The Vice President is position within the executive branch of the United States government that is behind the President in the presidential line of succession. The position was created based on Article 1 Section 3 on the United States Constitution which also gives the Vice President his power.

The Vice President has the main job to assume the Presidency if the for some reason the President cannot successfully act as president, for example, due to death, temporary incapacitation, or resignation. If both the Vice President and the Cabinet judge feel that the President is not fit for his duties, the he can take over the position. So far, only nine Vice Presidents have succeeded to the Presidency.

The Vice President is also the President of the United States Senate. In the case that a tie occurs during a vote in Senate, he has the power to cast a tie-breaking vote. Aside from this, the Vice President usually has a junior member of the majority party preside over the Senate.

According to the 12th Amendment and Section 3 of the 14th Amendment in the U.S. Constitution,the Vice President must be born in the United States, be a resident for at least 14 years, and be at least 35 years old. Furthermore, the individual can be disqualified by rebelling against the United States after swearing an oath to support the U.S. Constitution.

The Vice President is elected to a four year term through the Electoral College voting in the same way the President gets elected. Each member of the Electoral College has one vote for the position. Prior to the 12th amendment, the Vice President would be the individual who received the second largest amount of votes. Unlike the President, the he is not limited to only two elected terms, but rather there is no limitation.

The Vice President’s office is located in the West Wing of the White House along with one within the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Like the President and previous Vice Presidents since 1974, he also has an official residence, at the U.S. Naval Observatory.

Currently, Joseph R. Biden is in office as the 47th Vice President of the U.S. under the Obama administration. As Vice President, he has helped President Obama by being very critical of different positions, and looking at issues from many different angles.

 

The Obama administration is moving ahead with a plan to require cleaner gasoline as a means to reduce smog and traces of sulfur in gasoline. 

 

The rules are set to take effect in 2017, and their impact would not be realized until a decade later, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. A study released by the Environmental Protection agency stated the new rule has the potential to save 2,000 lives a year and significantly reduce the likelihood of childhood asthma. 

 

“We estimate the rule to reduce smog by 30 percent”, said Bill Becker the director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies, which represents several air quality control agencies throughout the world. 

 

A significant point of contention is how significantly the harsher rules would add to the price of gasoline. Oil and Refinery industry experts have postulated that such a move would require motorists to pay nearly 10 cents more per gallon of gasoline; however, the White House claims the move would add less than a penny per gallon, based on studies released by the Environmental Protection Agency. 

 

Representatives of the energy industry disagree with the government’s estimates. “There is a boatload of federal regulations coming from the EPA that could put upward pressure on gas prices,” said Bob Greco, a managing director at the American Petroleum Institute. 

 

The new rule targets sulfur, which is naturally present in crude oil. The more sulfur present in gasoline, the less efficiently an automobile runs. The new rules would force refineries to reduce sulfur content by nearly 60 percent to 10 parts per million from 30 parts per million, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

 

The United States Federal Government estimates the rule change to have the same effect as taking 33 million automobiles off the road. 

 

Refineries serving the European Union, Japan and California are already required to meet these stricter rules. 

 

The Sierra Club praised the plan as executive director Michal Brune proclaimed the rules to be an excellent use of current technology to “clean up our cars and fuel sources. “

 

The rules were developed with advice from car manufacturers, refiners and state officials, according to the Obama administration. 

 

Of the 111 refineries covered by the new rule, only 16 will need to purchase new equipment to meet the associated regulations. 

 

“Today’s proposed standards are the next step to protect public health; these rules will provide the automotive industry with the certainty they require to offer the same car models throughout the United States,” said EPA Administrator Bob Perciasepe.  

 

Source: whitehouse.gov

 

 

Mark another One Down: Republican Senator Mark Kirk Announces Support for Gay Marriage

 

Republican Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois announced today that he supports gay marriage. The announcement makes Kirk the second sitting Republican senator to affirm support for same-sex marriage. 

 

Senator Kirk, who previously opposed a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, said in a post on his website “gay couples should be given the right to civil marriage.”

 

“Our time on this planet is limited, I know this better than most,” said Kirk, who survived a stroke in January of 2012. “Life ultimately comes down to who you love and who loves you back, and the United States government has no place in the middle.”

 

Kirk was required to go through months of rehabilitation before returning to the nation’s capital earlier this year. Kirk, through his posting, said that when he went back to the Senate he promised he would return “with an open mind and a greater respect for people.”

