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Here’s why, whatever they said on the campaign trail, Democrats should vote to keep Pelosi as the leader of their new majority.
First, she’s already demonstrated the ability to stand up to a Republican White House and Republican Senate while also negotiating agreements that advance Democratic values. In September 2017, Pelosi outsmarted congressional Republicans and averted a fiscal crisis by building a bipartisan coalition with Trump that incr...
The question for Pelosi’s critics is: Who else can do that?
Second, a demotion for Pelosi would make for a rather odd coda to what David Wasserman of “The Cook Political Report” called “the year of the fired-up woman.” The day following Trump’s inauguration, women took to the streets. Then they ran for office—with Pelosi’s explicit encouragement—reclaiming suburban districts fr...
The question for Pelosi’s critics is: Why fire the top woman? Critics should also keep in mind that much of the venom directed at Pelosi—all those Republican ads about the horrors of a House led by her—are sexist, born of an anti-feminist fear of women in positions of power.
Third, there’s the fact that money matters immensely in the American election system, and Pelosi knows how to get it. In the 2018 cycle, the DCCC raised approximately $270 million. Pelosi personally raised nearly half of that total: $129 million. Much of that money came from donors who believe in Pelosi and in her abil...
The question for Pelosi’s critics is: Does anyone else even have a shot at bringing money in and stanching the need for money at the same time?
Sometime between Thanksgiving and early December, newly elected and reelected House Democrats will gather in the harshly lit Democratic-caucus room, several floors beneath the Capitol building. They’ll sit on uncomfortable mesh chairs, balancing on their lap paper plates with pizza or salad dispensed from serving trays...
But it’s not up to Republicans to choose the Democrats’ leader. It’s up to Democrats.
Their best choice is Nancy Pelosi, bats and all.
Steve Israel is a former Democratic congressman from New York and the former chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. He is the author of Big Guns.
April 12, 2017 2017 elections, Donald Trump, George Bennett, Trump Administration.
President Donald Trump made a Twitter appeal for Kansas Republican Ron Estes on Tuesday.
In a Kansas race that drew national attention as the first congressional election since President Donald Trump took office, a Republican backed by Trump pulled out a closer-than-expected victory in a normally solid GOP House district on Tuesday.
Republicans were nervous about the race as it became clear that Democrat James Thompson was running close to Republican Ron Estes in a district that Trump won by 27 points in November and Mitt Romney carried by 26 points in 2012.
Estes ended up winning with 53 percent of the vote in Kansas District 4.
Trump recorded a robocall for Estes in the campaign’s final days and took to Twitter on Tuesday morning to promote him.
“Ron Estes is running TODAY for Congress in the Great State of Kansas. A wonderful guy, I need his help on Healthcare & Tax Cuts (Reform),” Trump tweeted Tuesday morning.
Estes will fill the District 4 seat of Mike Pompeo, who resigned to become Trump’s CIA director. Pompeo won the seat by a 60.6-to-29.6 percent margin over his Democratic challenger only five months ago.
Another nail-biter for the GOP and Trump comes next week in Georgia, where polls suggest Democrats have a chance to win a suburban Atlanta district once held by Newt Gingrich. Georgia’s 6th District seat is vacant because Republican Tom Price stepped down to be Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services. Price was ...
After several rainouts, the Solano College softball team finally started the 2019 slate on Thursday and split with American River, winning 6-5 and losing 3-1.
In the win, Adriana Montuya got the win as she went all seven innings, allowing six hits and five runs. She struck out five and walked three. Larissa Raymond was 2-for-3 and Aleya Turner was 2-for-4 with a double and two runs scored.
In the loss, Montuya was 2-for-3 as the Falcons got just five hits. Courtney McGraw pitched well in her start, going 4 1/3 innings, allowing six hits and one run.
Solano hosts Diablo Valley College on Tuesday.
