DelMarVa's Premier Source for News, Opinion, Analysis, and Human Interest Contact Publisher Joe Albero at alberobutzo@wmconnect.com or 410-430-5349
Translation: After receiving billions in federal subsidies ($100 billion from the stimulus program alone), “green” jobs account for only 2.4 percent of the nation’s employment.
When President Obama signed his economic stimulus plan into law on February 17, 2009, he promised it “includes help for those hardest hit by our economic crisis,” and “As a whole, this plan will help poor and working Americans.”
But the newest data on how the stimulus money was given out across the 50 states and the District of Columbia shows a perverse pattern: The states hardest hit by the recession received the least money. States with higher bankruptcy, foreclosure, and unemployment rates got less money. And lower-income states also received less.
Rather than helping out those in the toughest shape, it looks like Democrats ended up helping their supporters, including unions and many very wealthy supporters.According to the Obama administration’s Recovery.gov, a total of $504 billion of federal contracts, grants, and loans to states and territories were awarded between February 17, 2009, and December 31, 2011. The amounts vary a lot across states, with the very lowest at $978 per capita in Virginia and the highest at $2,495 per capita in Alaska. The District of Columbia is the real winner at a whopping $7,603.
Depending on the number of contestants, three or four shuckers will compete at a time during the ninth annual competition, scheduled to begin at 1 p.m. at the West Ocean City Greene Turtle. The shucker(s) who cleanly open the most oysters in each three-minute round move on.
More than 3,000 oysters were shucked and eaten last year. Tom Creveling, representing Harrison’s Harbor Watch, won the 2010 and 2011 events. Last year, he narrowly edged out Jeb Vetock, also of Harrison’s Harbor Watch. Creveling shucked 61 oysters in the final round, while Vetock opened 59.
“That was the closest it’s ever been,” said Chad Rogers, Greene Turtle West general manager and contest organizer.
Both shuckers are set to participate this year, Rogers said.
The new movie “Hunger Games” seems destined to be a big hit. Yes, “Games” is a challenging story--a dystopian future in which an oppressive government forces young people into gladiator-type battles-to-the-death--but it’s getting good buzz and good reviews. One critic described “Games” as “like ‘American Idol’ with a body count.”
So c’mon folks! Head down to the ‘plex, buy your ticket, plunk down another $10 for soda and popcorn, and watch good-looking actors and actresses exchange longing glances as they kill each other.
The boy raised his hand, eager to answer the question. "What would you know about it?" exclaimed the teacher dismissively. "You're not our race."
This was not dialogue from a Hollywood movie. According to a woman named Melissa Coon, it was what a teacher at East High School in Kansas City told her 13-year-old son, Allen, when he attempted to answer a question during Black History Month. Coon identifies that teacher as Mrs. Karla Dorsey, who is black; Allen is white.
As has already been reported, Allen was a victim of a vicious racial attack last week in which two older black teens doused him with gasoline and set him alight, saying, "This is what you deserve. You get what you deserve, white boy." Not surprisingly, Coon has pulled her son out of East High and, concerned about further racial violence, intends to leave the K.C. area.
While this crime is making headlines, Coon states that it was merely the horrible culmination of continual racial harassment her son had to endure at East High. Moreover, after conducting an investigation that included extensive interviews with parents and students, I've learned that Coon's son is not alone. Other white students also report a pattern of racial harassment at the high school at the hands of their peers -- and, shockingly, their teachers.
A federal judge on Thursday ordered regulators to start proceedings to withdraw approval for the use of common antibiotics in animal feed, citing concerns that overuse is endangering human health by creating antibiotic-resistant "superbugs".
U.S. Magistrate Judge Theodore Katz ordered the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to begin proceedings unless makers of the drugs can produce evidence that their use is safe.
If they can't, then the FDA must withdraw approval for non-therapeutic use of those drugs, the judge ruled.
The FDA had started such proceedings in 1977, prompted by its concerns the widespread use in livestock feed of certain antibiotics - particularly tetracyclines and penicillin, the most common. But the proceedings were never completed and the approval remained in place.
Since when did we start treating courtrooms like our living rooms?
While members of the bar did not commit many of the aforementioned offenses, I’ve seen lawyers come to court in business casual, deposit garbage on the floor and chew bubble gum at trial table.