 

Kirk is the ranking Republican lawmaker in the state of Illinois, and his announcement comes less than one month after Senator Rob Portman of Ohio became the first conservative Senator to support gay marriage and one week after the United States Supreme Court held two days of arguments on the subject. 

 

The announcement also comes as the Illinois Legislature is giving consideration to a measure that would make Illinois the 10th state in the U.S. to allow same-sex marriage. 

 

The state senate voted in February to lift a ban on Illinois same-sex marriage; this legislation was then approved by a House committee, but has yet to be brought to the floor for a formal vote. House Speaker Michael Madigan believes that supporters are a dozen or so votes short the required mark to pass the bill. That said, Governor Pat Quinn announces that she would sign the measure if approved on the floor. 

Kirk’s announcement could offer political cover to the Republican party in the Illinois House who are for the first time considering a yes vote but remain fearful of a backlash from the conservative base. 

 

Senator Kirk served five terms in Congress representing Chicago’s northern suburbs before he secured the Senate seat vacated by President Barack Obama. 

 

Source: whitehouse.gov

 

Over 3,000 people gathered in Amsterdam to protest Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit on Monday. The throng of gay rights activists and supporters flew rainbow flags at half-mast around the city that prides itself on expression and enjoying every kind of freedom. 

 

The cheerfully dressed crowd constantly chanted “Go home Putting!” during a festive protest outside the museum where Putin enjoyed dinner with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte. 

 

Amsterdam in 2001 became the first nation to legalize gay marriage. 

Protesters were primarily targeting a bill before the Russian parliament that outlaws homosexual “propaganda” among minors, but also a broad rights clampdown in the nation of Russia, where Putin is serving his third term as president. 

 

Western governments and activists have expressed considerable anger over the measure, which imposes fines of up to 500,000 rubles (roughly $15,850) for any “public acts” that promote homosexuality or pedophilia. 

 

“The law does not impose violations on the rights of sexual minorities in our nation,” said a defiant Putin. “These people enjoy full liberties and rights like everyone else in Russia.”

 

Putin went onto say that gay couples could not produce children and that “Russia and Europe have demographic problems.”

 

“We need to reach a majority with this community; we need to work collectively and not insult each other.”

 

Dozens of police units were deployed in the highly secured area, including anti-riot forces. Dutch police reported that they had briefly detained one individual, a gay activist who wrote expletives against the Russian President on the window of his Amsterdam studio. 

 

Putin’s visit centered on trade negotiations with the Netherlands; many business leaders traveled with Putin discuss trade deals. 

 

Russia and The Netherlands have a detailed trade relationship as many Russian companies are registered in The Netherlands because of its favorable tax regime. 

 

Source: CNN

 

The Federal Reserve typically releases minutes from its 2pm meetings; however, it was forced to put the minutes out five hours early on Wednesday after learning that some people inadvertently received the minutes on Tuesday. 

 

The Federal Reserve accidently emailed the minutes from its March meeting to approximately 100 people a day early. While no major announcements were expected to come from the minutes, they are nevertheless viewed as a primary document that can move markets and influence politics. Wall Street analysts and players often delve deep into the minutes for clues about when the central bank may cut back on its bond-buying policy or hike-up interest rates.  

 

For this reason, the minutes are typically protected by the central bank and their release is supposed to be executed in a precise manner. A spokesman for the Fed told various news outlets that the mistake was entirely accidental and it can be chalked up to a human error. The 100 or so individuals on the list included mostly Congressional employees and employees of trade organizations. These individuals received the minutes shortly after 2 p.m. on Tuesday. 

 

After noticing the error this morning, the United States Federal Reserve decided to release the minutes to the public at 9 a.m. on Wednesday. It is currently not clear whether any trading took place based on the premature release, but the Reserve Board’s Inspector General will conduct an investigation regarding the error. 

The minutes contained very little information regarding expected Fed policy. The primary takeaway from the release is that most Fed members think the central bank should keep buying $85 billion in assets a month, at least until the midway point of this year. 

 

The Fed’s current policy includes purchasing $45 billion in treasuries and $40 billion in mortgage-backed securities each month; the primary intent is to lower long-term interesting rates. That said, the program, which is regarded as quantitative easing, is viewing by some as the primary reason why the S&P 500 and the Dow are at record highs. 

 

The central bank continues to keep short-term interest rates close to zero to further boost the economy. The Fed announced it plans to keep the interest rate near zero until the unemployment rate dips below 6.5 percent or inflation exceeds 2.5 percent a year. The bulk of Fed officials do not expect this to happen until at least 2015. 

