1.4 million about to lose Obamacare

According to an analysis by Bloomberg's Zachary Tracer, Tatiana Darie, and Katherine Doherty, roughly 1.4 million Americans will lose the coverage they have currently through the ACA, better known as Obamacare, exchanges and have to find a new plan.
Some states, such as Minnesota, Tennessee, and South Carolina have seen so many insurers leave that it has pushed the exchanges to the brink, lead to large premium increases, and have state lawmakers worried

Obamacare premium hikes

When you average all three methods together, the weighted UNSUBSIDIZED approved rate hike average for these 36 states + DC is 24%

Remember when people cared about this?

In fiscal 2016, which ended on Friday, the federal debt increased $1,422,827,047,452.46, according to data released today by the U.S. Treasury.
At the close of business on Sept. 30, 2015, the last day of fiscal 2015, the federal debt was $18,150,617,666,484.33, according to the Treasury. By the close of business on Sept. 30, 2016, the last day of fiscal 2016, it had climbed to $19,573,444,713,936.79.
According to the Census Bureau’s latest estimate, there were 118,215,000 households in the United States as of June. That means that the one-year increase in the federal debt of $1,422,827,047,452.46 in fiscal 2016 equaled about $12,036 per household.
The total federal debt of $19,573,444,713,936.79 now equals about $165,575 per household.

That's an oxymoron

Despite the widening of U.S. air support, the White House believes that the war in Afghanistan is tipping in the Taliban’s favor. Speaking on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly about Afghanistan’s deteriorating security situation, a senior administration official called the situation in the country an “eroding stalemate.”

Helmand

The Taliban pressed further into the capital of Helmand province on Wednesday, officials said, firing rockets at the governor’s compound as they threatened to overrun a second major Afghan city in just over a week.
The renewed bid to capture the city, Lashkar Gah, is further stretching Afghan forces still fighting to regain full control of the northern city Kunduz and responding to Taliban offensives in several other provincial capitals.
Over the past week, Afghan forces been fighting a multipronged offensive by the Islamist militant group on the outskirts of provincial capitals including Farah in the southwest, Pul-i-Khumri in the northeast and Tarin Kot in the south, which has for weeks been in danger of collapse.

Afghan soldiers being killed faster than replaced

Outgunned and surrounded by Taliban fighters in a chronic combat zone of southern Afghanistan, the police officers and soldiers thought they had negotiated passage to safety. They had walked into a trap.
In what appears to be one of the worst massacres of Afghan forces in a protracted and forgotten war, at least 100 were killed when the Taliban fighters opened fire on them from all directions as they tried to flee through the agreed-upon retreat route, Afghan officials said Wednesday....
From March to August, about 4,500 Afghan soldiers and police were killed and more than 8,000 wounded, according to information provided by a senior Afghan official who had seen the tallies, but like others spoke on condition of anonymity to share sensitive information. In August, the police and the army sustained about 2,800 casualties, more than a third of them fatal.
Beyond that, the inability to replace the fallen has raised particular alarm among the top ranks of the Afghan government as well as its Western backers, including the United States.
For months now, the police and the army have failed to achieve recruitment goals. While the army still maintains a marginal positive balance of recruitment over losses, the police seem in trouble.
The police force’s average casualty figure has been two to four times more than the average recruitment — a deficit that could translate into a reduction of 10,000 officers a year.
In August, the police recruited 650 new officers, in the face of more than 1,300 lost to casualties, arrests or desertion.

Corruption matters

At an international aid conference last week, Afghanistan’s leaders raised $15 billion from their international backers and pledged to clamp down on graft. But corrupt officials have hollowed out the national security forces, selling weapons and even government buildings to the Taliban, and alienated local populations. One Afghan official said that Helmand residents were so angry at corruption that they were turning to the Taliban, despite memories of the extremist group’s harsh rule...
Helmand is particularly afflicted by corruption, thanks in large part to its opium fields. The majority of the world’s heroin originates in this southern province bordering Pakistan. The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime last year valued the crop $3 billion a year, equivalent to around 20 per cent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product. It helps fund the Taliban insurgency, and local officials and military leaders profit from the industry too. They receive bribes to turn a blind eye, and sell their military equipment to cash-rich militants.
Local officials and residents say that corruption occurs at every level in the province and everything is for sale, from government jobs, to ammunition and weapons and state-owned buildings.
Across Helmand, soldiers and police regularly change sides and give up their vehicles and weapons rather than defend themselves against attack, said Attaullah, a member of the provincial council.
“Some sell their weapons, their ammunition, even in some cases their buildings, to the insurgents,” said Attaullah, who like many Afghans has only one name.
“Sometimes they sell the soldiers, too, along with their equipment.”

Hillary had a small role in this failure

In fact, Washington has so little to show for its efforts that a group of 10 former U.S. ambassadors and military commanders in Afghanistan declared in a joint statement last month, published by the National Interest magazine on Sept. 14, that stabilizing the country and ending its continued incubation of terrorism will require at least another generation of U.S. effort...
But the Joint Chiefs of Staff concluded in a 2014 report that military and civilian leaders alike grievously underestimated the gravity and impact of Afghanistan’s corruption. More “Lessons Learned” analyses are now emerging from within the government, and the most recent one points some sharp fingers of blame at the Obama administration—including the State Department while Hillary Clinton was at the helm, and at the CIA, during the entire period of the Bush and Obama administrations.
While trying to stabilize the country, these two organizations undertook two actions that made its problems worse, the latest study says: The CIA partnered over a long period with politically connected warlords that engaged in “rampantly corrupt activities,” largely out of political expediency; meanwhile, U.S. aid organizations helped stoke the country’s historic corruption by pouring in more funds than the country could responsibly absorb, all the while measuring their achievements by how much, rather than how well, money was spent...
A comprehensive annual survey in Afghanistan by the Asia Foundation found that the number of respondents who experienced corruption at the customs office rose from roughly 40 percent in 2006 to 61 percent in 2015—even though U.S. diplomats, in a rosy 2013 cable, hailed Afghan reforms there. The average value of a bribe increased by a fifth from 2010 to 2014, and the number of respondents who said they experienced corruption in the court system rose from 42 percent to 61 percent. The public’s sense of corruption within the national police—a major recipient of Western funds—remained largely unchanged through the occupation. (Half of the respondents experienced it.)
Even after Washington finally grasped the centrality of the corruption problem in 2009 and President Obama publicly called for a crackdown on such behavior, top officials essentially blinked: A comprehensive anticorruption strategy drawn up by the embassy in Kabul and sent to Washington in 2010 never won Secretary Clinton’s (or anyone else’s official) endorsement. When a key advocate—Richard Holbrooke, a top adviser to Clinton and veteran diplomat who had seen the debilitating effects of corruption up close during a previous assignment in the Balkans—died in December 2010, no one else seized the plan and compelled its formal approval