Elizabeth Preza, - The Raw Story
Stephan: The Great Schism Trend perfectly illustrated.
Paul Ryan tries to pose with eighth grade students.
About 100 eighth grade students refused to pose with Speaker of the House Paul Ryan on Friday, snubbing the top Republican to protest his policies.
Though Ryan’s official Instagram features a photo of him waving to a group students from South Orange Middle School in South Orange, New Jersey, it does not show their peers sitting in a park lot across the street, in an apparent rebuff of the GOP leader.
“It’s not just a picture,” student Matthew Malespina told ABC News. “It’s being associated with a person who puts his party before his country.”
When he learned of his school’s impending photo op with Ryan, Malespina texted his mother he’s “just not going to do it.”
“The point was, ‘I don’t want to be associated with him, and his policies and what he stands for,’” Matthew’s mother Elissa Malespina said.
An equal number of students opted to participate in the photo.
“I thought it would be very cool just seeing the man who is the third most powerful […]
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Jess Shankleman , - The Independent (U.K.)
Stephan: Here is another example of the Theorem of Wellbeing. By choosing the option most productive of wellbeing, costs go down, pollution decreases, and on and on. As you read this keep in mind the two pieces I ran a few days ago about the development of wireless technology allowing solar roadways to charge vehicles as they drove over them.
Battery powered cars will soon be cheaper to buy than conventional gasoline ones, offering immediate savings to drivers, new research shows. (emphasis added)
Automakers from Renault SA to Tesla Inc. have long touted the cheaper fuel and running costs of electric cars that helps to displace the higher upfront prices that drivers pay when they buy the zero-emission vehicles.
Bloomberg New Energy Finance sees electric cars becoming cheaper than conventional vehicles by 2030.
Now research from Bloomberg New Energy Finance indicates that falling battery costs will mean electric vehicles will also be cheaper to buy in the US and Europe as soon as 2025.
Batteries currently account for about half the cost of electric vehicles (EVs), and their prices will fall by about 77 per cent between 2016 and 2030, the London-based researcher said.
“On an upfront basis, these things will start to get cheaper and people will start to adopt them more as price parity gets closer,” said Colin McKerracher, an analyst at the London-based researcher.
“After that it gets even more compelling.”
Renault, maker of the Zoe electric car, predicts total […]
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Eileen Kinsella, Senior Market Editor - artnet news
Stephan: The National Endowment for the Arts is one of the nicest agencies in the government, and its policies explicitly are designed to foster wellbeing. For a modest sum of money children all over the country get exposed to the creative arts; artists, poets, writers, playwrights, composers, choreographers, and a dozen other creative arts are supported through the NEA. All this helping to make America a more pleasant place to live.
Donald Trump’s much-anticipated 2018 budget proposes steep cuts to domestic programs—including the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
According to an outline of the budget released last night, the proposal reiterates many of the cuts first rolled out by the administration earlier this year, including the elimination of the NEA and National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH). As usual, however, Congress remains intent on writing its own budget, so Trump’s plan is unlikely to go far on Capitol Hill. Trump’s proposal, CNN notes, is more a symbolic statement of policy than a practical budget that is expected to be adopted in full.
A spokesperson for the NEA confirms that the president’s 2018 budget proposes the elimination of the department, and includes a request for $29 million from Congress to shut down the agency in an orderly fashion. The spokesperson says that the organization is fully funded for the fiscal year, and will continue to make 2017 grant awards and “honor all obligated grant funds made to date.”
She adds: “This budget request is […]
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Joyce Frieden , News Editor - MedPage Today
Stephan: The Trump-Ryan Republican healthcare proposal, which is actually a tax cut for the rich, as scored by the Congressional Budget Office says, "An estimated 14 million more people under 65 would be uninsured in 2018 compared with current law and by 2026, that number would rise to 23 million." Everyone of those millions is a human being. Could you be one of them?
Credit: Joshua Roberts/Bloomberg
WASHINGTON — The long awaited Congressional Budget Office (CBO) scoring of the American Health Care Act (AHCA) is in and scores show the uninsured losing to deficit reduction.
An estimated 14 million more people under 65 would be uninsured in 2018 compared with current law and by 2026, that number would rise to 23 million, the report said. (emphasis added)
The AHCA, which the House passed on May 4th, also would decrease the deficit by $119 billion from 2017-2026, CBO said Wednesday.
These numbers are in contrast to the CBO’s score on an earlier version of the House bill, which the agency estimated would result in 24 million fewer people having health insurance by the year 2026 and decrease the federal deficit by $141 billion over 10 years, largely by making changes to the Medicaid program and cutting subsidies to individual enrollees on the ACA’s health insurance […]
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Klaus Brinkbaumer, Member Editorial Board - Der Spiegel (Germany)
Stephan: I have been involved with assessing geopolitical relationships since 1969 and in all that time I have never read an editorial like this one about an American president in a mainstream German national publication. The stable order that NATO has kept since it was founded in April 1949 is under assault by Donald Trump and his band of zombies, and the world order is changing.
Yet Trump's support among GOP voters through all the revelations that seem to come almost hourly, has hovered between 84 percent and 87 percent. In a new survey it has fallen to 81 percent, but that is still 81 per cent. That's the problem with America.
U.S President Donald Trump stands at the doorway of the West Wing awaiting the arrival of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the White House in Washington, U.S. May 16, 2017.
Credit: Reuters/Joshua Roberts
Donald Trump is not fit to be president of the United States. He does not possess the requisite intellect and does not understand the significance of the office he holds nor the tasks associated with it. He doesn’t read. He doesn’t bother to peruse important files and intelligence reports and knows little about the issues that he has identified as his priorities. His decisions are capricious and they are delivered in the form of tyrannical decrees.
He is a man free of morals. As has been demonstrated hundreds of times, he is a liar, a racist and a cheat. I feel ashamed to use these words, as sharp and loud as they are. But if they apply to anyone, […]
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