For years Kelly Clarkson's dalliance in country music has been little more than a playful tease. She shows up from time to time, suggesting that she'd consider crossing over at some point but then disappears. The emergence of a countrified version of her recent hit 'Mr. Know it All' could indicate she's finally ready t...
According to MjsBigBlog.com, this remix was first revealed at by an unnamed country radio station deejay, who called it her "new" song. It's a bit slower than the original version, with mandolin and fiddle replacing the drum machine and bright, pop-production.
Historically, the country audience has been slow to accept pop artists looking to dabble in country music (see Jessica Simpson) but perhaps Clarkson's slow entry into country waters will prove to be a more successful strategy. Her remake of 'Because of You' with Reba McEntire was a smash, and 'Don't You Wanna Stay' wit...
Recently Clarkson has been showing up at Blake Shelton and Miranda Lambert events. The original 'American Idol' winner is even planning a guest-mentor appearance on an episode of 'The Voice' next season.
Roy Condotti could be headed for the biggest challenge of his coaching career.
Considered one of the top basketball coaches in the Chicago Public League, Condotti is leaving Westinghouse to take over the program at Homewood-Flossmoor.
During Condotti's nine seasons as varsity coach, Westinghouse won two city titles and finished third in the state in 1992. H-F was 5-19 last season, 15-11 two years ago.
The Vikings have been unable to duplicate ex-coach Don Laketa's stretch of success in the mid-1980s, when H-F went 72-14 over three seasons, including third in Class AA in the 1986 tournament.
"I know there is athletic talent in the building because the football team won the Class 6A title last fall," Condotti said of H-F. "It's going to be a matter of getting that talent to come out and play basketball. I realize the program has not been successful for a number of years.
"Telling my players about it was one of the most difficult things I have ever had to do," said Condotti, frosh-soph coach at Westinghouse for 13 years. "I have some very special feelings for those kids. They tried to be stoic about it. I hope I never have to do that again."
Golf greats: The Illinois Coaches Association Golf Hall of Fame will induct 15 new members Friday in Bloomington.
Eleven of the new Hall of Famers are from the Chicago area. They will join 35 previous inductees.
Those to be inducted are Len Fiocca (Fremd boys), Bob Franz (Waukegan girls), Cas Kowalski (Jacobs boys, retired), Marlene Miller (Lake Forest girls), Dave Moe (Hinsdale Central boys), Jim Perkins (St. Edward boys, retired), Ed Rosenthal (Naperville North girls), Sid Sorenson (Crystal Lake South boys), Illinois Junior ...
Other inductees are Robert Kies of Quincy Notre Dame, Gene Maurer of Belleville West, Mike McGuckin of Pontiac and Gibson Woods Golf Course professional Tim Sweborg of Monmouth.
Members of the ICA Golf Hall of Fame have been chosen for their contributions to junior golf through high school and junior golf programs. The new inductees will be honored at a dinner at the Normal Holiday Inn. Tickets are $18. For more information, contact Earl Martin at 309-692-7060.
Gym dandies: Former Naperville North gymnastics coach and athletic director Jon Boulton and National High School Gymnastics President John Brinkworth are the 1995 inductees into the Illinois Gymnastics Coaches Association Hall of Fame.
Class change: Elmwood Park, Wauconda and Waterloo will compete in Class AA in the 1995-96 season after being in Class A last season. Madonna, St. Scholastica, Macomb and Olney will switch from AA to A. Official school enrollments issued by the Illinois High School Association for the 1995-96 school year list Victory Ch...
Lily Allen is planning to get more involved in tackling knife crime following her meeting with the London mayor earlier this year.
The singer met with Boris Johnson after blogging about the rising number of knife attacks in the British capital and says she intends to get involved further.
“From what I can see there’s a lot of money waiting to be spent, it’s just about finding the right thing that will make a difference,” she told The Observer Music Monthly.
Allen added that knife crime was likely to be the issue she focused on.