 

Source: AP

 

 

President Obama’s $3.77 trillion budget proposal for 2014 calls for long-term changes to Social Security and Medicare in hopes of reducing the deficit by $1.8 trillion over the next decade.

 

The budget’s blueprint, which has already drawn criticism from both the right and left, offers changes to Social Security and Medicare. The budget also includes tax increases that would hit high-income corporations and homes. 

 

The Obama budget also calls for greater spending on infrastructure, nondefense research and early childhood education programs. These investments would be funded by other measures to avoid further adding to the deficit. 

 

“Debate in Washington has raged between reducing our deficits and making investments needed to grow our economy. My budget answers this argument; we can grow our economy, and reduce our deficits,” said the President. 

 

President Obama’s budget was released with a delay, coming after the House and Senate each passed separate and different 2014 budget frameworks. 

 

While the proposal is not expected to fly on Capitol Hill, Obama’s budget sets a powerful marker for continuing debt talks with lawmakers. 

 

President Obama’s budget calls for a $50 billion investment to repair bridges, highways, airports and transit systems. The budget would also create a National Infrastructure Bank to merge public and private capital for noteworthy projects.

 

Obama has already faced heavy criticism from the left for supporting a switch to a chained CPI measure, which is a new way to track inflation to ultimately reduce federal spending by slowing the growth in federal benefits which are adjusted each year for cost of living purposes. Obama’s budget; however, calls for ways to compensate low-income veterans and recipients of Supplemental Security Income. 

 

By 2020, the use of the chained CPI measure would yield an average tax increase of $311 among the 80 percent of homes that would see a tax increase. 

 

Among the President’s new tax measures, Obama plans to place a cap on the tax-advantaged portion of a person’s savings across tax-preferred retirement accounts, such as IRAs. 

 

The President’s debt reduction proposal comes from an offer he made to House Speaker John Boehner during last year’s fiscal cliff talks. The proposal, if accepted, would replace the automatic budget cuts, which took effect last month.  

 

 

Source: whitehouse.gov

 

A recent wave of tremendous cyber-attacks has proven it is possible to bend, but not shatter the Internet. 

 

It is easy for a virus to take down a website; attack methods known as “distributed denials of service” enable cybercriminals to direct considerable amounts of traffic to a website to overwhelm its servers and render the site unreachable. Government websites, banks and financial exchanges have been commonly targeted venues for distributed denial of service attacks. 

 

However last month, European spam-prevention service Spamhaus was rocked by the largest known cyber-attack in history causing Internet speeds to slow throughout large chunks of Europe. The attackers utilized nearly 100,000 servers to transmit 300 gigabits of traffic per second during the breach. The attack was more than three times larger than the Iranian-sponsored cyber-attacks of September 2012, which impeded access to some American banks’ websites for days. 

 

Yet many experts contend that the entire Internet cannot just be flipped on or off like a simple light switch. “The infrastructure of the Internet is highly robust and designed to guarantee reliable traffic at a high quality of service,” said Dr. Schneck, chief technology officer at Intel’s Internet security division. 

 

Despite the relative ease of taking down individual websites, it would be particularly difficult to sustain a widespread level of attack for a lengthy period of time, let alone a continuous flow of traffic that would exceed the limits of Internet service providers. 

The Internet is also too widely distributed to fall victim to a widespread attack. There have numerous occasions when regional access to the Internet was disrupted, either by attacks on vital services, accidental cable cutting, or a government-run utility limiting or shutting off access. Yet the Internet continued to work for billions of people outside of those regions. 

 

In the United States, a number of redundancies are built into the Internet; if one or two avenues are disrupted from your local network to the Internet, you likely won’t even notice a hitch. 

 

Another reason why the Internet is impossible to take down: cyber attackers depend on the Internet to operate. “The Internet is what the attackers need to deliver their attack,” said Gavin Reed, the director of engineering and products for Cisco. “I suppose it is possible for an attack to be large enough to destroy large chunks of the Internet, but we have not seen that happen.” 

 

Only government bodies have the ability to grind the entire Internet to a halt for a sustained period of time. So even as cyber-attacks increase in frequency and size, cyber criminals will never be able to take down the entire Internet. 

 

Source: whitehouse.gov

 

 

As the battle for the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act heats up in the state of New York, two prominent members of the Trans Rights Coalition have launched powerful media campaigns to educate New York residents about discrimination on the basis of expression and gender identity. 

