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Volume XIX • Number 43 • November 8 - 14, 2012 •
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Troubled aftermath of hurricane horror By MIAWLING LAM Local homes are slowly getting back on the grid but mail delivery has ground to a halt and residents are facing a crippling gasoline shortage following the devastation of superstorm Sandy. As city agencies, utility providers and elected officials continue relief efforts in the battered region, those in Riverdale are reeling from the damage caused by the historic storm. Some power outages still persist, cable, phone and Internet service remains patchy and local drivers are being forced to endure epic lines at gas stations as pumps run dry. As of 10 a.m. Tuesday, Con Edison’s outage map showed around 5,000 customers remain
without power in the Bronx, of which 1,000 are in the Riverdale/ Kingsbridge area. The bulk of the blackouts were in Fieldston and Spuyten Duyvil, but service is slated to be restored in those areas by 11:59 p.m. on Friday, November 9. Commanding officer of the 50th Precinct Captain Kevin Burke said despite the emerging problems, local cleanup efforts were progressing smoothly. He cited power outages as one of the biggest issues post-Sandy and said police have stepped up patrols in the area to deter potential looters and assist residents. “We have two police cars in the area at all times,” he said. “We are looking to maintain a high visibility to prevent Continued on Page 10
Northbound traffic on Riverdale Ave. was reduced to one lane on Friday as motorists queued for gas.
No matter how the election came out, here are the reasons why How Mitt Romney won... How Barack Obama won... By IRA STOLL Mitt Romney is now President-Elect Romney, and it is because of these six reasons: “One-term proposition”: “If I don’t have this done in three years, then there’s gonna be a one-term proposition,” President Obama told NBC’s Matt Lauer in February 2009. He was talking about an economic recovery. As much as President Obama tried either to blame the previous administration or to argue that, bad as things are, it would have been even worse without his actions, the fact remained that the economy — with 7.9% unemployment, 2% economic growth, and 47 million Americans on food stamps — was just too weak. The president, precisely as he himself had predicted, got the blame. Peace and prosperity: Incumbents get re-elected in cases of peace and prosperity. Mr. Obama didn’t deliver the prosperity (please see “one-term proposition,” above), and the violent deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, in an attack launched on September 11 undercut Mr. Obama’s claim to have delivered peace. ObamaCare: President Obama thought he was being clever by delaying the full implementation of ObamaCare until 2014, after the election. But the consequence is that benefits the law would provide remain strictly theoretical to many voters. To run
By IRA STOLL Call it the Obama paradox: He’s been a failure as a president, but he was reelected, anyway. How can it possibly be explained? The answer is somewhere in these three
President-elect Mitt Romney successfully against the Republican claim that the law raises premiums, expands bureaucracy, cuts Medicare, and increases taxes, Mr. Obama needed a better response than just coverage for 25-year-olds and Continued on Page 19
President-elect Barack Obama
plausible story lines: The voters reelected Obama-Boehner, not Obama-Biden. The President Obama who’s leading in the polls isn’t the overreaching president of the first two years of his term, the Obama of the stimulus bill, the Dodd-Frank financial “reform” bill, and ObamaCare. That President Obama disappeared, or at least was hidden away, on Election Day 2010, to be replaced for the most part by the President Obama who worked with the Republican Speaker of the House, John Boehner, to extend the Bush income tax cuts for two years, add a payroll tax cut, keep Guantanamo open, and ratify free trade agreements with Panama, Colombia, and South Korea. The stock market, as measured by the Standard and Poor’s 500 Index, is up about 20% since Election Day 2010. Health care costs and energy costs are leveling off. By re-electing a Republican House, voters are rejecting President Obama’s argument that things would be better without the Republican obstructionists. They’re saying, instead, that they like the obstructed Obama better than the unobstructed one, and that the combination of a Republican House and President Obama might be something better than a failure. A second story line is that Romney was Continued on Page 12