Most Recent Posts

The spending bill in Congress is not just about money. Tucked inside the bill are provisions to change regulations affecting everything from banking to the environment. One regulatory rollback has those concerned about truck safety especially upset.

The regulation is part of a series of rules that spell out the number of hours that long-haul truck drivers, the ones behind the wheel of the big rigs on the interstates, can be on the road.

Last year, a rule took effect that required those drivers to take two consecutive nights off after every 70 hours they spend behind the wheel.

The trucking industry, which didn't like the requirement in the first place, said it had an unintended consequence: It forced more truckers to take to the road early in the morning, when commuters and school buses are out.

"Those hours are less safe statistically," says Dave Osiecki, vice president of the American Trucking Association. "They're trying to reduce nighttime crashes? They may be causing daytime crashes."

The Two-Way

'Cromnibus' Spending Bill Passes, Just Hours Before Deadline

No one knows yet if that rule caused the number of crashes to increase; the Department of Transportation hasn't compiled accident data for the past year. But Osiecki says truck crashes had been declining before the rule took effect.

He says the regulation has also hurt industry profits.

"You're talking about $1 billion in lost productivity to this industry," Osiecki says.

7 Things You Didn't Know Were In The 'Cromnibus'

So the association and its congressional allies wrote a provision into the spending bill, undoing the rule, at least temporarily.

The Obama administration opposed the change, saying that driver fatigue is a leading factor in large truck crashes, which killed more than 3,500 people in 2012. Safety groups are angry, too.

"It stinks," says Daphne Izer, who founded Parents Against Tired Truckers after her son and three of his friends were killed by a truck driver who had fallen asleep behind the wheel on Maine's turnpike.

"Drivers will be allowed to drive up to 82 hours a week," Izer says. "That's insane. That's twice the normal work week, and drivers don't get paid overtime. It's going to be more death and destruction on our highways."

The provision in the spending bill also calls for a detailed study of the effect of the regulations on truck crashes. The measure only rolls back the new rules until next October, when both sides expect to resume their arguments.

Yes, we know the 2008 presidential election is years in the past and will not come around again. The question is, does Sen. Ted Cruz know this?

The question arises because the junior senator from Texas, in hot pursuit of the presidency, has chosen a trail blazed by Barack Obama six years ago. Obama was in the midst of his first Senate term when he barged into a field that featured Hillary Clinton, then a second-term senator from New York, and several other seasoned veterans of national politics. The word was audacity, and it was right there in the title of Obama's book.

When the upstart from Illinois emerged the Democratic nominee that summer and the winner in November, many foresaw a wave of emulation. We now have Cruz, the constitutional crusader, generating White House buzz in just his second year in office, just as Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts does ditto on the left. And that's not to mention old-timers like Rand Paul and Marco Rubio, running hard for national notice as they finish their fourth year in the Senate.

Few now recall the days when senators and governors felt they needed the credential of at least one re-election before launching themselves at the White House. That notion now seems as ancient as the 19th century bromide about how "the office seeks the man."

Even in this age of galloping ambition, the 43-year-old Cruz rides ahead of the pack. While Obama liked to quote Martin Luther King's line about "the fierce urgency of now," Cruz seeks to embody it at every turn. He speaks for those conservatives most fiercely urgent about battling the current president at every available moment. He has made their cause his own. He did it in October 2013, when he engineered a brief and partial shutdown of the federal government over Obamacare. This past weekend, he tried to do it again.

This time, the immediate target was Obama's recent executive action deferring deportation for more than 4 million immigrants in the U.S. illegally. Calling it "executive amnesty," Cruz insisted on resisting the bipartisan budget deal that would fund immigration operations through February (and the rest of the federal government through September). Never mind that Republican leaders of the House and Senate had negotiated the deal with their Democratic counterparts and the president, and never mind that a bipartisan majority in the Senate planned to proceed with it.

Like every senator, Cruz is entitled to vote any way he wishes on the budget deal. Warren, among others, joined him in opposing it. But Cruz wanted also to force a point of order on the constitutionality of a budget that pays for a policy Cruz regards as unconstitutional. And he wanted the Senate to stay in session all weekend to deal with both issues, regardless of long-laid plans for this pre-holiday weekend.

