Snapler

March 11, 2010

UC System Overload: 16 Percent Enrollment Increase Expected

A new study, aptly titled "Ready or Not, Here They Come," predicts that California's college enrollment will increase by 16 percent in the next nine years.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the report, released by the California Postsecondary Education Commission, makes clear the need for more higher education funding.

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March 10, 2010

Obama Foreclosure-Prevention Plan Lagging, New Data Shows (EXCLUSIVE)

Only about a third of the homeowners who have successfully completed the trial period of the Obama administration's mortgage modification program have been offered permanent relief, according to new federal data obtained by the Huffington Post.

The conversion rate -- about 33 percent -- is woefully short of what the Treasury Department had forecast. Treasury thought the rate would be "ranging up to 75 percent," Herbert M. Allison Jr., assistant secretary for financial stability, told the Congressional Oversight Panel in October.

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Why Departing Dems Have It Right, By the Numbers

It's not often that someone turns in his membership card to the most exclusive club in the land. But when Evan Bayh decided to give up his seat in the U.S. Senate last month, he sparked a trend continued by Rep. Eric Massa this week. The departing legislators, citing partisan politics, give inside-the-beltway confirmation to something Americans have felt for years - Washington is broken.

We think Bayh, and those who continue to follow him, are onto something. And the numbers back them up. According to data from our users in 50 states, a quarter of the U.S. Senate votes along with its constituents only 30 percent of the time. In other words, when these 25 Senators, Republican and Democrat, say yea or nay on the Senate floor, they're voting against their hometown neighbors on two-thirds of the country's most important issues. What's more, half of the Senate votes against those back home more than 50 percent of the time.

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March 9, 2010

Charlie Crist Trails Marco Rubio In Florida Republican Senate Race By Shocking 32 Points

New poll numbers from Florida's high-profile Republican Senate primary race add credence to the theory that the only way Gov. Charlie Crist will win the seat is by switching parties.

The firm Public Policy Polling released findings on Tuesday showing conservative darling Marco Rubio with a jaw-dropping 32-point lead (62 percent to 28 percent) among Florida Republican voters.

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March 8, 2010

China Lassoes Its Neighbors

With the Doha Round of negotiations of the World Trade Organization in limbo, the heavy hitters of international trade have been engaged in a race to sew up trade agreements with smaller partners. China has been among the most aggressive in this game, a fact underlined on January 1, 2010, when the China-ASEAN Free Trade Area (CAFTA) went into effect.

Touted as the world's biggest Free Trade Area, CAFTA will bring together 1.7 million consumers with a combined gross domestic product of $5.9 trillion and total trade of $1.3 trillion. Under the agreement, trade between China and Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Singapore has become duty-free for more than seven thousand products. By 2015, the newer members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) — Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar — will join the zero-tariff arrangement.

The propaganda mills, especially in Beijing, have been trumpeting the FTA as bringing "mutual benefits" to China and ASEAN. In contrast, there has been an absence of triumphal rhetoric from ASEAN. In 2002, the year the agreement was signed, Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo hailed the emergence of a "formidable regional grouping" that would rival the United States and the European Union. ASEAN's leaders, it seems, have probably begun to realize the consequences of what they agreed to: that in this FTA, most of the advantages will probably flow to China.

At first glance, it seems like the China-ASEAN relationship has been positive. After all, demand from a Chinese economy growing at a breakneck pace was a key factor in the Southeast Asian growth that began around 2003 after the low growth following the Asian financial crisis of 1997 and 1998. For Asia as a whole, in 2003 and the beginning of 2004, "China was a major engine of growth for most of the economies in the region," according to a UN report. "The country's imports accelerated even more than its exports, with a large proportion of them coming from the rest of Asia." During the current international recession ASEAN governments, much like the United States, are counting on China — which registered an annualized growth rate of 10.7 percent in the last quarter of 2010 — to pull them out of the doldrums.

A More Complex Picture



But is the Chinese locomotive really pulling the rest of East Asia along with it, on the fast track to economic nirvana? In fact, China's growth has in part taken place at Southeast Asia's expense. Low wages have encouraged local and foreign manufacturers to phase out their operations in relatively high-wage Southeast Asia and move them to China. China's devaluation of the yuan in 1994 had the effect of diverting some foreign direct investment away from Southeast Asia. The trend of ASEAN losing ground to China accelerated after the financial crisis of 1997. In 2000, foreign direct investment in ASEAN shrank to 10 percent of all foreign direct investment in developing Asia, down from 30 percent in the mid-nineties.

