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Methinks Ezra Klein, in a Washington Post article pushing back on POLITICO's story about Congress seeking to exempt itself from Obamacare, reveals more than intended about a core problem with Obamacare.
[N]o one is discussing “exempting” congressional staffers from Obamacare. They’re discussing creating some method through which the federal government can keep making its current contribution to the health insurance of congressional staffers.
"Can keep making its current contribution to the health insurance of [employees]."
Have we heard that before?
Some of us have been warning from the start that forced defaults, sequestrations, and similar devices only end up empowering the executive branch. If Congress wants to determine the shape of spending cuts, it must write a budget. If it simply tells the executive, "spend less in every category," it grants the executive enormous discretion.
And guess what? The executive will use this discretion for its own political purposes. That's just so obvious! Yet House Republicans never saw it coming.
Until now.
Win McNamee/Getty Images
Getty Images
General Electric won't act as banker to gun stores any more, reported the Wall Street Journal yesterday.
This month, Glenn Duncan, owner of Duncan's Outdoor Store in Bay City, Mich., said he received a letter from GE Capital Retail Bank in which the lender said it had made "the difficult decision" to stop providing financing services to his store. Other gun dealers have received similar notices.
Meanwhile Cerberus is continuing with plans to sell its gun-making business, "which makes brands including Remington, Bushmaster, Marlin and H&R."
Today, April 25, is the anniversary of the first day of the Gallipoli campaign of 1915. In Australia and New Zealand, this day is honored as ANZAC Day, in remembrance of the heroic role of the armies of those two nations.
Captain Leslie Morshead (Australia) in a trench at Lone Pine after the battle, looking at Australian and Ottoman dead on the parapet
Yet (and despite the Peter Weir movie "Gallipoli"), it was not an ANZAC show only. The British and French fought at Gallipoli too. Twelve men - six sailors, six soldiers - won Victoria Crosses on this single day. The six soldiers all came from the same British regiment, the Lancashire Fusiliers.
Years after the battle, the best of the generals in the opposing Ottoman army paid generous tribute to the defeated soldiers of Gallipoli. By then, the former Mustafa Kemal had renamed himself Ataturk - and emerged as the ruler and remaker of his country. His words are inscribed on the memorial to the Allied forces that now stands at Gallipoli.
Congressional members and staffers are realizing what Obamacare means for them, don't much like it, and are attempting to exempt themselves from the law. From POLITICO (emphasis mine):
There is concern in some quarters that the provision requiring lawmakers and staffers to join the exchanges, if it isn’t revised, could lead to a “brain drain” on Capitol Hill, as several sources close to the talks put it.
The problem stems from whether members and aides set to enter the exchanges would have their health insurance premiums subsidized by their employer — in this case, the federal government. If not, aides and lawmakers in both parties fear that staffers — especially low-paid junior aides — could be hit with thousands of dollars in new health care costs, prompting them to seek jobs elsewhere. Older, more senior staffers could also retire or jump to the private sector rather than face a big financial penalty.
Plus, lawmakers — especially those with long careers in public service and smaller bank accounts — are also concerned about the hit to their own wallets.
Rule 1 of Middle East politics: things could always be worse. The Assad regime in Syria seems to be gaining a more attentive audience for its argument that the anti-regime militants represent even a worse option than the regime itself.
Rebel fighters from the al-Ezz bin Abdul Salam Brigade attend a training session at an undisclosed location near the al-Turkman mountains, in Syria's northern Latakia province, on April 24, 2013. (MIGUEL MEDINA/AFP/Getty Images)
[British Foreign Secretary William] Hague said there was now “uncontested space” in Syria where Islamist groups were free to establish training camps that would equip and train foreign fighters, including British extremists.
Via Jonathan Foreman (Follow him at @JonEForeman), an Anglo-American journalist who writes often about India, a little insight into how H1-B visas work in practice. The Wall Street Journal reports:
Indian companies such as Infosys Ltd., Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. and Wipro Ltd. have set up large U.S. offices to be closer to clients, staffing the sites overwhelmingly with Indian expatriates, who earn significantly less than their American counterparts. … Indian outsourcing giants sponsor more than half the 65,000 skilled-worker permits, known as H1-B visas, that the U.S. issues annually to workers with at least a bachelor's degree. … Many of these firms have as much as 80% of their staff in the U.S. on H1-B and other visas.
The Senate's immigration bill proposes gradually to curtail these practices over the years ahead.
