The Economic Policy Institute finds that a $10.10/hour minimum wage would save our government $7.6 billion annually in public assistance programs like TANF and food stamps. See? A higher minimum wage is not only fiscally conservative, it's also pro-pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps, which I suspect informs the support a higher minimum wage has received from conservatives like those at, well, The American Conservative. But most right-wingers would rather keep complaining about all the help they have to give to Those People and pretend that making $2/hour back in 1967 is sooooo much worse than making $7.25/hour now, as if a little thing called inflation doesn't exist.
"Do You Ever Shop Anywhere? Congratulations: Your Data Will Be Hacked," announces The Consumerist. And admittedly the numbers aren't on your side, since Home Depot and Target have been hacked this year and that accounts for over 100 million credit card numbers, but all is not so lost: Visa and Master Card will be rolling out encrypted-chip technology (you know, like the rest of the developed world has!) over the next three years, and there are many things you can do to ameliorate financial loss due to hacking, like checking your credit card account several times weekly. Which reminds me...
Jad Mouawad at the New York Times instructs us as to why a travel ban wouldn't help us fight ebola. It goes rather beyond the fact that a travel ban on West African nations wouldn't have stopped Mr. Duncan from getting to Texas, given that he flew in from Belgium -- a travel ban would actually make it harder to track folks who might have the disease, and it would make it harder to get aid workers into West Africa. But please, by all means, let's just do whatever John Boehner says, even though he's an expert in nothing.
Another day, another "liberal" media outlet botching a fact-checking assignment about ISIS operatives supposedly already being "caught" in Texas. And boy it sure is a good thing that former Bush Mobb House Liberal Matthew Dowd didn't want to "conflate" "ebola" with ISIS, which of course can never be done by mentioning them at the same time! And if liberals were as hard-headed as Duncan Hunter the Younger was about allegations he couldn't defend, no "liberal" media punditoid would defend them by saying they "sincerely believed" what they said.
File this one under "one more thing Bruce Braley will be too polite to mention in his campaign ads": Iowa Republican U.S. Senate candidate Joni Ernst thinks we have to "educate" Americans that they can "be self-sufficient," that "(t)hey don’t have to rely on the government to be the do-all, end-all for everything they need and desire." Plus the whole process will be very "painful," though much less so for her, I reckon. But don't play her game: just remember that, in the end, government belongs to us, and so when they talk about their fear that government will "do things for people," they really fear that we the people will do things for ourselves.
Finally, Wisconsin Republican U.S. House candidate alleges that the Supreme Court stayed Wisconsin's notorious voter ID law because they want Scott Walker to lose so he can't run for President in 2016. Setting aside that Rick Santorum lost his last Senate race by 18 points (as an incumbent!) yet was the clear runner-up in 2012's Republican Presidential primaries, I did actually give this matter serious thought -- does the Court actually want someone even worse who could still get elected? I wondered -- but I couldn't think of anyone worse than Scott Walker who could actually get elected President. I also found that this Dan Sebring character ran against incumbent WI-4 Rep. Gwen Moore in 2010 and 2012, too, peaking with 30% of the vote in 2010, so folks, there's just no there there.
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