Slogans and politics

via ABC News

So, what is President Obama's slogan this campaign? You don't know, do you?  How about Mitt Romney's?  Bet you didn't know that one either. The answer is "Forward" for Obama and "Believe in America" for Romney — and neither has the kind of pop that Obama got from "Hope and Change" back in 2008.

In just a couple of words that phrase summed up and symbolized who Obama was in that campaign and what he would do as President. But after four tough years, that slogan sounds tired.

And President Obama has known he needs a new slogan this time around — something that captures in a few words who he is and what he would do as a second term as President. He told me as much in this interview that I did with him on Yahoo.

But, the truth is slogans may not matter all that much.

Richard Nixon's lame 1972 slogan, "Now More Than Ever, " didn't stop him from a landslide in 1972. How about Lincoln's "Vote Yourself a Farm?" That doesn't really convey the kind of heroism and sweep that marked his presidency. But my personal favorite, "Keep Cool with Coolidge,"  that didn't  signal much of a presidency at all.

But the act of creating and sticking with a good slogan is good discipline for a  campaign; it crystallizes what the campaign is trying to say.  That certainly worked for those of us on the 1992 Clinton campaign. Our informal slogan, of course, came from James Carville — "It's the Economy Stupid" — and that drove home what the campaign was about and what we would schedule every day on the campaign trail.

It was reinforced by the candidate himself who said, time and time again, you had to be able to hone down the campaign's message from a 30 minute speech to 10 minutes to 5 minutes to 1 minute and right down to a bumper sticker. So, a slogan does help give organization and cohesion to a campaign.

So far, neither campaign this year has come up with a magic slogan and a silver bullet. My two favorites, though, are Joe Biden's,  'Bin Laden is Dead, GM is Alive'  for the Obama campaign and Romney's 'Obama isn't Working.'  Those crystallize the message in just a few words.

Can any of you do better? Tell us your slogan suggestions below.

My name is Barry Soetoro. I am a third-grade student at SD Asisi.My Mom is my idol

via yahoo news

In the forthcoming biography "Barack Obama: The Story," due in bookstores June 19, David Maraniss tells the largely untold story of Obama's family, his life growing up in Hawaii and Indonesia, his journey through college in California and New York and his years as a community organizer on the South side of Chicago.

Some of the details from the book have already been released, including sections about Obama's pot-smoking school days in Hawaii and stories about his early girlfriends, but the book, obtained by Yahoo News, is full of stories about Obama's past (even if Obama doesn't show up in the book until page 165).

Here are 20 details from Obama's life detailed in Maraniss' book:

1. Maraniss suggests that Obama's father, Barack Obama Sr., may have abused Obama's mother.

"There is no direct evidence that Obama hit Ann. She never talked about it to her son or family, and in retrospect always tried to give their brief relationship the rosiest interpretations. Bus as we shall see, Obama physically abused his next wife, another American with similar characteristics. This does not mean that he abused Ann, but it leads to that possibility."

2. When Obama was six years old, he moved to Jakarta, Indonesia to live with his mother and step-father, Lolo Soetoro, in a home full of exotic animals.

"The backyard was a sight to behold, Lolo's personal Indonesian zoo: Chickens, cockatoos, snakes, turtles, two biawaks (reptiles that resemble miniature crocodiles) in a pond, and a small ape named Tata that he brought back from a mapping assignment with the army in Papua."

3. Obama's presidential ambitions stretched back to the 3rd grade when he wrote this paper for his class.

My name is Barry Soetoro. I am a third-grade student at SD Asisi.

My mom is my idol.

My teacher is Ibu Fer. I have a lot of friends.

I live near the school. I usually walk to the school with my mom, then go home by mystelf.

Someday I want to be president. I love to visit all the places in Indonesia.

Done.

The eeeeeeeeend.

4. As a teenager, Obama was in a car accident while drag racing in Hawaii.

Obama wasn't behind the wheel of the car, but while he and some friends were racing, the car he was riding in flipped and landed upside down. The other car turned around and found Obama, who had crawled out a back window, laughing hysterically.

"You can't drive for shit!" he kept telling the driver.

5. Obama doesn't have hops.

He loved playing basketball in high school, but he was "one of few players on the team" who couldn't jump high enough to dunk.

