Playinghardball
Playinghardball's JournalCalifornia bill offering free preschool passes first hurdle amid budget skepticism
SACRAMENTO, California (Reuters) – A proposal to offer free preschool to all California four-year-olds passed its first legislative hurdle on Wednesday with support from Democrats but facing skepticism from Governor Jerry Brown and some educators that could doom its chances this year.
The $1.5 billion program is being pushed hard by the state senate’s Democratic leader, Darrell Steinberg, who is leaving office at the end of this year and views it as key to his legacy in the most populous U.S. state.
“Thirty million words – that’s the gap between the number of words heard by low-income children and their middle- and upper-income peers,” Steinberg told the senate education committee. “That number astounds me. They are behind before they even get started in their formal schooling.”
The bill, which passed the senate education committee on Wednesday, comes as a call for universal pre-K is gaining traction around the country. Last week, lawmakers in New York state included $300 million for public preschool programs there, and Oklahoma also offers them.
The idea is favored by many education advocates, who say children whose parents cannot afford preschool fall behind quickly once they get to kindergarten, and many never catch up.
More here: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/04/09/california-bill-offering-free-preschool-passes-first-hurdle-amid-budget-skepticism/
How to Cheat on Your Taxes
How to Cheat on Your Taxes
http://mag.newsweek.com/2014/04/18/cheat-taxes.html
>snip<
No Authority to Audit
Curnutt has been unable to get the IRS to follow up on the insights for which it honored him, for reasons neither spokespeople nor IRS commissioners have explained, despite my repeated queries. So Curnutt began offering his services to every state with an income tax. The response has been underwhelming.
Years ago, a Kentucky tax official told me Curnutt was rebuffed because his audits would have exposed some of the then-governor's major campaign donors. New York state officials under four governors have repeatedly claimed, in writing and interviews, that they already do "Curnutt audits," but that is not true.
California's Franchise Tax Board told Curnutt in 2009 that it could not afford to hire him. His fee? Travel expenses, plus $140 an hour. That is a fraction of the hourly rate states routinely pay lawyers, accountants and other experts for advice that does not raise a penny of revenue. And Curnutt could put many millions into state coffers for minimal expense and effort.
Only one state hired Curnutt: Pennsylvania. From 2002 to 2009, he put in seven months of work there and found hundreds of real estate partnerships that had failed to report more than $1.6 billion in income. That works out to close to $50 million in unpaid state taxes, and $400 million in federal taxes. Curnutt's fee came to less than $200,000.
Most NJ Residents Want To Keep Obamacare Law, Poll Says
Now that Obamacare is here and the first enrollment period has closed, a growing majority of New Jerseyans say want to keep the health care law and fix its flaws, according to a Monmouth University/Asbury Park Press Poll released today. About 60 percent of the poll’s participants said they want the law improved, while 7 percent said Obamacare, formally known as the Affordable Care Act, is fine as it is, but all of them, 67 percent, would oppose an effort to repeal it, according to the poll’s findings.
That’s 8 points higher than the response from a national poll by Kaiser Health poll last month. According to February statistics from the Obama administration, 74,000 New Jerseyans signed up for private health insurance through the online exchange and 123,000 enrolled through Medicaid. Enrollment closed March 31 for 2014, but will reopen in November for the following year.
More here: http://www.nj.com/politics/index.ssf/2014/04/most_nj_resident_want_to_keep_obamacare_law_poll_says.html#incart_river
http://theobamadiary.com/
Sheldon Adelson’s Culture Of Hate
Imagine this. Hillary Clinton, Andrew Cuomo, Elizabeth Warren and multiple lesser Democratic notables travel halfway across the country to kiss the ring of a Palestinian-American billionaire who has shown himself willing to spend tens of millions of dollars subsidizing presidential campaigns. The billionaire has some provocative views. Six months earlier, he suggested that if Israel does not end its nuclear weapons program, America should drop an “atomic weapon…in the middle of the [Negev] desert that doesn’t hurt a soul.” If that doesn’t work, America should drop “the next one…in the middle of” Tel Aviv.The billionaire insists that there is no such thing as the Jewish people. It’s a hoax; the Jews “have fooled the world very successfully.” And he declares that “There isn’t a” Jew “alive who wasn’t raised on a curriculum of hatred and hostility toward the” Palestinians. Change the words “Democrat” to “Republican,” “Israel” to “Iran” and “Palestinian” to “Jewish,” and that’s exactly what just happened. Leading contenders for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination spent last weekend wooing and feting a billionaire, Sheldon Adelson, whose views – if directed at Jews—would put him in the company of Louis Farrakhan and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Think I’m exaggerating? Let’s check the record. Adelson has called for nuking the Iranian desert (which supposedly wouldn’t “hurt a soul”) and then nuking Tehran unless Iran abandons its nuclear weapons program. I’m all for Iran abandoning its nuclear weapons program. But how does threatening Tehran with nuclear annihilation make Adelson any different than those Iranians who have threatened to destroy Israel? Then there’s Adelson’s view that the Palestinians are an “invented people.” Again, flip it around. In 2008, when Tel Aviv University’s Shlomo Sand published a book called “The Invention of the Jewish People,” he was widely called anti-Semitic. When Adelson says the same about Palestinians, he’s a Republican rock star. This isn’t hawkishness. It’s hate.
