Robert Gibbs caused a stir today when it was reported that he said it was likely that Obamacare’s employer mandate would be repealed. The White House pushed back, but this isn’t coming out of the blue. Here’s the backstory on why the employer mandate may fall — and why it wouldn’t necessarily be the end of the world.
Ocean of liquid water discovered on a moon of Saturn, buried under miles of ice.
A lot of the Republican-on-Republican political infighting going on day to day is below the national political radar, but some of it surfaced today when the primary challenger to Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS) got tripped up by that whole white nationalist thing. The pro-Cochran establishment political types have had a field day with it.
As someone who works in a male-dominated field like political journalism, I’m constantly aware of the gender imbalance in the profession. I’ve been caught on endless listserv threads about why there aren’t more women at a given organization and why more women don’t apply for certain types of positions.
German researchers found that something as simple as how the job description is written in the listing can affect the types of candidates companies attract.
Both Fort Hood shooters bought their weapons at the same store.
The early and still somewhat sketchy reports about Fort Hood shooter Ivan Lopez show he was having trouble at the base. One longtime friend reportedly said that he’d recently complained about having “been robbed or something.” Here’s what we know so far.
I don’t think I’ve ever done this before. But I’ve had a number of readers write in today asking that I link to each post from the “brittle grip” series I’ve been doing – the most recent of which was this morning. If you’re new to this: it’s a series of posts (going back a couple years) about the seemingly growing insecurity of vast wealth, even as the power of the wealthiest Americans – judged by most conceivable metrics – has risen dramatically over recent years and certain over the last few decades. What’s behind a Tom Perkins Kristallnacht outburst? The antipathy of Wall Street toward President Obama? The widespread belief among the very wealthiest Americans (let’s say centimillionaires) that wealth is under siege.
The Brittle Grip … May 21st, 2012
The Brittle Grip, Part 2 … January 25th, 2014
The Brittle Grip, Part 3 … April 3rd, 2014
Apparently if you are an employee of Koch Industries or one of its many companies you are strongly urged to embrace and spread his “vision” of a free society.
On the defensive after he attended a rally in support of cock-fighting he later claimed he didn’t know was about cock-fighting, McConnell primary opponent Matt Bevin now insists the Founder Fathers were really into cock-fighting. So it’s all good.
You may have seen the piece we published earlier this evening about Koch Industries asking employees to embrace and share owner Charles Koch’s “vision” of a free society and the threat it faces from the collectivist menace. This is a big, big company. According to the Koch website, the various divisions and subsidiaries and company operating under the Koch Industries banner operate in more than 60 countries and have more than 100,000 employees. But based on our reporting, in at least some parts of it, there’s a pretty heavy climate of propagandizing the Koch “vision” of a free society: courses, emails to staffers, just a pervasive climate of the Kochian view of the world, which as we saw from today’s WSJ oped seems to have a distinctly Perkinsian flavor to it.
In a 100,000 operation there must be a lot of people who don’t share the vision. So if you’re in this category and you work for Koch or one of its subsidiaries, can you drop us a line? We’d love to hear the details.
We promise complete anonymity.