As the election year begins, President Obama’s New Year’s resolutions come to bear.
News of Richard Cordray’s recess appointment to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has Republicans up in arms after they successfully blocked his appointment since July.
House Speaker John Boehner called the president’s move an “unprecedented power grab,” which might be true, legally speaking, because of the Senate’s own unprecedented “pro forma” sessions designed to stop the appointment. Of course, Democrats might compare the president’s 28 recess appointments in his first term to 61 made by President George W. Bush in the same period. Whatever the case, the move ups the partisanship ante in what promises to be a bruising election year for both sides of the aisle.
Some day, presidents will be able to make recess appointments disappear into the time space continuum. Or at least they can now dream of doing so: Scientists at Cornell University have successfully created a tiny temporal cloak of invisibility by changing the speed of light beams.
Cloaking devices sound somewhere between Star Wars technology and Harry Potter magic, we know, but lab workers apparently were able to create the effect by making the light beams too fast or too slow to be seen. The duration of time they were able to make “disappear”? Only 40 trillionths of a second. Dreams deferred, aspiring super heroes, dreams deferred.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is in the news again as well. He’s planning a weeklong getaway to Uruguay’s Punta del Este at the home of a fellow mogul, and the stories of the preparations made for the billionaire and his buddies are getting bizarre.
Zuckerberg’s reported requests include: sending all of the pets and animals of the estate to the vet to avoid any allergic reactions, cleaning everything the place with special chemicals, and replacing all the furniture.
Everybody needs some pampering on vacation, but replacing all of the furniture seems like just the kind of annoying Facebook redesign we all hate to see.
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