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Bernie Sanders Says He’s Being "Lectured" by Hillary Clinton on Foreign Policy

Mother Jones

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Bernie Sanders was defensive when he was asked at Thursday’s Democratic presidential debate why he doesn’t talk more about how he’d approach being commander-in-chief. So does he plan on changing course anytime soon? Not a chance.

On Sunday afternoon in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, speaking at the same community college that hosted Hillary Clinton on Saturday, Sanders did not mention foreign policy until the 50th minute of a 54-minute speech. Even then, he kept it short, telling supporters (and a few undecided voters) he was tired of being “lectured” by his opponent on the issue. “And by the way,” he said, as he wrapped up his remarks, “as somebody who voted against the war in Iraq—who led the opposition to the war in Iraq, lately I have been lectured on foreign policy. The most important foreign policy in the modern history of this country was the war in Iraq. I was right on that issue. Hillary Clinton was wrong on that issue.”

And then he moved on. In one of his final get-out-the-vote events before Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary, Sanders showed a willingness to continue taking the fight to Clinton on his own terms. The speech he gave on Sunday, his voice still hoarse from his appearance on Saturday Night Live with Larry David, was much the same speech he delivered in Boston in October, and in Burlington in May. He excoriated the oligarchs who he believes corrupt the political system and outlined a theory of change, from the suffrage movement to civil rights to gay rights, that he believes shows that grassroots movements like his own can overturn the system. The routine is so familiar that when he asked his audience who the biggest recipient of federal welfare is, about half of those in attendance were able to answer—”Walmart.”

What’s changed is the crowd. When I saw him in Boston in October, the crowd booed 17 different times during his speech, prompted by references to Jeb Bush or the Koch brothers. On Sunday, that number was halved in a speech of equal length. (Targets of booing included the black and Latino unemployment rate, speaker fees from Goldman Sachs, and companies that exploit loopholes in the tax code to avoid “paying a nickel in federal income taxes.”) Clinton refers to the animating ethos of Sanders’ supporters as “anger,” and there’s certainly that, but increasingly, there’s the optimism of an organization that truly thinks it can win.

That’s typified by one of the few tweaks he’s made to his speech over the last few months: He now talks about the poll numbers. “We started this campaign at 3 percent in the polls,” he told the crowd early on. “We were 30, 40 points down in New Hampshire. Well, a lot has changed.” Except for all the stuff that hasn’t.

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Bernie Sanders Says He’s Being "Lectured" by Hillary Clinton on Foreign Policy

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There’s a Huge Problem With the New Food Guidelines That No One Is Talking About

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Every five years, the government tries to tell Americans what to put in their bodies. Eat more vegetables. Dial back the fats. It’s all based on the best available science for leading a healthy life. But the best available science also has a lot to say about what those food choices do to the environment, and some researchers are peeved that new dietary recommendations released yesterday seem to utterly ignore that fact.

Broadly, the 2016-2020 dietary recommendations aim for balance: More veggies, leaner meats, try some fish! Oh, and eat way less sugar, no more than 10 percent of your total diet.

Read more: Congress doesn’t think agriculture affects your health.

But Americans consume more calories per capita than almost any other country in the world. (Austria occasionally out-gorges the US.) So the things Americans eat have a huge impact on climate change. Soil tilling releases carbon dioxide, delivery vehicles burp exhaust, and cattle spend much of their life farting methane into the atmosphere before they end up medium rare and slathered in A-1. The government’s dietary guidelines could have done a lot to lower that climate cost. Not just because of the bully pulpit: The guidelines drive billions of dollars of food production through federal programs like school lunches and nutrition assistance for the needy.

On its own, plant and animal agriculture contributes 9 percent of all the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. That’s not counting the fuel burned in transportation, processing, refrigeration, and other waypoints between farm and belly. Red meats are among the biggest and most notorious emitters, but trucking a salad from California to Minnesota in January also carries a significant burden. And greenhouse gas emissions aren’t the whole story. “Food production is the largest user of fresh water, largest contributor to the loss of biodiversity, and a major contributor to using up natural resources,” says Miriam Nelson, director of the John Hancock Center on Physical Activity, Nutrition, and Obesity Prevention at Tufts University.

All of these points and more showed up in the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee’s scientific report, released last February. Nelson chaired the subcommittee in charge of sustainability for the report, and is disappointed that bullet points like eating less meat and buying local food aren’t in the final product. “Especially if you consider that eating less meat, especially red and processed, has health benefits,” she says.

So what happened? The official response—foreshadowed last October in a joint press release from the secretaries of Health and Human Services and the USDA—is that sustainability falls too far outside the guidelines’ official scope, which is to provide “nutritional and dietary information.” (A government spokesperson referred me back to that press release when I requested to speak with an official about the sustainability omission.)

Possibly the agencies in charge of drafting the decisions are too close to the industries they are supposed to regulate. “On one hand, the USDA is compiling dietary advice,” says David Wallinga, a physician and senior health officer with the National Resources Defense Council. “On the other, their clients are US agriculture companies.” To the USDA’s credit, the agency makes sizable investments in sustainable farming.

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There’s a Huge Problem With the New Food Guidelines That No One Is Talking About

Posted in alo, Anchor, Casio, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on There’s a Huge Problem With the New Food Guidelines That No One Is Talking About