Grappling with the mish-mash of American politics
By Lori Montgomery, The Washington Post
Taxpayers earning more than $1 million a year would benefit the most from the GOP tax plan, the analysis shows, reaping an average $400,000 tax break that would send their after-tax income soaring by nearly 20 percent.
Meanwhile, taxpayers earning between $40,000 and $50,000 a year —
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Do you know the difference between oil reserve and oil resource? How about what fracking stands for? Confused? Or are you master of the energy buzzwords? Take the quiz and see how much you know!
House Speaker John Boehner has made many a headline laying blame for the sequester upon everybody elses’ shoulders but his own. He insisted the President was responsible for the massive spending cut set to go into effect March 1st. He’s touted his own accomplishments pushing through 2 sequester replacement bills in the House, forgetting to mention the obvious one-sided nature of both those pieces of legislation. And throughout most of this week he has thrown the entire weight of the sequestration onto the Senate who has not even considered the House bills and have come up with none of its own, despite a $110 billion Democratic replacement plan already released.
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A not entirely new development in the sequester blame game reemerged this weekend in the form of Bob Woodward putting a damper on the Democrats’ Speaker Boehner sequestration powerpoint, trump card. This not wholly unexpected wrinkle shifts the sequester’s inception back on the White House.
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In the often times twisted blame game of the hyperpartisan, gridlocked politics we’ve all grown to bemoan and loath, the Republican Party has talked themselves into many a reality altering claim aimed at absolving themselves of any resposibility for this nations problems. From blaming President Obama and Democrats for the Great Recession to the debt ceiling debacle of 2011, the GOP are now attempting to lay the entire idea of the sequestration on the White House’s doorstep.
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Mother Jones has sifted through the 50 states and cobbled together a list of state governors who have effectively chosen to deny the poorest of their constituencies health care coverage and the opportunity to attain basic medical care through their refusal to accept Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion provision. They represent the who’s who of Republican governors whose states occupy the core of stalwart opposition to the Affordable Care Act.
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Yesterday morning, reluctantly waking to the rude static of the clock radio I reach for the snooze but decided against ten more minutes of sleep. Instead I readjust the dial trying to find the local NPR station’s elusive, ever-shifting frequency. Squeezed in between the new Latino station and another springing reggae on unsuspecting early morning listeners, the hourly news had already broken in.
National gas prices are expected to rise above $4.00 a gallon soon…
“What? Why?”
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Do you know more about the news than the average American?Test your knowledge of prominent people and major events in the news, by taking our short 13-question quiz. Then see how you did in comparison with 1,041 randomly sampled adults asked the same questions in a national survey conducted online Jan. 18-24 by the Pew Research Center. The new survey includes a mixture of multiple-choice questions using photographs, maps and symbols.
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Both times in fairly recent years federal minimum wage was increased with the cooperation of Republican leadership. In 1996, the Republican-controlled House under Newt Gingrich, the minimum wage was raised from $4.25 to $5.15 over a 2 year period. The next wage increase took place a decade later, in 2006-2007, when Democrats won back control of the House. They found support for the increase in then President, George W. Bush. This instance raised the minimum rate to its current level of $7.25 per hour.
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With each new bit of regulation proposed a screeching chorus rises from industry pronouncing the dire consequences set to befall the country if even the slightest utterance of such rules are dared spoken. How many times have these warnings of cataclysm been heard? And how many times have they come to pass?
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