Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has moved forward a bill to raise the national minimum wage to $10.10 per hour. Not only would raising the minimum wage not help lift anyone out of poverty, but it would put jobs further out of reach for those struggling to find work in the Obamacare economy. Raising the minimum wage is a cruel blow to the poor.

In 2011, with bipartisan support from both Democrats and Republicans, Cover Oregon was ushered in as the vanguard of the state based healthcare exchanges encouraged by the Affordable Care Act. Instead of resisting the Obamacare mandate, the Oregon legislature doubled down on Obamacare, with the encouragement of our Democrat Governor, former ER doctor John Kitzhaber. Despite innumerable warnings from grassroots activists that the project was doomed to failure, most Republicans in the legislature were persuaded to go along. Now, Oregon is saying goodbye to the terminally ill Cover Oregon, after millions in wasted taxpayer money, FBI investigations, lawsuits and political fallout that will be felt for years to come.

While we rightly focus on the 2014 primaries and upcoming midterm elections, let's take a break and look in on the field for the 2016 presidential race.

Party-endorsed Ohio Republican Party (ORP) State Central Committee candidates are being promoted with inadvertently hilarious ORP flyers asserting, "It Takes a STRONG Republican Party to Stand Up to Obamacare."

There is an old philosophical puzzle that asks the following: If you begin to replace the parts of your car, one by one, until no original parts remain, is it still the same car? If not, at what point did the change occur?

Democracy and Power 104: Future Debt Burden A government debt is a government claim against personal income and private property – an unpaid tax bill. —Hans F. Sennholz

In the early months of the open enrollment period for the insurance exchanges created under the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare), nobody in the Obama administration seemed to know how many people had actually signed up for the subsidized insurance plans being offered. This left a lot of experts and members of Congress curious given that the exchanges, after all, were Internet-based and must have had some sort of electronic record of usage and purchases. As bad as the technical problems were during the initial roll out of the ObamaCare exchanges, there was simply no way that these websites were built without a mechanism that tracked or could be used to track enrollment. Yet the administration remained persistent that they had no such data.

Democracy and Power 105: The Politician seeks power To some people, government appears as a vast reservoir of power which inspires them to dream of what use might be made of it. They have favorite projects of various dimensions which they sincerely believe are for the benefit of mankind. They are thus disposed to recognize government—an instrument of passion, the art of politics to inflame and direct desire. - Michael Oakeshott – English political philosopher 1901-1990