Remember how much time was wasted arguing about this? Not this year. But Ebola is still an issue in W Africa and we may well see more cases here. In the meantime, it's flu season. Worry about flu and get your flu shot.
Henry Decker:
5 Republican Campaign Promises (That President Obama Fulfilled)
“I can tell you that over a period of four years, by virtue of the policies that we’d put in place, we’d get the unemployment rate down to 6 percent, and perhaps a little lower.”—Mitt Romney, May 23, 2012.
Mitt Romney’s vow to reduce unemployment to 6 percent by the end of his first term in office was almost universally hailed as bold and ambitious. But under President Obama’s stewardship, the economy improved much quicker than Romney promised: The unemployment rate has dropped steadily since the 2012 election, and dipped to 5.9 percent in September.
President Obama has also blown Rick Perry’s vague promise to create 1.25 million jobs out of the water.
Nick Hanauer:
This is why the middle class can’t get ahead
Uwe Reinhardt:
M.I.T. economist Jonathan Gruber, whom his colleagues in the profession hold in very high esteem for his prowess in economic analysis, recently appeared before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Gruber was called to explain several caustic remarks he had offered on tortured language and provisions in the Affordable Care Act (the ACA) that allegedly were designed to fool American voters into accepting the ACA.
Many of these linguistic contortions, however, were designed not so much to fool voters, but to force the Congressional Budget Office into scoring taxes as something else. But Gruber did call the American public “stupid” enough to be misled by such linguistic tricks and by other measures in the ACA — for example, taxing health insurers knowing full well that insurers would pass the tax on to the insured.
More politics and policy below the fold.
Aaron Carroll:
With the Affordable Care Act seemingly off to a good start in its first year, increasing access to insurance coverage for adults, attention is likely to turn to an older program for children that will come to an end in 2015 if it is not reauthorized: the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP.
This program has made a huge difference in insurance coverage for children, so much so that they are not, and did not need to be, the primary beneficiaries of the A.C.A. But that does not mean that children are not a concern. A variety of factors about our national strategy for children’s health care, or our lack of one, leaves them particularly vulnerable to challenges in access and quality in the next few years.
Children have not always fared so well. From 1980 through 1984, the rates of uninsured children and non-elderly adults were almost identical. Since that time, they have diverged significantly, so that in 2012, about 15 percentage points separated the two.
This turn of events was achieved though expansions of public coverage, specifically Medicaid, in the 1984 Deficit Reduction Act, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, in the 1997 Balanced Budget Act. In 2013, more than 41 percent of children were insured through a government program, making them more dependent on public coverage than any group except seniors.
The Hill:
Pope Francis is increasingly driving a wedge between conservatives and the Catholic Church.
The magnetic pope has sparked new enthusiasm around the world for the church and has flexed his political muscles internationally, most recently by helping to engineer a new relationship between the United States and Cuba.
But Francis’s agenda, which also includes calls to address income inequality and limit climate change, is putting him at odds with Republicans, including GOP Catholics in the United States.
Raw Story:
Fox affiliate fires reporter and cameraman who deceptively edited video of police brutality protesters
Paul Waldman:
While few believe the next two years are going to see much in the way of big, consequential legislation, there is still hope among some Republicans that Congress can pass comprehensive immigration reform, and thus show Hispanic voters that the GOP is not intractably hostile to them. The other day, Senator Lindsey Graham said, “If we don’t at least make a down payment on solving the problem and rationally dealing with the 11 million, if we become the party of self-deportation in 2015 and 2016, then the chance of winning the White House I think is almost non-existent.”
But in this coming Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Marco Rubio — the Republican most closely associated with comprehensive reform — shows decidedly less urgency about the issue.
Jamelle Bouie:
On race relations, President Obama is feeling optimistic.
At least, that’s how he comes across in an interview with NPR’s Steve Inskeep, who asks if “the United States is more racially divided than it was” when he took office. “No,” Obama says, “I actually think that it’s probably in its day-to-day interactions less racially divided.”
If America seems more divided, he says, it’s because we’re more aware of our racial shortcomings. “It’s understandable the polls might say, you know, that race relations have gotten worse—because when it’s in the news and you see something like Ferguson or the Garner case in New York, then it attracts attention.” And if many white Americans have a shocked response to claims of unfairness and discrimination, it’s because it’s outside their purview. “If you’d asked whites in those jurisdictions,” he said, referring to racial profiling in Illinois, ‘Do you think traffic stops were done fairly?’ the majority of whites probably would say ‘yes’ because it’s not something they experience. It’s not because of racism; it’s just that it’s not something that they see.”
It’s easy to dismiss this as undue optimism or a retreat to 2008-style post-racial thinking, especially given events in Cleveland, Ferguson, and New York, and the stark divide in how blacks and whites see law enforcement. But Obama isn’t wrong. When it comes to race relations, America is better than it’s ever been.
Dan Balz:
The year 2014 will be remembered politically for many things, among them the Republican Party’s impressive victories in the midterm elections. But as much as anything, the year was a reminder of the depth of racial divisions and the continuing existence of racial politics in America...
The Scalise episode, as colleagues Robert Costa and Philip Rucker, wrote, is more than the case of one politician and one event. It is also a reminder of the complexities of race and politics in the Old and New South as that region has made a long transition from one-party Democratic rule a generation ago to today’s one-party Republican dominance.
Having Scalise stay in leadership remains unacceptable, but I suspect the GOP will need to learn the hard way.