The decline continued in the rest of the decade, with the UN World Investment Report attributing the trend partly to "increased competition from China." Since the Japanese have been the most dynamic foreign investors in the region, much apprehension in the ASEAN capitals greeted a Japanese government survey that revealed that 57 percent of Japanese manufacturing transnational corporations found China to be more attractive than the ASEAN-4 (Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines).

Snags in a Trade Relationship



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One Easy Mistake To Avoid When Counting Calories On Workout Machines

Most calorie counting mechanisms attached to cardio equipment in your gym are calibrated to an average 150 pounds of active muscle mass as the basis for determining how many calories the user is burning.

Unfortunately, very few of us are 150 pounds, and even those of us that are probably do not carry 100 percent of that 150 pounds in lean muscle mass. In order to make as accurate as possible a caloric assessment without forking over the extra dough for advanced equipment to determine the exact number of calories you're expending during your workout, you'll need to do the following:

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Another Hurt Locker

When Mark Boal accepted his best original screenplay Academy Award last night for "The Hurt Locker," he dedicated his award to the troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Best Picture Award winner vividly depicts the particular traumas faced by those troops, and like other war films, it has made little at the box office. Perhaps, however, its six Academy Awards will call greater attention to the fact that we continue to be a nation at war.

Another, different "hurt locker" haunts these wars: it is the veteran hurt locker of hidden casualties. How many of us know that, of the 30,000 suicides every year in the U.S., twenty percent are veterans? About 18 a day kill themselves, and from 2005-2007, the rate among younger vets rose 26 percent. None of these many thousands of deaths is counted among the casualties of our current wars.

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March 5, 2010

The Age of Discontent in the Americas? Not Really

According to the UN Commission Trade and Development over 60 percent of the population south of the Rio Grande is under 35 years old. Latin America's young people will have an impact on political stability and the economy not just in their home countries but also in the U.S., where Latin America accounts for 20 percent of U.S. exports and is the major source of narcotics consumed in the U.S. There's also the issue of immigration, where a backlash against Hispanic immigration has fueled a growing desire to close borders and sometimes spilling over into an ugly racist anger against immigrants already within our borders. With the huge demographic bubble south of U.S. border, the lack of economic opportunity faced by many of the young means that in the years ahead larger numbers of them will be knocking on U.S. doors for entry.

Drawing from surveys conducted by the AmericasBarometer at Vanderbilt University in 2008 that examine youth attitudes and activities compared to their older counterparts Mitch Seligson and I discovered that in fact Latin American youth are not turning against democracy nor are even that pessimistic about their futures. (For a graphic display of the survey data, please go to http://www.americasquarterly.org/node/1357 )

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Sleep And Rhythm: How To Live In Accordance With Your Natural Cycles

In addition to a healthy diet and regular exercise, getting enough restful sleep is the most important thing you can do for your health. Proper sleep is one of the keys to looking and feeling your best, yet it's estimated that up to 70 percent of Americans are chronically sleep deprived. Unfortunately this is consistent with what I see in my NYC practice.

Chronic sleep problems interfere with your body's natural rhythms and rob it of the time it needs to restore itself. The incidence of many diseases including diabetes, high blood pressure, heart attacks and depression increases with a lack of sleep. Recent research has even shown a connection between poor sleep and weight gain. We simply weren't built to just go, go, go. We were built to go, go, go and then rest, rest, rest. We evolved according to the natural rhythms of darkness and light; our bodily functions reflect this and undergo similar fluctuations. They perform best when we live in accordance, as much as possible, with these cycles.

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March 3, 2010

The Wellpoint Effect

Call it the "Wellpoint Effect." Last month, the giant health insurance company, Wellpoint, announced premium increases for its individual coverage policy holders in California of 25 percent on average and as high as 39 percent. A new survey by the Center for American Progress Action Fund found double digit premium increases for individual policy holders in 11 of the 14 states in which Wellpoint operates. Other reports now document significant rates hikes by other insurers in individual and small group markets across the nation.

President Barack Obama publicly criticized the hikes in a television interview before the Superbowl. His Health & Human Services Secretary, Kathleen Sebelius -- a former state insurance commissioner -- has kept the pressure on, asking the heads of five major health insurers to meet with her this week.

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