Steven Binko is young, healthy and recently unemployed. He doesn’t see any reason he should be required to buy health insurance next year.
Since losing his job at an Olive Garden restaurant in Jacksonville, Florida, the 25-year-old said he can’t afford to buy health care on his own. Even a premium of $40 a month for a plan through the U.S. Affordable Care Act exchanges would be too much. Therein lies the challenge for President Barack Obama.
Binko is one of 2.7 million healthy 18- to 34-year-olds, dubbed the young invincibles, that the Obama administration has said are needed in the exchanges to offset the cost of providing care for millions of other uninsured people who are likely to be older and sicker. Without young adults, who pay for insurance yet rarely use it, premium costs in the exchanges may soar.
“For young people learning to take care of ourselves, it’s foolish if we have to take care of the older generation too,” Binko, who now lives in Los Angeles, said in an interview.
Young invincibles are the focus of a pitched battle between Obamacare backers and the law’s opponents as the U.S. nears the Oct. 1 roll-out of government-run insurance exchanges. It’s a conflict playing out on television and the Internet, on college campuses and in door-to-door campaigns by volunteers nationwide.
“This demographic is critical,” Caroline Pearson, a vice president at Washington-based consulting firm Avalere Health LLC, said in an interview. “If you mostly have high risk people, premiums go up. It becomes a death spiral.”
If premiums can be kept low, Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement has a better chance of fulfilling its promise of affordably expanding health care to most of the nation’s 50 million uninsured people. If not, the costs may open fertile ground for new attacks on an overhaul that has been under siege by Republicans since it was signed into law by Obama in 2010.
“Obamacare is an awful deal for young people,” said Evan Feinberg, 29, a former Republican candidate for Congress who is now president of Generation Opportunity, an Arlington, Virginia-based advocacy group for young adults that supports less government. “We’re talking about stealing from young people during our leanest years. We don’t have the money to be footing the bill for older generations’ health care.”
We talked of Mr. Burke. Dr. Johnson said, he had a great variety of knowledge, store of imagery, copiousness of language. Robertson: "He has wit too." Johnson: "No, Sir; he never succeeds there. 'Tis low; 'tis conceit. I used to say, Burke never once made a good joke. What I most envy Burke for, is, his being constantly the same. He is never what we call humdrum; never unwilling to begin to talk, nor in haste to leave off." Boswell: "Yet he can listen." Johnson: "No; I cannot say he is good at that. So desirous is he to talk, that, if one is speaking at this end of the table, he'll speak to somebody at the other end. Burke, Sir, is such a man, that if you met him for the first time in the street where you were stopped by a drove of oxen, and you and he stepped aside to take shelter for five minutes, he'd talk to you in such a manner, that, when you parted, you would say, this is an extraordinary man."
Minimum-wage laws can even affect the level of racial discrimination. In an earlier era, when racial discrimination was both legally and socially accepted, minimum-wage laws were often used openly to price minorities out of the job market.
In 1925, a minimum-wage law was passed in the Canadian province of British Columbia, with the intent and effect of pricing Japanese immigrants out of jobs in the lumbering industry.
A well-regarded Harvard professor of that era referred approvingly to Australia’s minimum-wage law as a means to “protect the white Australian’s standard of living from the invidious competition of the colored races, particularly of the Chinese,” who were willing to work for less.
In South Africa during the era of apartheid, white labor unions urged that a minimum-wage law be applied to all races, to keep black workers from taking jobs away from white unionized workers by working for less than the union pay scale.
Some supporters of the first federal minimum-wage law in the United States — the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 — used exactly the same rationale, citing the fact that Southern construction companies, using non-union black workers, were able to come north and under-bid construction companies using unionized white labor.
We are contemplating going to war in Syria to help the opposition a lot and to hurt Assad some, or to help the opposition some and hurt Assad a lot, or to hurt Assad some and help the opposition some, or to force Assad to stop or to leave, or to stop but stay, or to stop and leave; or to restore the word of the president, or the word of the United States, or the word of the international community by bombing, or by threatening to bomb but not bombing, or by neither threatening to bomb nor bombing; or to warn the Russians to stay out, or to welcome the Russians to come in, or to warn the Russians to stay out and welcome the Russians to come in. Message? We are planning to do all kinds of things by not doing anything....
