Study: 15 Percent of US Youth Out of School, Work

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Photo Credit: APAlmost 6 million young people are neither in school nor working, according to a study released Monday.

That’s almost 15 percent of those aged 16 to 24 who have neither desk nor job, according to The Opportunity Nation coalition, which wrote the report.

Other studies have shown that idle young adults are missing out on a window to build skills they will need later in life or use the knowledge they acquired in college. Without those experiences, they are less likely to command higher salaries and more likely to be an economic drain on their communities.

“This is not a group that we can write off. They just need a chance,” said Mark Edwards, executive director of the coalition of businesses, advocacy groups, policy experts and nonprofit organizations dedicated to increasing economic mobility. “The tendency is to see them as lost souls and see them as unsavable. They are not.”

But changing the dynamic is not going to be easy.

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Americans on Food Stamps Decline–From 47,760,247 to 47,637,497

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Photo Credit: APThe number of Americans enrolled in the federal government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—commonly known as food stamps—declined from 47,760,247 in June to 47,637,407 in July, according to data released this month by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

At 47,637,407, there are still more Americans taking food stamps than there are people in Spain, which, according to the CIA World Factbook, has a population of 47,370,542.

The number of households benefiting from food stamps also declined from June to July, dropping from 23,116,892 to 23,074,914 in July…

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Police: Man, 68, Shoots At 22-Year-Old Man Upon Finding Him In Bed With Wife

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Photo Credit: Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department via Getty ImagesA local senior citizen shot a 22-year-old man after he caught him sleeping beside his wife in their guest house.

According to ABC 15, the unnamed 68-year-old man found Stephen Trevor Chapman, 22, slumbering next to his 63-year-old wife. Authorities told the station that, upon discovering the pair, he woke Chapman by tapping him with a cane and telling him to leave.

Chapman reportedly responded by yelling and refusing to go. Officials with the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office then said that the homeowner, who is said to have Parkinson’s disease, fired what was referred to as a “warning shot” in Chapman’s direction.

The bullet hit a nearby wall, and Chapman sustained a minor hand injury from a stray fragment.

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With New Budget Deadlines, Top Hill Lawmakers Appear as Far Apart as Ever

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Photo Credit: Fox NewsTop Washington lawmakers appeared no closer Sunday to reaching deals on upcoming budget negotiations than they were on the recent ones — disagreeing over an entire range of issues including taxes, spending and ObamaCare.

Among the key issues is whether negotiators for the Republican-controlled House and Democrat-controlled Senate can agree on an alternative to the indiscriminate cuts know as sequester, a result of the 2011 Budget Control Act.

Such a deal seemed unlikely considering Missouri Republican Sen. Roy Blunt told “Fox News Sunday” the act was “better than anything we’ve had before to control spending.”

And Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin said later on the show that Democrats “won’t trade” reducing cuts on defense spending for deep cuts to entitlement, as Republicans have proposed.

Democrats want to increase spending levels next year above the sequester caps and replace them with more long-term budget savings through spending cuts and tax increases, which Republicans have rejected.

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The President Asked Oprah to Help Him Promote Obamacare ‘But She Refused Because She Feels Burned by the White House’

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Photo Credit: AFP/Getty Oprah Winfrey has been notably distancing herself from President Obama and First Lady Michelle and apparently her latest slight came against Obamacare.

The media icon was asked to attend a meeting at the White House along with other celebrities to see how they could help create some positive publicity for the Affordable Care Act.

Rather than jumping on board like Alicia Keys and Jennifer Hudson, Oprah reportedly quickly said that she would not be attending the meeting.

‘All of Oprah’s top people thought she would go, because when the president invites you to the White House, most people automatically say yes, but Oprah said she didn’t have the time or inclination to go. It wasn’t like she had to think it over. It was an immediate, flat-out, unequivocal no,’ an Oprah advisor told journalist Ed Klein.

Klein wrote a book, The Amateur, about President Obama’s first term in office and is currently working on a second.

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House Tea Partiers Snub GOP in 2014

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Photo Credit: AP Hard-line conservatives aren’t just sticking it to the national GOP by shutting down the government and bringing the nation to the brink of default – they’re also refusing to pony up to help their party defend the House in 2014.

With a little more than a year until the midterm election, many leaders of the shutdown strategy have yet to donate to the National Republican Congressional Committee, records show. At least eight of the debate’s 20 or so most outspoken figures have not given any money to the NRCC, and others have forked over token amounts.

Their refusal to contribute to the House GOP’s political arm, coming as Republicans are getting thumped by Democrats in the money race, is causing heartburn and frustration among Republican strategists charged with laying the groundwork for next year’s races. They say it is reinforcing a perception of the conservative gang that they’re only out for themselves and don’t much care about advancing the party’s larger cause.