6. Obama, college style.

Maraniss describes Obama's look while he was a student at Occidental University:

"First there was his little toe. It stuck out from the end of his slippers, or flip-flops as they were called on the mainland. his little toe was straight, rather than cramped and curling inward, a sign that his feet enjoyed a liberated existence, unbound by leather shoes. Then there was the rest of his daily uniform: OP (Ocean Pacific) corduroy shorts or denim jeans, a shell bracelet, polo shirts or tees (including one promoting the Hawaii state senate candidacy of Neil Abercrombie...)."

7. Obama's got the moves like Jagger.

"Barry Obama played a lot of Hendrix, Earth, Wind & Fire, and Billie Holiday, but was known in the Annex for his wicked impression of Mick Jagger. He could do the walk, the strut, the face, and act out the dramatic scene of the Rolling Stones onstage at the Altamont Speedway outside Livermore, California, on December 6, 1969,.."

8. Obama thought the world would be a better place without clothes, especially when nice-looking ladies were around.

Allegedly stoned and drunk one night at Occidental, Obama and a friend stopped to talk to an attractive girl and "Barry launched into a riff on nudity, offering his theory that the human race would be better off if people did not wear clothes. This declaration was made with the urgency of someone ready to strip then and there. ...It seemed apparent that Barry was trying to seduce the woman right in front of" his friend who had a crush on the girl.

She appeared "sympathetic to the theoretical argument but not ready to put it into practice."

9. Obama loved to wear hats in college

"Mark Parsons said Obama displayed one small trait that showed he wanted to be a player: he wore a lot of 'stupid hats.' He usually wore them cocked, to look cool."

10. In his younger days, Obama smoked his cigarettes like he smoked his weed.

"His friends noticed that Barry had a peculiar smoking style, a little affectation. He turned his wrist up and cupped the cigarette between thumb and index finger. He smoked a cigarette the same way he smoked a joint."

11. Obama joked that he would stop smoking after he got married because it would be okay to get fat then.

Mark Parsons: "I remember him telling me he would quit after he got married. He didn't want to quit smoking because he said he would gain weight, but after he got married it would be okay to gain weight. I think it was mostly a joke."

12. The camera loved Obama, and he loved it back.

At Occidental, fellow student Lisa Jack asked to photograph him in her apartment, and Obama stole the show.

"It was one of those times when his ambition was unmistakable ... He blew smoke like he was on a Bob Dylan album jacket. he put on his hat and cocked it low like he was Jimi Hendrix. he walked toward a heating grate and knelt down like Miles Davis. "These are all his ideas, not mine," Jack recalled. "No one else got up to stand over the grate with a hat on. Nobody. I think he was into it. he was pleased he had been asked. ... In one roll of film Barry goes from innocent baby to Jimi Hendrix to a Black Panther--from having furn to thoughtful to angst."

13. Obama was that guy in college who didn't study much but still got better grades than you.

Friends in his class at Occidental "returned from the library late one night and found Obama lounging on the Barf Couch, smoking."

...

"'Did you finish your project?'" they asked.

"'I've written it,' Obama responded. 'I just haven't written it down.' A while later Barry 'wandered off to the library' and pulled an all-nighter writing a paper that eventually got an A+."

14. Obama was known to show compassion to those who seemed lonely or different.

Friend Kofi Manu said, "Obama was especially friendly to people who seemed lonely or felt a sense of otherness ...'If you are alone he will come up next to you and engage you in conversation," Manu recalled. 'People would say he was engaging, but I would say it differently. He comes to you. He is drawn to people.'"

15. Five writing tips from a future president.

A friend sent Obama a manuscript for editing, Obama wrote back with five tips:

1)  "Careful about too many adverbs, particularly describing how people speak (Paul asked disbelievingly, etc.) It can be cumbersome and a bit intrusive on the reader"

2) "Resist the temptation of easy satire...Good satire has to be a little muted. Should spill out from under a seemingly somber situation."

3)  "Try to get the basic stats on the characters out of the way early {Paul was 24} so that you can spend the rest of the story revealing character."

4) "Think about the key moment(s) in the story, and build tension leading to those key moments."

5) "[W]rite outside your own experience...I find that this works the fictive imagination harder."