Cruz, in just two years as the Hotspur of the Senate floor and committee rooms, may have already set a record for rapid alienation of colleagues – on both sides of the aisle. But his latest foray produced a new low in his intramural relations. His confreres did not appreciate either his freelancing or the self-righteous disdain he showed for their distress.

But beyond that, Cruz proved heedless in another way with real consequences. By forcing a Saturday session, he created extra innings of Senate floor time not anticipated by McConnell. And that opened a window of procedural opportunity for Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, who used it to advance two dozen controversial presidential appointments. These nominations might have languished when Republicans took over as the Senate majority in January. Now, they are poised to win approval by the Democrats in the waning hours of their majority status. They include a new surgeon general, a new head of the immigration agency and a batch of federal judges who may be on the bench for decades.

Cruz's office asserts that Reid would have moved as many nominees as he could regardless of what Republicans did. And the Texas senator can maintain that none of the fallout from his disruption really matters when compared to the principles at stake. Surely there are those who agree and honor him for his stand. But if he is also counting on being a martyr and a hero in the eyes of party activists – the people who will choose the party's next leader — he may find his timing is off.

The Obama example is a powerful goad to the young and the driven in both parties, just as John F. Kennedy's was to another generation of politicians half a century ago. But will voters in 2016 be looking for another gifted orator from Harvard Law to rise from the Senate's back benches?

After eight years of a president who reached the pinnacle of power almost overnight, the country may be looking for something different. As a candidate, Obama was inspiring — an avatar of youth and idealism. As president, he has often seemed less than fully up to the task, lacking the savvy and personal political skills that might have helped him succeed.

In 2016, some may be looking for another telegenic sensation who has just burst on the scene — too big for the confines of one statehouse, or too dynamic to stew in the Senate. But as a rule, in choosing presidents, American voters have alternated between older faces and younger, between the fresh and the familiar, and between the rousing and the reassuring.

It will not take much study to decide which kind of candidate is on offer in Mr. Cruz.

Sen. Ted Cruz

2016 Republican presidential nomination

2016 presidential election

The United States spends nearly $7 billion a year to operate a network of federal prisons that house more than 200,000 inmates. About half of them are incarcerated for drug crimes, a legacy of 1980s laws that prosecutors use to target not only kingpins but also low-level couriers and girlfriends. Multiple convictions for small-time offenses under those laws mean thousands of people are locked up for decades, or even the rest of their lives.

This year, everyone from Attorney General Eric Holder to Tea Party Republicans in Congress has argued those stiff mandatory minimum prison sentences do more harm than good for thousands of drug offenders. Legislation to cut the tough-on-crime penalties has stalled on Capitol Hill, but it's likely to be reintroduced in 2015. Meanwhile, the White House and the Justice Department have taken the unprecedented step of asking for candidates who might win early release from prison through presidential pardons or commutations in the final years of the Obama presidency. That effort, known as Clemency Project 2014, is moving slowly.

Amid the backdrop of debate inside Washington and across the country, NPR decided to focus on the human toll of these mandatory prison sentences. We talked with judges who expressed tearful misgivings about sending people away for the rest of their lives for crimes that involved no violence. We found a newly-released inmate trying to reacquaint herself with her community in the Florida panhandle and rebuild ties with her grieving children after 17 years away from home. And we went inside a medium-security prison in New Jersey to find a lifer who says he deserves another chance. These people acknowledge they broke the law and accept the need for punishment. But they say their decades-long incarcerations cast a shadow that lingers over their families, damage that far outweighs the wrongs they did to put them in prison.

Kelly Brenner ushers in guests at the Adentro Dinner Club. This is a "puertas cerradas" restaurant – meaning behind closed doors. It's a culinary movement where people cook for paying guests in their homes. Adentro is the most well-reviewed in Buenos Aires.

Brenner who is originally from Boulder, Colo., acts as the host and her Argentine fianc Gabriel Aguallo does the cooking, focusing on grilled meat.