If we are going to bomb Syria, the president does not have to go to Congress. But he also is supposed to go to Congress. But he also can bomb Syria after he goes to Congress if he doesn’t like the way Congress votes. But he can also postpone going to Congress if he is afraid that he won’t like the way Congress votes. Or he can go ahead and not postpone going to Congress, and just bomb Syria because he does not want to go to Congress if he thinks he won’t like the way Congress votes. Message? Going and not going to Congress are essential.
Assad is a monster who kills thousands. Assad is a monster who gasses children and seems also to be the only one protecting Christians, Alawites, and Kurds from non-monsters who do not gas children but do kill minorities. Assad is opposed by monsters who are cannibals and execute prisoners as well as non-monsters who only kill but do not eat Assad’s monsters. Message? Sometimes monsters are non-monsters, and sometimes non-monsters are monsters.Read the whole thing.
“I would simply say that, when it comes to being commander-in-chief, I think the American people, at least in my assessment, appreciate a commander-in-chief who takes in new information and doesn’t, you know, celebrate decisiveness for the sake of decisiveness,” Carney added.Indecision is a virtue in a commander-in-chief. OK, then.
John Kerry's Russian counterpart mocks him for talking too much
Secretary of State John Kerry's negotiations with the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov got off to a rocky start Thursday, with the Russian mocking Kerry right at the outset.
"They got off to a really bad start yesterday --- partly because of the Putin op-ed and partly because Kerry in the opening remarks spoke at length --- and I mean at length --- compared to the unprepared few welcoming comments from the Russian counterpart," NBC News foreign correspondent Andrea Mitchell said on "Morning Joe."
"And then the Russian minister said at the end, very tartly, 'Sometimes diplomacy demands silence.'"
California's minimum wage would rise to $10 an hour within three years under a bill passed Thursday by the state Legislature, making it one of the highest rates in the nation.
Washington state currently has the top minimum wage at $9.19 an hour, an amount that is pegged to rise with inflation. Some cities, including San Francisco, have slightly higher minimum wages.
The state Senate approved AB10 on a 26-11 vote and the Assembly followed hours later on a 51-25 vote, both largely along party lines. Gov. Jerry Brown indicated earlier this week that he would sign the bill, calling it an overdue piece of legislation that would help working-class families.
The bill would gradually raise California's minimum wage from the current $8 an hour to $10 by 2016.
It would be the first increase in the state's minimum wage in six years and comes amid a national debate over whether it is fair to pay fast-food workers, retail clerks and others wages so low that they often have to work second or third jobs.
Democrats said the bill by Assemblyman Luis Alejo, D-Watsonville, would help workers left behind during the recent recession.
"It simply gives hardworking Californians the dignity and respect to provide for their families with their own hard-earned wages," Alejo said in arguing for the bill before his Assembly colleagues.
Sen. Marty Block, D-San Diego, said raising the minimum wage will stimulate the economy by giving lower-wage workers more money to spend.
"They're not going to put it into a hedge fund," he said.
But Republican lawmakers said it would do the opposite, encouraging businesses to cut jobs and automate.
"This is a classic example with how out-of-touch state leaders are," said Sen. Jim Nielsen, R-Gerber.
There’s no nice way to say this: It is hard to believe such a chill man has such warm feelings about the sad end of strangers far away. I think this has been one of his big unspoken problems in the selling of his Syria policy. It is based to some degree on his emotional indignation, and it is not fully credible because it’s hard to believe he’s so moved.
Even when he's supposedly "reaching out to us," this Master Diplomat and Coolly Brilliant Poet-Warrior steadfastly refuses to pay the right the slightest degree of respect.
And this man represents us in our dealings with foreign actors. Imagine how his similar haughtiness plays overseas. Imagine how it's already played for five years, and how it will play for another three.
Smart diplomacy, huh?
Hey wingers, get behind this war. It's got the three things you Bitter Clingers can't get enough of-- Guns, Spooky Religious Nonsense, and Killing Foreign People.
Now, Friends on the Left, you can get behind it for the true moral purposes which flow from reason and higher functions of the brain.
But Friends on the Right, we'll appeal to your Lizard Brains and Blow Up Some Shit because you folks seem to like that sort of thing. Why, we'll even give you some of those ribbons and parades that your Simple Ilk seems to crave.
I mean, Friends on the Right, let's face it, you don't believe in Freedom and Dignity for All People. No, that's a higher goal, and higher goals are promulgated by Obama's Friends on the Left.
People on the Right, you will provide the muscle for achieving the goals of Obama's Friends on the Left.
See, we can all work together and achieve big things. Obama's Friends on the Left will provide the thinking and moral reason, and Obama's Friends on the Right will provide the gruntwork, simple mechanical actions, and crude delight in high explosives.