16. Obama slept outside in an alley on his first night in New York.

"Obama arrived in New York a week before [his roommate], but when he reached 109th Street he did not have a key to the apartment and could not find anyone to give him one. he spent his first night in the big city outside, curled up in a nearby alleyway, and woke up with a white hen pecking at his face."

17. Obama says he wasn't very interested in running for office during his college days.

"I don't think I could see a clear path [to the presidency]," Obama told Maraniss in an interview for the book. "At that age I was much more interested in being a leader outside of politics. If you had asked me during that time what kind of career I'd love to have, more likely I would have said something like a Bob Moses [the civil rights leader], maybe with a slightly higher profile than that. ... I would not have precluded politics, but during that period I was pretty skeptical of it. There weren't a lot of political figures at that time that I particularly admired."

18. When it came to social life, Obama was friendly, but he was no Bill Clinton.

Amelia Rugland, a student at Columbia recalls:

"When you'd see him walking in the hall he always looked like he was thinking of something ... He was interesting. He didn't talk to everybody and know everybody's names. He was not gregarious. It was more that he was obviously very aware of other people and their surroundings ... He just seemed really engaged in what he was working on."

19. Obama the doodler.

"Wherever he went in Chicago, he had a pen and notebook with him. He constantly jotted notes or doodled. Since his lower school days at Punahou, when he got into superhero comics, he had shown a penchant for sketching figures and faces. 'He was always doodling, drawing, writing He could draw,' Loretta Augustine-Herron recalled. 'He could draw when we were in meetings, thing like that. He usually had a legal pad.'"

20. How Obama liked to chillax.

From a postcard Obama sent to friend Phil Boerner while he was back in Indonesia: "I'm sitting on the porch in my sarong, sipping strong coffee and drawing on a clove cigarette, watching the heavy dusk close over the paddy terraces of Java. Very kick back, so far away from the madness."

Fw: Kim Phuc (49) the iconic 'Napalm Girl' live in Canada now

From; AP/Yahoo News

It only took a second for Associated Press photographer Huynh Cong "Nick" Ut to snap the iconic black-and-white image 40 years ago. It communicated the horrors of the Vietnam War in a way words could never describe, helping to end one of the most divisive wars in American history.

TRANG BANG, Vietnam (AP) — In the picture, the girl will always be 9 years old and wailing "Too hot! Too hot!" as she runs down the road away from her burning Vietnamese village.

She will always be naked after blobs of sticky napalm melted through her clothes and layers of skin like jellied lava.

She will always be a victim without a name.

It only took a second for Associated Press photographer Huynh Cong "Nick" Ut to snap the iconic black-and-white image 40 years ago. It communicated the horrors of the Vietnam War in a way words could never describe, helping to end one of the most divisive wars in American history.

But beneath the photo lies a lesser-known story. It's the tale of a dying child brought together by chance with a young photographer. A moment captured in the chaos of war that would be both her savior and her curse on a journey to understand life's plan for her.

"I really wanted to escape from that little girl," says Kim Phuc, now 49. "But it seems to me that the picture didn't let me go."

____

It was June 8, 1972, when Phuc heard the soldier's scream: "We have to run out of this place! They will bomb here, and we will be dead!"

Seconds later, she saw the tails of yellow and purple smoke bombs curling around the Cao Dai temple where her family had sheltered for three days, as north and south Vietnamese forces fought for control of their village.

The little girl heard a roar overhead and twisted her neck to look up. As the South Vietnamese Skyraider plane grew fatter and louder, it swooped down toward her, dropping canisters like tumbling eggs flipping end over end.

"Ba-boom! Ba-boom!"

The ground rocked. Then the heat of a hundred furnaces exploded as orange flames spit in all directions.

Fire danced up Phuc's left arm. The threads of her cotton clothes evaporated on contact. Trees became angry torches. Searing pain bit through skin and muscle.

"I will be ugly, and I'm not normal anymore," she thought, as her right hand brushed furiously across her blistering arm. "People will see me in a different way."

In shock, she sprinted down Highway 1 behind her older brother. She didn't see the foreign journalists gathered as she ran toward them, screaming.

Then, she lost consciousness.

___

Ut, the 21-year-old Vietnamese photographer who took the picture, drove Phuc to a small hospital. There, he was told the child was too far gone to help. But he flashed his American press badge, demanded that doctors treat the girl and left assured that she would not be forgotten.

