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The results of the February 24, 2011, CBS/New York Times poll show strong support for public workers in schools, firefighters, police and other functions. On collective bargaining 60% opposes weakening the bargaining rights of public workers, only 33% support it. On reducing the benefits and pay of public workers to reduce deficits, 56% opposed cutting pay or benefits, only 37% support it. Are public workers overpaid or have overly generous health and pension benefits. On this issue 61% -including over half of Republicans- say the salaries of public workers were either "about right" or "too low" for the work they do. So how are states to reduce their deficits? The people polled say they prefer tax increases over benefit cuts for public employees- only 22% chose to reduce the benefits of public employees, 40% said they would increase taxes, 20% said they would cut financing for roads, only 3% said they would cut financing for education. How this breaks down in politcal groups. 71% of Democrats opposed weakening collective bargaining rights, the opposition was also strong from Independents with 62% of Independents opposing weakening of collective bargaining rights. Followup interviews showed independents saying the public workers work hard and still struggle to have a home, saving for retirement, and sending their kids to college, with both spouses generally having to work, which is why they oppose weakening collective bargaining rights. Which segment of the populations support cutting pay and benefits of public workers? The one income group that showed support for cutting pay and benefits- those earning over $100,000 a year! There 45% said they favored cutting pay and benefits, even here 49% opposed it. On the intentions of the governors and state legislators trying to cut pay or benefits of public workers- 45% said they did this to cut the deficits, and as many as 41% said the saw this as an effort to weaken unions. Which takes one to the last question, so how are unions perceived in the U.S. in 2011? A far smaller number of people, 37% saw unions as having "too much influence" on American life and politics vs. 48% who said that unions had the "right amount" or "too little" influence....

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A Washington Post poll in September 2016 shows some surprising results with Clinton competitive in Texas and Arizona, long red states. It shows Trump's appeal to older white voters helping him in Iowa and Ohio. Clinton has a slight lead in Michigan. Clinton also leads in Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Colorado, and also in Florida.  As the race gets closer with about 50 days left Clinton's lead of 8-9 points is now about 4 points. Most striking this time compared to 2012 is that Clinton is polling way ahead with college educated voters. A race with libertarian candidate Johnson shows him getting 15% of the vote in 15 states narrowing Clinton's advantage, but also putting pressure on Trump to win undecided voters. Clinton has consolidated the Democratic vote better than Trump with 90% support in 32 states compared to Trump's above that in only 13 states, a key weakness because of dividing the Republican vote with Trump's crude and blatant attacks during the primaries that have left some Republicans thoroughly alienated. Unlike any previous election this one is dividing the vote based on gender and education. A big additional difference is college educated white women where the gap is the widest seen in any election- a 23 point lead for Clinton with white college educated women nationwide. In the midwest Michigan still has a history of voting Democratic especially after the auto industry rescue by Obama. Demographic changes not mentioned here also play a part such as in Colorado and Nevada long time red states. A Clinton edge in Texas is the most surprising result in the entire poll results showing the old red state blue state division is now replaced by women, minorities and college degrees as the dividing line. Part of the reason for this is that the losses due to globalization. And in this respect Clinton does better than Obama, but not as well as Merkel in Germany who has also suffered with people who lost out in globalization but not to the extent of Obama, and to a lesser degree than Obama for Clinton. Enough minority support, Republican support, and blue collar support, in addition to women voters,  may be the difference for Clinton in Texas. The other factor is the advertising campaign funding and the national security issue, on which Clinton does better than Obama in the latter a key factor in red states, and is similar to Obama in the former to tackle midwestern states. Such as Michigan and Wisconsin, liberal in history but with large shifting blue collar votes. Hurt by globalization, but in the case of Michigan helped by the Democrats rescue of the auto industry. In a way this could bring the country together after Obama with the disappearing North-South or red state blue state division, and with enough union or working class white support for Clinton in addition to dominant college educated voters to form a new coalition of support compared to a predominantly red state white state division of Obama years based on the minority vote.  ...

