A review of the New Hampshire primary

A team of reporters for CNN had a recap of the New Hampshire primary and how it came to be that the two outsiders won. It explains why Chris Christie zeroed in on Marco Rubio in the last debate and savaged him, rather than aiming for the frontrunner Donald Trump. It is true that Christie was competing to win the ‘establishment ‘ candidate slot that Rubio seemed to be holding on to but there was apparently more to it than that, that it was also motivated by a desire for revenge.
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Presidential pensions

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 people who can’t sleep

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 doesn’t even believe his own robotic line

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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Will ‘Hillary-only Feminism’ carry the day in New Hampshire?

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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