 

The New York State Pride Agenda movement—often known as the Empire State Pride Agenda Campaign—has been broadcasting a radio spot in a number of media markets throughout the state. These advertisements serve as a reminder to listeners that New York employees should be judged on their accomplishments and merits, and not on the basis of their expression or gender identity. The Human Rights Campaign issued a simply statement to back the initiative of the Empire State Pride Agenda campaign, by saying “nobody deserves to be fired from their job or not hired for an employment opportunity because of who they are.”

 

Housing works has issued several postcards that illustrate the struggles that transgender New Yorkers face on a day to day basis. Housing works also explains on its webpage why the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act is such a critical piece of legislation to an initiative whose mission is related to the homelessness and HIV populations. 

 

Both campaigns draw attention to the prominence of New York State passing the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act this legislative session. This piece of legislation would prohibit discrimination against transgender people in employment, education, housing, credit and public accommodations. The state of New York protects lesbian, gay, bisexual, and heterosexual people from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. 

 

The Human Rights Campaign claims that it is time for the state of New York to close the gap and guarantee that transgender individuals are afforded the same vital anti-discrimination protections that are provided to the rest of the population. Currently sixteen states, Washington D.C., and 166 cities and towns in the United States institute similar laws, including Buffalo, Albany, New York City, Suffolk County, Rochester, and Tompkins County in the state of New York.  

 

 

Source: Human Rights Campaign

 

Support for same-sex marriage is now seemingly a wide held belief among adults born after 1980 as 70 percent claim that they believe lesbian women and gay men should be able to marry.

 

These results were released today from Pew Research; the poll showed millennial support for same sex marriage far outpaces any other generation in the United States. Among those Americans born between 1928 and 1945, only 31 percent support gay marriage. Meanwhile, nearly 40 percent of Baby Boomers and roughly half of Generation X-ers say they believe gay men and lesbian women should be allowed to legally marry. 

 

The prodigious support of the millennial generation has driven a significant shift in the country’s overall attitude toward same sex marriage. Presently, roughly 50 percent of Americans are in favor of legalizing gay marriage while 44 percent are opposed to the formation. This is a dramatic reversal from just 10 years ago, when over 58 percent of Americans opposed gay marriage and just a third of Americans were in favor of gay marriage. 

 

Last Tuesday, Rhode Island became the 10th state in the U.S. to legalize gay marriage. The state Senate of Delaware is set to vote tomorrow on a measure that only narrowly passed in the state House that would also allow gay men and lesbian women to secure a legal marriage. 

 

Earlier this year, the United States Supreme Court heard a pair of cases that challenged the constitutionality of a federal law that prohibits the government from conferring benefits on gay spouses and a California state law that prohibits the formation of gay marriages. The results of these cases are expected to be rendered sometime in June. Gay rights activists and supporters are hoping that the Court will rule in a matter that will legalize gay marriage in more or all of the 50 states in the U.S. 

 

 

Source: Human Rights Campaign

 

Today, President Barack Obama welcomed President Park Guen-hye of South Korea to the White House to celebrate 60 years of bilateral partnership between the United States and South Korea. 

 

Established after the Korean War, the United States-Republic of Korean Alliance is a linchpin of security and peace on the Korean Peninsula and within the Asia Pacific Region. 

 

Today, the two leaders affirmed that they would continue building on the last sixty years of stability by adapting and strengthening the alliance to adhere to the security challenges of the 21st century. 

 

“Guided by our shared vision, we are investing in the shared technologies and capabilities and missile defense systems that allow our forces to operate and succeed with one another,” said President Obama. The President added, “we are determined to be fully prepared to meet fully any challenge or threat to our nation’s security.”

President Park and President Obama also agreed to continue implementing the historic trade agreement between South Korea and the United States, which is already yielding benefits for both of our nations, President Obama said. 

 

“The United States is selling more exports to South Korea, more services, more manufactured goods, and more agricultural products,” the President said. “And even though we have a long way to go, our automobile exports are up nearly 50 percent, and the Big Three (Ford, Chrysler, and GM) are selling more and more cars in South Korea.

The agreement between the two nations is expected to boost American exports by roughly $10 billion and support tens of thousands of American jobs, in addition to creating employment opportunities in Korea, President Obama said. 

 

President Obama thanked President Park, who is the Republic of South Korea’s first female President, for choosing the United States of America as her first foreign trip. The visit between the two presidents reflects South Korea’s progress over the past 60 years,” President Obama said, “from the lowly depths of war, to one of the globe’s strongest economies; from a recipient of international aid to a donor that now helps other countries develop.”  

 

 

Source: whitehouse.gov