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$500,000
Amount left unpaid from Carly Fiorina’s failed 2010 U.S. Senate bid “— even as Fiorina reimbursed herself nearly $1.3 million she lent the campaign. She finally cleared most of the balance in January, a few months before announcing her run for president,” the Washington Post reports. Said Fiorina’s former campaign manager Martin Wilson: “Occasionally, I’d call and tell her she should pay them. She just wouldn’t.”
20,000M
Crowd that Sen. Bernie Sanders drew “in Massachusetts on Saturday as he sought to attract donors and build a political infrastructure that will boost his campaign a month after the first two states vote,” the Boston Globe reports. “It was the third-largest rally Sanders has held this year, smaller only than events in Portland, Ore., and Los Angeles in August. To put it in context, the number of people who showed up to see Sanders at the convention center was nearly three times the population of Montpelier, the capital of the US senator’s home state of Vermont.”
There’s homophobes still left. Most of them are running for president, I think.
— Vice President Joe Biden, quoted by The Hill.
The regularity of mass killings breeds familiarity. The rhythms of grief and outrage that accompany them become — for those not directly affected by tragedy — ritualised and then blend into the background noise. That normalisation makes it ever less likely that America’s political system will groan into action to take steps to reduce their frequency or deadliness. Those who live in America, or visit it, might do best to regard them the way one regards air pollution in China: an endemic local health hazard which, for deep-rooted cultural, social, economic and political reasons, the country is incapable of addressing. This may, however, be a bit unfair. China seems to be making progress on pollution.