Friends on the Left, Obama calls you to your better angels.
Friends on the Right, Obama promises you some Sweet Fucking War Footage on CNN. Guncamera shit, Hoss. And you know you love that.
Friends on the Left, think of the children that can be saved.
Friends on the Right, keep in mind that a lot of the people we'll be dropping bombs on look reasonably similar to Trayvon Martin. Pretty good, right? Yeah you bet it is!!!
When Libya agreed to give up chemical weapons in 2003, it took less than a year for the OPCW to begin overseeing destruction activity, Kimball said.
The volatile Syria situation — a civil war, the threat of military attacks from the West, uncertainty about how long Assad will be in power — calls for a faster track. But the fighting would probably slow down the work; an effort to destroy sulfur mustard in Libya in early 2011 was delayed for two years because of unrest there, Chorley said.
Because the weapons are so dangerous, destruction facilities are usually built on-site, and then it can take months to get rid of even a small arsenal.
The Times of London reported that a previous plan drawn up by the Pentagon suggested that 75,000 troops would be needed on the ground to destroy up to 500 tons of chemical weapons. Given Syria's arsenal is thought to be double that, the operation could take as many as 150,000 troops to carry out.
To put that number in perspective, a Congressional Research Service Report prepared in 2009 estimated that the number of “boots on the ground” in both Afghanistan and Iraq in 2008 was 187,000.
When Bush decided to take us to war, he got... the four requisites you need. He got the American public opinion up to 70%, he got an overwhelming Congressional vote of authorization, he got 40 allies, and he went to the U.N. and made a genuine effort. This Nobel laureate, this work across the aisles sophisticate has about 35% approval for what he’s doing, he has no Congressional support, and just about was humiliated. He has no allies, and he’s not only not gone to the U.N., but before he says he might go to it, he humiliated it and called it hocus pocus. So it’s inept, and all he can talk to, what is he reduced to? He’s reduced to I’m not Bush, I’m not Bush, this isn’t Iraq, this isn’t Iraq.
Think about what will happen if the Russian initiative starts to fly.
Chemical weapons are relatively easy to make and store (and fire), but much harder to dismantle safely. The chemicals themselves are fiendishly dangerous and need to be destroyed with specialist equipment without creating environmental hazards. Plus the explosive part of the delivery shell needs careful handling. Destroying CW stocks is therefore a complex and expensive operation, even under calm conditions. Both the United States and Russia have both heavily failed to meet internationally agreed deadlines for destroying their massive Cold War legacy chemical weapons stocks.
There is no precedent for attempting anything like this in a country wracked by civil war. It just can’t happen. No Syrian chemical weapons will be destroyed or "handed over" quickly.
Meanwhile any new process of setting up an international monitoring and destruction regime will require painstaking UN and wider negotiation with the Assad regime, thereby giving Assad and his state apparatus a massive boost of renewed confidence and legitimacy. Before long Washington may find itself locked on to implicitly or even explicitly supporting Assad in his civil war as the best chance to get some sort of internationally agreed CW destruction programme delivered in Syria.
How has this happened?
Yesterday it was all, “Hey, this is a Munich Moment.” Today the same people are all “We’ve got a deal that means peace in our time!”
A Russian proposal for Syria to place its chemical weapons arsenal under international control will not succeed unless the United States and its allies reject the use of force against Damascus, President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday.
The proposal "can work only if we hear that the American side and all those who support the United States in this sense reject the use of force," Putin said in televised remarks.
At the same time the IRS harassed Republican nonprofit groups during the 2012 political campaign, it selectively advised black churches and other Democrat nonprofits on how far they can go in campaigning for President Obama and other Democrats.
This raw exercise in political favoritism has not been reported in the context of the still-smoldering IRS scandal, in which the agency in 2012 audited big GOP donors and blocked Tea Party groups trying to obtain tax-exempt status as part of what House investigators suspect was an effort to re-elect the president.
But that same year, top officials with both the IRS and Justice Department — including the IRS commissioner and attorney general — met in Washington with several dozen prominent black church ministers representing millions of voters to brief them on how to get their flocks out to vote without breaking federal tax laws.
The "summit" on energizing the black vote in houses of worship was hosted by the Democrat-controlled Congressional Black Caucus inside the U.S. Capitol on May 30, 2012.
The day before the special IRS training session, then-Black Caucus Chairman Rep. Emanuel Cleaver predicted Obama would get 95% of the African-American vote — but only if black pastors "encourage" them to get to the polls. (He ended up getting over 93% of the black vote.)
