Story

CHARLESTON, S.C. (Reuters) - U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders released details on Sunday evening about his "Medicare-for-all" universal healthcare funding plan and how he would pay for it.

The plan was released hours before Sanders was to square off in a Democratic presidential debate in Charleston, South Carolina, against Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state and front-runner for the Democratic nomination, and former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley.

Clinton's campaign had taken aim at Sanders in recent days, saying the U.S. senator from Vermont had not said how he plans to pay for his healthcare plan and that he needed to before the first party-nominating contest in Iowa on Feb. 1.

Sanders said that expanding Medicare, a government-run program that insures the elderly, would save $6 trillion over the next 10 years when compared with the current system, which was established by President Barack Obama's signature healthcare law, the 2010 Affordable Care Act.

Individuals would pay a 2.2 percent "premium" and employers would pay a 6.2 percent payroll tax to fund the healthcare plan. Individuals making $250,000 to $500,000 a year would pay a tax rate of 37 percent and those making more than $10 million would pay a 52 percent tax rate, according to details provided about the plan.

The average annual healthcare costs for a working U.S. family are nearly $5,000 in insurance premiums and another $1,300 on deductibles for care that is not covered, Sanders' campaign said.

Under Sanders' plan, a family of four earning $50,000 would pay $466 to the Medicare program, saving roughly $6,000 per year, the campaign said.

Clinton favors building on the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare, and has said Sanders' state-administered plan would jeopardize the healthcare of those with Republican governors. Sanders has said the federal government would intervene in such a scenario.

"It would be a mistake to really thrust our country into another contentious national debate about how we're going to provide quality, affordable healthcare to everybody," Clinton told CNN's "State of the Union" program on Sunday.

Sanders defended his forthcoming proposal on the same CNN program.

"I believe healthcare is a right for all people; it will be politically difficult to achieve, but I will maintain that vision and fight for it," Sanders said.

Sanders last week tweeted a 1993 photo of himself and Clinton signed by the then-first lady, who was waging her own fight for universal healthcare, which thanked him for his commitment to "real access to healthcare for all Americans."

Aaaand the young will eat this up without understanding the mechanics.

Second to last debate before the Iowa Caucuses on tonight, hosted by Fox Business once again (Streaming can be done on their website).

Undercard begins at 6PM and features Santorum, Huckabee, and Fiorina. Rand Paul was demoted to the Undercard debate as well, however currently it is believed that he will boycott the debate entirely.

Main stage debate features Trump, Cruz, Rubio, Carson (Who's campaign is collapsing, in other news), Bush, Christie, and Kasich.

Make your predictions now. Who will be the biggest loser? Who will walk away victorious?

I will do whatever the community wants.

Full Story

Could actually play well for Sanders in the long run

Get Hyped

Education Fight to Shit towards States

The Senate sent a bill to the president’s desk Wednesday that replaces much of the widely disliked No Child Left Behind Act and shifts more power over education to states and school districts.

The bill passed the chamber 85-12 on the heels of its passage in the House last week. After No Child Left Behind established a high watermark for federal involvement in education, the new bill slashes the federal role by historic proportions, experts say. The bill — which the president is scheduled to sign Thursday — would dump the current law’s intense focus on test scores and the well-intentioned but impossible goal of having all students reading and calculating at grade level.

The Every Student Succeeds Act (S.1177) allows states to set their own guidelines for rating schools and improving them, with federal oversight and restrictions. It was a victory for many Republicans and teachers unions, who were allied in their mission to undercut what they viewed as prescriptive, top-down regulation and intrusion into local schools.

The bill would “put education back in the hands of those who understand their needs best: parents, teachers, states and school boards,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Wednesday. “It’s conservative reform designed to help students succeed instead of helping Washington grow.”

Democrats see the bill as a chance to offload some of the aspects of NCLB that are unpopular with constituents, while maintaining their paramount goal of protecting poor and minority students, whose performance often lags their peers and who disproportionately attend the worst schools. The bill requires states to track performance of such students closely and intervene when schools are failing. Because of this, it earned the backing of the president and
overwhelming support from Senate Democrats.

Senate Republicans supported the bill, with the exception of a handful of conservatives including 2016 presidential candidates Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, who don’t think it walks back the federal role in education far enough.

