Dan J

The biggest reason employment has been dropping has nothing to do with politics. Productivity gains (automation, etc.), without similar gains in economic growth has made it unnecessary for companies to hire as many people as they used to.

This trend has been going on for 30+ years.

600 million dollars and it doesn't work.

A small group of IT geeks developed this website in their spare time. It took them 3 days.

All you need is your zip code,number and ages of family members and if you are a smoker.

http://www.thehealthsherpa.com/

Its a bit misleading. They appear to be getting their price data from healthcare.gov and state exchanges. Which they wouldn't be able to do if they didn't exist. Imagine if they actually had to deal with insurance companies?

You tell me,,,,, what else could it be, inflation is about the same, the coverage is the same. My insurance has rising gradually over the last 30 years at about a 3 to 4% rise. (never even close to the 56% for 2014). What else has dramatically changed but ObamaCare. The insurance company has to price its policy so that it does not go bankrupt, so they have raised thier prices to cover what they think thier cost will be next year for the changes that ObamaCare is causing.

I will state again. i have looked at my policy, my deductable is going up, my total out of pocket will go up, the total amount of coverage that they could be out is the same. I am getting no increased coverage for the increased cost!!

ACA has been a convenient scapegoat for some employers to shift more costs on employees.

(technically) No fraud is involved except for the deceptive way it was sold to We the People (starting with FDR), but...the system uses money from new investors to pay earlier investors. How is it different from a Ponzi scheme? Not much difference at all.

(but fwiw...I was being sarcastic to emphasize a point = reduction in payouts is prudent & I hope for an eventual privatize.)

A Ponzi scheme works by paying earlier investors their investment + interest by getting new investors into the scheme. Of course, this eventually falls apart.

Social Security pays a basic income to retirees funded by contributions from non-retirees. This is not an investment, nor was it ever designed to be one. Some people will certainly make more contributions to social security than they will ever see in benefits.

The long term sustainability of social security relies on maintaining a balance between non-retiree contributions and retiree benefits. Up until this point, social security has been growing a surplus due to baby boomers being part of the workforce. Now that this is shifting, that surplus will eventually deplete. Other changes have happened since social security was established like a growing income inequality (wage cap only tracks with inflation) and growing systematic unemployment (jobs being replaced by automation).

Its likely the company would have liquidated eventually anyway (whether it was now or a couple more years), its been in bankruptcy before. The strike just provided the perfect cover.

The affair didn't begin until after Petraeus was confirmed as the head of the CIA.

Why does everyone keep on saying the GOP needs to change and adopt new social policies? If Republicans were to adopt all of the changes people are suggesting, they are just libertarians.

They wouldn't be quite libertarians, but I would argue that is not a bad thing. One of the demographics they have had a hard time capturing is young people. This is largely due to positions on social issues that are largely irrelevant with younger generations. Look at the supporters of Ron Paul, he attracted quite a few young people to his movement.

Now, the question becomes, can the Republican party afford to alienate somewhat the Christian Coalition that makes up a bulk of its voters? That might be a harder sell. While its unlikely they will switch to vote for Democrats, its also unlikely they will get excited about voting for a party who does not champion their issues.

I guess I see a few routes as to how the parties will develop over the next generation. While its unlikely that a third party will develop due to the optimization of the US political system, social issues are likely to become less relevant. Its generally not important to younger generations. What remains to be seen is how each of the parties will define themselves when social issues are no longer important part of the political discourse.

He is upset that he and his buddies(Sheldon Adelson, Koch Brothers, etc.) couldn't buy the election.

No, Mitt is done. You will have real contenders in the race in 2016. I see Jeb.

Depends who ends up as casualties in the GOP civil war. The tea party cost the Republicans a lot, including the chance they had to control the senate. Even Michele Bachmann barely won in a R+8 district (margin of about 3k votes)

In MN, the marriage amendment was defeated, the voter ID amendment was defeated, The democrats gained one more house seat and took over the state house and senate. Supposedly one of the main reasons why the marriage amendment was put on the ballot by Republicans, was to increase turnout of supporters this election. It appears to have backfired.

Shhhhhh!!! Don't tell the Rmoney crowd. They are waiting for their landslide victory!

They are still living in their alternate universe.

Florida 76% reported in and they are 300 votes apart!

At 82% Obama is leading by 10k

Like I said anyone who is honest will admit it is a toss up.