Put it all in the blender and it creates an environment where it feels OK to say and do whatever you want without consequences. Worse, it gives the impression that the courtroom and those occupying it don’t deserve respect. It becomes abundantly apparent when people curse during victim impact statements, refer to the judge by just her last name and loudly snicker at opposing counsel that we are not in Kansas anymore.
The officer carried the silk banner home to Maine as a souvenir, and it stayed in his family for three generations in a box along with a handwritten note: "To be return to Savannah or Atlanta sometime."
Nobody knows for sure why the late Maj. William Zoron Clayton wanted his Civil War trophy flag returned to the South. But after 148 years, his wish has been honored.
“Mountains of data point to the connection between traditional marriage and religion to civil order and economic prosperity,” Parker said. “Yet, we are here today, because our times necessitate that we defend both sexual integrity and religion from the onslaught of the same big government and social engineers that gave us the sexual revolution and the war on poverty.
“No more should my auto insurance cover your tune up, should my health insurance cover your sex life,” Parker said. “Not your Viagra, not your condoms, not your birth control devices, not your abortions.”
A separate Gallup survey, meanwhile, shows that Americans who attend religious services at least once a week are also less likely to approve of the job Barack Obama is doing as president.
The Gallup survey on the emotional disposition of religious and non-religious Americans was based on interviews with 329,152 adults conducted throughout 2011.
WASHINGTON — Sales of U.S. new homes fell in February for the second straight month, a reminder that the depressed housing market remains weak despite some improvement.
The Commerce Department said Friday that new-home sales dropped 1.6 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 313,000 homes. Sales have fallen nearly 7 percent since December.
While a mild winter and three months of strong job growth have lifted re-sales, those conditions haven’t benefited the new-home market. The current pace is less than half the 700,000 that economists consider to be healthy.
Economists cautioned that the housing market is a long way from fully recovering.
“As you hear from these stories, this is a liberation,” Pelosi said at a Capitol Hill news conference Thursday.
“This is what our founders had in mind--ever expanding opportunity for people.
ANNAPOLIS — Republican presidential candidates are planning to visit Maryland next week.
Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum’s national press secretary said in an email Friday that Santorum is planning a visit to Maryland on Tuesday. Alice Stewart says details are still being worked out.
Texas Rep. Ron Paul’s campaign announced on its website a town hall meeting at the University of Maryland, College Park on Wednesday night.
A co-chairman of Newt Gingrich’s Maryland campaign recently announced the former House speaker also is planning a visit to Maryland on Tuesday.
Frontrunner Mitt Romney was in Arbutus this week.
There are 37 delegates at stake in Maryland’s April 9 primary.
As a consequence, Egypt is leaning more toward a strategic relationship with Iran. Closer Egyptian ties with Iran also were underscored by Egyptian parliamentary member Mohamed Abu Hamed, who resigned recently from the Free Egyptians Party, or FEP, which has enthusiastically embraced closer strategic relations with Tehran even though it opposes the Brotherhood.
The Free Egyptian Party was formed last year in the aftermath of the ouster of Mubarak. It has swiftly risen in popularity in opposition to the Freedom and Justice Party, or FJP of the Muslim Brotherhood.
ANNAPOLIS — The House of Delegates has approved a package of budget measures, including an income tax increase for people who make more than $100,000.
The House also voted Friday to double the state’s “flush tax” on sewer bills from $30 a year to $60.
The income tax increase would go up a quarter of a percent for single filers with more than $100,000 in taxable income. It would go up a quarter of a percent for joint filers who make more than $150,000 of taxable income.
The House also approved splitting teacher pension costs with counties. The split would be phased in over three years.
A panel of House and Senate lawmakers will need to work out differences in the budget legislation approved by the two chambers.
Ben Bernanke tells EU to clean up banks ... Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke has exhorted Europe's leaders to take further action to beef up banks and help southern Europe claw its way back to health, warning that the world financial system is not yet on a sound footing. Strains in global financial markets "continue to pose significant downside risks", said Bernanke. –
UK Telegraph
Dominant Social Theme: You've got to get your banks in better shape, the way they are in the US.
Free-Market Analysis: This is surely a dominant social theme – that banks can be seen as healthy due to so-called stress tests. The whole idea is that the paper money reserves held by banks must be adequate to surmount any larger financial downturn.