The bill “unfortunately continues to propagate the large and ever-growing role of the federal government in our education system—the same federal government that sold us failed top-down standards like Common Core,” Cruz, who didn't vote, said in a statement Wednesday. “The American people expect the Republican majority to do better.” Fellow
2016 contenders Marco Rubio and Bernie Sanders also didn't cast votes. Paul voted against the bill.

The new bill bans future Education secretaries from pushing a Common Core-like set of academic standards and limits what the department can and can’t regulate. Dozens of waivers from No Child Left Behind granted by the Obama administration would be void starting in August 2016. States would have more than a year to shift to the new system, which would take hold starting in the 2017-18 school year.

But there will also be places for the Obama administration to leave an imprint, thanks to a streamlined regulatory process written into the bill that it will have a year to leverage. For example, the department could place broad parameters on when a group of students would be considered “consistently” low-performing, signaling a need for intervention.

Even before the bill was headed to the president, a swath of education, civil rights and business groups were already lining up ways to shape the law’s implementation. Since the bill returns power to states, advocates plan on waging state-by-state battles over education policy that were previously fought in Washington.

Advocates in D.C. have worked furiously over the last year to preserve strong federal protections in the bill for poor and minority students. But in the coming years, they’ll be “trying to make equity at the heart of education in states,” said Ryan Smith, executive director of The Education Trust-West, the California arm of the Washington-based education advocacy group.

“With all of this wonderful flexibility comes great responsibility” for states, said Cheryl Oldham, vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber is highlighting the need to continue to focus on minorities this week with a conference it is co-hosting with the NAACP on African-American student achievement.

One central issue for the Chamber will be making sure states continue to heavily weigh academic measures of students success — like test scores and graduation rates — when they rate schools. The new law allows states to also use some non-academic measures, such as student engagement, when evaluating schools.

That change in school rating metrics alone was a major legislative victory for teachers unions. Unions pushed all year to ditch No Child Left Behind’s embrace of testing, which they’ve dubbed a “test-and-punish” approach. Lawmakers ultimately settled on keeping a federal requirement that schools test students annually — but they gave states more leeway in how much test results matter. The law will also provide new funding to help states audit and get rid of excessive tests.

“You’ve had 15 years of test, test, test, test, test, test, test,” American Federation of Teachers Randi Weingarten said. “This is a vast improvement over what we have right now.”

And in another win, states will no longer have to evaluate teachers in a way that takes student outcomes — such as test scores — into account, a provision in the Obama administration’s waivers that unions opposed.
Now unions are making preparations of their own for the new law.

The National Education Association is pulling together a task force to begin planning how to educate teachers and organize in states.

The Obama administration, too, has begun positioning itself for an intense new phase — designing regulations to implement the law.

“We’re gearing up,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in an interview Saturday. Getting the law passed now is important to the Obama administration so it has “13 months to think about implementation,” he said. On Tuesday, Duncan was at Maryland’s National Harbor kickstarting outreach about the new law in a speech to educators.
Duncan is set to step down at the end of the year, so the dash to regulate the law will be the work of his successor, John King. And King will be operating in a different environment than Education secretaries did in the past because of the bill’s limit on the secretary’s power.

Senators celebrated the bill’s passage, but the next steps already loom on the horizon. Senate HELP Committee ranking member Patty Murray (D-Wash.) pledged Tuesday to keep close watch on implementation now that the work in Congress is done.

“We can’t just sign the bill and walk away,” Murray said. “We have to follow through and make sure they’re doing what we wanted to do with this law.”

Should I do it?

He asked to date me. I'm contemplating a move.

Give me advice

Discuss.

It's slow tonight and I want some discussion

Oh Discrimination

A married Carbon County couple says they plan to fight a judge's order that would force them to give up their infant foster daughter simply because they are lesbians.

"We love her and she loves us, and we haven't done anything wrong," Beckie Peirce said Wednesday. "And the law, as I understand it, reads that any legally married couple can foster and adopt."

Peirce, 34, and her wife, 38-year-old April Hoagland, have had the 1-year-old girl in their home for three months while the state moves toward terminating her biological mother's parental rights.

"The mother has asked us to adopt," Hoagland said.

So the pair — who married in October 2014 and were licensed as foster parents earlier this year — were caught off guard Tuesday when 7th District Court Juvenile Judge Scott Johansen ordered the child removed from their care.

