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2011
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February
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- Barker's Newsbites: Monday, February 28, 2011
- Thank you, Carl
- Weekend Newsbites: Sat. & Sun., Feb. 26 & 27, 2011
- Barker's Newsbites: Friday, February 27, 2011
- Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, February 23, 2011
- Remember...
- Barker's Newsbites: Tuesday, February 22, 2011
- Barker's Newsbites: Monday, February 21, 2011
- Weekend Newsbites: Sat. & Sun., Feb. 19 & 20, 2011
- So This Is America.... in the age of Obama...
- Barker's Newsbites: Friday, February 18, 2011
- Barker's Newsbites: Thursday, February 17, 2011
- Barak Hussein Obama: Math Challenged or Integrity ...
- Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, February 16, 2011
- Barker's Newsbites: February 15, 2011
- Barker's Newsbites: Monday, February 14, 2011
- Bush vs. Buchanan: Game, Set, Match... Buchanan!
- Weekend Newsbites: Sat. & Sun., Feb. 12 & 13, 2011
- My Goddaughter Is The Greatest...!!!
- I've Asked My Congresswoman, Nan Hayworth (R-NY-19...
- Barker's Newsbites: Friday, February 11, 2011
- About That Moron (Former) Rep. Christopher Lee
- Barker's Newsbites: Thursday, February 10/ 2011
- Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, February 9, 2011
- Barker's Newsbites: Tuesday, February 8, 2011
- Hey, Nan Hayworth (R-19-NY)... What's The Deal?
- Barker's Newsbites: Monday, February 7, 2011
- Worst Superbowl Half-Time Show... EVER...!!!
- Happy Birthday, Mr. President
- Weekend Newsbites: Sat. & Sun., Feb. 5 & 6, 2011
- Barker's Newsbites: Friday, February 4, 2011
- Barker's Newsbites: February 3, 2011
- Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, February 2, 2011
- Stock Market Gains...
- A Newsbite for Nan
- Barker's Newsbites: Tuesday, February 1, 2011
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February
(36)
About Me
- William R. Barker
- Pearl River, NY High School Class of '81; Northeastern University, Boston, MA Class of '87.
10 comments:
http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2011/02/02/nyc-expected-to-ban-smoking-in-parks-beaches/
By a vote of 36 to 11 on Wednesday the [New York] City Council approved a bill to ban smoking in all city parks, beaches and pedestrian plazas.
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
* I DON'T SMOKE... BUT THIS IS FRIGG'N RIDICULOUS!
“People who have made the decision not to smoke have civil liberties too and their health and their lives should not be negatively impacted because other people have decided to smoke,” Council Speaker Christine Quinn said.
* WHAT... A... MORON...!
Norman Siegal [,former Director of the New York Civil Liberties Union,] said the ban is just plan wrong.
* WHEN BILL BARKER AND NORMAN SIEGAL ARE ON THE SAME PAGE... (*SIGH*)
“I think we’re moving towards a nanny state where government thinks they know what’s best for its citizens. You can inform, educate and persuade, but don’t take away our freedoms,” Siegal said.
A John Jay College public management professor said he finds it hard to believe secondhand smoke outdoors is harmful.
“What is the documentary evidence that secondhand smoke on the street is bad for you. It’s a tough sell. There’s a lot of air out here, not that much cigarette smoke,” Daniel Feldman said.
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.0bcf7660807b5b8e782fa73f510af552.471&show_article=1
World food prices reached their highest level ever recorded in January and are set to keep rising for months, the UN food agency said on Thursday, warning that the hardest-hit countries could face turmoil.
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.155b621fd0222d640f22c8ee8ab21457.b01&show_article=1
Brent crude rallied to a 28-month high above $103 on Thursday...
http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/2011/02/obama-issues-global-warming-rules-january-gives-ge-exemption-febr
Last month, the Obama EPA began enforcing new rules regulating the "greenhouse gas" emissions from any new or expanded power plants.
(*ROLLING MY EYES*)
This week, the EPA issued its first exemption, Environment & Energy News reports:
The Obama administration will spare a stalled power plant project in California from the newest federal limits on greenhouse gases and conventional air pollution, U.S. EPA says in a new court filing...
