What’s interesting in the news today?
1. In case you hadn’t heard, last night was the State of the Union address.
If you missed it, you didn’t miss much you hadn’t already heard.
From TheHill “The White House had foreshadowed that Obama’s address would emphasize a new willingness by the president to use executive action, and Obama promised a dozen actions in the next year, including the creation of new “starter” savings accounts and a hike in the minimum wage for federal contractors.
Throughout the speech, the president stressed that the government should work to provide “opportunity for all,” by addressing head-on the problems of income inequality and waning mobility.
Those proposals, along with other calls to Obama’s liberal base, were intended to embolden Democrats ahead of this year’s midterm elections but were delivered in a measured tone.
“What I offer tonight is a set of concrete, practical proposals to speed up growth, strengthen the middle class, and build new ladders of opportunity into the middle class. Some require congressional action, and I’m eager to work with all of you,” Obama said.”
That would be a first.
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2. Here’s some excerpts from the Republican rebuttal. Again, if you missed it, you didn’t miss much.
From Speaker Boehner
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3. Ted Cruz and “The Imperial Presidency of Barack Obama.”
From TheWallStJournal “Of all the troubling aspects of the Obama presidency, none is more dangerous than the president’s persistent pattern of lawlessness, his willingness to disregard the written law and instead enforce his own policies via executive fiat. On Monday, Mr. Obama acted unilaterally to raise the minimum wage paid by federal contracts, the first of many executive actions the White House promised would be a theme of his State of the Union address Tuesday night.
The president’s taste for unilateral action to circumvent Congress should concern every citizen, regardless of party or ideology. The great 18th-century political philosopher Montesquieu observed: “There can be no liberty where the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or body of magistrates.” America’s Founding Fathers took this warning to heart, and we should too.
Rule of law doesn’t simply mean that society has laws; dictatorships are often characterized by an abundance of laws. Rather, rule of law means that we are a nation ruled by laws, not men. That no one—and especially not the president—is above the law. For that reason, the U.S. Constitution imposes on every president the express duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”
Yet rather than honor this duty, President Obama has openly defied it by repeatedly suspending, delaying and waiving portions of the laws he is charged to enforce. When Mr. Obama disagreed with federal immigration laws, he instructed the Justice Department to cease enforcing the laws. He did the same thing with federal welfare law, drug laws and the federal Defense of Marriage Act.”
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4. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before…. “We have to pass it to find out what’s in it.”
Only this time, it’s Republicans. And even after they pledged to not do stuff like this.
From NationalJournal “Congressional negotiators released a massive 959-page farm bill Monday night, giving House members less than 48 hours to dig through the bill before they’re expected to pass it Wednesday.
Sound familiar? Congress did the same thing two weeks ago with the omnibus spending bill, taking less than a week to pass a nearly 1,600-page tome (and that’s not even included the appendices!). The farm bill is expected to follow a similar route through Congress, potentially hitting the president’s desk by the end of this week.
That quickened pace breaks—at least in spirit—a House Republican transparency pledge from 2011, promising constituents that they would not vote on any legislation for at least three days after it has been released for public consumption. House Speaker John Boehner’s office argues that neither bill violates the three-day rule, though both were posted online on Monday evenings and scheduled for Wednesday votes.”
Yeah! Who you gonna believe? The Speaker’s office, or your lyin’ eyes?
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5. Of course he will. Can’t be losin’ all those campaign dollars for Dems, now can we? It’s the reason they set ObamaCare up this way. It’s the bloodiest kind of cronyism.
From TheWashingtonExaminer “The Obama administration is threatening a veto of legislation that would permanently ban federal funds for abortion.
In a statement on Monday, the administration said the measure would intrude on women’s reproductive rights and prohibit the ability of individuals to spend their own money on insurance coverage for abortion under President Barack Obama’s health care law.”
As we learned yesterday, everyone is already paying a surcharge for it. This would fix that. But it’s obvious that the President doesn’t want it fixed.
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6. Snow hits the South, millions lose their minds….. 🙄
Come on people, act like you’ve done this before. 🙂
From NBCNews “On Tuesday, the city was ready to give them a workout for the first time in at least three years. A rare winter storm stretched from Texas to Virginia, grounding thousands of flights and making a snowy, icy mess of roads.
Traffic came to a complete stop in the Atlanta area, where a traffic officer delivered a baby late Tuesday afternoon in the back seat of the car for a couple who were stranded in icy conditions on Interstate 285 in the suburb of Sandy Springs. A spokesman for the Sandy Springs police said mom and baby, who weren’t identified, were doing fine.
Classes were canceled from Texas to the Carolinas, while some school districts that did open told parents it would be safer to simply let their kids stay at school overnight.”
😯 Poor kids.
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Wandering Views 
All this talk about “income inequality” is so much blather. There is no “income equality” and never will be.
What comes to mind is the beauty contestant who couldn’t find Europe on the map, asked what her aspirations were, she says, “World peace and a cure for aids”.
So, she could add “income equality”. It isn’t even a fancy, it’s campaign talk.
And raising the minimum wage raises wages all around and nobody is better off by it.
Except the Chineese.
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Anonymous,
Please google “Gini co-efficient” and learn some economics. No need for care quotes around “income inequality.” It is a real, measurable, thing and not a new concept at all. I remember it from freashman economics back in ’81.
It is growing, and it is higher in the US than in most other industrialized countries.
And two questions are therefor ripe for serious discussion:
* How much inequality is too much?
* If it is too high, what are the best policies to lower it?
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“scare quotes” 🙂
And if we were *really* serious about creating jobs, we’d also address wealth distribution. Watch this, if you haven’t seen it yet.
