So, we are all well aware of the so-called “reporter” from CNN, Susan Roesgen whose on-air haranguing of those she was ostensibly reporting on made obvious her anti-Republican bias. Well, for the past day Americans have been emailing her to let her know how they feel about her unprofessional attitude. Apparently, CNN does not appreciate hearing from its viewers, though, because all of a sudden anyone that sends an email to Roesgen’s CNN email address will have it returned as address unknown!
Public Policy Polling has another survey out today, this one on the overtime Minnesota Senate race. It finds that nearly two-thirds of Minnesotans believe it’s time for former Sen. Norm Coleman to concede the race to Democrat Al Franken.
A three-judge panel declared Franken the winner on Monday. Asked if Coleman should concede or appeal the ruling, 37 percent said he should appeal, while 63 percent said he should concede. Asked if Franken should be seated immediately, a slightly smaller number — 59 percent, said yes, while 41 percent favor leaving it vacant. An identical ratio said Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R) should sign a certificate of election.
On Tuesday I noted that the Republican Party organization is lining up to support Arlen Specter in his battle against Pat Toomey. Meanwhile, it appears to be moving against Jim Bunning.
Our former colleague Reid Wilson has an interesting article at The Hill, which features this little tidbit:
Bunning will face either a rematch with Mongiardo or a battle with state Attorney General Jack Conway (D), who announced his own candidacy last week. Conway is rapidly scooping up support from prominent Kentucky Democrats while Mongiardo has backing from Gov. Steve Beshear (D).If Bunning leaves the contest, Republican sources close to Secretary of State Trey Grayson (R) say Grayson is prepared to make a bid, and that he would make his announcement within hours of Bunning’s own. [Emphasis mine]
I’d take that as a strong signal of the party’s intention. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, we’ll have a replacement within hours!
After her sport utility vehicle sideswiped a van in early February, Shirley Kimel was amazed at how quickly a handful of police officers and firefighters in Winter Haven, Fla., showed up. But a real shock came a week later, when a letter arrived from the city billing her $316 for the cost of responding to the accident.
“I remember thinking, ‘What the heck is this?’ ” says Ms. Kimel, 67, an office manager at a furniture store. “I always thought this sort of thing was covered by my taxes.”
“In this tough economic time, we all need to cut back,” he said. “I strongly support many of the projects submitted to my office, so I understand why this decision will not be popular with some and that it may meet criticism.”
Minnick said he would not push for earmarks - specific spending authority placed in congressional bills - for at least one year. He said he would try to bring money to Idaho by helping businesses and agencies win competitive grants offered in the stimulus package.
Rather than this “above board” approach allowing everyone to cool down and move on, essentially Calaway, with presumably the full cooperation of the majority of the Board of Trustees, has decided to manufacture a crisis over what could have been a simple acknowledged mistake. (more…)
April 17 (Bloomberg) — Google Inc., owner of the world’s most popular search engine, reported slower profit and sales growth in the first quarter as the recession discouraged users from clicking on ads.
Net income climbed 8.9 percent to $1.42 billion, or $4.49 a share, the company said yesterday. Excluding revenue passed on to partner sites, sales were $4.07 billion, compared with the average analyst estimate of $4.1 billion in a Bloomberg survey.
The slump in advertising spending led to Google’s first sequential drop in quarterly sales since it went public in 2004. The company is now cutting research, marketing and side projects to cope with the economy, which shrank 6.3 percent last quarter.
The U.S. has already committed nearly $3 trillion to rescue the financial system and domestic auto makers, according to a recently released report by a special inspector general.
Treasury alone has announced plans to fork over more than $600 billion in TARP funds, and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner seems to announce a scheme a week to jump-start the economy. Unfortunately, just as vigorous thumping won’t accelerate — and can even disrupt — the rebooting of a computer, unpredictable interventions and improvised initiatives jeopardize rather than hasten robust economic recoveries.
Sustainable recoveries cannot be rushed because individuals and firms can’t instantly pick the best possible alternative. We can’t immediately auction off our labor to the highest bidder, for instance. Rather we must devote time and effort to finding a suitable job. Once we find a position that satisfies us and learn to do it well, we are loath to leave.
Rich Lowry’s column cited in the Daily News today complains that the TARP “had nothing to do with troubled assets and has been used for purposes far afield of the justification.”
Yeah, well okay, it has been used for more than advertised, perhaps. But we warned on this blog, that TARP’s “700 billion can be used to buy a lot more than just mortgages. It’s ‘troubled assets.’ And what would those include?
“The short answer is anything the [Treasury] Secretary wants to buy from anyone.”
The language changed somewhat, but not much, before the bill became law. The answer we gave before the bill passed is still accurate today. Unfortunately.
Anyone who took a few minutes to read the key portions of the bill could have known this.
So yes, Lowry is right that “TARP is an endlessly flexible slush fund that has given the federal government warrant to intervene in the private sector however it pleases.”
But the letter of the law seems to allow just that, no matter how much he protests. I wouldn’t interpret it that way. But there is plenty of wiggle room to allow for such interpretation and no court would stand in the way of the flexibility.
