential primary.

So what is next? First off, we never again have to hear Chris Matthews and Ed Rendell talk about how great Pennsylvania is. The next round of primaries is May 6th – so get out your Indiana and North Carolina guidebooks and start looking up interesting facts to throw around. Did you know that “historic Parke County [Indiana] has 32 covered bridges and is the Covered Bridge Capital of the world?” But do the bridges want to change politics as usual? Do they believe in the audacity Hope? I hate these states already.

To my surprise, there was news outside Pennsylvania, so Iraq, the food crisis, and the Supreme Court after the jump. Don’t worry if you skip it though, no one at the office will talk about anything bu the primary.

A series of bombings launched by Sunni militants killed 22 across Iraq today. Apparently, because of the expected draw down and the US elections in the fall, violence will be on the upswing as the various organizations jockey for influence and control.

The UN World Food Program is calling the growing world food crisis a “silent tsunami.” They are estimating that 25,000 people a day are dieing from conditions linked to hunger. The world hunger crisis has several causes, but true to form, we will try to explain the crisis in one run-on sentence: Because of rising oil prices, food is more expensive to ship; Because oil is more expensive, the US has invested in ethanol (made from corn) and US farmers are using their corn for ethanol instead of selling it as food; Because there is less corn, corn is more expensive; Because corn is expensive, cattle farmers are buying other staples (wheat, sorghum) to feed their herds, driving up their price, making food in general more expensive. Lather, rinse, and repeat until we hit a Thunderdomeesque scenario.

Finally, Jeff turned me on to a great Op-Ed in today’s New York Times that goes over our country’s checkered history with the death penalty. It is in response to last week’s decision by the Supreme Court that lethal injection is not cruel and unusual punishment. It details the history of courts deciding that various forms of killing people are not inhumane. The part guaranteed to make you laugh, then probably cry: “My God!” Wilkerson shrieked. “My God! They have missed!”(Shouted after being shot in the arm by a firing squad).

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