Apr 10
2012
Every once in a while …
Posted 13 years ago
Apr 10
2012
Apr 9
2012
NY Times: “The distress of the last four years has added a cautionary postscript … a program that built its reputation when times were good offered little help when jobs disappeared. Despite the worst economy in decades, the cash welfare rolls have barely budged.”
Apr 9
2012
Apr 8
2012
It turns out Joe Friday is a hockey fan. Who woulda thunk it, Joe being from Los Angeles and all. Detective Friday realizes that while Terry Pegula owns the Buffalo Sabres, the team’s fan base pays the bills. What kind of return on investment did they get this season? When you consider the Sabres ranked No. 2 for payroll and No. 18 for points, the ROI was among the worst in the league. Only two teams spent more per point. Here are the facts: Team Team payroll for 2011-12 season: $69,830,000. Rank in league: Second highest after the Philadelphia Flyers[...]
Apr 6
2012
Apr 6
2012
A muckraking columnist Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times is both thoughtful and provocative. Consider two recent columns. First, his take on a couple of studies of all the chemical junk fed to the animals that are the source of our meat. My topic today is a pair of new scientific studies suggesting that poultry on factory farms are routinely fed caffeine, active ingredients of Tylenol and Benadryl, banned antibiotics and even arsenic … To me, this underscores the pitfalls of industrial farming. When I was growing up on our hopelessly inefficient family farm, we didn’t routinely drug animals.[...]
Apr 5
2012
Buffalo is not Austin, Texas, and never will be. They bake. We freeze. They have Lance Armstrong. We had OJ. They don’t pay state income taxes. We do. Oh boy, do we. But I’ve come away from two visits to Austin since last summer thinking there are lessons to be learned. The Texas capital is booming. Austin proper added some 160,000 residents between 2001 and 2010, up 20 percent. Only one major metro area grew at a faster pace. The region also added jobs at a faster rate than any major metro area in the nation over the past eight[...]
Apr 4
2012
At $79,500, New York legislators are the third-highest-paid state lawmakers in the nation. And then there’s the stipends and per diems they pay themselves. The Albany Times Union has the details.