A 2010 exchange between President Obama and Paul Ryan — then the top Republican on the House Budget committee — foreshadowed this week's campaign trail brawl over Medicare.
Obama, speaking at the House GOP retreat in Baltimore, said that any change to Medicare by either Democrats or Republicans would undoubtedly provoked a furious response from the other side — with the president lamenting the inevitable political back and forth.
"There is a political vulnerability to doing anything that tinkers with Medicare," Obama said, referring to Ryan's proposal to make Medicare into a voucher system for future retirees.
MEDELLIN, COLOMBIA—Nine days into a hunger strike in which he has sewn shut his mouth, Jorge Parra, a former worker for General Motors in Colombia, says his condition is deteriorating. “I have terrible pains in my stomach, my lips are swollen and sore, and I am having problems sleeping,” he says. “But I will not give up.”
The 35-year-old is one of a group of men who say they were fired after suffering severe workplace injuries at GM’s Bogota factory, Colmotores, and have taken drastic action to demand compensation.
After protesting for a year outside the United States embassy with no results, four of the ex-workers sewed shut their mouths on August 1, followed by another three men a week later. More will undergo the procedure every week until their complaints are answered, they say.
Devo‘s next song is about Mitt Romney‘s dog. The American new wave band are putting an Irish setter front and centre on Don’t Roof Rack Me, Bro! (Remember Seamus), which takes fire at the Republican presidential candidate.
Twenty-nine years ago Romney took his family on a 12-hour road trip from Boston to Ontario, strapping the family dog to a kennel on their car roof. As the Chevrolet station wagon barrelled down the highway, Seamus clung on for dear life; even after the dog suffered a diarrhoea attack, Romney just sprayed everything down and continued with the journey.
NYPD released information on an earlier Domain Awareness System in 2009 in response to a citizen push-back such as a 2004 Chatham Green/ACLU law suit. (Chatham Green the name of a housing complex adjoining NYPD Headquarters negatively impacted by security apparatus)
It is not yet clear how the new version, developed with Microsoft, differs from the earlier one. It may be that the name has been retained to avoid having to conduct environmental impact and other mandated studies done for the 2009 version -- an evasion tactic amply used by governmental and corporate interests.
The Domain Awareness System is a component of a much broader, global surveillance system of the NYPD. A recent HOPE9 video on the topic:
There is something to be said for universal health care systems.
When my son developed a rash on an Italian vacation in Liguria last month, the pharmacist showed me to the doctor downstairs, who diagnosed the problem at no charge and sent me off with a handshake and a joke about a daughter in med school at the University of California, San Diego.
Italy may be in a funk, with a shrinking economy and a high unemployment rate, but the United States can learn a lot from it, and not just about the benefits of public health care. Italians live longer. Their poverty rate is much lower than ours. If they lose their jobs or suffer some other misfortune, they can turn to a more generous social safety net.
Every developed country aspires to provide a better life for its people. The United States, among the richest of all, fails in important ways. It has the highest poverty and the highest infant mortality among developed nations. We provide among the least generous
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In the heyday of her celebrity, it often seemed that the only appropriate public response to Ayn Rand was dismissal. In 1961, Newsweek magazine sent a reporter to investigate the growing circle of devotees clustered around the right wing novelist. Visiting the New York City headquarters of Rand’s Objectivist movement, the reporter declared the Russian-born Rand an “apparition” with a “glare that would wilt a cactus.” After a similar pilgrimage, a writer for Life magazine forthrightly concluded that Rand was the leader of a cult. A review of Rand’s essay collection Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal in The New Republic simply referred to Rand as “Top Bee in the communal bonnet, buzzing the loudest and zaniest throughout this all but incredible book.”
And yet, some fifty years later, Rand is the avowed intellectual inspiration of presumptive GOP Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan. Ryan offers no apologies for interest in Rand’s philosophy and makes little effort to hide his alle
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CHILLICOTHE, Ohio—Mitt Romney offered his strongest criticism yet of President Barack Obama's campaign tactics, accusing his Democratic opponent of resorting to "diversions and distractions" and "defaming others" in order to win re-election this November.