More here:
http://theobamadiary.com/
Wave Of Newly Insured Patients Strains Oregon Health Plan
Millions of Americans who didn’t have health insurance last year now do because of the Affordable Care Act. In Lane County, Oregon, Trillium Community Health Plan is struggling to deal with a huge influx of new patients looking for health care. CEO Terry Coplin says the company figured 26,000 people would sign up in the first few years. Instead, about that many signed up right off the bat. Cheryl Stumph is one of them. She and her husband, Mike, run Green Streak Automotive, an all-service garage in Veneta, Ore. Last November, Stumph’s 27-year-old son had a stroke and died at the wheel of his tow truck. The stroke stemmed from a genetic problem, so Stumph spent the winter worrying about her six other kids.Genetic testing is expensive, and she didn’t have health insurance. But now she and her family get Medicaid through Trillium Health. She’s thrilled to be able to get a mammogram and treatment for a stubborn infection. The kids can get genetic testing.
She says her husband has a chronic medical problem that needs attention, too. Stories like Stumph’s are being repeated across Oregon. Trillium’s Coplin says the health plan has come up with a four-part plan to deal with this unexpected influx. First, it will pay bonuses to doctors who accept new patients covered by Trillium. Second, Trillium is giving Lane County $900,000 to open a new clinic in an existing building. “They have proposed ways that they can get this clinic up and running by mid-year,” says Coplin. Third, Trillium is hiring a consultant to see if existing clinics can increase efficiency, for example, by changing who fills out forms. “Having physicians do clerical work is really a waste of valuable resources,” Coplin says. And finally, Trillium is offering $500,000 to any clinic or group of physicians willing to expand their practice to take on another 5,000 adult patients.
More here: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/04/08/300248220/wave-of-newly-insured-patients-strains-oregon-health-plan?sc=tw
http://theobamadiary.com/
Republicans Warn Of New Obamacare Reality: No Repeal Without Alternative
For all the challenges still facing Obamacare and its supporters, conservative health wonks are increasingly cautioning Republicans that the politics of the issue have changed in the wake of the 7 million initial sign-ups. Simply repealing the law is no longer an option, they warn, even if Republicans gain the power to do so. If they want to unwind the law, the least they’ll have to do is coalesce around health care solutions of their own, lest they strip away benefits for millions of Americans without a plan of their own. And the party is far from a consensus on how they’d replace the law. There is internal dissent on whether Republicans ought to come up with an alternative. One congressional GOP health aide, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly, said his party is as determined as ever to fight Obamacare, and will remain so as long as it exhibits failure. He said devising an alternative is fraught with the difficulty of crafting a new benefits structure that doesn’t look like the Affordable Care Act.
“If you want to say the further and further this gets down the road, the harder and harder it gets to repeal, that’s absolutely true,” the aide said. “As far as repeal and replace goes, the problem with replace is that if you really want people to have these new benefits, it looks a hell of a lot like the Affordable Care Act. … To make something like that work, you have to move in the direction of the ACA. You have to have a participating mechanism, you have to have a mechanism to fund it, you have to have a mechanism to fix parts of the market.” It sheds light on why Republicans haven’t yet followed through on the “replace” component of their “repeal and replace” mantra, more than four years after Obamacare was enacted. The popular parts of the law, most notably the preexisting conditions guarantee, are unsustainable without unpopular parts like the individual mandate. Unraveling the parts people dislike means unraveling the whole structure, and rebuilding the well-liked elements is difficult without arriving at a similar place as Obamacare.
More here: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/republicans-new-obamacare-reality-no-repeal-without-replace
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Please SUPPORT Democrat Nina Turner for OHIO Secretary Of State
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RT : Please SUPPORT Democrat @NinaTurner for OHIO Secretary Of State pic.twitter.com/LKXWl70iGU #VOTEOutGOP2014
6:33 AM - 8 Apr 2014
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