"I cried when I saw her running," said Ut, whose older brother was killed on assignment with the AP in the southern Mekong Delta. "If I don't help her — if something happened and she died — I think I'd kill myself after that."

Back at the office in what was then U.S.-backed Saigon, he developed his film. When the image of the naked little girl emerged, everyone feared it would be rejected because of the news agency's strict policy against nudity.

But veteran Vietnam photo editor Horst Faas took one look and knew it was a shot made to break the rules. He argued the photo's news value far outweighed any other concerns, and he won.

A couple of days after the image shocked the world, another journalist found out the little girl had somehow survived the attack. Christopher Wain, a correspondent for the British Independent Television Network who had given Phuc water from his canteen and drizzled it down her burning back at the scene, fought to have her transferred to the American-run Barsky unit. It was the only facility in Saigon equipped to deal with her severe injuries.

"I had no idea where I was or what happened to me," she said. "I woke up and I was in the hospital with so much pain, and then the nurses were around me. I woke up with a terrible fear."

Thirty percent of Phuc's tiny body was scorched raw by third-degree burns, though her face somehow remained untouched. Over time, her melted flesh began to heal.

"Every morning at 8 o'clock, the nurses put me in the burn bath to cut all my dead skin off," she said. "I just cried and when I could not stand it any longer, I just passed out."

After multiple skin grafts and surgeries, Phuc was finally allowed to leave, 13 months after the bombing. She had seen Ut's photo, which by then had won the Pulitzer Prize, but she was still unaware of its reach and power.

She just wanted to go home and be a child again.

___

For a while, life did go somewhat back to normal. The photo was famous, but Phuc largely remained unknown except to those living in her tiny village near the Cambodian border. Ut and a few other journalists sometimes visited her, but that stopped after northern communist forces seized control of South Vietnam on April 30, 1975, ending the war.

Life under the new regime became tough. Medical treatment and painkillers were expensive and hard to find for the teenager, who still suffered extreme headaches and pain.

She worked hard and was accepted into medical school to pursue her dream of becoming a doctor. But all that ended once the new communist leaders realized the propaganda value of the 'napalm girl' in the photo.

She was forced to quit college and return to her home province, where she was trotted out to meet foreign journalists. The visits were monitored and controlled, her words scripted. She smiled and played her role, but the rage inside began to build and consume her.

"I wanted to escape that picture," she said. "I got burned by napalm, and I became a victim of war ... but growing up then, I became another kind of victim."

She turned to Cao Dai, her Vietnamese religion, for answers. But they didn't come.

"My heart was exactly like a black coffee cup," she said. "I wished I died in that attack with my cousin, with my south Vietnamese soldiers. I wish I died at that time so I won't suffer like that anymore ... it was so hard for me to carry all that burden with that hatred, with that anger and bitterness."

One day, while visiting a library, Phuc found a Bible. For the first time, she started believing her life had a plan.

Then suddenly, once again, the photo that had given her unwanted fame brought opportunity.

She traveled to West Germany in 1982 for medical care with the help of a foreign journalist. Later, Vietnam's prime minister, also touched by her story, made arrangements for her to study in Cuba.

She was finally free from the minders and reporters hounding her at home, but her life was far from normal. Ut, then working at the AP in Los Angeles, traveled to meet her in 1989, but they never had a moment alone. There was no way for him to know she desperately wanted his help again.

"I knew in my dream that one day Uncle Ut could help me to have freedom," said Phuc, referring to him by an affectionate Vietnamese term. "But I was in Cuba. I was really disappointed because I couldn't contact with him. I couldn't do anything."

___

While at school, Phuc met a young Vietnamese man. She had never believed anyone would ever want her because of the ugly patchwork of scars that banded across her back and pitted her arm, but Bui Huy Toan seemed to love her more because of them.

The two decided to marry in 1992 and honeymoon in Moscow. On the flight back to Cuba, the newlyweds defected during a refueling stop in Canada. She was free.

Phuc contacted Ut to share the news, and he encouraged her to tell her story to the world. But she was done giving interviews and posing for photos.

"I have a husband and a new life and want to be normal like everyone else," she said.

The media eventually found Phuc living near Toronto, and she decided she needed to take control of her story. A book was written in 1999 and a documentary came out, at last the way she wanted it told. She was asked to become a U.N. Goodwill Ambassador to help victims of war. She and Ut have since reunited many times to tell their story, even traveling to London to meet the Queen.

