The Hayseeds blog, No. 234 for the week starting December 8, 2007.
November 24, 2007
Hayseeds No. 233
December 8, 2007
Hayseeds No. 234
December 15, 2007
Hayseeds No. 234
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As many of you already know, the state gives out money to certain cities and towns to make up for land that's off the tax rolls as it's publicly owned. This is done by a case by case bases, and often is decided
And a County Court out in Western New York said this was patently unfair and this practice must be stopped.
Walker wrote that the defendants—Pataki, state Sen. Majority Leader Joseph L. Bruno, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Comptroller Alan Hevesi—"have caused, are now causing and are about to cause an unconstitutional disbursement of state funds by paying taxes and/or payments in lieu of taxes on state-owned lands to counties, municipalities, school districts or special districts ... while not making such payments on state-owned lands situated elsewhere in New York."
The court is right—payments in lieu of taxes should not be divided up solely by political favors or power. Maybe Albany gets too much PILOT payments or maybe not in comparison to other municipalities. There needs to be a formula that ensures that other similar cities who have substantial acreage off the tax roles by compensated (such as Plattsburgh which loses a lot of land to the college).
It can't be an acre to acre comparison though. State office campuses have different costs to municipalities then do state forests. Office campuses require roads and create more traffic then forests, and those roads are of a different quality. They also require much more policing on their borders for accidents or other things that urban areas require like crime. State Colleges pose even different costs, such as increased policing costs to the locality.
It looks like Don Imus was back on the radio this morning, at least in the New York City area and some cable networks according to the NYT which ran the story on the front page of their website.
I never understood what the big deal was with nappy haired hos, much less pictures of nooses or swastikas. Hell, even the words fuck, shit, piss, cunt, nigger, and so forth are just words. I'm sure Don Imus would agree that none of those things will hurt you as much as angry bull or tripping on the curb of a street.
Maybe we as a society need to become more desensitized to such concepts, and be more aware of the real people we are hurting. 3,885 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq, with 3 or 4 times that number of contractors killed. Air pollution is killing people every day in our country, as is carcinogens and other toxins that we are breathing, eating, and absorbing everyday into our bodies.
We really should be rethinking what we take offense to today. I don't particularly like Don Imus' program, usually turning it off when it comes on, but he should be allowed to speak about issues in the language that he feels most adapt.
I just learned that if your petitioning for Obama, then your coordinator is Anton Konev, who recently crossed party lines to run as a Republican against Mary Lou Connelly about a month ago.
In case you don't remember some of his key points where Republican talking points that he got from the worlds biggest sleazeball and Pataki's Brendan Quinn. He wanted to:
So this is the person that is representing Barack Obama. We can see what can people Obama attracts.
Maybe you should be with their union busting tactics, the subject of a recent petition that you should consider signing.
It looks like both the New York candidates are sinking in the polls, with Rudy basically no-longer being a player and Hillary starting to drop even further.
Rudy (aka Nasty Man) as a president is a truly scary prospect. Hillary is a bit less scary, although I'm not sure if our country would be better off with a repeat of the sterile 1990s when her husband was President.
Unfortunately, for those of us looking for an anybody but Clinton candidate for President, it seems none has appeared so far as the leader on the Democratic-side. Yet, there still is a month until Iowa and things can change dramatically in that time.
There are many signs that Mayor Jennings will be retiring in 2009, not the least his hinting and then retractions of his hints that he will be retiring, after Governor Spitzer turned him down for the jobs that he hoped to get.
Dan VanWripper notes that the University is giving him an award to mark his service, suggesting that the end of his reign is nye. He goes on to suggest that he will resign turn the reigns over to Chief Tuffey.
It should be interesting to see how this all plays out, as the Mayor continues to have an important influence over the region. He may have lost control of the party, but he still very much matters.
It was frontpage news today in the Times Union that in our fine city, blacks are 58 times more likely to be imprisoned for drug crimes then whites are. But we aren't alone.
It turns out within the 15 populous counties with the highest ratio of African Americans to Whites in jail for drug crimes, 13 of those counties are north of the Mason-Dixie line, and centered on the liberal east coast.
That's pretty scary. It's purty clear the northern states that are disproportionally locking up blacks for drug crimes.
