The Arizona proposal, HCR 2056, would allow employers to pay a teenage worker $3 less than the current minimum wage if the worker is either part-time or a temp. The Arizona minimum wage is $7.65, forty cents more than the federal rate. If the proposal is approved teenagers could end up being paid $4.65 per hour.

Employers who must pay tipped employees would be able to lower their workers pay by more than $2 per hour. The minimum wage for servers and other tipped workers in Arizona is $4.65 an hour. If a worker’s tips don’t add up to the normal minimum wage of $7.65, the employer must cover the difference, a stipulation that would not change with the legislation.

In Florida the Tourism and Commerce committee is considering giving businesses the option of dropping the state minimum wage for servers, currently $4.65, in favor of the lower federal one of $2.13. However, if the employer opts for the lower wage and the employee doesn’t earn at least $9.98 per hour after tips, the employer would have to make up the difference.

Advocacy groups have denounced the proposed legislation in Florida as an attack on low-wage workers. Members of the Florida AFL-CIO have been leaving literature on restaurant tables to inform servers of the potential changes, and the group also put together a protest outside an Outback Steakhouse in Miami Lakes. To mock the minimum wage they described as being from a long gone era they encouraged attendees to dress in 1980′s garb.

Outback Steakhouse’s parent company, OSI Restaurant Partners, supports the Florida measure.

The Tampa-based company, which lists Carrabba’s Italian Grill and Bonefish Grill among its holdings, donated more than $120,000 last year to 32 Republicans running for state office.

Carol Dover, president of the Florida Restaurant and Lodging Association, told The Huffington Post that the proposal under consideration has been mischaracterized.

“There appears to be confusion as to the legislation,” said Dover, whose trade group supports the proposal. “No one is having their wages cut. Employees are being guaranteed 130% of the state minimum wage if the employer elects to offer that option.”

Rich Templin, legislative and political director of the Florida AFL-CIO, says that the measure would let employers save money at workers’ expense.

“We believe that many people in the legislature, from both sides of the aisle, once they understand what it’s about will not be supportive of this,” says Templin. “It really is a pretty despicable idea.”

Those donations have helped new Republican-leaning outside groups out-fundraise Democratic-friendly super PACs by a large margin.

“Without the flow of super PAC money, the Republican race would be over,” said Anthony Corrado, a campaign-finance expert at Colby College in Maine. “Super PACs have become a vehicle for a very small number of millionaires and billionaires who are willing to spend large sums in pursuit of their political agenda.”

The largest super PAC donor of the 2012 election is Harold Simmons. He and his holding company, Contran, gave $12 million to Karl Rove affiliated super PAC American Crossroads, as well as $2.2 million to three super PACs supporting Republican presidential candidates. Simmons also contributed $3 million dollars to “Swift Boat” ads in 2004, challenging then presidential candidate John Kerry’s Vietnam War record.

Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, gave $10 million to Winning Our Future, a super PAC aiding former House speaker Newt Gingrich.

In a Forbes magazine article, Adelson said he is willing to donate an additional “$10 million or $100 million” to aid Gingrich.

“I’m against very wealthy people attempting to or influencing elections, but as along as it’s doable, I’m going to do it,” Adelson said.

Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, donated $2.6 million to Endorse Liberty, a super PAC helping Rep. Ron Paul of Texas. Thiel, a libertarian, gave $70,000 to a 2010 ballot initiative in California to  legalize marijuana.

Thiel is the single largest donor to Endorse Liberty, which has spent more than $3 million, mostly on Internet ads, to advance Paul’s candidacy.

“Men and women who want freedom and growth should take action,” he said. “A good place to start is voting for Ron Paul.”

Since January 1st, Houston home builder Bob Perry has donated $3.6 million to super PACs, including $2.5 million to American Crossroads.

He has supported Texas Gov. Rick Perry and former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty in the past, but last year donated $1 million to a pro-Romney super PAC.

No Democratic donors rank as high as the top donors to Republican super PACs.

Priorities USA Action, the main super PAC backing Obama’s re-election, collected $2 million last year from Dreamworks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg. However, the super PAC raised just shy of $59,000 in January, a fraction of the $27.2 million raised last month alone by five leading GOP super PACs. The biggest donation to Priorities USA Action last month was $50,000 from John Rogers, CEO of Ariel Investments and one of Obama’s closest friends.

