AP:
Nearly 10,000 Rhode Islanders are set to get an automatic raise beginning Wednesday as the state raises its minimum wage to $8 an hour.
The hike goes into effect New Year's Day, and will put Rhode Island on par with Massachusetts. Twelve other states will also start the new year with a higher minimum, including Connecticut, which is going from $8.25 to $8.70 an hour. New York is also set to increase its minimum wage to $8 effective Tuesday.
Christopher Flavelle:
A CNN poll taken last week showed that many Americans are exaggerating the effect of Obamacare on their own lives. As I wrote on Tuesday, this suggests the law will get a bump in public support over the next few months, as the widely anticipated negative consequences don't materialize for most people outside the health-care insurance exchanges.
The poll is interesting for another reason: It suggests that the public's divergent views on Obamacare don't reflect different opinions about the proper role of government, so much as wildly different understandings about what the law will mean for the average American. Here's the thing: They can't both be right.
Flavelle is correct. When conservatives argue that ACA will simply collapse and go away, they're wrong. All ACA does is build on the existing system. Sure, it's flawed. But it's also not going away any time soon. Why do conservatives argue that? Because they'd otherwise have to deal with the reality of 6 million more people getting insurance Jan 1, and they apparently can't. They've predicted no one will want it. And the cognitive dissonance is making them claim very stupid things.
Susan J. Demas:
I know who the next president will be!
Really good piece.
More politics and policy below the fold.
NY Times on Friday's released material on 12/14 in Newtown:
For all its material, the report did not appear to alter the broader understanding of the shooting, for which the authorities have not established a clear motive.
The state’s Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection said the release of the full report was “indicative that this State Police criminal investigation is concluded.”
Questions of how and when to release sensitive investigative details from the shooting have been prevalent since shortly after the massacre.
In a letter accompanying the report, Reuben F. Bradford, the commissioner of the state’s Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection, said the names and “contextually identifying information of involved children” were withheld, including descriptions of the children, their clothing and their belongings. “All visual images depicting the deceased have been withheld,” he added, “as well as written descriptions whose disclosure would be highly offensive to a reasonable person and would violate the constitutional rights of the families.”
Mr. Bradford said that balancing the “often competing interests of government transparency and individual privacy has been difficult.”
Indeed it has. And if it's not news, it need not be broadcast widely.
Added:
Dave Barry:
It was the Year of the Zombies. Not in the sense of most of humanity dying from a horrible plague and then reanimating as mindless flesh-eating ghouls. No, it was much worse than that. Because as bad as a zombie apocalypse would be, at least it wouldn’t involve the resurrection of Anthony Weiner’s most private part.
NYT editorial:
Has the National Security Agency’s mass collection of Americans’ phone records actually helped to prevent terrorist attacks?
No, according to the 300-page report issued this month by a panel of legal and intelligence experts appointed by President Obama.
Yet in a ruling issued on Friday, Judge William Pauley III of the Federal District Court in Manhattan came to the opposite conclusion. “The effectiveness of bulk telephony metadata collection cannot be seriously disputed,” Judge Pauley wrote in a deeply troubling decision dismissing a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union that challenged the constitutionality of the N.S.A.’s bulk data collection program.