How many jobs could middle class, and even poor people, create, if they had access to wealth to start businesses?
http://www.upworthy.com/9-out-of-10-americans-are-completely-wrong-about-this-mind-blowing-fact-2
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Our man on the ground tells us China’s got lots of problems. For some time, the Chinese government was building model cities with terrific technology and new buildings for the manufacturing plants beating paths to their doors.
The wages in China, however, have been going up, it’s no longer a slam dunk to build and use factories in China and now those beautiful cities stand empty and the workers who built them have no jobs.
I heard several years ago that Chinese factories had built enough refrigerators that everyone in the world could get a new one and there’d still be some left over. They’re stored in warehouses, not enough buyers.
BTW, have you noticed lower prices on refrigerators? I just bought a new one last year and the answer is no. They all were $1500 and up.
Just an FYI
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Well, wait, that’s an exaggeration. (I apologize) There were some cheaper models, but anything that looked like it would last more than a couple years (and I have my doubts about that given the last expensive refrigerator I bought), was usually closer to $2K. 😦
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It snows like this here once every 5 or 10 years. Let’s see you do something well you only get to do every 10 years.
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Roy,
Anonymous’s “care quotes” were around income EQUALITY. You could add questions to the ones you pose:
If “income inequality” is bad, is it the government’s business to fix it?
Or,
Do government policies curb or exacerbate “income inequality”?
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Here’s a brief article that may answer some of those questions about “income inequality”…
http://courantblogs.com/dan-haar/five-things-you-need-to-know-about-income-inequality/
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Michelle – We bought a fridge with a little dent in the door, near the bottom, which saved us $400 dollars. (I don’t remember the price, though.)
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I’m guessing most of the kids who are spending the night are kids whose parents have been stranded at work or on the road. I have some Facebook friends in that situation. It was forecasted as a light dusting. That happens often and usually dismissing early works well. Yes, we are unprepared for a snow storm. This is the South, I saw how well the Northeast was prepared for super storm Sandy. As for a really big emergency, we handled 65 tornadoes in one day so well, FEMA started going door to door begging people to sign up so they could justify their existence.
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Where in the Constitution is the federal government given any authority to deal with income inequality?
In fact, the government is a huge part of the problem as it regulates and subsidizes many industries (financial, healthcare, “green” energy, etc,) while giving half the population incentives to stay on the old government welfare plantation.
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Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve is useful at this point. We have a wider range of intelligence among our people than other developed countries. When most workers were plowing a field or bolting fenders on Chevys, intelligence was not as determinative of income as it is today.
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rickyweaver, I prefer “income inequality,” with the scare quotes.
Certainly, there’s nothing in the Constitution that could reasonably taken as giving power to the govt to “fix” “income inequality.” And we certainly should make no mistake about it: big corps and businesses have little problem with the myriad rules and regulations on the books. They don’t mind that stuff at all. It’s just easier (and lazier) for some folks to pit the mean ol’ Fat Cats (private and corporate) against kind-hearted dear old government Dad, and argue Dad needs more power to keep the meanies in check.
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KBells,
Apologies for the snark. You’re right, in a tornado, us northerners would lose our minds like you folks did with the snow. 65 of ’em! Yikes. 😯
And they were prepared for Sandy. But folks from Jersey and NY were too stupid to listen to the warnings to leave. The preparation was there, but so was the stupid. But either way, Christie and Obama fixed everything, so it’s all good. 🙄
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AJ, next to putting sugar in cornbread and using y’all in the singular, laughing at our snow driving is the top complaint Southerners have about Northerners. (noticed I didn’t use the “y” word) And one more thing DO NOT send Christie and Obama down here. We have it under control. I repeat DO NOT send Christie and Obama down here.
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Languate Alerty but I can’t fix it and the article is good. I agree with KBells, please don’t send Obama and Christie down here. Yes, our politicians are crooked but we know how to skirt around them
http://gizmodo.com/why-the-south-fell-apart-in-the-snow-1511566912?utm_campaign=socialflow_gizmodo_facebook&utm_source=gizmodo_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow
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OK,
We’ll keep Christie in Jersey. I say that because I don’t live there. 🙂
Obama? You’re stuck with him just like the rest of us.
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I don’t know Kim,
The cussing, the name calling….
He seems awfully defensive…..
In poker, that is what’s called a tell, several in fact. 🙂
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Then there is this:
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2014/01/29/chick-fil-gives-free-food-to-motorists-stranded-in-southern-snowstorm/
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The president really needs to do something about snow inequality. Look around. Here we are in Michigan with piles of snow, way more than we can ever use. Meanwhile I have a friend in California who can’t even go to the Sierras to find a decent snow pack. It’s not fair, it’s not right, it’s downright un-American. As long as he’s going to ramp up executive action, the president should do something to fix this.
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AJ, You have to cut him some slack, he is a transplant.
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Kim,
I already picked that one for tomorrow. It’s a good story of kindness to strangers. 🙂
I’ll post it anyway, in case someone misses it.
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Kevin,
😆
If that’s case and snow is now a valuable commodity, we’re technically rich! 🙂
I better post a guard in my yard before “Occupy Snowy Yard” shows up and tries to redistribute my snow, as well as making a mess of the place. 🙂
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AJ: (:
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AJ: 🙂
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(Can you tell I don’t do smileys around here often enough?)
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You’re absolutely right, Kevin.
Though today we’ve got a tiny little misty-drizzle of what could turn into rain. Wettest it’s been in a very long time.
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and this
http://blog.al.com/live/2014/01/fairhope_restaurant_owner_goes.html
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1,2,3 — well Cheney wanted an imperial presidency…..
Income inequality is a serious issue. A certain amount is not acceptable but probably necessary. However, too much income inequality is bad for the economy, breaks down the middle class, fractures the sense of community, and generally lead to greater social and moral ills in society.
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