"Students in New London [CT] will not only have to pass English to graduate, but they will have to prove that they know the American English language and be able to demonstrate it as of 2015."
In sum, the Democratic Party has thrown overboard decades of tax ideology (“soak the rich”) and succumbed to the Republicans’ insistence that Keynesian spending must end and fiscal discipline must commence.
The White House has lost control of the fiscal debate and of its own party. (“The White House has condemned efforts to attach additional measures to the debt-ceiling issue. Press secretary Jay Carney has called it ‘a dangerous, risky idea to hold hostage . . . a vote on raising the debt ceiling to any other piece of legislation.’ ”) Now, the White House grudgingly accepts the prospect of spending conditions. I suppose this is, as they say, leading from behind.
Here's a rundown of what Obama might do to start bringing gas prices back to earth:
Invest more in renewable energy sources. In a radio address Saturday, Obama called this effort "the key to helping families at the pump and reducing our dependence on foreign oil."
End the $4 billion in subsidies for oil companies. "Instead of subsidizing yesterday's energy sources, we need to invest in tomorrow's,"Obama has said.
Root out fraud and manipulation in the oil markets. Obama has said he'll have a Justice Department task force probe whether oil market traders and speculators are "taking advantage of the American people for their own short-term gain."
Boost domestic oil production. "We don't want a repeat of the oil spill that we had in the Gulf last year," Obama said in an interview Tuesday. "But we've got to continue to make sure that U.S. production is strong." That might mean expanding drilling off the coast of Florida, or in Alaska.
Work with automakers to increase fuel economy standards for cars and trucks.
Press oil-producing allies like Saudi Arabia to do their part. We need to "let them know," Obama said, "that it's not going to be good for the if our economy is hobbled because of high oil prices."
Still, none of these approaches looks likely to have an immediate impact when Americans fill up their tanks. Ending oil subsidies and instead boosting investments in renewables may be good long-term policy, but it would take years for consumers to start feeling the benefits of such shifts at the pump. LIkewise, increasing domestic production wouldn't bring prices down any time soon, while raising fuel economy standards is a long-term project requiring a serious buy-in from Congress. And most experts think manipulation of the oil markets account for only a very small part of the recent price spikes, so it's unlikely that cracking down on such practices will have a major impact. As for leaning on Saudi Arabia, the Saudis profit from high prices, so it's far from clear what leverage the United States may have to counter the Saudis' push for market dominance.
Some of the Georgia’s largest hospitals could face multimillion-dollar losses in Medicare reimbursements, if a new federal investigation finds surgeons do not follow guidelines for patients receiving implantable cardioverter defibrillators.
The review will determine whether hospitals followed National Coverage Decision (NCD) criteria in determining who should receive the small battery-powered electrical impulse generator. The devices, which cost upward of $35,000 each, detect an abnormal heart rhythm that can cause sudden cardiac death, and then fire an electric jolt to restore a normal heart beat....
The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) sets specific guidelines that prohibit the devices being implanted if the patient has received other types of treatments or procedures prior to the surgery, according to Rebekah Plowman, a partner in the Atlanta office of Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough, LLP and chair of the firm’s fraud and abuse practice.
“The government found it was pretty easy to go out and use data mining techniques to see if they or any other hospital had billed for codes associated with a heart attack or other [prohibited] procedure,” [Emphasis & color mine] said Plowman. “Then they send a letter to the hospital asking why we shouldn’t collect the fees we paid back from you.”
The NCD criteria prohibits hospitals implanting the device in patients who have had a heart attack within the last 40 days or undergone procedures such as balloon angioplasty or open-heart surgery within the past 90 days. [Again, emphasis & color mine] [Really? They just assume that every patient fits this template does not get this procedure?]
...
With the potential for losses so high, hospitals have an incentive to fight the claims.
“What hospitals are doing is hiring lawyers to put everything under attorney-client privilege and then hiring consultants to review the medical records,” said Plowman.
...
Critics of the CMS review contend that its guidelines for when a defibrillator can be implanted, which were issued in 2003, are out of date and haven’t kept up with research. Others point to evidence that doctors implant too many of the devices without regard to evidence-based guidelines that result in medical complications.
A recent Duke University study found that surgeons often strayed from the evidence-based guidelines for when defibrillators should be implanted. Those cases that did not follow the professional recommendations were more likely to produce in-hospital complications and even death.