Based on the 30 days ending Feb. 15 Gallup’s mid-month reading serves as an estimate of the U.S. government’s employment report. Gallup found that unemployment decreased to 8.3% in its mid-January report, and suggested that the U.S. unemployment rate the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported for January would decline.

Gallup also finds that 10.0% of U.S. employees in mid-February were forced to settle for part time due to a lack of full-time work, the same as in January.

Underemployment, a combination of the percentage of workers who are unemployed and the percentage working part time but wanting full-time work, is 19.0% in mid-February, up from the 18.7% recorded for January.

In early March the Obama administration will report its February unemployment rate. That rate will be based on mid-month conditions. Gallup’s mid-month unemployment reading, based on data collected through the 15^th of the month, normally provides a good basis on which to estimate the direction of unemployment rate for the month.

Administration officials claim that staffers and advisers with venture capital ties had no input as to where funding was directed in regards to these companies. But e-mails released in a congressional probe of the president’s clean-tech program show that some of those staff and advisers did in fact informally advocate for some of those companies.

David Gold, a venture capitalist and critic of Obama’s investments in clean tech, said that even if staffers had been removed from the final decision-making, they had the kind of inside access to exert subtle influence.

“To believe those quiet conversations don’t happen in the hallways — about a project being in a certain congressman’s district or being associated with a significant presidential donor, is naive,” said Gold, who once worked at the Office of Management and Budget. “When you’re putting this kind of pressure on an organization to make decisions on very big dollars, there’s increased likelihood that political connections will influence things.”

In 2008 Sanjay Wagle, a venture capitalist and Barack Obama fundraiser, was head of a group known as “Clean Tech for Obama”.

Shortly after Obama’s election, he left his California firm to join the Energy Department, just as the administration started up it’s massive program to stimulate the economy with federal investments in clean-technology firms.

During the next three years, the department provided $2.4 billion in public funding to clean-energy companies in which Wagle’s former firm, Vantage Point Venture Partners, had invested.

Wagle was one of several players in venture capital who was providing financial backing to start-up clean-tech companies, then moved into the Energy Department at the same time their industry had a huge stake in decisions about which companies would receive government loans, grants and support.

David Danielson, formerly of General Catalyst, joined an Energy Department office which was in charge of funding breakthrough energy technologies. Three General Catalyst portfolio firms received %105 million in funding.

David Sandalow, a former Clinton administration official and Brookings Institution fellow, was paid $239,000 for consulting work for a venture capital firm, Good Energies, in 2008 before joining the Energy Department as assistant secretary for policy and international affairs. A Good Energies-backed firm, SolarReserve, won a $737 million agency loan.

Thousands of agency and White House e-mails released as part of the Solyndra investigation show that venture capitalists who held advisory roles with the Energy Department were given access to Obama’s top advisers.

European Union member states had already agreed to stop importing Iranian crude from 1 July.

The move is intended to put pressure on Tehran to stop enriching uranium.

Iran insists its nuclear program is peaceful and for civilian use only, but the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency says it has information suggesting Iran has carried out tests “relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device”.

Sunday’s statement on the oil ministry website was attributed to spokesman Ali Reza Nikzad Rahbar.

Some Iranian media outlets had recently reported that Iran had stopped oil exports to the Netherlands, Greece, France, Portugal, Spain and Italy in retaliation for the EU’s oil embargo, but this was later denied by the oil ministry.

The EU oil embargo, which was agreed upon last month, was phased so member states that were relatively dependent on Iranian crude, most notably Greece, Spain and Italy, had enough time to find alternative fuel sources.

The bloc currently buys about 20% of Iran’s oil exports, which account for a majority of government revenue.

However, Iran’s Oil Minister Rostam Qasemi claims that a cut in exports to Europe would not hurt Tehran.

Oil industry sources quoted by Reuters news agency say Iran’s top oil buyers in Europe have already started reducing purchases of Iranian crude.

