Marc Ambinder again has some important things to say on the topic of obesity:

The explicit premise is that people who have successfully lost weight are the only people who can give reliable advice on weight loss. That's understandable, although not logical. The implicit premise is kind of insidious: it assumes that Benjamin is grossly overweight, which isn't true; it erases the distinction between obesity and being a few pounds too heavy; and it replicates the harmful cultural assumption that weight loss depends on willpower and choice and has little to do with culture, society, environment or physical space.

As was the case the last time I linked to Ambinder on the topic, I'm not sure that I have much to add other than go over and read the whole post.

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Marc Ambinder has written up what I think is one of the most important and interesting pieces I have read in a long time on what the anti-obesity movement can learn from the anti-tobacco efforts of the last several decades. I recommend you read the post in full, but here's Ambinder's final graf:

Apply that lesson to the debate over obesity. The same cognitive frames apply; lawmakers, supported by the food and agribusiness industries, see obesity as a personal issue, one where willpower and individual choices matter. Science sees obesity as a complex epiphenomenon. Our health care system has few incentives to fight obesity; health insurance have few incentives, right now, at least, to proactively cover preventative interventions, like paying for personal trainers and nutritionists for the slightly overweight. The food industry lobby is huge and powerful; the anti-obesity lobby is correspondingly weak and not terribly sophisticated.  Many health economists and scientists believe that action is needed now, but if the tobacco model repeats itself, it may be a while before something -- whatever that something is, because there is no consensus -- gets done.

I'm not sure that I have much to add beyond the call again to read the article in full.

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When a little birdie told me that the Atlantic's Marc Ambinder is reporting that the Obama Administration is vetting Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen for Secretary of Health and Human Services, my head exploded.  I damn near stroked out, y'all.  A diehard Hillarycrat, this is his transparent way of saying that we would have been better off with the Queen of Triangulation, and by extension, her approach to health care reform.  I don't know if that's true, but if Barack Obama gives a mutha%$#*ing bastard like Phil Bredesen the reins of HHS, I do know we'll all wish we had been volunteer slaves on the Clintons neo-liberal plantation.

Placing Governor Bredesen in charge of the Administration's health care reform effort is analogous to giving a pedophile unfettered access to children.  At least an establishment tool like Tom Daschle has a few scruples left; a capitalist pig like Phil Bredesen has none. It's my moral obligation to sound the alarm so that this capitalist piggy screams "wee, wee, wee," all the way home.

I know what you're thinking. "Damn, Skeptical Brotha has gone off his meds." If you must know, I ain't on no meds, at least not for that, but if I were, and I depended on Tennessee's Medicaid program, for example, an MF like Phil Bredesen would be rationing my sh*t to "2 name brand drugs and 3 generic prescription drugs monthly, the lowest in the country." This is done without any regard for the maladies people have or what doctors say their patients need. Thanks be to Gawd that my therapist thinks my depression is situational and not clinical.  That is a conversation for another day and I need to stay on task.  

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Fox News is out with a new poll that shows the race tightening:

Obama 47
McCain 44

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It's amazing how well Edwards is doing. Recent polls of the first three states have Edwards ahead in Iowa and tied with Obama for second in New Hampshire* and Nevada. You can find less favorable polls, of course, but there's no question that he's in the thick of the race--an astounding accomplishment given the effort of the elite media to take him down and the celebrity of his two top rivals. One of the big un-discussed stories of the race is that Edwards is not slipping, a la McCain. On the contrary.

I could write a 10,000-word post on the elite media's distaste for Edwards: it's multi-layered. Elite journalists are in many cases members of the D.C establishment, which didn't take to Edwards even when he was a Senator, and which now hates him. Edwards is running against Washington in a very real way--not just rhetorically. He's winning powerful enemies with his "class warfare," his attacks on lobbyists, his criticism of Dems in Congress for caving in to Bush on Iraq, his call for reform at the D.N.C and Congressional committees. I feel confident saying that in the Giant Secret Conversation, in which elites socialize and leak and gossip, few are raving about Edwards.

My sense is, the dislike for Edwards is more personal than political. It's his earnestness that most offends elite journalists. They prefer irony and knowingness, the Bob Dolesque wit signaling that the political game is just that, a game, nothing too serious. But Edwards is dead serious. He speaks in moral terms. He has grand goals. He understands that political issues are matters of life and death. Jaded and often depressed, scornful of people fortunate enough to have strong beliefs, journalists think Edwards is a moralizer and hope to lay him low with charges of hypocrisy. They want us to think Edwards is as cynical as they are. But he's not.

The media assault was unrelenting from the end of March to the end of June. The Haircut dominated. It found its way to every story about Edwards. Compared to Clinton and Obama, he got almost no coverage and when he did, it was negative. He came very close to losing control of his image and his narrative. In a now infamous, blasé post, Marc Ambinder, formerly of the Note and now of the Atlantic, confirmed what we had lost suspected, that the media were "trying to bury Edwards."

A candidacy with a less solid core would have gone under. His substance kept him above ground.

A hit-job by Leslie Wayne on the cover of the Times ratified the glorious, liberating feeling among supporters that we were part of an insurgency, one that simply would not get a fair hearing from elite journalists. So fuck `em, we said. Fuck `em once and for all. The hit-job created energy and intensity and prompted the blogosphere and his allies in a leading grassroots antipoverty group, ACORN, to rally around Edwards.

The press was challenging Edwards to abandon poverty as an issue, trying to convince him that it was a losing hand. So what did Edwards do? He doubled-down. He launched a tour through the South and Midwest focusing on poverty. Though derided in some quarters of the media, it generated a host of positive stories, including the first ones in months that included no mention of the Haircut.

But the corner was officially turned during the You-Tube debate. The "What Really Matters" video generated buzz and signaled that Edwards would be the first Democratic candidate in history to run against the mainstream media. More important, though, was his first comment of the night:

...[H]ow do we bring about big change? And I think that's a fundamental threshold question. And the question is: Do you believe that compromise, triangulation will bring about big change? I don't. I think the people who are powerful in Washington--big insurance companies, big drug companies, big oil companies--they are not going to negotiate. They are not going to give away their power. The only way that they are going to give away their power is if we take it away from them. And I have been standing up to these people my entire life. I have been fighting them my entire life in court rooms -- and beating them. If you want real change, you need somebody who's taking these people on and beating them.

With a single comment, he filled in the holes that the media had dug out of his narrative. It brought together his career as attorney battling violent crime by corporations, the "Two Americas" theme of his last campaign, his antipoverty agenda, and his battle against K-Street. It also distinguished him from Clinton, with her fondness for lobbyists, and Obama, with his inclination toward compromise.

Around the same time, the media finally noticed that JRE's policy positions were shaping the race. Or, as the Wall Street Journal put it, he has "sway over the party's agenda." With its substance, his campaign is built to last, able to withstand attacks from all sides.

He's in a solid position as we head into the heart of the campaign, when voters will start to learn about the candidates in detail. In addition to his lead in Iowa, there is other evidence that he does well among high-information voters, and the number of those will increase dramatically in the fall. If and when he wins in Iowa, all bets are off. So critics should stop waiting for the Edwards campaign to die. If he were going to go under, he already would have.

*I couldn't find a MoE; I assume it's 4 or greater.

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