* HMM...
According to a declaration by [Obama] Air Chief Gina McCarthy, officials reviewed EPA policies and decided it was appropriate to "grandfather" projects such as the Avenal Power Center, a proposed 600-megawatt power plant in the San Joaquin Valley, so they are exempted from rules such as new air quality standards for smog-forming nitrogen dioxide (NO2).
* O.K., NOTHING STAND OUT ABOUT THIS SO FAR...
There's something interesting about the Avenal Power Center:
* OH-OH! HOLD ON...
The proposed Avenal Energy project will be a combined-cycle generating plant consisting of two natural gas-fired General Electric 7FA Gas Turbines with Heat Recovery Steam Generators (HRSG) and one General Electric Steam Turbine.
* GENERAL ELECTRIC...???
Maybe GE CEO Jeff Immelt's closeness to President Obama, and his broad support for Obama's agenda, had nothing to do with this exemption.
(*SMIRK*) (*RUEFUL CHUCKLE*)
On the upside, at least Job Czar Immelt is creating jobs!
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-03/u-s-administration-in-contempt-over-gulf-drill-ban-judge-rules.html
The Obama Administration acted in contempt by continuing its deepwater drilling moratorium after the policy was struck down, a New Orleans judge ruled.
Interior Department regulators acted with “determined disregard”...“Each step the government took following the court’s imposition of a preliminary injunction showcases its defiance,” U.S. District Judge, Martin Feldman of New Orleans said in [his] ruling.
“Such dismissive conduct, viewed in tandem with the re- imposition of a second blanket and substantively identical moratorium, and in light of the national importance of this case, provide this court with clear and convincing evidence of the government’s contempt,” Feldman said.
Feldman also ordered the government to pay the legal fees of Hornbeck Offshore Services LLC, which filed the initial lawsuit.
* IN OTHER NEWS...
The Offshore Marine Service Association, a group representing offshore service vessels and shipyards, urged the president to end an informal moratorium on offshore drilling that it said remains in place.
“President Obama claims to have lifted the Gulf moratorium, yet not a single deepwater permit has been issued in nine months,” Jim Adams, the association’s president, said in a release after the ruling. “As a result, thousands of workers are out of jobs, Americans are paying more for gasoline and heating oil, and our nation is becoming even more dependent on unstable nations for our energy needs.”
* BRENT OIL... SURGING TO OVER $103/BBL. TODAY... (*SIGH*)
* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703960804576120360648820674.html?mod=WSJ_newsreel_opinion
Move over, Chris Christie. New York Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo is bidding to join the New Jersey Republican as the national spokesman for fiscal sanity, and he's doing so in a politically clever way that House Republicans could learn from.
The budget that Mr. Cuomo unveiled this week closes a gaping deficit with major budget reductions, calling for spending cuts in state hiring, education, health care, aid to universities and payments to cities.
* FOLKS... BELIEVE ME, THERE'S NO ONE ON EARTH WHO WANTS TO BELIEVE ALL THIS THAN I! THAT SAID... APPARENTLY CUOMO'S BUDGET ISN'T ALL IT'S CRACKED UP TO BE. WE'LL SEE...
The plan would balance the Empire State's $135 billion budget without a dime of new taxes or borrowing. Remarkably, if his budget passed, the state would spend $3.5 billion less than it did last year.
* THAT WOULD BE NICE!
* HEY... LISTEN... I'M DESPERATE TO AFFORD CUOMO EVERY BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT; IF HE'S THE REAL DEAL I'LL BE WORKING FOR HIS RE-ELECTION!
These cuts are impressive on their own, but Mr. Cuomo's real conceptual breakthrough is to expose the rigged-game of "baseline budgeting."
(This is a gambit by which spending increases automatically each year even before a Governor submits his budget.)
The "baseline" grows each year due to spending formulas that legislatures build into the law even before they take a single vote.
Mr. Cuomo put it this way in a New York Post op-ed on Tuesday: "When a governor takes office, in many ways the die has already been cast. Unbelievably, this year these rates and formulas in total call for a 13% increase in Medicaid and a 13% increase in education funding next year."
