Sharpton needed to attack the transition team for lack of diversity before it was even announced, so he could take credit for the diversity when he was proven wrong.
The Latest
Long Term Care Insurance: As I Was Saying
|As I said in detail in a prior post, long term care insurance is not a solution for the custodial care of the aging. Giving a large share of your money to a private entity over 20 or 30 years, expecting in every case it will meet your needs that many years later, is a good way to pay and get nothing.
Today, according to Bloomberg News, MetLife announced it will halt the sale of long term care insurance. Fortunately for its long term care customers, it is a big company and long term care is a small part of their business, so profits elsewhere might allow claims to eventually be paid. Not so for a company for which long term care insurance accounts for a larger share of the business. By using optimistic assumptions, such a company can divert a large share of premium payments to executive pay and bonuses, then run out of money 20 or 30 years later as its customers age. Imagine you are 80 years old, you've paid in $600,000 to a company, if you stop paying you get nothing, but it will likely be unable to honor its claims? At least Metlife pulled the plug early.
As The New Governor Prepares To Take Office
|The latest Current Employment Survey release from the New York State Department of Labor shows that local elementary and secondary school employment in the portion of New York State outside New York City increased by 11,400 future pension recipients from September 2009 to September 2010. Public school spending, staffing and pay has been off the charts in the rest of the state for decades.
In the past that has been at the expense of New York City, where local elementary and secondary school employment fell by 100 in the most recent September to September period. But now NYC school funding is higher, if lower than in the rest of the state — but with most of the added funding going to the retired. So local government employment in the rest of the state excluding the public schools is being slashed instead, by 32,600 in the most recent September to September period. In New York City, it fell by 5,800. State agencies are being gutted too. So what else happened in New York City?
The Gateway (Rhee-Considering Bloomie Edition)
|If Bloomie had picked Michelle Rhee, that would have been an act of guts, vision and audacity; this is merely an act of "arrogance," a trait he usually attributes to his betters.
The Gateway (A Week Later and Still Whining Edition)
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To my whining friends on the left, another example, among thousands, of why even if you think the Dems are wusses, you should still care enough to beat the GOP.
A Suggestion – Ignore Worthless Speculation
|Yesterday I suggested that we pay little or no attention to the spin from all sides regarding who will win too close to call election results. While writing about it, I was reminded about two other examples of worthless speculation that people in New York politics engage in – one happened last week and the other will happen shortly.
LGBTQ Teen Suicides A Crisis
|It is hard to say that after the horrible suicide of Rutgers student Tyler Clementi there either followed a rash of more LGBTQ suicides or that those high numbers have always been there and we are only now paying attention to the fact.
The New Anarchists: The Republican Party
|The Republican Party with its extremist calls for limited government is nothing more than an incarnation of the Anarchist movement of a century ago which resulted in the assassination of U.S.
Close Elections Not Decided – Don’t Believe The Spin – Nobody Knows
|As each side tries to explain why their side is absolutely certain to win the still undecided Congressional & State Senate elections in New York, I’d like to reprint what I wrote previously about this type of speculation –
http://www.r8ny.com/blog/jerry_skurnik/20th_cd_results_wait.html
In Frank Rich’s World – Nobody Can Win An Election
|Frank Rich in Sunday’s NY Times writes one of those pithy comments that make no sense if anyone thinks about it for more than a minute.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/opinion/07rich.html?emc=eta1
You can’t win an election without a coherent message. Obama, despite his administration’s genuine achievements, didn’t have one. The good news — for him, if not necessarily a straitened country — is that the G.O.P. doesn’t have one either