Iran Votes, and New Rules on Smokes
Iran’s presidential elections are on Friday, and they may be only round one. If none of the candidates makes it over the 50% vote threshhold, there’ll be a runoff.
A good deal of our time today was spent on what the differences could be among the four candidates, especially given that a council of clerics has to approve each candidate who appears on the ballot [and it rejected hundreds more hopefuls, including all the women].
President Ahmadinejad may be in trouble with voters because of the floundering economy, or it may turn out that the force of personality may be enough to carry him in a race where the candidates all share revolutionary-theocratic politics. Our guests and callers — among them many Iranian-Americans — were wonderfully insightful on the nuances.
Washington correspondent Kitty Felde updated us from outside the Holocaust Memorial Museum on the fatal shooting of a security guard, allegedly by an elderly white supremacist who was himself shot and wounded when he opened fire. She’ll be reporting more on this in the hours and days to come. We considered the larger question of hate crimes at a moment in history when the country elected a black president.
And by this time tomorrow, the U.S. Senate should have done a u-turn on decades of policy, voting to put tobacco products under the regulation of the FDA. Years of lobbying by tobacco companies had exempted nicotine from FDA supervision, but now even one of the big tobacco companies, Philip Morris — corporate name Altria — figures it can benefit from regulation. The new rules will not only govern what can go into cigarettes and other tobacco goods, but how they can be sold and marketed, so don’t expect to see either flavored cigarettes or cartoon-like characters peddling smokes.
Tomorrow, we hear from a White House point person on health care reform. And what’s the difference between a migraine and a headache? A world of hurt.
Source: Scpr