"Today, I'm so happy I helped Kim," said Ut, who still works for AP and recently returned to Trang Bang village. "I call her my daughter."

After four decades, Phuc, now a mother of two sons, can finally look at the picture of herself running naked and understand why it remains so powerful. It had saved her, tested her and ultimately freed her.

"Most of the people, they know my picture but there's very few that know about my life," she said. "I'm so thankful that ... I can accept the picture as a powerful gift. Then it is my choice. Then I can work with it for peace."

___

Online:

http://www.kimfoundation.com

violent Arab ghetto in Israel

http://news.yahoo.com/violent-arab-ghetto-shows-israels-seamy-underside-140639832.html

LOD, Israel (Reuters) - "My friend is on the floor, dying, 11 holes in his body, and I only have 10 fingers," raps Tamer Nafar. "Don't close your eyes, blink if you can hear me."

Nafar isn't rapping about violence and crime in urban America, but murders, drugs, guns and gang warfare in his own Israeli slum.

The backstreets of Lod, a mixed Arab-Jewish city just 20 minutes from the tree-lined boulevards of Tel Aviv, reveal a seamy underside of Israel that few visitors get to see, tucked away behind Ben Gurion airport off the main highway to Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank.

"There's crime pollution in this city that hits everybody. Nobody has immunity," said Nafar, lead MC in the Arab group DAM.

Residents, police, government officials, academics and social workers agree conditions in the areas where Arabs live have reached a crisis point, with poor schools and infrastructure fuelling crime and drug abuse.

Arab residents and analysts say that Israel's government and the police have ignored the problem because it has stayed within the Arab community and the country's Jewish population is largely unaffected.

But awareness is growing, partly thanks to wider public appeals from the communities themselves.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a special Knesset meeting in mid-February organized by Arab parliamentarian Ahmed Tibi that statistics showing that 40 percent of Arab Israelis felt threatened were "intolerable".

"‎The lives of Israeli Arabs are insufferable as a result of crime, murder, the killing of women, murder in general, robbery and looting," Netanyahu said.

POVERTY

Out of a total population of 7.8 million in Israel, 1.6 million - 20 percent - are Arabs. Many live in Nazareth and Arab villages located mostly in the north of Israel and in so-called mixed cities such Acre, Lod, Ramle, Haifa and Jaffa.

Most are descendants of Palestinians who stayed on after the 1948 war to establish Israel in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were driven out. Many Arabs feel kinship with Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and Jewish rightwingers say many Arabs are disloyal to the state.

Most Arabs are exempt from service in Israel's conscript military forces, which is compulsory for Jews, and they are barely integrated into the local economy.

The government estimates that just over 50 percent of Arab families live under the poverty line.

Truly mixed Jewish-Arab neighborhoods are increasingly hard to find as Jews, often with government support, move out to more affluent neighborhoods, creating Arab ghettoes and exacerbating the feeling among Arabs that they are second-class citizens.

Dor Shaulov, a project manager at City Without Violence, a government-funded initiative aimed at reducing violence in urban areas, said Arabs tend to be in favor of mixed communities while Jews preferred to stay separate.

"When Arabs start to move in a Jewish neighborhood, the Jews start to move out," Shaulov said.

Residents in the Arab areas complain of inferior municipal services, higher unemployment rates, crowded neighborhoods, inferior health care and unfair allocation of resources in the education system and housing.

"Since 1948, there has not been one governmental housing plan in the Arab neighborhoods of Lod ... even though there have been hundreds of plans for Jews," said Faten Zinati, a municipal government employee who works in Lod.

As a result, she explains, Arabs have been forced to build homes without permits, many of which have been demolished, and the rest are under threat of demolition.

The result is that today, "the Arab neighborhoods are neglected, dirty and disordered," she said.

WHERE ARE THE POLICE?

Out of 141 murders last year in Israel, 62 were committed in the Arab sector, according to the latest figures cited by Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovich in the Knesset.

Thirty percent of the prison population is Arab, and 68 percent of all gunfire incidents involve Arabs, he said.

In Lod, where about a third of the population is Arab, most crime involves Arabs against Arabs. Residents and observers say lack of adequate policing in Arab areas is a big part of the problem.