Take Michigan Rep. Justin Amash, the libertarian acolyte of Ron Paul and one of the most outspoken lawmakers for a hard line on the budget and debt negotiations. Amash, who voted against the final deal to reopen the government, hasn’t contributed to the NRCC this year, according to Federal Election Commission reports. Nor has he given to the committee at any point during his two terms in Congress.

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Tech ‘Surge’ to Tackle Obamacare Websites

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Photo Credit: APThe Obama administration Sunday said it’s called on “the best and brightest” tech experts from both government and the private sector to help fix the troubled website at the root of the Obamacare enrollment problems.

The unusual Sunday 600-word blog post from HHS was the first update in more than a week on the many failings of an expensive website that HHS itself described as “frustrating for many Americans.” But it didn’t specify who the administration had called in, or when the American people would see clear-cut results on Healthcare.gov.

“We’re kind of thinking of it as a tech ‘surge,’” an HHS official told POLITICO.

The Health and Human Services statement didn’t explain everything that’s wrong, or give technical details about the repairs underway. It outlined some steps being taken to fix the site, including updates with “new code that includes bug fixes.” The department also says it’s installing monitors to catch parts of the website that are proving the most troublesome for consumers. And it also said it had seen some improvements in wait times and consumer access to the website, the online portal to health insurance exchanges or marketplaces the federal government is running in 36 states.

The administration said one essential component — the federal data hub — is working as hoped. That hub is crucial. It links federal agencies to determine an applicant’s eligibility for Obamacare coverage and subsidies. States running their own exchanges have to be able to draw on that data as well, and some of them have been doing so successfully.

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Obamacare Seeks to Segregate Patients, Doctors by Race

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor under Obamacare — if you both belong to the same race.

Obamacare’s spectacular flop of a rollout distracts from its crude calculus that encourages the allocation of healthcare resources along racial lines and a doctor-patient system splintered into ethnicities.

While the 2010 Patient Protecion and Affordable Care Act’s language on diversity sounds innocuous, a review of the frankly separatist thinking of the law’s ardent supporters indicates Obamacare is aiming for a health care system that puts political correctness above the struggle against illness and death.

A 2009 report by the Center for American Progress (CAP) examining the House and Senate bill eventually signed by President Barack Obama advocates pairing patients and doctors of the same race, a goal toward which the law channels taxpayer dollars.

“Research suggests that health care providers’ diagnostic and treatment decisions, as well as their feelings about patients, are influenced by patients’ race or ethnicity,” the CAP report reads. “Several studies have shown that racial concordance is substantially and positively related to patient satisfaction.”

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GOP Splits Over Obama’s Immigration Offer

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller The high-stakes overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws faces a little-noticed obstacle — the reluctance of many GOP legislators to accept the political trade offered by President Barack Obama and his fellow progressives.

“We’re split all over the place,” Alabama Republican Rep. Mo Brooks told The Daily Caller.

It’s a fight that combines Obama’s progressives with chicken processors and software moguls, pitting them against about 200 GOP legislators, who are looking for ways to not anger any employers, or any of their donors or all-important voters.

Democrats pushing the Senate’s complex bill would quickly earn boost their voting bloc to the tune of 11 million amnestied illegals, plus 22 million new immigrants that would be welcomed by 2023. The potential gain for GOP legislators? They could provide their business allies with immediate access to the 33 million immigrant workers and customers, plus up to two million temporary guest-workers per year.

But most GOP legislators are balking at the trade, partly because the GOP’s own voters strongly oppose the import of more workers during an extended recession.

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Twitter Quitters Dog IPO

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Photo Credit: Reuters/Robert GalbraithRetired schoolteacher Donald Hovasse signed up for Twitter about a year ago at the urging of his daughter. He lost interest after trying the service a few times and finding lots of celebrities but few of his friends using the online social network.

“I didn’t really get the point of it at all,” said the Las Vegas resident. “Most of them were people I wasn’t interested in hearing what they had to say anyway.” He said, however, that he does check Facebook every day to see what his friends are up to.

Hovasse’s experience highlights a risk for investors as Twitter Inc marches towards this year’s most anticipated initial public offering in the United States, expected to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange in mid-November.

According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll, 36 percent of 1,067 people who have joined Twitter say they do not use it, and 7 percent say they have shut their account. The online survey, conducted October 11 to 18, has a credibility interval, a measure of its accuracy, of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.

In comparison, only 7 percent of 2,449 Facebook members report not using the online social network, and 5 percent say they have shut down their account. The results have a credibility interval of 2.3 percent.

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