* WOULDN'T IT HAVE BEEN GREAT IF CUOMO HAD BEEN "FIGHTING THE GOOD FIGHT" AGAIN BASELINE BUDGETING ALL ALONG INSTEAD OF SUDDENLY "DISCOVERING" THE SLIGHT OF HAND "ALL OF A SUDDEN" UPON BECOMING GOVERNOR?
(*SMILE*) (*EYES TWINKLING*)
This means that if Mr. Cuomo proposes a spending increase for Medicaid that is less than 13%, he will be attacked for "cutting" spending. Yet overall Medicaid spending would still increase. As Mr. Cuomo notes, "this process frames the dialogue around the budget and biases the political discourse."
(That is precisely the goal of government unions and the politicians who follow their orders because it allows them to increase spending even as they cry fiscal havoc.)
* To be continued...
* CONTINUING... (Part 2 of 2)
Mr. Cuomo points out that under the automatic baseline formulas, the New York state budget deficit this year is estimated to be $10 billion. Yet if the state operated like families do, with a new budget for each year starting from a base of what the state spent the year before, the deficit would be closer to $2 billion.
Closing a deficit of that size suddenly becomes a lot easier...
(*NOD*) (*GRIN*)
The Governor is proposing a reform that would deflate these baselines with more reasonable and affordable spending projections. For example, his budget would base a spending increase for Medicaid on the rate of medical inflation...
(*BUZZ*)
* I'VE GOT A BETTER IDEA; STRAIGHT BUDGETING - JUST THE WAY AN INDIVIDUAL OR A FAMILY DOES IT.
There's a vital lesson here for House Republicans because the same baseline games have long prevailed in Washington. The Democrats who wrote the budget rules also built in formulas that increase spending each year before Congress even takes a vote. Those same Democrats are now lying in wait for Republicans to propose their budget, and they will describe even increases in spending as brutal "cuts." The media will dutifully play along.
(*FROWN*) (*NOD*)
Republicans ought to follow Mr. Cuomo's savvy lead and blow the whistle on this rigged process early and often.
(*NOD*)
Alas, we fear too many Republicans want to brag about their "cuts" to impress the tea party even if they come from an inflated baseline. This is a recipe for letting Democrats frame the budget debate in ways that will make it harder for Republicans to achieve their budget goals, even as the GOP suffers political damage in the process. They would be smarter to take Mr. Cuomo's cue.
(*NOD*)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703439504576116680460638092.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopBucket
[New Jersey taxpayers] still owes about $110 million in debt on the old Giants Stadium.
* I DID NOT KNOW THAT!
(How did this happen? Simple: The politicians spent the money that was originally intended to pay off the debt on other things. It's a common problem. Revenues get diverted to other programs and the stadium debt gets refinanced.)
Harris County, Texas, still owes about $32 million in debt on the Houston Astrodome, which opened in 1965 and was dubbed the "Eighth Wonder of the World."
* NOR DID I KNOW THAT!
The RCA Dome in Indianapolis, which was demolished in 2008, still has about $60 million of outstanding debt and will not be paid off for at least 10 years.
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
Even tiny Vero Beach, Fla., longtime home to Dodgers Spring Training, is on the hook for some $17 million in debt after the Dodgers moved to Glendale, Ariz., two years ago. Pima County, Ariz., taxpayers similarly still have to pay $21.3 million in stadium debt after the Chicago White Sox and Arizona Diamondbacks moved their training camps to Phoenix from Tucson.
[C]ities often overestimate how much revenue a stadium tax will generate - and they often do it to make the new tax and the new stadium more palatable to the citizenry.
Hamilton County, Ohio, passed a special tax to pay for stadiums for the NFL's Cincinnati Bengals and baseball's Reds. As of last year, the fund was about $15 million in debt, a figure that the Bond Buyer estimates could balloon to $90 million by 2014.
Many in New Jersey applauded when the Jets and Giants opened the $1.6 billion New Meadowlands Stadium because it was financed with $1.3 billion in private debt and $300 million from the NFL's G3 fund for stadium construction, but the economics are still appalling.
Under the old Giants Stadium financing scheme, New Jersey took in about $20 million a year in tax revenues.