Toss up is what you call it to keep the drama alive. But when several different polls put Obama ahead, its likely that he is ahead even if he is still within the margin of error to call it with certainty. He is ahead in Ohio, and doesn't show any likelihood of changing. Without Ohio, Romney's chance of winning is very small. This is a helpful visualization of the difficulty that Romney has to win: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/11/02/us/politics/paths-to-the-white-house.html

ouch...

His campaign style certainly reflects that. He keeps repackaging himself to different audiences. If we had a Republican incumbent this year, he would probably switch parties and try to run as Democrat.

A lot of people have preferred candidates or parties, but that does not preclude them from being able to make a neutral analysis. If you take into consideration the data and historical trends, its not hard to conclude that Obama has a higher probability of winning than Romney. But its still in the end just a probability. Romney could still win even if Nate Silver has estimated a 30 some percentage chance of him doing so.

The storm that is about to hit the east coast could effect turnout, and untimely the outcome. Maybe that will increase the probability that Romney will win, or decrease it. Its probably going to come down to which states are affected, and which of those states have early voting (Get the vote in before the storm) or are using electronic voting machines (They wont work if the power is out on election day).

Nate Silver is a statistician who has been pretty damn accurate. In the polling biz you make your money based on how close you can predict the result not on whether or not not your predictions fit one party's idea of reality. But there is a self fulfilling prophecy angle to this. If the media/pollsters are saying your candidate is going to loose anyway, why bother going out to vote? By not going to vote, you make the prediction come true. This is what Romney and other conservatives are trying to attack.

Libs like to cherry pick the Holy Bible. In fact they are in the midst of rewriting it to the way they think it should be.

Pretty much everyone does that, cherry pick what fits your existing values and conveniently ignore the rest. To some extent, you kinda have to to compensate for the contradictions.

If Voter ID laws were really about in person voting fraud, the laws would also address absentee voting fraud, vote selling, and voting machine tampering (including full disclosure of all the source code powering electronic voting machines). But instead they just expense and hassle to a mostly non-existent problem.

Also ironic is that voter ID laws will cost states and counties in providing IDs and training election judges to verify them. Which means bigger government from the party which claims to want smaller government.

i can see why the second one isn't, but why not the first?

The government is too large to operate without a large amount of delegation. Nothing will happen if the President has to be involved in every decision made by government employees.

Routine security decisions involving US embassies and consulates should be primarily handled by the State Department and the President and Congress should make sure they have the resources they need to do their jobs.

Of course she would. She wants less regulation on all the things that have put her in jail.

The unusual Obama.com website redirects traffic directly to a donation page on the Obama campaign’s official website, my.barackobama.com, which does not require donors to enter their credit card security code (known as the CVV code), thereby increasing the likelihood of foreign or fraudulent donations. The website is managed by a small web development firm, Wicked Global, in Maine. One of Wicked Global’s employees, Greg Dorr, lists on his LinkedIn page his additional employment with Peace Action Maine and Maine Voices for Palestinian Rights. According to the GAI report, 68 percent of all Internet traffic to Obama.com comes from foreign visitors.

This is a rather stupid argument. There is no requirement to check a CVV code or to verify the billing address matches the card. Many merchants do however, not because they have to, but because they will eat the chargeback if its fraudulent. Credit card processors will revoke accounts if the chargeback rate is too high. They do require an address and they may be checking that against the card.

Barackobama.com is the offical campaign site. Looking at Obama.com it appears that its owned anonymously by someone else, who are redirecting requests to the real campaign website. Wicked Global does not manage official campaign site, that is most likely done by the campaign itself.

Keeping your employees abreast of the economic realities is good employer-employee communications if you ask me.

Now if he could know who voted for Obama and fired them individually that would be different.

Actually that would be more like GREAT!

That would probably be a case for wrongful termination.

Like most racists/segregationists, Governor Ross Barnett is a Democrat. You must be so proud Steven.

Now they want to keep hispanics in slavery by allowing them to be exploited by business for a profit.

A sterling legacy of dispicable racism.

Martin Luther King was Republican. Abraham Lincoln was Republican. George Wallace, Democrat. The KKK supported Democrats. Nathan Bedford Forrest, Democrat.

If you look at what the parties stand for today, its likely the labels would be switched. Republicans used to be progressive too, what happened to that?

Here is one person's answer:

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-fix-the-economy-in-one-simple-chart-2012-8

While that essentially what needs to happen, alot of companies are driven by short term share price and don't see the long term value in that decision. This is especially true for companies that are primarily B2B and not B2C, since it will take longer to realize the benefit.

I would say additionally that many large companies are pretty much transnational and will just go to other countries for growth instead of trying to realize it at home.

Until we find a way to address these problems, we are never going to see much of an economic recovery.