The Northern States missed out on the Civil Rights and desegregation in the 1960s. We read about it in the papers, and we thought it was terrible what those evil southerns did to the blacks down south. But we where more then happy to keep the status quo up North.
It seems that both the Assembly Democrats following the lead of the Republicans are chiming in against increasing toll hikes and are holding hearings on this matter.
As I've previously noted, the Thruway Authority is little more then a welfare agency for small towns along it. The administration costs for the Authority is amazing, taking up as much as 40% of the budget, to say nothing of cost of duplication of services.
Ultimately, most of those small communities would be better off if tolls did not exist. Tolls discourage people to get on or off the road, and Thruway plazas take business away from local businesses.
It's clear that much of the abuse and cussing at the Thruway Authority is well deserved. Yet, between it's 3/4 billion dollar a year cost and all the people it employees, it's very difficult to do much about it. They may hold down the toll increases, and reduce the quality of the roads, but it won't fix it's fundamental problem—the fact that it exists.
There has been alot of talk lately about cleaning up the blight in Albany and Schenectady, after the media covered several high-profile building collapses in various ghettos of the City.
Who could be against cleaning up blight? Maybe landlords and property owners. Or those against fascist building inspectors who want to enforce conformity in the city. On the other hand, there is no question that buildings need to be safe for people walking past them, and that places rented to people need to be safe and decent.
People argue for more code enforcement and going after evil landlords. That's the wrong attitude—there are people who legitimately can't afford to make improvements, unless they raise their rents. What there needs to be is a cooperative partnership, one that emphasizes community thinking and working together with landowners for policies good for all.
Landlords in poor parts of the city are as much to blame as many of their clientel. Poor people don't typically pay much in rent. They also tend to be messy, and some are engaged in illegal conduct such as drug dealing and drunkness, which destroys property further.
It's a complex problem, but blaming landlords completely for what is wrong in our city is a terrible mistake. It's as much the uneducated poor people and the lack of efforts on the city's behalf to provide a more enlightened path for them.
The NYS Attorney General Office and Blair Horner now have the much fabled Sunlight Project Website open, which makes it easy for the general public to track campaign donations, lobbying, and legislators.
You can view the site at sunlightny.org and do many cool things with a few clicks. Some parts of the site are still broken, but here's a preview of what anybody who has web access can find out in a few minutes.
For example, Assemblyman Koon's burn barrel ban legislation A.5457. You can quickly find out that the following organizations are lobbying for or against this bill:
Of course, that's not to say that his support of banning trash burning comes from checks on any of those organizations. Most likely he believes strongly that New York needs such a ban, and any lobbying of those organizations and campaign donations probably doesn't influence his views that much.
Still, I'm amazed at some of the organizations lobbying to ban backyard trash burning. It seems that chemical lobby organizations are steadfastly for it—and it's not out of their benign care for all New Yorkers. In their mentality, if the burn barrel puts out pollutants, it's a serious problem, if the big stack does, then nobody should worry.
The chemical industry knows that they are putting out toxic products, bad for all New Yorkers, whether or not they burn their trash. They don't want to be regulated further, and if they can point out that their products are only being disposed of in "regulated landfills and incinerators" with modern pollution control, we will all be okay, at least until landfills leaks.
Happy digging!
This is the performance that Pete Seeger was banned from CBS playing, until he got it the Smother Brothers Comedy Hour on February 25, 1968, right after the Tet Offensive and shortly before Lyndon Johnson announced he wouldn't run the president.
After being censored for the September 1967 show, he finally did it after mocking the show for a while. Today, it's amazing that they would censor such a mild mannered show. It's a classic. Pete Seeger is such an American hero, and still an inspiration to us today. Enjoy.
A Bronx man tape recorded his own interrogation in a police station on an iPod, and when it came to prosecuting him, it turned out the officer in charge ended up getting prosecuted for perjury.
Not person should be above the law, including police officers and other people who work for the state. We need more integrity in our whole system.
For those of you who ride airplanes frequently, there is some good news. You might soon be able to surf the web on the plane as several airplanes are planning Wi-Fi access as an extra $10 perk.
They are already experimenting with this on some Amtrak trains. That's particularly neat, as trains are far more green and are our future. So look forward to more opportunities to surf online.