* O.K., GOT THAT... $20 MILLION A YEAR IN TAX REVENUES.
Under the new deal, the Giants and Jets will pay about $6 million a year in taxes, or about 20% of what the property would generate if it were privately held and taxed at the rate that most other businesses pay.
* WHAT...?!?!
"The problem with tearing down stadiums early isn't the debt," said Neil deMause, who co-wrote "Field of Schemes" (Bison) and blogs at a website with the same name. "It's the revenues that you're giving up by allowing teams to move into new buildings with sweetheart leases."
* SON... OF... A... BITCH...!!!
Indeed, the owners of New York's Madison Square Garden, prime real estate at the corner of 33rd Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, have been exempted from paying property taxes since 1982...
(*BLOOD THREATENING TO SHOOT OUT OF MY EARS*)
The $375 million used to build the Prudential Center, where the New Jersey Devils play hockey, was actually financed by the Newark Housing Authority.
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
[T]here was nothing functionally wrong with the old Yankee Stadium, the old Giants Stadium, or many other stadiums that have been replaced over the past decade. The problem was that the old stadiums didn't generate enough luxury revenue.
(So New Jersey, which is about $36 billion in debt at last count, gave up about $15 million in annual tax revenue so that the Giants and Jets could be more profitable.)
Similarly, New York City used its finite bonding authority to help the richest franchise in all of sports build a $1.5 billion luxury palace in the Bronx that's too expensive for the average taxpayer.
(The Yankees make $350 million a year on their TV contract alone. That's before they've sold a season of $1,200 tickets, $40 ball caps and $15 mixed drinks inside the stadium's Hard Rock Café.)
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/561799/201102021855/Education-Cost-Top-Problem-For-Local-Govt.aspx
The proportion of resources devoted to education has ballooned over the past two decades.
Inflation-adjusted expenditures per student have more than doubled to around $12,000 over the last three decades, about 50% more than the typical private school spends. The extra resources have delivered no increase in student achievement by the end of high school.
Education spending as a share of tax revenue jumped 90% from 1992 to 2011 at the state level and 73% at the local level.
In 2011, state and local governments will spend 46 cents out of every tax dollar they raise on public K-12 education.
Add in payments needed to meet the approximately $800 billion in underfunded commitments to teacher pension plans over the next 30 years and K-12 education gobbles up 50% of all state and local tax revenue.
Teacher pension plans should be based on defined contributions rather than defined benefits to alleviate growing and unsustainable commitments. Public school employees must share a substantial portion of their own health-care costs. And school district finances must be made more transparent so waste can be identified and eliminated.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/258751/forced-spending-katrina-trinko
Even as governors brace for enormous budget shortfalls in the upcoming fiscal year, there’s one program they cannot - by law- cut eligibility for Medicaid.
That’s something Republican governors would like to see changed.
* AND IF THEY CAN'T CHANGE THE LAW, I CALL UPON THEM TO OPT OUT - TO REFUSE TO PARTICIPATE IN ANYTHING LESS THAN A FULLY FUNDED FEDERAL MANDATE.
If there are two big issues that governors have to face, Medicaid is one of them and the pension crisis is the other one,” says Brian Blase, a health-care-policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, adding that Medicaid is “the more immediate issue.”
The stimulus bill that was passed in 2009 (which included increased funding for Medicaid) required states to maintain the same level of Medicaid services they provided in 2008, regardless of the hit their revenues have taken since then. Obamacare has a similar “maintenance of effort” provision. It’s no small requirement: States spend an average of 22% of their budgets on Medicaid. And while the stimulus-funding requirements end this fiscal year, the Obamacare provisions aim to be permanent.
(*SMIRK*)
Once Obamacare is implemented in 2014, everyone making less than 133% of the federal poverty level will be eligible for Medicaid.
(*SNORT*) (*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
[T]he writing is on the wall. Collectively, the states are expected to face budget deficits of $140 billion next fiscal year, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. And without the extra Medicaid funds the federal government has provided in recent years, states will face soaring Medicaid costs - between this fiscal year and the next, these costs will rise 25%, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
(*CONTINUING TO JUST SHAKE MY HEAD*)
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