Speaking on the steps of a courthouse here on the final stop of his four-state bus tour, Romney lashed out at Obama, describing him as "intellectually exhausted, out of ideas and out of energy." As a result, Romney said, Obama and his allies are running a campaign based on personal attacks rather than "fresh ideas."
While he didn't mention him by name, Romney made reference to a Vice President Joe Biden's attack on his fiscal policies in Virginia speech Tuesday when he said Romney would "put you back in chains" if elected.
Campaign-finance discussions tend to focus on a) the Presidential race and b) the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, but the biggest outrage concerning money in politics has little to do with either. It involves elections that rarely receive the attention they deserve: those for judgeships.
Thirty-nine states elect judges to their highest courts. (Fortunately, New York does not, though many lower-court judges in the state stand for election.) State courts decide about ninety-five per cent of the cases in American courts. The federal courts, where the judges are nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate, hear only about five per cent, though those appointments get far more attention. Criminal prosecutions, civil lawsuits, child-custody matters, personal injuries—almost all are decided in state courts, under rules established by each state supreme court.
OSKALOOSA, Iowa – Rolling into his first campaign event of the day, President Obama made a surprise stop for coffee and muffins at a local breakfast spot.
“Hello, everybody,” the president declared as he walked into the Coffee Connection in Knoxville, Iowa, before working the room.
Obama spent time chatting with the owner, who is a Republican running for country supervisor, about his business and was overheard saying that “this is what America is all about … and I’m going to contribute by buying something.”
The president ordered coffee, an ice tea, muffins and a cinnamon roll, according to pool reports, before turning to the diners and asking, “Anyone else need anything? I’m buying.”
The VP candidate pushed an anti-abortion bill that would outlaw IVF—which Mitt Romney's children used.
Now that Mitt Romney has chosen Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate, Ryan's long history as a culture warrior is getting a fresh look. Women's groups have already honed in on his extreme anti-abortion record, which consistently has earned him a 100 percent voting approval rating from the National Right to Life Committee.
What isn't so well known about Ryan's record, though, is that one piece of legislation he supported is so extreme that it would have turned Romney's children into criminals.
The Sanctity of Human Life Act, which Ryan co-sponsored, would have enshrined the notion that life begins at fertilization in federal law, thus criminalizing in vitro fertilization—the process of creating an embryo outside of a woman's womb. In IVF, doctors typically create multiple embryos and then only implant the healthiest ones in the woman. Some
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The Florida papers are destroying Paul Ryan. So much so that a distraught and panicked Village believes "Mitt Romney is in big, big trouble" for selecting the man who wants to pull the plug on Grandma.
The very first available headlines from the all important swing state of Florida are devastating.
Ecuador's president Rafael Correa has agreed to give Julian Assange asylum, officials within Ecuador's government have said.
The WikiLeaks founder has been holed up at Ecuador's London embassy since 19 June, when he officially requested political asylum.
"Ecuador will grant asylum to Julian Assange," said an official in the Ecuadorean capital Quito, who is familiar with the government discussions.
On Monday, Correa told state-run ECTV that he would decide this week whether to grant asylum to Assange. Correa said a large amount of material about international law had to be examined to make a responsible informed decision.
Ecuador's foreign minister Ricardo Patiño indicated that the president would reveal his answer once the Olympic Games were over. But it remains unclear if giving Assange asylum will allow him to leave Britain and fly to Ecuador, or amounts to little more than a symbolic gesture. At the moment he faces the prospect of
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I will never forget it. I was standing on the corner of 43rd Street and Broadway in New York City with my coworker Laura. Laura and I had been through a lot together in the year we had worked on the same public relations account team. We had coped with ego-obsessed executives and unreasonable clients, and we had implemented innovative and creative ideas neither of us knew we had in us. Nearly every day, Laura and I had lunch together to dish about our projects and the latest goings-on in our personal lives.
Standing on the corner, I said to Laura, “I’m so glad you’re one of my closest friends.”
She looked at me strangely. “Alex,” she said. “There’s a difference between close friends and people you talk to at work. You know that, right?”
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