Mary Jo Peterson isn’t worried. “I think Hillary is going to be the best president we’ve ever had,” she says, calmly surveilling a crowd of about 1,500 in Davenport for Bill and Hillary Clinton Friday night.

Peterson, a 53-year-old teacher from Grand Mount, first got involved in politics in 2007 for Clinton’s first presidential bid. Before those caucuses she worked her heart out—as did the whole campaign—in a frantic belated push to counter a surging Barack Obama. When Clinton placed third in Iowa, Peterson was crushed. But this time, she says, she’s a lot more confident.

In recent weeks, Clinton has battled a flurry of headlines declaring her “panicked” at rival Bernie Sander’s surge in polls and fundraising. Clinton is “racing to close the enthusiasm gap,” while her polls numbers are in “an absolute free fall,” and “Sanders’ surge threatens a replay of 2008 for Clinton.” But the reality on the ground doesn’t bear this out.
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The Davenport rally, essentially Clinton’s closing argument to Iowa’s eastern Quad Cities, was one of the largest crowds Clinton has addressed by design. As Clinton makes her way across the Hawkeye State ahead of Monday’s caucuses, her events—as well as her husband’s—are by design smaller and more intimate. There are no desperate recriminations, just a calm outline of the differences between Clinton and her rival Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. She is so on message that her events hardly vary in structure and tone. Her husband’s events are so quiet—a retelling of how he met his wife and how she has over the years been a force of good in his life and, he argues, the world—that the New York Times declared “the magic seems to be missing” and quoted political observers worried about his health.

What’s missing, actually, is the panic. The final month before the 2008 Iowa caucuses was a long, chaotic freak out. ...

Nearly 49 million passports are set to expire within the next three years, and government officials are warning there will be an flood of renewal requests through 2018.

The reason: A U.S. law that went into effect in 2007 requires U.S. citizens to use a passport when traveling to Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean and Bermuda.

As a result, nearly 18 million passports were issued in 2007 alone, and since passports are only good for 10 years, all of these will soon be up for renewal.

Adding to the time crunch is the fact that many European countries won't accept passports within six months of their expiration date.

When Iowa holds the nation’s first caucus in less than a week, Jim and Karen Gorham will be there—just as they’ve been to every single caucus since 1972.

This year, they’ll be caucusing for Hillary Clinton.
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“We've never had a chance,” they say, “since we started voting in 1960, to vote for somebody that has the issues that are closest to us in her heart. We have four granddaughters and two daughters. That's as personal as you can get for us. Hillary Clinton focuses on things that will make a huge difference in our daughters' lives.”

The 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of their German citizenship and prohibited them from marrying or having sexual relations with “people of German blood”.

A subsequent ruling confirmed that black people (like “gypsies”) were to be regarded as being “of alien blood” and subject to the Nuremberg principles. Very few people of African descent had German citizenship, even if they were born in Germany, but this became irreversible when they were given passports that designated them as “stateless negroes”.
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Instead, the process that ended with incarceration usually began with a charge of deviant or antisocial behaviour. Being black made people visible to the police, and it became a reason not to release them once they were in custody.

In this respect, we can see black people as victims not of a peculiarly Nazi racism, but of an intensified version of the kinds of everyday racism that persist today.

Last night, Bernie Sanders told the Washington Post that his campaign has “an excitement and energy that does not exist and will not exist in the Clinton campaign.”

That’s crazy—and more than a little insulting!

All across America, this team is turning out in droves to knock doors, make calls, and wait in line for hours for a chance to hear Hillary speak about her plans to make life better for American families. They inspire me every single day—take a look:

A couple of weeks ago, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Denis McDonough, the White House chief of staff, appeared to indicate that President Obama wouldn’t be backing anyone in the Democratic primary. The President would vote in the Illinois primary, on March 15th, and campaign for whichever candidate emerged from the process, McDonough said. Now, though, Obama has come very close to issuing a public endorsement of Hillary Clinton.
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Was Obama just shooting the breeze with a guest in the Oval Office who happened to be carrying a tape recorder? Hardly. It is much more plausible that the President was sending a supportive message to an embattled candidate whom he sees as the best option to replace him, in order to safeguard the electoral position of the Democratic Party and preserve his legacy as a center-left reformer.

For all the differences they had in 2008, some of which lingered, Obama and Clinton both represent the centrist, pragmatic approach to politics that has dominated the Democratic Party since the nineteen-eighties. A victory for Sanders and his insurgent left-wing populism would represent a sharp break with the moderate tradition. In the opinion of many Democrats in the White House and on Capitol Hill, it would also set up the Party for defeat come November, not just in the Presidential race but in congressional elections. And, from Obama’s perspective, it would place a shadow over his biggest achievements, particularly the Affordable Care Act, which Sanders has described as merely a first step in transforming the health-care system.

If the Republicans win the Presidential election and strengthen their grip on Congress, they are likely to repeal large parts of the Affordable Care Act and roll back many of President Obama’s executive orders in other areas, such as environmental regulation. If Sanders were to become President, he would presumably seek to build on Obama’s policies, but there would still be a significant change in approach. In part to try to prevent either of these things from happening, a number of former Obama Administration officials are working for the Clinton campaign. John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, worked at the White House under Obama. So did Jennifer Palmieri, the Clinton campaign’s director of communications. Joel Benenson, a senior strategist and pollster for the Clinton campaign, carried out a similar role in Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns. The Sanders campaign doesn’t have these sorts of personal ties to the White House.

The tremendous buildup to the Iowa caucuses is about to culminate in real voting. We’re less than a week away. But anything can still happen … there’s still plenty of time … right? Sort of. It’s true that even the final Iowa polls are sometimes way off. But it’s also true that every caucus winner since 1980 was either within about 10 percentage points of the leader or showing at least some momentum in the polls by this point.

Right now, only two candidates on both the Democratic and Republican side are even close to the lead. In the Republican race, Donald Trump seems to have some momentum over Ted Cruz, though Cruz remains within striking distance. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton continues to hold a small lead over Bernie Sanders, though the race remains as close as it did a week ago.

How does that compare to past races? Let’s time travel to a week before the caucuses in each open election since 1980 (we don’t have any polls for this time period for the Democratic caucuses in 1984 and 1992): What did a 10-day polling average show, and how did that average compare to the results?

Russian reviewers have responded with both praise and barely concealed amusement to the BBC’s adaptation of War and Peace, with reviewers describing it as a “medium-budget soap opera” and a “classic with cleavage”.

One review of the Tolstoy adaptation starring Paul Dano and Lily James said eyebrows had been raised in Russia at the risque scenes. St Petersburg news website Fontanka.ru said one dress was so low cut, the actor’s cleavage looked like it would “fall on the dinner plate”.

Leo Tolstoy’s four-volume novel set during Napoleon’s 1812 invasion is deeply lodged in Russia’s collective psyche, and it was once compulsory to read the 1,000-page book in schools.

The BBC series, written by Andrew Davies and watched by 6 million viewers, has not yet aired in Russia, but many have sought out episodes online, Russian media reported.