Five Ways Barack Obama Can Mess with Republicans in 2015

Bloomberg.com:

President Barack Obama knows how to get under Republicans' skin (in so many ways, but in this case we're talking about going around Congress to get things done), and he ended 2014 with a bang: A climate deal with China. Executive action on immigration. A move to normalize relations with Cuba.

As he makes his New Year's resolutions, the liberated, second-term, post-midterm president's list may well include some new maneuvers to enrage the opposition party. Here are five ways he could do it again in 2015.

Keystone

You already know more than you ever thought you would about oil-sands crude, right? TransCanada Corp. wants to complete an $8 billion, 1,179-mile pipeline starting in the Canadian province of Alberta and running 830,000 barrels of oil per day through Nebraska into a network to refineries in Texas and Louisiana. While Obama cares about the Keystone XL project in the context of foreign policy and maintaining good relations with neighbor, ally and trading partner Canada, in 2012 he blocked it because of concerns in Nebraska and kicked it to the State Department for more study.

Now, incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, said he wants to start the new Congress by taking up a bill by Senator John Hoeven, a North Dakota Republican, to approve Keystone under congressional authority. Environmentalists and major Democratic donor Tom Steyer are fighting the project, saying it will worsen global warming and could trigger toxic spills. Republicans largely back the project, saying it can create jobs and reduce gas prices. Opponents say such benefits are greatly overstated or downright irrelevant, given how low gas prices have fallen lately.

Obama was coy throughout the midterms about which way he'll go, maintaining that it was in the State Department's hands and that he would weigh the pros and cons. But he doesn't want Congress to tell him what to do. And in recent weeks, he's hinted strongly that he's turned against Keystone XL. He told comedian Stephen Colbert that while it would be good for Canada, “it's not going to push down gas prices here in the United States,” and that any economic benefit must be weighed against contributing to the warming of the earth, “which could be disastrous.” In his year-end news conference, the president said that “it’s not even going to be a nominal benefit to U.S. consumers.” Asked whether he was issuing a veto threat, he demurred. “I'll see what they do,” he said of Republicans in Congress. “We'll take that up in the new year.”

Campaign finance reform

So-called dark-money nonprofits, such as those affiliated with the Koch brothers, could find it much harder to muck around in elections. Under current practices, up to half of these groups' money can be spent on politics. Changes to the Internal Revenue Service regulations governing 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations could shrink the percentage they can devote to election activities such as advertising. Overall, the aim would be to make it more difficult for any nonprofit group to engage in campaign politics; in practice, it would likely be perceived as a disproportionate handicap of conservative donor-backed organizations. These are among the reforms that the administration, regulatory groups or Congress could take on if so inclined (which Congress probably is not).

Climate change

Think power plants and methane.

Last year, Obama proposed power-plant standards Republicans oppose to reduce carbon dioxide by 26 percent by 2020 and 30 percent by 2030 from 2005 levels. The standards are set to be issued in June, and then states will have another year to adopt their own plans to carry the standards out. McConnell will make it a top priority to try to stop Obama, either by blocking funding to carry out the policy or by changing provisions of the Clean Air Act, said David Doniger, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council climate and clean air program. “It will be fought over by the Republicans all through the year,” he said. “There will be lots of lawsuits and so on. But the administration's very committed to this.”

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Despite Highest Poverty Numbers in 50 Years, Barack Obama Okays Illegals to Compete for Jobs in U.S.

HotAir.com:

It simply doesn’t make sense in any sort of context that says the job of the President of the United States is to look after the welfare of the country’s citizens:

The official U.S. unemployment rate has indeed fallen steadily during the past few years, but the economic recovery has created the fewest jobs relative to the previous employment peak of any prior recovery. The labor-force participation rate recently touched a 36-year low of 62.7%. The number of Americans not in the labor force set a record high of 92.6 million in September. Part-time work and long-term unemployment are still well above levels from before the financial crisis.