On a recent evening, visitors gasped with pleasure at the beautifully set dinner table before they were ushered up for cocktails on a roof terrace festooned with lights. Despite the success of the venture, the pair though say they have been struggling.

"Tourists would call and want to make a reservation for two months in advance but we couldn't take that reservation because we couldn't tell them how much it was gonna cost in two months," she says.

i i

An Argentine 100 pesos bank note (top), featuring an image of former first lady Eva Peron, is displayed next to a U.S. $100 note. At the official rate, US$1 is about 8 and a half pesos. But at the so-called blue-dollar rate – which is actually the black market rate — it's about 13 pesos to the dollar. Enrique Marcarian/Reuters/Landov hide caption

itoggle caption Enrique Marcarian/Reuters/Landov

An Argentine 100 pesos bank note (top), featuring an image of former first lady Eva Peron, is displayed next to a U.S. $100 note. At the official rate, US$1 is about 8 and a half pesos. But at the so-called blue-dollar rate – which is actually the black market rate — it's about 13 pesos to the dollar.

Enrique Marcarian/Reuters/Landov

The problem is inflation.

It's been ravaging Argentina's economy. Government figures are considered highly suspect and many private economists estimates that inflation is running at around 40 percent this year.

Prices rise at a dizzying rate, Brenner says. Some restaurants in Argentina only have their menus on a chalkboard because it's too expensive to print new ones every month with the new, higher prices.

She says she just couldn't run her business relying on the local currency.

"We've just started at the beginning of this month charging in dollars instead of charging in pesos, the local currency, because it was too chaotic," she says.

A Long Affair With The Dollar

Argentina has had a long love affair with the U.S. dollar — mainly because its economy has historically been so bumpy.

"People go to the dollar basically to preserve the value of their purchasing power, to hedge against inflation," explains Alan Cibils the chair of the political economy department of the National University of General Sarmiento.

Because a peso will buy you less and less each day, people put their money in more stable dollars.

But getting those dollars has become increasingly difficult. Argentina defaulted on its debt in 2001 and chose to default again this past summer so has been locked out of international markets where it could pay on credit. It also needs dollars to pay for things. The way it's been getting them is preventing dollars from leaving the country, with tough currency controls.

The government there has even put currency sniffing dogs at border crossings to try and prevent capital flight.

Which leads to scenes like this: I'm buying a ferry ticket inside Argentina and I'm being told I can't pay in pesos, I have to pay in dollars, or with my U.S. credit card.

The ticket seller tells me the government issued a decree that all foreigners have to pay for their travel in "hard currency."

A Flourishing Black Market

Argentina now has a dual currency system. At the official rate, one dollar is about 8 and a half pesos.

And then you have the so-called blue-dollar rate – which is actually the black market rate of about 13 pesos to the dollar.

Related NPR Stories

Parallels

The Man Argentines Love To Hate Is An American Judge

Parallels

Grandmother Finds Grandson, Abducted In Argentina's Dirty War

Parallels

Argentina: Where Cash Is King And Robberies Are On The Rise

Which brings us back to the sharing economy. Kelly Brenner can charge in dollars because most of her clients are tourists.

Airbnb, where people rent out their homes for cash, has become a huge hit in Argentina. It has the added benefit that the homeowner can charge and get paid in dollars.

According to Airbnb, there are now 8,500 active Argentine properties on the site. That's a 70 percent jump from last year. It's one of their fastest growing markets in Latin America, according to the company.

Back at the Adentro Dinner Club, Kelly Brenner says it really a tiny fraction of the population who has regular access to foreign currency, though some estimates say that Argentinians love to hoard dollars so much that they hold one of every 15 dollars in the world.

Brenner jokes the three national pastimes are "soccer and Malbec and looking for dollars."

Still, the vast majority of Argentinians are paid in pesos and have to deal with inflation. She says she's lucky and she wishes there was a strong national currency.

"But we don't want to raise the prices, we want to keep it somewhat stable," she says.

And that means ditching the peso and charging dollars.