Last year Iran supplied more than 700,000 barrels per day (b/d) to the EU and Turkey, but by the start of this year that had dropped to about 650,000 b/d.

France’s energy giant Total has stopped buying Iranian crude and Royal Dutch Shell, one of the biggest purchasers of Iranian oil, has cut back sharply.

Tupras of Turkey was the biggest European customer for Iranian oil in 2011, taking about 200,000 b/d, followed by Total (100,000 b/d), Shell (100,000 b/d), Hellenic of Greece (80,000 b/d) and Cepsa of Spain (70,000 b/d).

Ralph Janvey, a court-appointed receiver has been placed in charge of returning the money to investors defrauded by Stanford. Janvey obtained a federal court order last June against five Democratic and Republican campaigns, but they have not as of yet returned the money.

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee received $950,500; the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), $238,500; the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, $200,000; the Republican National Committee $128,500, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) $83,345.

The contributions to the campaign committees and candidates were given by Stanford himself, Stanford executives, and a political action committee associated with the financier.

Mr. Janvey, is also trying to get back money Stanford donated to individual politicians. The list of recipients includes President Obama – who received $4,600 from Stanford in his 2008 election campaign, Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas), the chairman of the NRCC, and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee. Janvey is seeking these funds informally, and has not filed lawsuits.

Money has already been returned by House Speaker John Boehner, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Sen. John McCain, among others. But the roughly $154,000 recovered from elected officials is a fraction of the $1.8 million still outstanding.

The $4,600 Janvey is seeking from the Obama campaign only reflects contributions that Stanford himself personally made. The actual total amount may be as high $31,000 when taking into account Stanford’s contributions to Obama’s other campaign committees, along with money from senior Stanford executives, and the Stanford Financial Group’s now defunct PAC, according to campaign finance records and an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics. The Obama campaign donated the $4,600 to charity on February 18, 2009, just days after Stanford’s alleged fraud came to light.

The Obama campaign officially has no comment on the matter, but a source familiar with the campaign says that it does not intend to return the money to the receiver or Stanford investors.

Kevin Sadler, lead counsel for the Stanford receivership, condemned the failure by the Obama campaign to turn over the contributions to the receiver. He said “the money was never theirs to begin with,” so they have no more right to the money than an ordinary person who was given it from “a guy who goes into a Seven Eleven and robs the store.”

Ralph Janvey wrote to the Obama campaign five days after it gave the money to charity in 2009, asking that it instead be returned to investors.

“If you have already donated such amounts to charity, we request you consider donating an equal amount to the Receivership,” Janvey wrote back on February 23, 2009. “By returning such amounts to the Receivership Estate, you will help reduce the losses suffered by victims of the alleged fraud.”

This is not the first time the president’s campaign contributions have come under scrutiny. Just recently Obama’s reelection campaign returned more than $200,000 in contributions from the American brothers of a Mexican casino magnate who has been in trouble with the law. Juan Jose Rojas Cardona jumped bail in the U.S. in 1994 after being charged with drug trafficking and fraud, according to the New York Times. The campaign said it did not know the background of the Cardona brothers when it accepted the contribution.

According to former U.S. State Department and federal law enforcement officials, Stanford spent considerable sums of money on lobbying members of Congress with the goal of blocking legislation and regulations that would have strengthened money laundering laws relating to offshore banking.

As a U.S. Senator from Illinois, Obama was one of three senators who in February 2007, along with Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and then Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), sponsored their own version of offshore banking legislation.

“Senior ranking U.S. military leaders have so distorted the truth when communicating with the U.S. Congress and American people in regards to conditions on the ground in Afghanistan that the truth has become unrecognizable.” That’s the assessment of a damning new report by Army Lt. Col. Daniel Davis who returned in October from his second year-long deployment in Afghanistan and says military officials have not leveled with the American public about how poorly the the decade-long war is going. He argues that local Afghan governments are unable to provide the basic needs of the people and that insurgents control virtually all parts of Afghanistan beyond eyeshot of a U.S. base. We speak with Michael Hastings of Rolling Stone, who obtained a copy of the full report and published it last week. “Lieutenant-Colonel Davis is on the right side of history and the fact [is] that he believes in this and is willing to risk [his career],” Hastings says.