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Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan's early years in Washington D.C. working for Senator Robert Kasten as an intern and on his staff, at Empower America for Jack Kemp and in other jobs.

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Seen in a larger context, the Biden tax pledge seen from the southern and midwestern and less well off states is not about taxes, it is about federal revenues that build the infrastructure and services in these states that increase the standard of living. This happened in the 1930's and 1940's under FDR and Truman, in the 1950's under Eisenhower, in the 1960's under Kennedy/LBJ. And is happening again under Biden today. Lets not forget that president John F. Kennedy says in his speeches that these regions in America in the 1860's under Lincoln were in development close to what prevailed in the 1960's in India, Ceylon, Chile, Turkey or China. The Biden pledge not to increase taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 is significant because it grasps the situation in America where extraordinary gains in wealth since 1980 have gone only some of it to the top 1-2% in midwestern states and southern states, and most of it to the top 3-5% in coastal states population in the east and west, New York and California, where the finance and tech industry are based. In Michigan and Wisconsin only 2% of households make more than $400,000, in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona and Florida 3%. WSJ shows a map of the US showing this for individual states. The core southern states have 2% of households with incomes over $400,000- including Arkansas, Tennessee, South Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana, Oklahoma, with Mississippi less than 1%. It is only segregation in the late 1960's and culture issues such as abortion that have turned them from Democratic states to Republican states as they were the largest beneficiaries of taxes diverted into investment in these places since FDR/Truman and John Kennedy/LBJ. It was JFK who came up with the phrase "a rising tide lifts all boats" when he opened federally funded projects in Arkansas. Seen objectively the large investments made under Lincoln, FDR/Truman, Kennedy/LBJ from tax revenues are what changed this region from conditions that prevailed in less developed countries that John Kennedy points out in his speeches, true for the midwest, parts of the west, and the southern states alike.  President Kennedy said on Feb. 25, 1963 to the American Bankers Association Symposium on Economic Growth: "Today, many Americans tend to think of developing underdeveloped countries in terms only of faraway nations. But in 1863, even measured by 1963 dollars, our own per capita income--and this should be a source of encouragement to many who are laboring with the problem of underdevelopment in far-off countries--our own per capita income was less than $1 a day, approximately the same as Chile's. Nearly 60 percent of our labor force was engaged in agriculture, the same percentage as is today engaged in the Philippines. An estimated 20 percent of our population was illiterate, the same percentage of the population of Ceylon. Only one-fifth of our 34 million people lived in towns or cities of over 5,000 in population, as is roughly true now of Turkey. In 1863, this Nation had fewer railroad tracks laid than India has today, and its children had a shorter life expectancy than a child born this year in Thailand or Zanzibar."   ...