Charlie Kaufman's screenplay titles—Being John Malkovich, Human Nature, Adaptation, Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind, and the new Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind—each have either a metaphysical or an anthropological ring, either of which amounts to a detached sense of looking in from the outside. Not that his film...
Playing against his manic instincts, a subtle, self-effacing Jim Carrey stars as a man saddened to discover that his ex-girlfriend Kate Winslet has had her memories of their relationship erased. In response, he contacts Lacuna, Inc., the outfit responsible for the procedure, and demands to have Winslet removed from his...
For most of Eternal Sunshine, Gondry and Kaufman strand Carrey (and the audience) inside the echo chamber of his own head, where reconfigured scenes and moments from his life create a heightened feeling of déjà vu. Through this radical narrative and visual strategy, the film smuggles poignant insights on how even a fai...
An amateur historian and archaeologist has stumbled upon the find of a lifetime after discovering a dazzlingly beautiful 1,800-year-old ring which was once worn in ancient Rome.
It is believed that the ring is comprised of 24-karat gold and the artist that designed the ring fashioned the surface of it with black onyx, over which was overlaid a scene that depicts two horses being heroically driven by their master, who was the Roman god of victory, as Live Science has reported.
Jason Massey, the archaeologist who discovered this ring, is one of the many members of a group who are known as Detecting for Veterans. The 1,800-year-old Roman ring was found while a survey was being conducted on July 29 in Crewkerne, England.
The ring has weighed in at 1.7 ounces and even though a proper analysis has not been conducted of it yet, the British Museum has tentatively concluded that it was almost certainly made sometime between the years 200 and 300 AD.
It has been reported that when Massey first spotted the ring he actually thought it might be a gold coin at first glance, which makes sense considering the fact that it was discovered among 60 Roman coins that were scattered throughout the field where the Roman ring was found.
As indicated by the hoard of gold coins and the 1,800-year-old Roman ring that was discovered in the field, Massey explained it is very likely a “very high-status Roman villa” was once perched on the site. Even though there have been numerous figures attached to the ring, archaeologists like Massey are much more concer...
While this is certainly not the first ring that an amateur historian and archaeologist has discovered, it is nevertheless a priceless little piece of history from life as it was lived 1,800 years ago in ancient Roman times.
Crowdfunding platforms like GoFundMe have shown just how generous people can be towards complete strangers. Jordan Erica Webber looks at why humans are so willing to trust people they don’t know online.
Online crowdfunding first started around the turn of the millennium, and big crowdfunding websites such as IndieGoGo, Kickstarter and GoFundMe launched around the end of the last decade. Artists and musicians have used these platforms to gather funds for books, albums and other projects. Other people have raised money ...
This week Jordan Erica Webber chats to the CEO of GoFundMe, Rob Solomon, and to Emma Houlston, who started a campaign to raise money for cancer treatment.
She also hears from Dr Cornelia Reyes-Acosta, of King’s College London, about why we have become so trusting in this sometimes untrustworthy online world.
LONDON (Reuters) - In Britain it started with Sid, the “giant slug with a message”, who slicked his way onto television screens back in 2004 as part of a government health campaign to warn people about the dangers of consuming too much salt. “Stay away from fast cars, loose women and SALT!” he screamed.
Sid’s message — that liberal sprinklings of sodium, the main component of salt, don’t only kill slugs but humans too — has now become conventional wisdom worldwide. High salt intake is linked to high blood pressure, or hypertension, a key risk factor for strokes, heart attacks and other cardiovascular diseases. Togethe...
Or is it? Recent scientific papers suggest the basis for a global crackdown on salt is not what you’d call rock solid. Two 2011 studies indicate that the evidence is inconclusive, or that reducing salt may even be harmful.
It’s a debate that has flared over the past few months, with each side harnessing a legion of experts in hypertension, heart disease, nutrition and scientific analysis. The salt industry has, naturally, jumped on studies that question the conventional wisdom, and at least one food manufacturer has started to add salt b...