A suburban high school closed earlier Friday after dozens of students and teachers came down with flu-like symptoms.
Westchester County health inspectors left Horace Greeley High School after formulating a plan to battle a virus that’s making students violently ill and prompted Friday’s early dismissal.
“Rumors of like 160 people not in school today — and in one of my classes we had a test and 10 people weren’t there,” junior Karan Jin said.
“She just felt very nauseous, this was at 6 last night, and by the time she got home she got very sick and was sick all night long,” parent Bill Weinberg said.
Beware of geeks bearing formulas. That’s the lesson most of us have learned from the financial crisis. The “quants” who devised the risk models that induced so many financial institutions to buy mortgage-backed securities thought they had reduced risk down to zero.
Turns out they got a few things wrong. Their formulas were based on only a few years of actual data. Or they failed to take into account the possibility that housing prices would fall. Or that the market for mortgage-backed securities might suddenly stop functioning.
Louisville, Ky. - Future Kansas University basketball guard Elijah Johnson scored 11 points off 5-of-6 shooting in the Black Team’s 151-145 loss to the Gold Squad in Saturday’s Derby Festival Classic at Freedom Hall.
Johnson, a 6-2 point guard from Las Vegas’ Cheyenne High, had eight assists against two turnovers in 19 minutes.
LAWRENCE — Kansas running back Jocques Crawford is suspended from the team for repeated violations of team policy and might not return to the KU program, coach Mark Mangino said Saturday.
“To be quite honest, it was a situation where he has breached team policy more than once in a relatively short period of time,” Mangino said. “Every kid that I deal with and every situation, they’re all different. I’m taking a look at his situation. He will not participate the rest of the spring. I just don’t know his situation. I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know his status, whether he’ll be back or not.”
Wednesday’s tax day tea parties had a cause mirroring those of the original Boston tea party, to whit, a government so invasive and unwieldy that it can perpetrate generational theft on the order of tens of trillions of dollars, with no one to stop them. They were there to demonstrate against the ability of government to tax our grandchildren into oblivion, and more importantly, the fact that government is effectively doing it with mind-numbingly large spending packages. They were there to protest taxation with representation that doesn’t listen to them, representation that doesn’t represent their interests, taxation that they don’t want, don’t need, and will be forced to pay anyway. (more…)
Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s star is rising among a new constituency - the anti-tax “tea party” crowd - in the wake of his recent endorsement of a Texas state House resolution affirming the state’s sovereignty.
The resolution urges that “all compulsory federal legislation that directs states to comply under threat of civil or criminal penalties or sanctions or that requires states to pass legislation or lose federal funding be prohibited or repealed.”
The Republican governor’s public embrace of that language - a thinly veiled reference toward the conditions set by the Obama administration’s financial stimulus package - and his efforts to reject some of the stimulus funds have made him popular among the big government opponents who attended Wednesday’s “tea party” events across the nation.
Gov. Kathleen Sebelius signed a bill Friday adding a new level of intrigue to an ongoing dispute about a sand and gravel business in Topeka.
The governor endorsed legislation passed by the House and Senate creating a special exemption for surface-mining law in zoning decisions. City and county commissions will now be able to amend zoning for mining projects with a simple majority vote rather than by a supermajority when dissident residents file a protest petition.
Sixty-six percent (66%) of likely voters nationwide say it is Very Important for the government to improve its enforcement of the borders and reduce illegal immigration. However, the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that just 32% of America’s Political Class agrees.
An even more dramatic gap appears on the question of legalizing the status of those immigrants now in the country illegally. Voters nationwide are evenly divided on the question of whether it is even somewhat important: 48% say it’s important, and 45% say it’s not.
However, among the Political Class, 74% say legalizing the status of these residents is important, and only 17% disagree.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Wall Street bankers aren’t the only ones who got big checks despite huge losses last year. The staff of the Missouri state employees retirement system received close to $300,000 in bonuses, even though the pension fund they manage lost almost $1.8 billion.Don’t blame the employees. Blame the pension board, which approved the bonus plan. These fund managers were well compensated when the pension fund was growing. Last year the state pension fund performed better than many other funds, but still lost nearly 24 percent. When informed of the bonuses, Gov. Jay Nixon called them unconscionable.
President Obama says international investors should have “absolute confidence” in the safety of U.S. government debt.
Uh-oh. It’s scary when this subject even comes up. No one is saying the United States is on the verge of defaulting. That isn’t going to happen. But until now, the safety of U.S. Treasury securities was a given. It wasn’t even worthy of mention.
In the last several months, however, there’s been a change. The cost of insuring against a U.S. default has risen by about 60 percent since the end of last year.
(CNSNews.com) - The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) for the first time has listed the eleven most-wanted Mexican drug-crime fugitives sought by the United States.
The fugitives, all Mexican nationals, are members of Mexican drug cartels that are now considered to be the top organized crime threat to the United States, responsible for murderous violence along the U.S.-Mexico border in recent years.
When thousands of people in all 50 states assemble to protest government policy, you might suppose that this is news. Not according to the coverage on the front pages of the Washington Post, New York Times, or the Wall Street Journal. (more…)