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Robert Kaiser, former managing editor of The Washington Post, reviewed this book on Joe McCathy in The Washington Post on August 7, 2020. It shows the link with today of Senator Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn, the then 27 year old lawyer chief counsel of the senate subcommittee on investigation when Joe McCarthy became chairman in Jan. 1953. The book is-  Demagogue The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy by Larry Tye. Roy Cohn passed on some of the methods used at that time to Mr. Trump. Kaiser points out that the senator Joe McCarthy assembled "a coalition of the aggrieved." Tye shows that it started with the junior senator from Wisconsin making a speech in West Virginia for Lincon Day dinner to the Republican ladies of Wheeling, W. Va. The senator used it to talk about threat of communists working in the State Department. He claimed there were 205 Communists. Today we know that this was just made up by McCarthy, at a time when Winston Churchill made the speech about the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and a sense of shock in America at the People's Republic of China being formed in 1949 under CCP chairman Mao tse tung. McCarthy saw this as an opportunity to gain prominence and a Senate career. What is seen from this carefully researched book is that for a while it succeeded in putting many of the Nation's best leaders on the defense. This includes Harry Truman, Eisenhower himself who disdained McCarthy's and Cohn's methods, Gen George Marshall who was a mentor to Dwight EIsenhower, Joe Stilwell, and other military leaders who ran the 1940's war effort under Marshall in Europe against the Nazis and in China against the Japanese imperialists. On the domestic side it included the head of TVA and the new Atomic Agency setup by president Truman. Gallup said at that time of McCarthy's 38% support in the US following his censure in US Senate by 67-22  -even if it was known that McCarthy killed five innocent children they would still go along with him. Tye writes that in that atmosphere similar to the sense of shock at China's rise and America's loss of manufacturing and falling behind in infrastructure by 2016, in that atmosphere if one told a small lie or big lie it made not much difference in public's penalty or censure, then why not tell a whopper of a lie. This became the ethic for a while in 2016-2024 similar to the period till the collapse of McCarthyism in America by 1957 with McCarthy's death in 1957 and in 1960 the election of John F. Kennedy. What is forgotten is that Richard Nixon a young senator from California was part of the group in Congress, so that in some shape or form it existed and remained part of the Reagan efforts to push back against the Soviets that led to wars in Afghanistan and then Iraq sapping the Nation's energies and resources and with faulty economic theory allowed China to dominate key industries and outspend America in infrastructure investment, creating the kind of shock that led to the second McCarthyist decade under Mr. Trump. ...

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Walk in clinics at drug stores like CVS and stores like Walmart now have the cooperation of hospitals. Hospitals are now affiliated with 25 Walmart clinics. THe Cleveland Clinic has lent its name and backup services to a number of CVS clinics in northeastern Ohio. And the Mayo Clinic is operaing ne Express care clinic at asupermarke in Rochester, Minnesota, and asecond one at ashopping mall. This helps clear emergency rooms of people seeking bsic medical care as for astrep throat or flu. About one thousand clincs are operating in the US at drugstores, supermarkets and big stores since the idea took root 4 years ago. Wal-Mart has partnered with hopitals like the Christus Medical Group in Texas, Aurora Health System in Wisconsin and COxHealth in Missouri to setup clinics. Mayo did so after employees and patients said they wanted more convenient treatment for minor medical problems, so there may be a need here that as not been met. The lower costs at these centers compared to primary care doctors offices or emergency rooms make it possible for them to price lower and meet the needs of the 45 million or so uninsured people in the US, numbers growing as jobless rate increases. They are typically staffed by nurse practitioers or physicians asistants. Dr Herman at Mayo Clinic, who supervises its retail store clinics, says rather than fight this trend primary care doctors should learn from it, and work with hospitals around the country to offer more convenient locations and consumer friendly office hours, including periods of walk-in care with no appointment....

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Ted Cruz is seen as the most pro-Israel candidate for the Republican nomination. In this story by Flegenheimer in the NYT Cruz visits a Hasidic bakery in Brooklyn, New York, as children roll out matso dough right in front of Cruz.

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Election expert Karl Rove from the Republican Party goes over the math for the nomination for upcoming Republican primaries in New York, followed by primaries in Delaware, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania. He says the anti-Trump movement would still be in the lead at the end of these primaries. His figures are that Trump stands at 743 delegates on April 7, 2016, citing the Associated Press, and the non-Trump delegates at 897, ahead by 154 delegates. In New York primary of April 19 only 14 of the state's 95 delegates go to the winner, the rest are given three for each of 27 congressional districts. two to the winner and one for the second place finisher as long as the winner is less than 50% and the second place candidate has 20%. Delaware has 16 winner take all delegates, Connecticut and Maryland have 28 and 38 winner take all by congressional district, Rhode Island 19 proportionally. Interestingly Pennsylvania is cited by Rove as having only 14 statewide winner take all delegates, with 54 officially unbound congressional district delegates, contrary to popular impression that it is winner take all state wide. The elections in South and North Dakota, and Nebraska, give Cruz some of the delegate offset to control the gap in delegates between him and Trump created in the northeastern states. A factor in the race is also the change in the Cruz campaign made for Wisconsin where Cruz was able to win by 14 percentage points by expanding his message to Jobs, Opportunity and Growth from the social conservatism message that did not counter the Trump message to conservative and working class voters on the economy and trade. Another factor is women's vote trending away from Trump. ...

