Good news: the Washington, D.C. City Council overrode Mayor Gray's veto of a minimum wage hike, meaning minimum wage workers in D.C. will get $11.50/hour in 2016. In a related development, more studies are finding that hiking the minimum wage does not result in fewer jobs. But more important to John Boehner (we learn in the latter piece) are his "personal experience" and ability to deploy a metaphor using a ladder.
More good news: Pennsylvania Supreme Court has dealt major blows to the state's notorious gas-drilling welfare bill, Act 13. Specifically, the Court struck down the provision allowing gas drilling corporations to override local zoning regulations -- a provision that should have offended conservatives as much as it offended liberals -- and sent back several items for Commonwealth Court review, including the part which forbids doctors from telling their patients about the health impacts of gas drilling. That part, too, never raised conservative getting-between-you-and-your-doctor ire like it should have. Anyway, big win for Team Good!
"Wind Power Rivals Coal With $1 Billion Order from Buffett," announces the headline on this Blooomberg.com article, but when we dig deeper we learn what that really means: not that more people are using wind than coal now, but that the price of producing wind power is only a little more expensive than the price of producing coal -- and, ah, that Mr. Buffett's hefty investment in his Iowa utility isn't a cause of the downward depression on wind power prices but an effect. In any case, you don't need to be an economics professor to predict that as more businesses develop wind power, production prices will come down.
ProPublica describes, at some length, "how fraud flourishes in Medicare's drug plan." Before your right-wing uncle rushes in with GUMMINT DOESN'T WORK!!!!!, remind him that private insurance corporations run Medicare's Part D drug plan and that they're supposed to be the ones looking for fraud. Seems like you do a lot better if you don't outsource vital government functions to private corporations -- your government belongs to you, at least, and its workers are, one way or another, answerable to you.
Finally, a right-wing think tank has been attacking a series of "John Doe" probes looking into potential campaign finance wrongdoing during the 2011 and 2012 recall races in Wisconsin -- but has apparently not disclosed that many of the folks who might be caught up in the John Doe probes just happen to be connected to the think tank. And THAT! Is the MOST! SURPRISING! THING! I! Have EVER! HEARD!
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