Every month, a hundred or so people crowd the lobby of the Arlington Free Clinic, clutching blue tickets to enter a health-care lottery. Uninsured and ailing, they hope to be among the two dozen who hit the jackpot and are given free care.
Some might think the lottery’s days are numbered, given that the insurance expansion under President Obama’s health-care law is taking effect in January. But clinic officials say the lottery will stay because demand for their services is likely to be as high as ever. “We will be business as usual,” said Nancy Sanger Pallesen, the clinic’s executive director.
The Affordable Care Act, the most sweeping health care program created in a half century, is expected to extend coverage to 25 million Americans over the next decade, according to the most recent government estimates. But that will still leave a projected 31 million people without insurance by 2023.
Yes, the unemployment rate fell a notch to 7.3 percent, from 7.4 percent in July. Yes, the nation added 169,000 jobs, broadly consistent with the pattern of recent months.
But in almost all the particulars, you can find signs that this job market is weaker than it appeared just a few months ago, and maybe getting worse. The drop in the unemployment rate was caused by 312,000 people dropping out of the labor force. The number of people actually reporting having a job actually fell by 115,000 in the survey on which the unemployment rate is based.
And while the overall August jobs number was okay, the Labor Department revised down its estimates of June and July job creation by a combined 74,000 positions. In other words, through the summer, hiring has been quite a bit shakier than it had appeared.
Jobs numbers ebb and jobs numbers flow, and as always, it would be unwise to make too much of one report. But this one has enough signs of weakness embedded in enough places that it has to make economy-watchers — including those at the Federal Reserve who meet in less than two weeks — reassess their confidence that a solid, steady jobs recovery is underway.
Consider this: The nation has averaged 148,000 new jobs a month for the last three months. The number was 160,000 for the last six months, and 184,000 a month over the last year. That looks to me like a downward trend, no two ways about it. It’s certainly not the gradual acceleration that most mainstream economists have forecast as 2013 advances and the impact of tighter fiscal policy fades.
Want another sign? The proportion of the U.S. population that had a job in August was 58.6 percent. Six months earlier, the number was a whopping — wait for it — 58.6 percent. The year is nearly three-quarters over, and the economy isn’t growing fast enough to put a higher proportion of its citizens back to work.
Obama, as senator and presidential candidate, made the serial argument that U.S. military interventions, barring an “imminent threat” to our national security, are both illegal and immoral unless they have the triad of U.S. congressional support, U.N. approval, and American public support.
In the present circumstances, to make the argument for attacking Syria he must assume that congressional authorization is an eleventh-hour afterthought and not necessarily binding, that the U.N. is mostly hocus-pocus and not worth the bother, and that overwhelming public opposition does not matter.
There are so many contradictions and hypocrisies in such thinking as to render it farcical. I’ll give one, though: In 2002–03 George Bush built public opinion for an intervention, assembled an allied coalition, succeeded with the U.S. Congress, and tried at the U.N. He made the argument that Saddam Hussein’s past use of WMD, his support for terrorism, and his genocide (read all 23 congressional writs) made a good moral and realist case for intervening in a post-9/11 landscape. In response, Barack Obama launched his political career by deriding just such logic, which he is now far less impressively adopting as his own.
KERRY: I believe that the aftermath of the Iraq experience and Afghanistan left a lot of people saying, we don’t want to see our young people coming back in a body bag and so forth. But that’s not what we are talking about and what we have to do is make clear to people that this is were not talking about war. We are not going to war. We will not have people at risk in that way. We will be able to hold Bashar Assad accountable without engaging in troops on the ground or any other prolonged effort. In a very limited, very targeted, very short-term effort, that degrades his capacity to deliver chemical weapons without assuming responsibility for Syria’s civil war. That is exactly what were talking about doing an unbelievably small, limited kind of effort. Now you know that has been engaged in previously on many different occasions.
A chilly Arctic summer has left nearly a million more square miles of ocean covered with ice than at the same time last year – an increase of 60 per cent.
The rebound from 2012’s record low comes six years after the BBC reported that global warming would leave the Arctic ice-free in summer by 2013.
Instead, days before the annual autumn re-freeze is due to begin, an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia’s northern shores.
The Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific has remained blocked by pack-ice all year. More than 20 yachts that had planned to sail it have been left ice-bound and a cruise ship attempting the route was forced to turn back.
Some eminent scientists now believe the world is heading for a period of cooling that will not end until the middle of this century – a process that would expose computer forecasts of imminent catastrophic warming as dangerously misleading.
