I remember in grammar school being chased every day by bullies. But twice a week after school I found refuge in the Hicksville Public Library Bookmobile which was parked in front of the school after classes. The bullies never entered this domain sort of like the sanctuary offered in some cases by churches.
Category: News and Opinion
New York Loses Two
|Looks like New York lost another two seats in Congress, but NYC’s share of the state’s population is going up. I wonder how they are going to take one or both of those seats out of New York City, without putting existing suburban legislators at risk from being voted against by new voters?
Texas gains four. It seems that most of the growth is in Blue portions of Red states.
PROFOUND: AN 1895 EIGHT GRADE FINAL EXAMINATION (SALINA; KANSAS).
|THIS WAS SENT TO ME BY E-MAIL RECENTLY AND I HAD TO SHARE IT WITH YOU ROOM EIGHT READERS:
Take this test and pass it on to your more literate friends.
This is what it took to accomplish an eight grade eduction back then.
Remember when grandparents and great – grandparents stated that they only had an 8th grade education? Well, check this out. Could any of us have passed the 8th grade in 1895?
Happy Holidays (or, if you insist, Merry Christmas) from a Heterordox Jew
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GATE: We always help our Christian friends and relatives celebrate Christmas , but we don't celebrate it for ourselves, because we don't believe that Jesus is the son of G-d.
DYBBUK (age 7 & 3/4ths) : That's because we are all G-d's children. Even though you have a father and I have a father, we are still children of G-d
The Gateway (Nydia, Oh Nydia, Say Have You Met Nydia Edition)
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This article about Nydia Velazquez as savior of the Brooklyn “Reform” movement gets much wrong every which way.
Nydia has been a constant and unremitting Vito Lopez enemy for at least two and a half decades, and in contrast to the article's assertions, has injected herself many times into races in Lopez's turf, sometimes even running her own staff, when most members of Congress would have just concentrated upon their own business. Supporting Lincoln Restler is not an anomaly for her.
The Gateway (No, “Ice Cream for Crow” is Not a Politician’s Dessert Edition)
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Someone once said that Captain Beefheart was Howlin’ Wolf crossed with Ornette Coleman (which might not be that farfetched; Ornette once played in Pee Wee Crayton's Combo).
I’ll admit Beefheart's not for the squeamish, but neither is politics; so if you‘re a regular reader of this column, you can probably take it.
The Advent of Corporate Democracy
|A recent report in the New York Times stated that it appears that the United States Supreme Court led by Chief Justice Roberts is under the sway of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce when it comes to business interests. One court supporter went so far as to say it was a response against business regulation through litigation.
The Gateway (Self Aggrandizement, More Election Analysis and Christmas Party Gossip Edition)
|If you sneeze during Justin Sullivan’s Paul Newell documentary “Excuse Me. Mr. Speaker,” you will miss the scene at the convention where Paul Newell yells at me in response to a (unheard) question I asked him.
But there's two or so solid minutes of me in the DVD’s bonus footage, although I get not one laugh.
It didn’t have to be this way. If Paterson had appointed himself or Carolyn Kennedy to the Senate
|It just didn’t have to end this way.
Governor David Paterson on a farewell tour, counting down his final days in office.
President Obama names Hillary Clinton Secretary of State. What if Paterson had appointed himself as Clinton’s Senate successor? What if Paterson had opened that door?
Health Care and Social Services Expenditures: Census Bureau State and Local Finance Data
|Over the past near 40 years, the share of the personal income of both Americans and New Yorkers spent by state and local governments on cash assistance for the needy has plunged, a long term look at data from the Governments Division of the U.S. Census Bureau shows, while the share spent on payments to private sector medical care vendors, generally under the Medicaid program, has soared. The data, in the attached spreadsheet, shows that public health and hospital spending has fallen as a share of personal income in New York while rising in the U.S. as a whole, while spending on social services has increased in both areas, though by much less than Medicaid-funded health care vendor payments.