Jonathan Gruber tells it like it is: The Washington Post's Marc Thiessen contends that recent comments by Jonathan Gruber, an economist who helped design the Affordable Care Act, demonstrate that members of the Obama administration 'intentionally deceived Americans' in their positioning on universal health care coverage.
'Members of the Obama team knew all along that it was a tax . . . if they had called it a tax, Obamacare would never have become law,' he writes. 'It's one thing for Americans to suspect that their president lies to them. It's quite another to hear a key Obama adviser boast of it.' Read more.
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Splitting the Amazon baby: Quartz's John McDuling weighs in on the recent debate on whether or not Amazon should spin off cloud-computing division Amazon Web Services (AWS) from Amazon's online retail business.
'Spinning off AWS would bolster the bottom line of Amazon's remaining and much bigger core retail business, and theoretically support a higher valuation for it, too.' Read more.
Pass the surveillance bill: The editors of the New York Times urge the Senate to break a filibuster and pass the USA Freedom Act, which would curb the government's efforts to collect personal telephone numbers.
'The bill . . . would require the National Security Agency to ask phone companies for the records of a specific person or address when it is searching for terrorists, instead of scooping up all the records in an area code or city,' they write. 'The bill is a good way to begin restoring individual privacy that has been systematically violated by government spying, revealed through the leaks provided by Edward Snowden.' Read more.
Ferguson case is misusing the grand jury system: In a Huffington Post op-ed, the Rev. Al Sharpton argues that actions of the Ferguson, Mo., grand jury convened to determine if there is enough evidence for a case against the police officer accused of killing teenager Michael Brown are a 'complete misuse of a grand jury.'
'If the grand jury's stated role is to simply ascertain whether or not there should be a case against the accused, then why are they acting as if this is the trial?' he writes. 'If a grand jury is hearing evidence tantamount to what they would hear in a jury trial, then what is the point of a grand jury?' Read more.
The frail side of Roger Federer: Writing for the Atlantic, Kevin Craft opines on the impact of tennis champion Roger Federer's recent withdrawal from the ATP World Tour Finals.
'This idea of top-level athletes as living reminders of the human mortality is what makes Roger Federer's withdrawal from yesterday's championship match of the Barclays ATP World Tour Finals so depressing,' he writes. 'Federer's withdrawal on account of a back injury that has plagued him in years past brings into question how much longer the dapper Swiss . . . can continue to compete at the highest level.' Read more.
Posted by Unknown on Tuesday, November 18, 2014 - Rating: 4.5
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