Tag: Waste

Democratic presidential candidate John Delaney thinks it's a waste of time for candidates to talk about the Electoral College. “I would love to get rid of the Electoral College because I don’t think it’s the right way -- but it’s not changing. Doing things that matter to the American people.” “Every vote matters and the way we can make that happen is that we can have national voting, and that means get rid of the Electoral College,” said another Democratic White House hopeful, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, in remarks Monday at Jackson State University in Mississippi. Delaney also addressed the topic of age, and the question of whether fellow candidates like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., 77, and former Vice President Joseph Biden, 76, were too old to run, reacting to a column in The Washington Post asking if the two veteran politicians had waited too long to pursue the high office. “I don’t think people should be telling the American people that, you know, someone based on their age isn’t qualified to be the president. That’s up for the American people to decide,” Delaney, 55, told McCallum. “It’s crazy. Look, I’m a capitalist. “I believe in the power of capitalism, in its ability to create jobs and innovate, but I also believe in strong social programs.”

Human feces, overflowing garbage, illegal off-roading and other damaging behavior in fragile areas were beginning to overwhelm some of the West’s iconic national parks, as a partial government shutdown left the areas open to visitors but with little staff on duty. “It’s a free-for-all,” Dakota Snider, 24, who lives and works in Yosemite Valley, said by telephone Monday, as Yosemite National Park officials announced closings of some minimally supervised campgrounds and public areas within the park that are overwhelmed. “It’s so heartbreaking. “We’re concerned there’ll be impacts to visitors’ safety.” “It’s really a nightmare scenario,” Garder said. Campers at Joshua Tree National Park in Southern California’s deserts were reporting squabbles as different families laid claims to sites, with no rangers on hand to adjudicate, said Ethan Feltges, who operates the Coyote Corner gift shop outside Joshua Tree. Feltges and other business owners around Joshua Tree had stepped into the gap as much as possible, hauling trailers into the park to empty overflowing trash bins and sweeping and stocking restrooms that were still open, Feltges said. Feltges himself had set up a portable toilet at his store to help the visitors still streaming in and out of the park. Joshua Tree said it would begin closing some campgrounds for all but day use. Visitors were allowing their dogs to run off-leash in an area rich with bears and other wildlife, and scattering bags of garbage along the roads, Snider said. In Yellowstone National Park, private companies have picked up some of the maintenance normally done by federal workers.

Breaking News Alert (Henrietta Wildsmith/The Times) A disgruntled former city employee wearing a shirt with a mayoral candidate's name told Shreveport sanitation workers to call in sick to disrupt trash pickup, perhaps to hurt Mayor Ollie Tyler's chances in the coming runoff election, the mayor said Wednesday. Tyler said the former employee was wearing a campaign shirt for Adrian Perkins, the mayor's opponent in Saturday's election, and told sanitation workers that he soon would be their boss when instructing them not to appear for work on Monday and Tuesday — apparently suggesting that Perkins had tapped him to become city public works director. Sanitation and streets and drainage employees all work in the city Public Works Department. Tyler said the former employee's action appeared planned to affect the outcome of Saturday's election, although she said she couldn't be certain. "It's unfortunate if it was politically motivated." "I wouldn't have authorized this at all," Perkins said. Tyler and other city managers said 15 sanitation workers earlier this week called in sick and did not show up for work Monday and Tuesday, idling 10 to 12 collection trucks. Sheila Johnson, the union president for city employees, said the employees calling in sick were not politically motivated to do so. Crawford said the employees who called in sick attended a weekly safety meeting Wednesday morning with other employees but refused to stay when asked to assist in trash pickups. "We will not stand for employees playing politics with the daily operations of this city," Crawford said.

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Furious about her treatment on the CBS news-magazine program on Sunday night, Betsy DeVos spoke to reporters on Monday, and called “60 Minutes” a “total waste of a half hour.” “I had never watched ‘60 Minutes’ before, but I can tell you this, I will never watch it again,” the Education Secretary said. “I have better things to do with a half hour of my time.” Calling her interviewer, Lesley Stahl, a practitioner of “gotcha journalism at its worst,” DeVos said that it was “very unfair of her to ask me so many questions about education.” “She asked me one thing about schools, and then another, and another,” she said. “If I had to answer every question she had about schools, I would have had to bone up on education for a month.” DeVos said that she was “frustrated” that Stahl neglected to ask her about any of her “really good ideas” for the nation’s schools, such as “purchasing guns for teachers with money that is currently being wasted on books.” “If a bear comes into your classroom, throwing a book at him will only stun him momentarily, at best,” DeVos said.