"The majority of the drug dealers are Arabs stationed in the Arab parts of the city, and the violent crime victims are mostly Arab too," said Mahmoud Mohareb, a professor of Israeli studies at Al Quds University.

"There is no police seriousness when it comes to investigating crimes committed between Arabs," Mohareb said.

Police defend their record and point to success in cleaning up the drugs scene. They reckon up to 1,500 drug users a day bought narcotics in Lod's Arab "Mahata" neighborhood two years ago using "ATM's" -- holes in the walls that supplied heroin and crack cocaine -- a trade that is almost nonexistent today.

"It was like a market place, but for drugs and drug users," said resident Amer Zawarkeh.

Violence continues, the police agree, but they say the problem is due to "tribalism" in the communities. A third of Lod's Arab population are tribal bedoins, who began migrating to the city in the 1950s in search of work.

Israel's Police Commissioner, Yohanan ‎Danino, agreed the rate of crime solving in the Arab community is low and needed to be improved. More Arabic-speaking officers is one solution, but he said getting the full cooperation of the Arab community would be key.

HOUSING PERMITS

Crammed into decrepit tenement-style flats, many homes in the Arab parts remain under threat of demolition. A study by the Israeli rights group Shatil estimates that some 70 percent of Arab homes in Lod lack legal permits, which are hard to obtain.

In their neighborhoods, the streets have no names, the houses have no numbers and GPS tracking systems go blank. There are no paved roads and rubbish is strewn everywhere.

Municipal services such as street lighting and rubbish collection stop at the boundaries of their quarters.

"The only way to fix this neighborhood is to destroy it entirely and let us build new houses, with permits," said resident Zawarkeh.

In March 2011, Human Rights Watch put out a report called "Israel: Stop Discriminatory Home Demolitions" in which the group criticized the practice of demolishing homes in Arab communities built without permits when getting permits was so hard.

"When it comes to housing rights in Lod, Israeli officials seem to have one rule for Palestinian citizens, another for Jewish citizens," Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.

Israel's government has earmarked about 172 million shekels ($46 million) for a number of improvement schemes. But Netanyahu and his cabinet argue local policing, housing and infrastructure are just part of the overall problem.

The Knesset meeting on the problem was a landmark event, participants said.

"This is the first time that the Arab sector has cried out for help and wants the police to enter the towns and cities," Netanyahu said at the meeting. "Arab MKs (members of Knesset) have told me: 'we are in distress'."

‎"The principal solution is the integration of Israeli Arabs in the economy and education," he said. "Simultaneously, action needs to be taken in the field of law enforcement."

City Without Violence's Shaulov says that in Lod, unlike other cities in his scheme, even small changes such as picking up the trash in Mahata neighborhood made a big impression. Locals were awed by the installation of street lighting in a district that for years was pitch black at night.

"There was an inequality in the allotment of funding," Shaulov said. "Now, we aim to spend more on the Arab side in order to make up for the past.

"It's horrible now, but it was a disaster before."

(Additional reporting by Crispian Balmer and Dan Williams; Editing by Douglas Hamilton and Sonya Hepinstall)

What does $7.25 an hour get you?

via yahoo news

What does $7.25 an hour get you?

These days, barely two gallons of gas. You'd probably have to work 30 minutes to enjoy a tall Frappuccino (maybe more if prices keep going up), although that's an indulgence when a box of diapers would cost about two hours of labor.

As the economy slowly rebuilds itself, talk about raising the minimum wage is, well, on the rise, and it has taken on more urgency in cities, states, and at the national level:

• Eight states raised minimum wages on January 1.
• Advocates in New York ($7.25/hr) are lobbying for $8.50, a pay raise that Governor Mario Cuomo calls harder to pass than gay marriage.
• Legislators in New Jersey ($7.25/hr) want to add $2,500 to a full-time minimum-wage annual salary that is indexed to inflation. Governor Chris Christie has said, "I'm showing a willingness to listen but also honestly saying I'm not inclined to do so."
• Connecticut ($8.25/hr) lost momentum on its campaign to raise wages, although the issue is still percolating among legislators.
• Missouri may vote on a November referendum.
• Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) introduced the Rebuild America Act in March, part of which addresses raising the federal minimum wage.