...
Ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching. President Obama's perpetual campaign cash-o-matic machine kicks into high gear again this week as the celebrity-in-chief heads to Hollywood for several high-priced fundraisers. But while the Democrats' 2012 re-election team stuffs its hands into every liberal deep pocket in sight, questions about the Obama 2008 campaign finance operation still fester.
Last week, the laggard watchdogs at the Federal Election Commission announced an audit of the Obama 2008 campaign committee -- which raised a record-setting $750 million. White House flacks are downplaying the probe as a "routine review."
But there's nothing routine about the nearly $3 million Obama has spent on legal expenses to address federal campaign finance irregularities and inquiries. Roll Call reports that Obama's campaign legal fees have exceeded all other House and presidential campaign committees, including members of Congress under ethics investigations.
There's nothing routine about the whopping $6 million that Team Obama has refunded to individual donors since Obama took office.
And there's nothing routine about the 26 warning letters to Obama for America totaling "more than 1,500 pages of questions and data that outlined compliance concerns -- including the longest one ever sent to a presidential candidate," according to Roll Call.
... We may think of taxes as just a source of government revenue. But tax rates are a big political statement on the left, whether they bring in any revenue or not.
For more than 80 years, the political left has opposed what they call "tax cuts for the rich." But big cuts in very high tax rates ended up bringing in more revenue to the government in the Coolidge, Kennedy, Reagan and Bush 43 administrations. This included more-- repeat, more-- tax revenue from people in the highest income brackets than before.
... After all, "the rich" paid that larger sum of taxes only because their incomes had risen. Their paying a higher share of all taxes doesn't matter to the "progressives," who see high tax rates as a way to take a bigger bite out of the incomes of higher-income people, not just provide more revenue to the government.
Tax rates are meant to make an ideological statement and promote class-warfare politics, not just bring in revenue.
....Internal Revenue Service data show that the income of people who were in the lowest income tax bracket in 1996 rose by 91 percent by 2005. But people in the "top one percent" had their incomes drop by 26 percent in those same years.
There is nothing complicated about this. Most people simply start at the bottom when they are young and their pay rises as they get more experience. Most people in the top one percent are there for only a single year when they happen to have a spike in income. They too are not an enduring class.
"Republicans want to slash funds for Medicare, benefits for the elderly, and Medicaid, a health program for people with low income, but Democrats would prefer to make up much of the deficit by raising taxes on the wealthy."
"....why would lower wages promote higher employment?"
He was asked Saturday if he would feel comfortable appointing a Muslim to his Cabinet or to a federal judgeship.
"I will not," he said. "And here's why. There is this creeping attempt, this attempt, to gradually ease Sharia law and the Muslim faith into our government," Cain said. "It does not belong in our government. This is what happened to Europe. And little by little, to try to be politically correct, they made this little change. They made this little change. And now they've got a social problem that they don't know what to do with hardly."
...now Obama is chief executive, and learning, as did Prince Hamlet, that thinking out every possible side of a question can mean never acting on any of them -- a sort of Shakespearean "prison" where "there is nothing either good or bad." Worrying about pleasing everyone ensures pleasing no one. Once again such "conscious does make cowards of us all."
Hamlets, past and present, are as admirable in theory as they are fickle -- and often dangerous -- in fact.
France became the first country to formally recognize the rebels’ newly created Interim Governing Council, saying it planned to exchange ambassadors after President Nicolas Sarkozy met with two representatives of the group based in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi.
1. In 2010, the union membership rate--the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of a union--was 11.9 percent, down from 12.3 percent a year earlier.
2. The number of wage and salary workers belonging to unions declined by 612,000 to 14.7 million. In 1983, the first year for which comparable union data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1 percent, and there were 17.7 million union workers.
3. The union membership rate for public sector workers (36.2 percent) was substantially higher than the rate for private sector workers (6.9 percent).
4. Workers in education, training, and library occupations had the highest unionization rate at 37.1 percent.
5. In 2010, 7.6 million public sector employees belonged to a union, compared with 7.1 million union workers in the private sector.
6. The union membership rate for public sector workers (36.2 percent) was substantially higher than the rate for private sector workers (6.9 percent). Within the public sector, local government workers had the highest union membership rate, 42.3 percent.
