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This is the most important week of President Obama’s bid for a second term in November.
Consider:
The
Supreme Court will rule not only on the constitutionality of Obama’s landmark health-care law, but the highest court in the country also will hand down judgment on Arizona’s stringent illegal immigration law .
Congress will be forced into action (or inaction) on
federal student loans and highway projects — both of which will expire within the next week.
The House will vote on whether to hold Attorney General
Eric Holder in contempt of Congress due to his refusal to turn over some documents related to the "Fast and Furious" gunrunning operation.
Any one of those issues — in isolation — would be a major political event with resultant consequences on the presidential race. Combined them all in the space of a week and we may well look back at this coming seven days as where/when Obama’s second term bid was made/broken.
First among equals when it comes to its impact on the dialogue of the presidential race is the Supreme Court’s ruling on the
Affordable Care Act , which is set to be handed down either Monday or Thursday.
Given that proclamation, if the Court rules against the law it’s hard not to see it as a repudiation of a major part of Obama’s first term in office.
Immigration has emerged as a hot-button issue of late, with Obama making a direct appeal to the growing Hispanic vote by announcing that his administration would cease to deport young illegal immigrants. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney sought to counter Obama’s move by announcing a series of policy proposals during a speech in Florida last week to the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO).
No matter how the Court rules on the Arizona law, which, among other things, broadens the latitude of police to detain those who they suspect may be in the country illegally, both Obama and Romney will be forced to react to it — and how they do so will be closely watched by the Latino community.
In Congress, time is running out on a long-standing stalemate — what else is new — over funding for federal highway projects, and a dispute over the interest rate paid on federal student loans, which is set to double on July 1 if no action has taken.
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The Transportation Security Administration already shares intelligence it collects with airports. Now a
House bill would expand TSA's intel sharing to local mass transit systems as well.
Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.), the bill's sponsor, said the legislation is a "common sense approach" to fighting terrorism. The House passed the bill May 30 and the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs is now considering the bill.
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Food, sex and Facebook posting views. It’s what your brain likes best.
The reward given by a person’s brain when a Facebook posting of theirs is viewed, liked and commented on has proven to be comparable in pleasure to the response from food and sex, according to a recent Harvard University study.
The research, which was published last month in an edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that social media outlets give way to an increased rate of "self-disclosure." The increase in "self-disclosure" leads to a spike in the amount of dopamine produced based on the pleasure or anticipation of a reward as a result of a social-media post being viewed, according to the research.
The study, which hints at Facebook’s role in the study but never directly cites the social-media giant, discovered "that humans so willingly self-disclose because doing so represents an event with intrinsic value, in the same way as with primary rewards such as food and sex."
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If you drive a car, you'll be blue when you read this: red cars attract more bird droppings than any other color.
The game-changing evidence comes from a new study from Great Britain, which recorded the number of "emissions" made on cars by the birds in five British cities.
More than 1100 cars were analyzed over a two-day period and at the end, 18 percent of the pooped-on cars were red and 14 percent were blue, followed by black (11 percent), white (7 percent), grey or silver (3 percent) and green cars, which only got one percent of the bird bombs.
Instead, they gathered anecdotal explanations from drivers. For instance, one Lexus driver suggested newly polished cars suffer because birds see a reflection of themselves, while a Ford Focus owner believed the darker the color the deeper the reflection and the more violent the reaction.
Others thought birds saw red as a danger or they went for similar colors to their own plumage. In seaside resorts seagulls went for white cars, while in cities pigeons go for grey