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The leaders of Republicans and Democrats, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Speaker Boehner, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, and Minority leader Harry Reid, reached a budget compromise with the White House in October 2015 after long closed door negotiations, following years of deadlock in previous years. The compromise lifts sequester spending caps agreed to previously in a previous settlement of differences, and lifts the budget ceiling till March 2017. Speaker Boehner said it was time to "clean out the barn," as he did this over the opposition of Senators Rand Paul and Ted Cruz from the right wing of his party who opposed his efforts to compromise with Democrats. On October 28, 2015, the House of Representatives passed the two year budget agreement 266-167, and the following day Speaker Boehner passed on the Speaker's position to Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. On Oct. 29, 2015, the Senate voted 64-35 to pass the budget compromise agreement. The agreement increases discretionary spending by $80 billion over 2 years, giving half to defense spending with the increase in military threats overseas, and the other half to domestic spending programs. The domestic spending goes to limit premium increases for some Medicare Part B beneficiaries, and a prevents a 20% across the board cut to Social Security Disability Insurance benefits, set for 2016. This removes the uncertainty posed by threats of a showdown on the budget ceiling and threat of defunding Planned Parenthood posed by right wing Republicans in Congress, which were bad for the economy at a time when the U.S. and Europe faces increasing threats overseas. Without a budget agreement the U.S. Treasury Department would have seen its borrrowing authority expire on Nov. 3, 2015....

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Fomer U.S. Census Bureau officials Gordon Green and John Coder released a study by the firm Sentier Research. The study looks at two groups of Census data from 2005-2007 and 2008-2010, which has information on interviews with 3.5 million households for each period. The study shows 38 states with household income declining. The losses in income are greatest in the midwestern states affected by the loss of manufacturing industries. Incomes fell by 5.7% in the midwestern region of Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin. Oil, shale and other energy producing states- Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas- saw incomes rise by 0.3% from 2007 to 2010. This report looks at pretax income levels in 2010 dollars for all 50 states and 297 metropolitan areas. Michael Greenstone, professor of environmental economics at MIT, says the regional shocks from the economic crisis can last for a couple of decades. The Midwestern states showed median annual household household income decrease by 4.7% to $49,710 and the Southern states showed a drop of 2.5% to $47,389. Nationally for the U.S. the drop in annual median household income from 2007 to 2010 was 3.5% to $51,287. Another finding of the study was that of the top ten metropolitan areas with the highest percentile of incomes, nine were in Connecticut, New York and New Jersey, a region where the financial industry is based. Silicon Valley in California comes in at No. 10 in this list of metropolitan areas. In terms of growth of households reflecting migration patterns and new families the Mountain States of Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, New Mexico, and Nevada did as well as the oil patch states of Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma, showing an increase in households from 2007 to 2010 of 5.8%....

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Garrison Keillor asks the President to "lets start making our way out of Afghanistan," in his own inimitable style. He also quotes U.S. Marine Officer Matthew Hoh, who resigned his Foreign Service post- "American families must be reassured their dead have sascrificed for apurpose worthy of futures lost, love vanished, and promised dreams unkept. I have lost confidence such assurances can be made any more." And Keillor summarizes Hoh's reasons and does it so well- that our presence among the Pastun people, the people in the villages, the rural religious people, is only wosening the conflict, the role of the Taliban and Al Quaeda is not the main thing here, the real issues are tribal and cultural. The last phrase deserves repetition- the real issues are tribal and cultural, which no foreign nation can overcome.

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A survey by GlaxoSmithKline shows that 60% of S. Africans are clinically overweight. A study by Imperial College of London, shows 75% of S. African women are overweight, 43% are obese an increase from 24% in 1980. As a result about 13% of the S. African population suffers from diabetes.