The report, by the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, states that at least 50 civilians have been killed in follow-up strikes after they attempted to help those hit by a drone  missile. The bureau also says that more than 20 civilians have been killed in strikes on funerals.

The bureau interviewed several witnesses to strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas, but American officials question the accuracy of such claims. They assert that accounts might be made up by militants or falsely confirmed by residents who fear retaliation; not an admission of guilt nor a statement of denial.

Since President Obama took office, BIJ counted 260 strikes by Predator and Reaper drones in which 282 to 535 civilians had been “credibly reported” killed, including more than 60 children. American officials said that the number was much too high, though acknowledged that at least several dozen civilians have been killed in strikes aimed at militant suspects.

A senior American counterterrorism official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, questioned the report’s findings, saying “targeting decisions are the product of intensive intelligence collection and observation.” The official added: “One must wonder why an effort that has so carefully gone after terrorists who plot to kill civilians has been subjected to so much misinformation. Let’s be under no illusions — there are a number of elements who would like nothing more than to malign these efforts and help Al Qaeda succeed.”

The drone campaign is classified as top secret, and Obama administration officials have refused to make public even the much-disputed legal opinions underpinning it.

But Mr. Obama spoke about the program in an online appearance last week.

“I want to make sure that people understand: actually, drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties,” he said in the forum on YouTube. “For the most part they have been very precise precision strikes against Al Qaeda and their affiliates.” He called the strikes “a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists.” For the most part.

American officials familiar with the rules governing the strikes and who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that many missiles had been fired at groups of suspected militants who are not on any list. These so-called signature strikes are based on assessments that men carrying weapons or in a militant compound are legitimate targets.

The Department of Labor claims that the unemployment rate dropped from 8.5% in December 2011 to 8.3% in January 2012, but the CBO report states that, “The official unemployment rate excludes those individuals who would like to work but have not searched for a job in the past four weeks as well as those who are working part-time but would prefer full-time work; if those people were counted among the unemployed, the unemployment rate in January 2012 would have been about 15 percent.”

These numbers reflect the actual status of labor in the country that many outside of the mainstream media have been pointing to as indicators of the overall health of the economy.

The rate of unemployment, according to the White House, has been above 8% since February 2009, making the past three years under President Obama the longest stretch of high unemployment in the United States since the Great Depression.

Additionally, the CBO reports that the unemployment rate in America will stay above 8% through the election of 2012 and even until 2014.

“…the unemployment rate will remain above 8 percent until 2014. The share of unemployed people who have been looking for work for more than six months — referred to as the long-term unemployed — topped 40 percent in December 2009 and has remained above that level ever since.”

When Obama took office in 2009, the official rate was 7.8%. He promised to keep unemployment under 8%, but only three years into his administration has it finally dropped below 9%.

Historically, presidents do not get re-elected with unemployment over 7.2%.

Apparently a turkey and cheese sandwich, a banana, bag of potato chips and box of apple juice do not meet U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines. In order to meet those requirements, the child was instead given chicken nuggets. The agent, for some reason, was inspecting the entire classes lunch boxes that day.

The state’s Department of Health and Human Services requires that all lunches served to pre-kindergarten students, whether from school or home, meet USDA meal guidelines of one serving each of meat, milk and grain, and two servings of fruit or vegetables. If meals or snacks brought from home do not meet nutritional requirements outlined in the “Meal Patterns for Children in Child Care,” the school “must provide additional food necessary to meet those requirements.”

State officials can not explain why the girl’s meal was considered not nutritious enough. Jani Kozlowski, fiscal and statutory policy manager for the Division of Child Development told the Carolina Journal that the meal should have met guidelines.

“With a turkey sandwich, that covers your protein, your grain, and if it had cheese on it, that’s the dairy,” Kozlowski said. ”It sounds like the lunch itself would’ve met all of the standard.”

The government last month announced new guidelines for student’s school meals. The new standards call for more whole grains and produce as well as less sodium and fat in the food served in schools. While the measures mark a step forward from previous years, members of Congress fought to keep pizza and french fries on the menu claiming that both the tomato paste on pizza and the potatoes that make fries are vegetables.