7. Among these occupational groups: education, training, and library occupations (37.1 percent) and protective service occupations (34.1 percent) had the highest unionization rates in 2010.
8. The largest numbers of union members lived in California (2.4 million) and New York (2.0 million). About half of the 14.7 million union members in the U.S. lived in just six states (California, 2.4 million; New York, 2.0 million; Illinois, 0.8 million; Pennsylvania, 0.8 million; Ohio, 0.7 million; and New Jersey, 0.6 million), though these states accounted for only one-third of wage and salary employment nationally.
9. Texas had about one-fourth as many union members as New York, despite having 1.9 million more wage and salary employees. Similarly, North Carolina and Hawaii had comparable numbers of union members (117,000 and 111,000, respectively), though North Carolina's wage and salary employment level (3.7 million) was about seven times that of Hawaii (511,000).
....
Are we doomed to a dull campaign? Not if the Hermanator has his way.
If you don’t attend Tea Party rallies or listen to political talk radio, the name Herman Cain may not register. Cain intends to rectify that. He’s planning to seek the GOP nomination, so he’s spreading his blustery, relentlessly upbeat right-wing social and economic message, which can be heard weeknights from 7 to 10 on WSB in Atlanta. Cain is so exuberantly confident of his message that he has upgraded its status: he bestows upon audiences not speeches or talking points but “The Hermanator Experience.” He’s even trademarked the phrase.
.....
His entrance into national politics was a fluke—albeit, if he runs, an enormously beneficial one. In 1994, Cain, then still CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, participated in a town-hall meeting that Bill Clinton held to drum up support for his flagging health-care plan. He challenged the president’s claim that restaurateurs would bear only a marginal new cost. Clinton objected, but Cain wouldn’t relent. “I’d had my financial people run the numbers,” he told me. The Wall Street Journal published them, and after Clinton’s plan collapsed, Newsweek identified Cain as one of its “saboteurs”—a badge of honor, especially among conservatives today.
We do not have a good frame of reference to understand the concept of a trillion. Professor Davies shared the following analogy to provide a frame of reference we can understand.
If the Federal government were scaled down to the size of the average US household, here’s what its finances would look like:
The Federal government would earn $50,000 a year in tax revenue (the same as the average US household).
It would be $325,000 in debt.
It would pay almost $10,000 a year in interest on that debt.
Last year, it would have spent $79,000.
This year, it is hoping to spend $86,000.
The $100 billion in spending cuts (that some politicians view as draconian) would be equivalent to the household cutting its $86,000 in planned spending down to a mere $83,700.
Not a bad start, but the household has another $33,700 to go before it balances its budget.
The week began with an old soldier running Egypt. It ended with different old soldiers running Egypt with even more formal power than Mubarak had. This has caused worldwide shock and awe. We were killjoys in 2009, when we said the Iranian revolution wasn’t going anywhere. We do not want to be killjoys now, since everyone is so excited and happy. But we should point out that, in spite of the crowds, nothing much has really happened yet in Egypt. It doesn’t mean that it won’t, but it hasn’t yet.
An 82-year-old man has been thrown out of office, and his son will not be president. The constitution and parliament are gone and a military junta is in charge. The rest is speculation.
During a House Intelligence Committee hearing Thursday, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper called Egypt's branch of the Muslim Brotherhood movement "largely secular."I quake with fear when I think how incompetent our government is... Thank God we have a military that can get us out of the messes in which the politicos put us.
In response to questioning from Rep. Sue Myrick (R-N.C.) about the threat posed by the group, Clapper suggested that the Egyptian part of the Brotherhood is not particularly extreme and that the broader international movement is hard to generalize about.
"The term 'Muslim Brotherhood'...is an umbrella term for a variety of movements, in the case of Egypt, a very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence and has decried Al Qaeda as a perversion of Islam," Clapper said. "They have pursued social ends, a betterment of the political order in Egypt, et cetera.....In other countries, there are also chapters or franchises of the Muslim Brotherhood, but there is no overarching agenda, particularly in pursuit of violence, at least internationally."
The Brotherhood uses the slogan, "Islam is the answer," and generally advocates for government in accordance with Islamic principles. The movement has as a broad goal unifying what it perceives as Muslim lands, from Spain to Indonesia, as a "caliphate."
Myrick interrupted Clapper at one point, saying her concern isn't simply with the violence but with the Brotherhood's beliefs regarding government.