Minimum Wages in the United StatesThe debate over who benefits: It's clear who immediately profits from a wage bump—the current job-holder. But, the real back-and-forth revolves around who loses out because of a wage hike: Are increases a "job killer" (a $1.25/hour boost for one could mean no job for another), or will businesses benefit from better-paid consumers? Do the poor lose out, partly because they don't even work in the first place?

Then there's the impassioned debate over the "moral obligation:" Faith leaders talk about championing the "poor and needy," while the other side emphasizes the "moral imperative" of protecting job creation. In a speech commemorating a federal hourly wage raise 15 years ago, Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton, hinged the minimum wage concept to a "moral basis of our labor."

Minimum Wage Chart

Declining purchasing power: While media coverage has defined the debate along party lines, politicians like Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama have agreed on one thing: Inflation has reduced the purchasing power of the minimum wage. "Over 30 years, we've had either stagnating, at best, or declining wages for our low-wage workers," says University of California at Berkeley labor economist Sylvia Allegretto to Yahoo!. "This idea that we can have a thriving economy, when we have a good swath of our workers losing ground in pay decade after decade, while those at the top are making more and more money, that does not make a successful economy."

Minimum wage by the numbers:

• The last time there was a federal minimum wage boost was in 2009.
• 1.8 million workers earn $7.25/hour.
• 2.5 million workers earn less, due to exemptions that allow lower wages for certain types of workers (including students).
• Women make up two-thirds of minimum-wage workers.
• The same proportion of women work in occupations that depend upon tips, which has a federal minimum of $2.13/hour.
• If wages were indexed to inflation since 1968 wages, which is the high point of American purchasing power, the minimum wage would be $10.58.
• If wages rose at the same rate as executive salaries, the lowest-paid worker would make a whopping $23/hour.

Earned income tax creditThe case study of the teen summer market: Among those campaigning for minimum wage increases are kids barely old enough to land a job. A 12-year-old Girl Scout helped to galvanize the New York discussion on wages: Hannah Buckler started a petition to support a minimum wage increase. More than 3,000 miles away, students at a San Jose college pushed the city council to approve a November ballot initiative to raise its minimum wages and tie future increases to the cost of living.

Some economists, though, have focused on the younger generation as a prime example of the minimum wage's negative effects: Teens lose out on summer and part-time jobs because businesses can't afford to hire them. A recent effort has been underway to loosen child-labor laws. Some studies, however, dispute a causal connection.

Instead, academics like Allegretto say that the laws of supply and demand don't apply to minimum wage, pointing to the idea of monopsony. For instance, the way Apple and Wal-Mart have created their own supply chain and labor forces, illustrates monopsony in action.

To oversimplify: Basic economy theory believes that when the cost rises (in this case, labor costs), demand falls. But the buyer in this case is the employer paying below-competitive wages. "The wages are actually set below supply and demand," Allegretto says. "In theory, you can increase the wage and employment" and also reduce costly churn and recruitment at the same time. And while it's tempting to see this as a labor versus business dispute, coalitions like the Business for a Fair Minimum Wage, which includes companies like Costco, support minimum wage increases.

Sub-minimum wages: There's another class of wage-earners who make even less than the minimum: those who get tips on the job.

Like many tipped workers, [Zhanneta] Dunder has trouble making ends meet because of an obscure federal provision called the tip credit, which has established a sub-minimum wage for tipped workers at $2.15 per hour, or $4,333 a year for a full-time worker. Forty-five states have established slightly higher sub-minimum wages...Organizations like the New York nonprofit Restaurant Opportunities Centers don't think that's enough, and recommend at least raising tipped wages to 70 percent of the minimum wage...Tipped workers, the group says, are more likely to fall into poverty than those who receive minimum wage. Servers rely on food stamps at nearly double the rate of the general population. (May 23, Women eNews)

As with federal minimum wages, regions can choose to pay more. The San Francisco living wage rose to $10.24 on January 1; employers are also required to pay towards health care coverage, which diners have seen as a bill surcharge.

Real value of minimum wage and tipped-worker minimum wageWhat is minimum wage throughout United States? Although the federal minimum is $7.25, three states (Wyoming/$5.15, Georgia/$5.15, and Arkansas/$6.25) have lower state wages that apply to certain businesses and exemptions.

Below, a chart that contrasts the annual minimum-wage salary with a state's median income, for a sampling of states.

Range of state minimum wages