Worse, middle-class incomes continue to fall during the recovery, losing even more ground than during the December 2007 to June 2009 recession. The number in poverty has also continued to soar, to about 50 million Americans. That is the highest level in the more than 50 years that the U.S. Census has been tracking poverty. Income inequality has risen more in the past few years than at any recent time.

The true indicator of the actual unemployment rate is the labor participation rate. It is at a 36 year low. The fudged numbers used by the US government hides the actual depth of joblessness problem. And, frankly, it’s a “buyers market” in the labor market. Lots of labor competition for few jobs. That’s one reason you don’t see incomes rising and you do see underemployed Americans.

So let’s introduce about 5 million illegal workers from other countries and enable them to compete in an already depressed labor market and while we’re at it, let’s agitate for a raise in the minimum wage.

Mind blown.  How do you square that sort of action with your oath of office if you’re the President of the United States?

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Far-Left Supreme Court Justice Ruth Ginsburg: Citizens United Was The Current Supreme Court's Worst Ruling

HuffPo.com:

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg expressed her extreme regret over several of the current Court's rulings in a wide-ranging interview published in The New Republic Sunday evening, including their rejecting the commerce clause of President Barack Obama's health care law, and issuing a huge blow to the Voting Rights Act in their Shelby County v. Holder decision.

But the first Supreme Court ruling Ginsburg would send to the guillotine would be the Court's decision in the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, giving corporations and unions the green light to give and spend unlimited sums of money on independent political activity. "If there was one decision I would overrule," Ginsburg told The New Republic, it would be Citizens United.

"I think the notion that we have all the democracy that money can buy strays so far from what our democracy is supposed to be," she said.

Ginsburg said that the Court, in CItizens United as well as in the case of Shelby County, "should have respected the legislative judgment."

"Legislators know much more about elections than the Court does. ... I think members of the legislature, people who have to run for office, know the connection between money and influence on what laws get passed."

According to Ginsburg, things may have played out differently had Justice Sandra Day O'Connor not retired so soon. She told The New Republic that O'Connor would have sided with the minority on Citizens United, Shelby County, as well as the Court's Hobby Lobby ruling.

"I think she must be concerned about some of the court’s rulings, those that veer away from opinions she wrote," Ginsburg said.

This woman is nothing but a fraud. A leftist extremist. It's a wonder conservatives don't call her out more for what a predictable justice she is. And hell if she cares, as in her rapid senility, she could care less what people think of her rigid ideology what with every decision she makes coming down to which side conservatives are on

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Study Shows White People Believe One Successful Black Person Means Racism Is Over

And when white liberals somehow got Barack Obama elected POTUS, the "Black Power" movement effectively came to an end:

As the votes were tallied for the 2008 presidential election, conservative pundit William Bennett weighed in on the election's significance. “I’ll tell you one thing it means, as a former secretary of education,” Bennett said on CNN. “You don’t take any excuses anymore from anybody who says, ‘The deck is stacked.'”

Bennett, who is white, suggested that if Barack Obama could become president, so could any black man. Implicit in the argument was that systemic racial discrimination was no longer keeping black men and women from success. 

Bennett is far from alone in arguing that a single black American's success is proof that impenetrable racial barriers no longer exist. In fact, it's a common view, according to a recent study published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 

The study authors, Clayton R. Critcher, assistant professor at University of California Berkeley, and Jane L. Risen, associate professor at the University of Chicago, found that exposure to a single African-American in a high-performing position -- any position outside stereotypical jobs in which blacks “traditionally” excel -- is enough to make whites more likely to deny the existence of systemic racism. 

“People shifted the blame from vestiges of racism in America to problems in black communities,” Critcher told The Huffington Post over the phone.

To test this finding, Critcher and Risen recruited several hundred college students and adults to participate in eight experiments. In each study, participants were asked to identify images of marginally famous individuals.

In most cases, all participants were shown the same images, depicting moderately famous white men and women. However in certain cases, one group was presented with an image of a successful African-American, like Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier, while others saw an image of a white person of equivalent success, like Lockheed Martin Executive Chairman Robert Stevens. 

Then, participants were asked their opinion of the role of race in modern America, including whether they felt that race could influence workplace success. 

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