"The danger of the Muslim Brotherhood is not just encouraging terrorism through their ideology, but also trying to take over government, so everyone has to succumb and live under their ideology," Myrick said.
Clapper said later in the hearing that the Brotherhood in Egypt runs 29 hospitals "not under the guise of an extremist agenda." He said the group fills a vacuum caused by the absence of government services, but added, "It is not necessarily with a view to promoting violence or overthrow of the state."
FBI Director Robert Mueller said some branches of the Brotherhood have engaged in violence, but he declined to go into detail in a public session. "Obviously, elements of the Muslim Brotherhood here and overseas have supported terrorism," he said.
Hamas, which is designated by the U.S. as a terrorist group but also runs the elected government in the Gaza strip, is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. U.S. prosecutors have also produced evidence that some Islamic organizations in America, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Islamic Society of North America and the North American Islamic Trust, grew out of the Brotherhood.
Warnings of higher food prices headed for American supermarkets and restaurants were swallowed easily across much of farm country Wednesday.
The big gulp came when the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that global demand had pushed U.S. corn supplies to their lowest point in 15 years.
The price of corn, which has doubled over the past six months, affects most food products in supermarkets. It's used to feed the cattle, hogs and chickens that fill the meat aisles.
It is the main ingredient in Cap'n Crunch and Doritos. Turned into syrup, it sweetens most soft drinks and many foods.
Corn also is part of the agricultural blend that fuels the economies of Nebraska, Iowa and other farming states. Iowa is the nation's top corn-producing state; Nebraska is third.
Shoppers could see higher grocery bills as early as three months from now, though most of the impact won't be felt for another six months, said Scott Irwin, an agricultural economics professor at the University of Illinois.
Chicken prices are among the first to rise because the bird's life span is so short that higher feed costs get factored in quickly, he said. Price hikes for hogs take about a year and cattle two years. Prices on packaged foods take six or seven months to rise.
Tyson Foods, the nation's biggest meat company, said chicken, beef and pork prices are expect to rise this year, if only slightly, as producers seek to cover costs.
ConAgra Foods Inc. — the Omaha-based producer of brands including Healthy Choice, Banquet and Chef Boyardee — is raising prices on some of its products because of higher costs for corn and fuel, said Teresa Paulsen, a spokeswoman.
The price rally has bolstered the financial fitness of America's crop and livestock operators over the past eight months. Midwestern cropland is yielding record values. Rural banks and equipment makers report record profits.
“We're seeing record income levels for the ag community and ... wealth accumulation that cannot be denied,” said Bruce Johnson, an agricultural economist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “We've moved into a whole new level.”
Said Bruce Babcock, an agricultural economist at Iowa State University: “Farmers are going to be earning quite a bit more money.”
Jason Henderson, Omaha branch executive for the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, said farmers are buying more tractors, pickup trucks, grain bins and land.
“And they also come to Omaha to shop and go to events,” he said.
But it hasn't been simply a spending spree, Henderson said. Farmers are paying down debt and fewer are seeking loan renewals or extensions.
“It's a good time to be an ag banker,” said Brian Esch, president of McCook National Bank in southwest Nebraska. “But I have concerns over what this means for consumers. If one guy is selling at a record profit, someone is buying at a record level.”
Corn prices have risen over the past six months from $3.50 a bushel to nearly $7.
The U.S. will have a reserve of 675 million bushels left over in late August, when this year's harvest begins. That's roughly 5 percent of all corn that will be consumed, the lowest surplus level since 1996.
“There is going to be enough corn for food, for feed, for fuel and for export opportunities,” Tom Vilsack, the U.S. agriculture secretary, said at a Washington press conference.
Babcock, the Iowa State economist, said the U.S. mandate to increase the use of renewable fuels like ethanol is a major reason why the nation's corn supply is so low. About a quarter of the nation's corn crop is consumed by the production of ethanol. The ethanol industry's projected corn orders this year have risen 8 percent, to 13 billion bushels, after record-high production in December and January, USDA said.
“We've created a hungry business that is dependent on corn, even high-priced corn,” Babcock said.
Johnson, the UNL economist, said global supply and demand are the root causes behind low U.S. corn stocks.
“Ethanol is a factor, but it's not the driver,” he said.
Johnson said the declining value of the dollar not only has fueled greater agricultural export demand, but also has driven up the price of oil. That, in turn, has propelled higher prices for corn-based ethanol.