I very much enjoyed Craig Fehrman's literature review at The American Prospect of a pair of books about the midwest. You might as well:
Some of the region’s stronger communal traits still hold. I grew up in the same sprawling gray farmhouse my grandfather was born in, for instance—his mother gave birth to him in the front room, where we kept my sister’s piano—and while that kind of rootedness has become rarer in other parts of the country, it’s still pretty standard in Southern Indiana.
Still, plenty has changed, for economic but also other reasons. After World War II, interstate highways opened, and new bypasses rerouted life away from cloistered downtowns. Later, manufacturing began to dry up, and local farms became attached to corporate monoliths. Kids who went to college never came back; those who stayed watched their self-reliant communities turn into commuter towns or unemployment zones. I’ve always felt these shifts brought some good with the bad. It’s sad to see boarded-up movie theaters in Sunman-size locales, but a multiplex offers ten times the choice, even if it’s an hour-long drive to the city.
At the Atlantic, David Graham explains that the Montana Democratic primary to replace Sen. Max Baucus may be the first major display of progressive efforts to challenge Democrats with heterodox positions on guns.
In the more militant corners of the left, there have been calls for a liberal Tea Party to enforce more ideological purity, forsaking the likes of Baucus and Senators Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Mark Begich of Alaska, and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, all of whom voted against the gun bill.
(It's worth noting that even a unified Democratic caucus would have fallen short of the 60 votes required to pass the measure.)
The UK may be entering a ‘triple dip’ recession. The official first quarter numbers, to be released tomorrow, could spell disaster for the government’s largely detested austerity program.
Although economists on average expect growth of 0.1 percent on the quarter, they warn it would take the smallest statistical variation to put the figure in negative territory. That would place the country in recession, typically defined as two consecutive quarters of economic contraction...
The government desperately wants a strong number to justify its increasingly criticized policy of painful spending cuts. But recent indicators on Britain's economy, the third-largest in the 27-country EU after Germany and France, have been disappointing.
Inflation is rising faster than wages, cutting into people's standard of living. Unemployment is up at 7.9 percent. Two international ratings agencies have downgraded the country's credit grade from the top level AAA, warning about the government's fiscal policies.
The First Lutheran Church of Oklahoma City dug up a time capsule chest that had been buried in double concrete walls and under 12 inches of concrete exactly 100 years ago.
The Ladies Aide Society, the church group responsible for the project, buried the chest on April 22, 1913 and left detailed instruction on how to exhume it. Inside were items such as a man’s suit; a woman’s dress, hat, and shoes (which were still shining); a copy of the daily newspaper from April 22, 1913; a telephone; an original Oklahoma state flag; and a pen used by President William McKinley.
The contents of the time capsule will be displayed at the Oklahoma Historical Society.
Government makes a lousy venture capitalist, a continuing series.
From the Wall Street Journal:
At its peak, tiny Fisker [Automotive] was one of the largest U.S. venture capital backed companies ever. Its founders raised more than $1 billion from highly regarded Silicon Valley venture funds. …
When we talk about the economy, we hear it said over and over: things have radically changed since the days of the mass-production economy. Upward mobility is more difficult, wages of people with ordinary middle-class qualifications are in decline.
But when we talk about immigration, we are supposed to forget all those things, and to believe that patterns that held true between 1913 and 1963 will hold equally true over the next half century.
Immigrants walking across pier from bridge on Ellis Island. ca.1909-1932 (Library of Congress)
David Leonhardt in the New York Times on Sunday:
Boston mosque refuses to give Tamerlan Tsarnaev an Islamic funeral, NBC reports.
A Boston-area mosque has refused to hold a funeral for Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the dead suspect in the attack on the Boston Marathon, his aunt said Wednesday.
American authorities have told the family that they can have Tsarnaev’s body, and an uncle approached the mosque to request a burial and funeral but was declined, said the aunt, Patimat Suleimanova. … A spokesman for the mosque, run by the Islamic Society of Boston, has said that congregants have been questioned by the FBI. The mosque did not immediately return a request for comment Wednesday from NBC News.
Is this first time in history an economic study has been ridiculed on a television comedy program? (H/T Business Insider)
About the Author
David Frum
David Frum is a contributing editor at Newsweek and The Daily Beast and a CNN contributor. He is the author of eight books, including most recently the e-book WHY ROMNEY LOST and his first novel Patriots, published in April 2012.
