More executive actions on the way

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

I like this new Obama:

The Obama administration is preparing another active year of executive action in 2015, pumping out new rules and enforcing others for the first time — setting tougher standards on everything from air pollution to overtime pay to net neutrality, food safety, commercial drones, a college ratings plan and a crackdown on for-profit colleges that don’t prepare their students for well-paying jobs. There’s even going to be the first draft of a rule for organic pet food.

And, of course, there will be more executive actions to move forward on other initiatives as well — like the new measures President Barack Obama is set to announce on Friday to help more people go to college.

The rules and regulations will set up more confrontation with a newly unified Republican Congress, which will use all of the tools at its disposal to try to stop individual policies and blast the Obama administration for being too rule-happy in general. The new rules will get merged, generally, with the GOP’s complaints about about Obama’s executive actions on immigration — their view that he’s a go-it-alone president who’s ready to fire off executive actions on whatever he wants without listening to Congress.

Most of the administration’s agenda for 2015 doesn’t rise to that level. It’s more about keeping the regular stream of regulations coming on initiatives that have been underway for years. But even that will give the Republicans plenty of ammunition — they’ll talk a lot about how, in their view, Obama is indifferent to the economic impact of all of his regulations.

“The president doesn’t seem to care about the impact of these regulations on families,” said John Barrasso of Wyoming, the chairman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee, adding that the administration is showing “a complete neglect of the economic impact” of the load of new rules.

Not so, Obama administration officials say. They insist there are also lots of economic benefits to the rules, and they’re ready to fire back with numbers they say the Republicans aren’t considering. And they’re sticking with Obama’s script for moving his agenda forward: When you can’t do it through Congress, do what you can through the executive branch.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/01/another-year-of-executive-action-113963.html#ixzz3O0CGFFS6

This made me laugh

~ susie

Space hopper race

So this drunk guy in Scotland was bouncing on one of these — in an underpass, into oncoming traffic:

Mr Shankland said he stopped his car because a police car was blocking the lane and there was a “commotion”.

“As I pulled out past the police car I noticed there was a big red balloon on the road,” he said.

“It wasn’t until I passed and saw the two horns on top of it that I noticed it was a space hopper.

“I can only assume that the gentleman was space hoppering for some time because there is no path there.”

Mr Shankland said the man was being questioned by police when he saw him.

“You could tell from the sheepish look on his face that he knew he was doing something wrong but he did not know what it was,” he said.

“He looked very drunk to be honest.”

Mr Shankland added: “He was coming towards the oncoming cars, he wasn’t bouncing away from them, so it could have been a worse story to tell.”

My mom used to say that angels watched over small children and drunks. In this case, she had a point!

Schumer: Enough votes to uphold KXL veto

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Man wearing tie holding up sign "Keystone Is An Act of War", other protesters next to him.

You ever see big bugs when you flip them onto their backs and their legs flail frantically? That’s how the Republicans will act when we stop the Keystone pipeline:

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) announced on CBS’s Face The Nation that Senate Democrats have enough votes to sustain the widely expected veto that President Obama will issue after Republicans pass a bill authorizing the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.

Schumer said, “I think there will be enough Democratic votes to sustain the president’s veto…Our Republican colleagues say that this is a jobs bill but that really is not true at all. By most estimates it would create several thousand temporary construction jobs and only 35 permanent jobs…Why create very few jobs with the dirtiest of energy from tar sands when you can create tens of thousands more clean jobs using wind and solar? Our Republican colleagues are doing what they always do: they’re appeasing a few special interests — in this case oil companies and pipeline companies and not really doing what’s good for the average middle class family in terms of creating jobs.”

Senate Republicans won’t get anywhere near the 67 votes that they will need to override a presidential veto of the bill to authorize the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. President Obama made it clear that he was leaning towards vetoing the bill during his final press conference of 2014.

Cities are only for rich people, Part 17

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

This not only makes me sad, it scares me. Unless I can somehow manage to make a lot more money, I’m sure I’ll be in a similar situation. Rents are skyrocketing in my part of the city:

This breakneck transformation has prompted some soul-searching over how to define the wealth of the city: by the rents it commands or the diversity of its people and places?

“New Yorkers have come to expect this kind of thing. We know that change is always around the corner, right?” said Plimpton, as her matzo ball soup cooled. “Nothing lasts forever. We know this here very well. The thing is there are things about our city that give it character that regular working people use that are disappearing that we need.”

The skyrocketing rents aren’t just squashing local establishments; they’re pricing out whole populations. An analysis by the real estate information firm RealtyTrac found that Brooklyn is now the least affordable housing market in the country, which has hit some of the city’s most fragile residents hard.

Annemarie Mogil loves the view from her bedroom window. The 92-year-old has taken dozens of photographs of it in the year that she’s lived here, which she keeps in a tidy shoebox. At a prime corner in Brooklyn, Prospect Park Residence has been a home for seniors since 1962 and an assisted living facility for the last decade.

But two months after Mogil moved in, the owner sold the building to a developer of luxury condos for $76.5 million, nearly double its sale price in 2006. More than 120 residents, including some Holocaust survivors, were told to find another place to live. Mogil is one of only eight residents who refused to leave.

“I’m not ready to go,” she said. “This was really advertised from the beginning as a place where you come to age in place. And aging in place means this is your final residence.”

According to their families, many of the residents who left have seen sharp declines in their health. Some have died since the residence announced it would be closing.

“It’s a devastating feeling,” said Mogil about the prospect of being forced out of her home. “And I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”

Notice anything?

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

MTAmugging

Pretty interesting, yes?

Just before the holidays, on December 23, a man in a windbreaker and sneakers got into a verbal altercation with an on-duty, uniformed female transit employee that escalated into a physical assault. According to police, the man put the 28-year-old woman into a bear hug and slammed her to the ground where he began choking her. Thankfully, another employee rushed to her aid and the assailant fled.

The next day, the police released images of the attacker and asked the public for help identifying him. The New York Daily News ran the story in their typically sensationalist way. They described the man as a “brute” and a “thug” and described the incident in lurid detail and begged for readers to help ID the coward who attacked the woman and “ran away smiling.”

The problem? The man turned out to be an off-duty NYPD police officer and the New York Daily News, like almost every other media outlet in the country — liberal or conservative — has a completely different set of rules for covering police officers accused of committing a crime. By the next day, the story had been cleaned up.

Shrill, an eagle-eyed writer for Wonkette, noticed the blatant change in tone from one day to the next after the paper learned that this attacker was no random guy, but actually a police officer. The change in title and opening paragraph say it all.

Shrill aptly sums up the differences:

“Notice anything? Gone is the evocative “thug” in the headline and the “hulking brute” of the lede, and the sensationalism of the label of an “unprovoked” attack, replaced by plainspoken and bare nouns. Gone, too, is the directness of the active voice, replaced by a circumspect passive voice, accompanied by the (necessary) lawyerly “allegedly.” The callousness of him smiling has been dropped, too, demoted to the second paragraph. This is no surprise — it’s just an example of the subtle way in which our media defers to and genuflects before law enforcement, shaping and coloring the narrative in their favor.”