“The two sides are totally polarized and there’s no agreement or consensus on what the answer is,” says Peter Sherratt of the UK Salt Association. Any new scientific paper which supports the anti-salt position is lauded as proof salt consumption is dangerous, but any piece of evidence or science showing salt is benefic...
The debate has big implications for business. Salt for food use accounts for only a fraction of the 250 million tonnes of annual global production. Looking at the United States alone, 1.5 million tonnes of so-called human nutrition salt was sold in 2009 with a value of more than $321 million.
But the U.S. snack foods industry — a key consumer of salt which includes major companies like Pepsico’s Frito-Lay and Kraft’s Nabisco — has a combined annual revenue of $27 billion, according to analysis by company profile builder Hoover’s. Then there’s the business of selling drugs to treat high blood pressure. World...
Heagarty disclosed that 15 years ago, his department accepted 2,000 pounds ($3,200 at today’s rates) from the U.S.- based industry lobby, the Salt Institute, but said he has no current financial conflict of interest.
Salt has been taxed, monopolized, treasured and fought over for thousands of years. Today’s scientists are waging a modern-day salt war.
In the 1970s, American researchers experimenting on rats found very high doses of salt raised blood pressure. Some of the most-cited evidence on salt and health came in a 1988 international study called InterSalt, which surveyed more than 10,000 men and women in scores of populations across the world. The study include...
A 2005 study in the PubMed journal found almost 1 billion people around the world have high blood pressure, which makes the heart work too hard, hardens the walls of the arteries and can cause other problems such as heart failure, kidney disease, and blindness. Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death glo...
In the past few years, governments have begun to act. Under its health-promoting mayor Michael Bloomberg, New York City pledged in 2010 to coordinate a U.S.-wide effort to cut salt in restaurant and packaged foods by 25 percent. National sodium reduction strategies have been adopted across Europe and in Australia, Chin...
Scores of health authorities around the world advise that we should aim to reduce our salt intake from the roughly 9 to 12 grams a day we eat now down to around 6 grams - about a teaspoonful a day. Since around 75 percent of all the salt we consume comes from packaged and processed food, rather than from what we sprink...
Under pressure from health authorities and the WHO, the food industry — which stands accused of using salt to boost the flavor, shelf-life and profit of what would otherwise be bland ingredients — has taken action. Big brands like Heinz, Kellogg’s, Nestle, Pepsico, General Mills and others have been steadily reducing s...
According to Susan Jebb, a nutrition adviser to the UK government, Britain is leading the way, forcing foodmakers to make some “impressive” reductions including a 30 percent reduction in salt in bread, about a 50 percent cut in branded breakfast cereals and around 25 percent in pasta sauces.
Among the health-conscious at least, a salt-shaker on the dining table is becoming almost as frowned on as an ashtray.
But the findings that policy-makers have accepted as settled are not as clear-cut among scientists. A study in July by the much-respected Cochrane Library, which conducts meta-analyses of scientific data by grouping together the best studies on a subject and pooling the results, found no evidence that reducing salt int...
In that study Rod Taylor, a professor of health services research at Exeter University, analyzed seven randomized controlled trials covering more than 6,500 people and found that although cutting down did appear to lead to slight reductions in blood pressure, this did not translate into lower risk of heart disease or p...
In one group of people — those with pre-existing heart conditions — reducing salt was actually associated with an increase in the likelihood of premature death.
Taylor said he did not receive payment from, or have links to, the salt industry. His study was funded by a grant from the UK government’s National Institute for Health Research.
Taylor’s study came hot on the heels of another, by Belgian scientists, which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). That found people who ate lots of salt were no more likely to get high blood pressure, and were statistically less likely to die of heart disease, than those with low sa...
The researchers used data from two different studies, involving a total of around 3,700 Europeans whose salt consumption was measured through urine samples. The scientists divided the participants into three groups with low, medium and high intake: those with the lowest salt intake had the highest rate of death from he...