This is part of a larger dominant social theme of the power elite, that central banking economies have banks or even money in the normal sense. In the modern world, money is anything but "normal."
But the elites that want to create world government want to insist on mimicking pre-modern monetary environments. They need to create the perception that the faux-money of central banking is every bit as valid as previous monetary systems.
MoreAfter months of searching, investigators commissioned by Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio to examine Barack Obama’s eligibility for office found Immigration and Naturalization Service travel records for foreign flights into Hawaii in 1961, only to discover that records for the week of Obama’s birth were missing.
Investigators were searching to determine if Barack Obama might have been born in a foreign country and returned to Honolulu in or around August 1961 with his mother, Ann Dunham.
Arpaio’s team looked at databases in the National Archives and Records Administration with microfilm of INS passenger records for foreign flights arriving in Honolulu and New York City.
If Obama was not born in Hawaii, as he and the Hawaii Department of Health have been insisting, there should be INS passenger cards that the new mother filled out for herself and her infant son upon arrival in Honolulu from a Pacific Rim city or arrival in New York City from across the Atlantic.
Author and talk-show host Brian Sussman, a meteorologist, went on the Tweet counter-offensive today – directing a pithy challenge to debate Baldwin and/or Kennedy about global warming claims.
“If Jim Inhofe is an ‘oil whore’ then Alec Baldwin is an eco-slut,” Sussman said in his first salvo on Twitter.
He followed that one minute later with this: “If Jim Inhofe is an ‘oil whore’ then Alec Baldwin is an enviro-hooker.”
Less than 60 seconds later, he Tweeted: “If Jim Inhofe is an ‘oil whore’ then Alec Baldwin is a green strumpet.”
A dramatic scene unfolded in a Massachusetts courtroom Thursday after a jury acquitted one man accused in a quadruple murder trial and deadlocked over another.
The execution-style killings of three adults and a toddler had become known as the “Mattapan Massacre,” Boston’s Fox 25 reported.
Court officers restrained two women who rushed forward to the defendants’ table, screaming after the verdict was announced.
Watch a report from the Boston Globe HereANNAPOLIS — A panel of state Senators is supporting legislation to expand gambling in Maryland.
The Budget and Taxation Committee voted 10-2 Friday afternoon to move the bill to the full Senate.
The proposal would create a sixth Maryland license for a slot machine parlor to be built in Prince George’s County and legalize table games at that location and the state’s five other slots sites.
It would also increase the share of revenue casino operators keep and relieve the state of an obligation to buy slot machines, which has proved to be an ineffective expense.
If the legislature passes the bill it will have to be ratified by a majority of Maryland voters.
The theme of this year’s conference is “Connect.”
“No theme is more relevant to kids than ‘connect,’” said Metro-Maryland Youth For Christ Executive Director Robert Arnold. “Facebook, Twitter … every possible way they are trying to connect with friends and family.”
The three-day conference will feature regional and national entertainers, including musical acts Disciple, Tenth Avenue North, Ascend the Hill and artist KJ-52.
HYATTSTOWN, Md. - Coins and bills spilled from an armored truck on northbound Interstate 270 Friday morning, and passersby stopped and scooped them up.
Maryland State Police are investigating how the cash came out of the truck -- owned by Garda -- shortly after 9 a.m.
Police are asking motorists who helped themselves to the cash to return it to the Rockville barracks.
An eyewitness says it was like a "snow globe of cash."
Officers pulled the Caped Crusader heading southbound on Route 29 at Prelude Drive.
The back tag on the Batmobile - in this case a black Lamborghini - was the superhero's emblem rather than state tags required by law, according to police.
The man, who has not been identified by police, was heading down to a hospital to visit sick children in the hospital.
Police say the photo of their officers pulling over Batman became a sensation on Twitter.
Eating OutWASHINGTON - Anne Arundel Police Chief James Teare is refusing to testify at an inquiry scheduled by the County Council surrounding his part in a corruption scandal.
The scandal surrounds County Executive John Leopold who has been indicted on corruption charges.
Among the things he's accused of: having county police officers, acting as his security detail, act as lookout while he had sex in county parking lots.
Councilman Jamie Benoit says he wants to know "What the chief knew when, what action if any he took..and it will inform our judgment as to whether or not the chief can continue on as the chief of police".