"He said he has research to back that children do better in heterosexual homes," Hoagland said.

Johansen did not provide specifics of that research in court despite questions from attorneys for the Utah Division of Child and Family Services and the Guardian Ad Litem Office assigned to represent the child, Hoagland and Peirce said.

A copy of the order was not publicly available Wednesday, but a court spokeswoman confirmed its contents.

The couple, who are also raising Peirce's 12- and 14-year-old biological children, hired an attorney Wednesday and will fight to keep the girl, whom they say has fit seamlessly into their family.

"We have a lot of support," Peirce said. "DCFS wants us to have the child, the Guardian Ad Litem wants us to have the child, the mother wants us to have the child, so the only thing standing in the way is the judge."

Johansen's order gives DCFS seven days to find the child a new home.

Utah law does not prohibit legally married couples from serving as foster parents and no other state judge has expressed concerns about placing foster kids with same-sex parents, DCFS director Brent Platt said.

DCFS attorneys have not seen the order, but they will review it, Platt said, in part to determine whether there are grounds for an appeal.

"If we feel like [Johansen's] decision is not best for the child," he said, "and we have a recourse to appeal or change it, we're going to do that."

Meanwhile, DCFS is looking for an alternate home for the infant, so as not to run afoul of Johansen's order, he said.

This is not the first time Johansen has been in the news for making controversial rulings.

In 1997, he was reprimanded by the Utah Judicial Conduct Commission for "demeaning the judicial office" after slapping a 16-year-old boy who became belligerent during a 1995 meeting at the Price courthouse.

Johansen was also criticized in 2014 for ordering a woman to lop off her 13-year-old daughter's ponytail as punishment for the teen cutting the hair off a 3-year-old girl at a restaurant. The judge offered to shave off 150 hours of community service from the sentence if she cut her daughter's hair in court.

And it continues

T4R

T4R

I'm probably going to regret this thread, but yeah. Backstory is in the quote before. Please read it before commenting answers to my questions at the bottom. It's long, I'll try and do a Tl;Dr. Ktnx

---

SO

When I was in Florida during the first half of this year for my time working for Disney, I made the decision (along with one of my roommates) to transfer to the University of Central Florida, get an apartment together, and all that jazz. All the while, I was still technically enrolled at my old school back here in New York on a leave of absence, with all intentions (from their point of view) of me returning this Fall.

In April of this year, I was accepted to UCF for the major of my choice. This gave me roughly two weeks to make a choice of going home or remaining in Florida after August, as my old school needed a decision by May 1st as to whether I would be returning. If I did not respond or outright told them I would not be coming back, I would be unenrolled for the fall. I kept flip flopping on my decision until the very last day, when I simply did not contact my old school - mostly because I was still torn on what would be better. Not that it mattered anymore, but yeah.

With the decision (unfortunately) made, we proceeded with the UCF process, toured the campus, and all that jazz. It wasn't until late-June, after paying for the orientation fee, that I realized a huge problem - my credits weren't transferring, even though both were public, 4-year institutions. Out of my 43 credits, I would get 16 in the new school, on top of taking a whole new batch of General Electives that I didn't need back here in New York. So on top of paying double my old tuition, I would essentially be falling backwards in terms of my education standing. My roommate had it even worse - only 9 of his credits would transfer. We both decided this wouldn't work for us, decided to return to our individual homes and finish there.

He was reaccepted to his school rather quickly. Problem for me, my school is not so forgiving. I returned home this past August and filled out a readmission application for this upcoming spring semester -  basically asking for the school to let me back in for my major. The application was sent in this past September, and I also called in to speak to the Assistant Dean in charge of them - I was told there is no deadline as to when we'd here back on our application, there is no way to check on the status, and that we receive information through postal mail (No Email).

So I've waited. And waited. And now, students at the school are registering for classes and I have no idea when, or if, I'll hear. Even if I do get in, I'm going to fall another semester behind because I won't get any of the classes I need to further my major. So, I'm kind of torn between a couple choices...

---

Should I...

1 - Bide it out with my old school and hope to hear back soon, even if it means falling behind in my current major/having to change

2 - Apply elsewhere (UCF or another school) for the Fall 2016 Semester, potentially pairing it with a semester at a community college this spring.

3 - Other (Advice pls)

This with my peppermint mocha coffee and ugg boots.

Unf.