The agricultural economies of Nebraska and Iowa will continue to grow into greater prominence as global food providers, economists said.
Johnson said rising population numbers globally and greater demand in major developing countries for higher-protein diets have strengthened the Midlands' agricultural market.
Farm cash receipts — led by corn and other crops — doubled in Nebraska from 2000 through 2010. Crop receipts alone ended the decade in the $9 billion range, up from a 2000 total of $3 billion.
Nebraska's net farm income hit a record $4.25 billion last year, according to preliminary estimates. The 2010 level would be nearly 65 percent above the 10-year historical average, Johnson said.
Although farm income represents only about 6 percent of Nebraska's $75 billion personal income total, it has a major impact on local and regional economies, Johnson said.
“There is no question that agriculture buffered the state from going into a deeper recession these last few years, and it has helped pull us out of the recession faster than other areas,” he said. “Agriculture has been our pack horse.”
A research study by the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), in collaboration with the State University of Campinas (Brazil), shows that young Spanish people were by 2001 taking six years longer than in 1981 to reach full employment, residential and family independence.I cannot imagine anyone is surprised, are they?
Spain considers itself to be a "family-centred" country, in other words, families are expected to take up the slack with regard to areas not covered by social security. "The objective was to evaluate transformations in the trends of how young people gained their independence in Spain over the last decades of the 20th Century", Pau Miret Gamundi, a researcher at the UAB Centre for Demographic Studies, tells SINC.
The transition from youth to adult life can be broken down into three key stages – the passage from student life to the world of work (joining the labour market), from a dependent member of the household to a leading figure within it (residential emancipation), and from a position of being exclusively a child to being a parent (formation of family).
"Our results show there has been a significant change in the age at which the most intense status changes take place, which were six years later in 2001 than in 1981", says Miret, who is a co-author of the study, which has been published in the journal REIS.
This time lag has been the same for both sexes. In 1981, the average age at which young people gained full independence was 22 for females and 24 for males, while this age had risen by 2001 to 28 and 30, respectively. "These ages, in comparison with other geographical locations outside southern Europe, are considered to be extraordinarily late", the researcher explains.
No regional differences can be appreciated with regard to different autonomous communities "as we showed in the detailed study of particular cases in Catalonia – which is representative of an urban, industrialised setting – and Galicia, which is more rural". When the two regions were compared, the researchers found the results converged towards identical patterns of independence.
The study is based on data from the Spanish censuses for this period, which were provided by the University of Minnesota (USA), as part of a project that is attempting to collect census data from as many countries as possible. The next census that will allow further calculations to be made of the transition to adult life will be carried out in 2011.
Crises exacerbate the situation
The 1973 recession is considered to be one of the reasons for the growth in university education in the 1970s. "The constant sensation of instability makes it hard for young people to achieve full autonomy and residential independence", say the authors.
The experts say investment in education "is part of the dynamic of the labour market", in other words, young people prolong their studies in the hope of increasing their career opportunities, putting their other personal plans on the back burner.
"Policies regarding young people are not usually a priority and are the last to be implemented. The independence grants that the Government is providing are a favourable policy for helping resolve this problem, but it would also be interesting to be able to provide access to subsidised rent for housing, not necessarily for single-occupancy flats, but flats shared by three or four people", Miret concludes.
Translated by Palestinian Media Watch, book details group’s goal of global Islamic conquest.
On Tuesday, two Brotherhood representatives participated in an opposition delegation that met with Vice President Omar Suleiman for the first set of talks over implementing political reforms.
Pundits have portrayed the Brotherhood as uncompromising zealots or beneficent providers of social services that long-deprived Egyptians desperately need.
But a translation released Tuesday of a 1995 book by the movement’s fifth official leader sheds light on just how Egypt’s Brotherhood views itself and its mission. Jihad is the Way is the last of a five-volume work, The Laws of Da’wa by Mustafa Mashhur, who headed the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt from 1996-2002.
A number of Muslim leaders who relate Islam and Socialism in the political system usually use the term Islamic Socialism to describe the system. They combine the principles of Socialism with the spirituality of Islam in the system. Muslim socialists consider the principles of Socialism, such as redistribution of wealth and equality, are in accordance with the teachings of Prophet Muhammad and the Holy Qur’an.