The disclosure comes 11 months after The Mail on Sunday triggered intense political and scientific debate by revealing that global warming has ‘paused’ since the beginning of 1997 – an event that the computer models used by climate experts failed to predict.
In the most actively cited example of the Republican nominee’s foresight, Romneyites point to the candidate’s hardline rhetoric last year against Russian President Vladimir Putin and his administration. During the campaign, Romney frequently criticized Obama for foolishly attempting to make common cause with the Kremlin, and repeatedly referred to Russia as “our number one geopolitical foe.”
Many observers found this fixation strange, and Democrats tried to turn it into a punchline. A New York Times editorial in March of last year said Romney’s assertions regarding Russia represented either “a shocking lack of knowledge about international affairs or just craven politics.” And in an October debate, Obama sarcastically mocked his opponent’s Russia rhetoric. “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years,” the president quipped at the time.
That line still chafes Robert O’Brien, a Los Angeles lawyer and friend of Romney’s who served as a foreign policy adviser.
“Everyone thought, Oh my goodness that is so clever and Mitt’s caught in the Cold War and doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” O’Brien said. “Well guess what. With all of these foreign policy initiatives — Syria, Iran, [Edward] Snowden — who’s out there causing problems for America? It’s Putin and the Russians.”
Indeed, earlier this summer, Moscow defiantly refused to extradite National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden to the United States, prompting Obama to cancel a meeting he had scheduled with Putin during the Group of 20 summit. Russia has blocked United Nations action against Syria. And on Wednesday, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told lawmakers that Russia was one of the countries supplying Syria with chemical weapons.
To Romney’s fans, these episodes illustrate just how unfairly their candidate was punished during the election for speaking truths the rest of the country would eventually come around to.
As far as President Obama is concerned, his actions, to me, just don’t make any kind of sense. To call Congress back, and then to go off to the G-20 to talk to Putin, and he played a couple of rounds of golf in the meantime, is an astonishing way for a leader of the Western world to behave in a moment of such crisis, when as I say, the element of surprise, so important in military affairs, has just been thrown away completely.
Whatever critics thought of George W. Bush, there was no question that he was both a decisive and at times an unpredictable leader that enemies were not comfortable testing.
In contrast, fairly or not, Obama has earned a reputation for predictable equivocation, rhetorically eloquent, but not decisive, sermonizing without consequences, judgmental but not muscular — as we saw from serial but meaningless deadlines to Iran, simultaneous surges and withdrawal dates in Afghanistan, pink-lines in Syria, leading from behind in Libya, unpunished killers in Benghazi, flip-flop-flip in Egypt, failed flirtations with the Muslim Brotherhood and the new Ottomanism, and reset reset with Putin — all at a time of massive defense cuts, the so-called pivot, Anglo-American dissolution, and loud proclamations about a new, reduced U.S. profile abroad.
The result is that our rivals and enemies seem more rash than at any time in the last 15 years, our allies never more bewildered.
And, of course, we have recent history to guide us. We backed the "rebels" in Egypt and got the Muslim Brotherhood, a coup, and chaos, with Coptic Christians in the middle. We backed the "rebels" in Libya and we got Benghazi. Why exactly should we trust the judgment of the Obama foreign policy team in Syria?
Mutinying security men have taken over oil ports on the Mediterranean and are seeking to sell crude oil on the black market. Ali Zeidan, Libya’s Prime Minister, has threatened to “bomb from the air and the sea” any oil tanker trying to pick up the illicit oil from the oil terminal guards, who are mostly former rebels who overthrew Muammar Gaddafi and have been on strike over low pay and alleged government corruption since July.
As world attention focused on the coup in Egypt and the poison gas attack in Syria over the past two months, Libya has plunged unnoticed into its worst political and economic crisis since the defeat of Gaddafi two years ago. Government authority is disintegrating in all parts of the country putting in doubt claims by American, British and French politicians that Nato’s military action in Libya in 2011 was an outstanding example of a successful foreign military intervention which should be repeated in Syria.
In an escalating crisis little regarded hitherto outside the oil markets, output of Libya’s prized high-quality crude oil has plunged from 1.4 million barrels a day earlier this year to just 160,000 barrels a day now. Despite threats to use military force to retake the oil ports, the government in Tripoli has been unable to move effectively against striking guards and mutinous military units that are linked to secessionist forces in the east of the country.
Libyans are increasingly at the mercy of militias which act outside the law.