Staessen told Reuters he had no financial conflicts of interest. His work was funded largely by grants from the European Union and European national governments.
WHO SAYS A TEASPOONFUL WILL DO?
Such studies are re-drawing the battle lines around salt. Foodmakers are starting to fight back against the low-salters. Campbell’s is now putting more salt back into all 31 of its Select Harvest soups after consumers voted with their taste buds and stopped buying the reduced-salt version.
Other major food industry groups and manufacturers approached by Reuters, including Kellogg’s and Pepsico, as well as the U.S. Grocery Manufacturers’ Association, either declined to be interviewed or sent statements reiterating their commitment to reducing sodium levels in their foods, in line with government dietary r...
But the powerful U.S. National Restaurant Association is questioning the accepted wisdom. “The science is very clear in showing that reducing sodium reduces blood pressure. There’s no question about that. The controversy is around reducing cardiovascular disease and ... basically the risk of death. That’s where the evi...
Michael Alderman, a blood pressure expert at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the United States and editor of the American Journal of Hypertension, believes there’s a sense that some scientists — and most policymakers — may have moved too early to target salt as the cause of the problem. “If we’re doing something...
Of around a dozen scientists interviewed by Reuters for this story, about half shared this point of view; but since they included salt-reduction campaigners and salt industry representatives, that is not necessarily an indicator of the balance of opinions across the scientific community.
Alderman argues that in addition to changing blood pressure, cutting sodium can cause other physiological changes such as increased resistance to insulin — which can set the stage for diabetes and increase the risk of death from heart disease. Too little sodium can also increase sympathetic nerve activity which raises ...
“What we have — like almost all interventions in health and medicine — is something that produces a multitude of different effects,” said Alderman, who disclosed having taken one $750 payment more than a decade ago from the Salt Institute, but who said he has since had no financial help from the industry. Besides Alder...
IS SALT THE NEW TOBACCO?
That kind of talk exasperates the Wolfson Institute’s MacGregor, one of the most vocal advocates of salt reduction anywhere. Along with Franco Cappuccio, head of the WHO’s collaborating center for nutrition at Warwick University and Simon Capewell, a professor of clinical epidemiology at Liverpool University, McGregor ...
It’s perhaps an indication of his conviction that MacGregor equates the argument about salt to past rows over tobacco, even though unlike tobacco, salt is a fundamental nutritional requirement for humans to survive.
WASH and its UK counterpart CASH (Consensus Action on Salt and Health), which is also chaired by MacGregor, are funded by donations from individuals and charities.
Cappuccio and Capewell point to scores of scientific analyses to make their point. A 2007 study predicted that reducing salt intake around the world by 15 percent could prevent almost 9 million deaths by 2015. Another study published in March 2010 found that cutting salt intake by 10 percent in the United States could ...
When confronted with the two most recent scientific studies suggesting the contrary, MacGregor dismissed them as flawed or paradoxical. “There is absolutely no evidence of any harm from reducing salt intake. Absolutely none,” he said.
In the case of the Cochrane review, MacGregor set about re-crunching the numbers and swiftly published a fresh analysis of the data in a rival medical journal, The Lancet, which drew the opposite conclusion.
Taylor responded by saying MacGregor had taken two of the sets of data in the study — one from people with normal blood pressure and one from people with hypertension - and grouped them together. This, he said, is like comparing apples and oranges, and breaks a central tenet of statistical analysis.
Much of the argument barely touches on the data — descending instead into personal attacks and accusations of conflicts of interest. Scientists on both sides talk of being taunted by their rivals. Both Cappuccio, who advocates less salt, and Staessen, the hypertension expert who has found risks in salt reduction, say t...
There is one thing the two sides appear to agree on: the matter could be settled by a large-scale — 20,000 to 30,000 people — randomized clinical trial with half allocated to a high and half to a low salt diet. To be done properly, the main protagonists agree, such a trial would need to run for several years. The huge ...

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