In 2008, 14.6% of U.S. households, equal to about 49.1 million people, "had difficulty providing enough food for all their members due to a lack of resources" said USDA. The families, which the USDA calls "food insecure," went to food pantries, enrolled in anti-hunger programs and ate less varied diets.
The numbers are a significant increase from 2007, when 11.1% of U.S. households suffered from "food insecurity."
The FHP says commercial vehicles were involved in over 16,000 crashes in 2008, leaving 343 people dead.
Also in 2008, officials with the DOT's office of Motor Carrier Compliance (MCC) inspected over 126,000 vehicles, and took 18,000 off the roads for safety reasons.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services received roughly 30 warnings from inspectors over three years - mostly under the Bush administration - but didn't respond to half of them, even after repeated letters, according to records provided to The Associated Press by U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley's office.
A July 2008 warning said organized crime had infiltrated the system and was costing more than $1 million dollars for each phony Medicare provider license the crooks obtained. The letter got no response, Grassley said.
He and other critics said lack of oversight in the federally administered program is part of an estimated $60 billion a year in Medicare fraud.
A dredging project that will benefit cargo ships calling on Jacksonville’s Talleyrand port faces a multimillion funding shortfall because a federal survey incorrectly calculated the amount of material that would have to be dredged.The Army Corps awarded a $46 million contract this year for dredging a 5.3 mile stretch of the St. Johns River leading up to Talleyrand.
But it could cost an estimated $18 million more to do the work, Army Corps project manager Steve Ross said today.
He said the contractor has continued to do the dredging and the Corps is working to get money so the work will finish as scheduled by September 2010. Based on the estimated cost increases, the Army Corps would need $2.5 million from the Jacksonville Port Authority to help cover the overruns, he said.
He said the Corps has corralled additional federal money but still would need another $3.5 to $4.5 million in federal dollars to close the funding shortfall.
Shane Downey was using a piece of tumbling equipment at North Florida Gymnastics and Cheerleading on June 2, 2000, when he fell and broke his neck.
The jury decided the business was 100% negligent for not supervising Downey as he was using the equipment.
The total award of $25.5 million is primarily to cover medical expenses.
All agree that the bursting of the housing bubble caused the financial collapse of 2008. Most agree that the housing bubble started in 1997. Less well understood is that this bubble was the result of government policies that lowered mortgage-lending standards to increase home ownership. One of the key players was the controversial liberal advocacy group, Acorn (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now).
The watershed moment was the 1992 Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and Soundness Act, also known as the GSE Act. To comply with that law's "affordable housing" requirements, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would acquire more than $6 trillion of single-family loans over the next 16 years.
Congress's goal was to force these two government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) to purchase loans that had been originated by banks—loans that were made under the pressure of another federal law, the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), to increase lending in low- and moderate-income communities.
From 1977 to 1991, $9 billion in local CRA lending commitments had been announced. CRA lending by large banks increased dramatically after the affordable housing mandate was in place in 1993, growing to $6 trillion today.As a result of congressional and regulatory actions, the percentage of conventional first mortgages (not guaranteed by the Federal Housing Administration or the Veteran's Administration) used to purchase a home with the borrower putting 5% or less down tripled from 9% in 1991 to 27% in 1995, eventually reaching 29% in 2007.
Fannie and Freddie acquired $1.2 trillion of loans from banks and other lenders from 1993 to 2007. This amounted to 62% of all such conventional home purchase loans with a down payment of 5% or less that were originated nationwide over the same period.
Fannie and Freddie also acquired $2.2 trillion in subprime loans and private securities backed by subprime loans from 1997 to 2007. Acorn and the other advocacy groups succeeded at getting Congress to mandate "innovative and flexible" lending practices such as higher debt ratios and creative definitions of income. And the serious delinquency rate on Fannie and Freddie's $1.5 trillion in high-risk loans was 10.3% as of Sept. 30, 2009.
This is about seven times the delinquency rate on the GSEs' traditional loans. Fifty percent of the high-risk loans are estimated to be CRA loans, with much of the remainder useful to the GSEs in meeting their affordable-housing goals.
The flood of CRA and affordable-housing loans with loosened underwriting standards, combined with declining mortgage interest rates—to 5% in 2003 from 10% in early 1991—resulted in a massive increase in borrowing capacity and fueled a house price bubble of unprecedented magnitude over the period 1997-2006.
Issue: City Council salaries
What it means: The council is expected to deny a bill introduced by Councilman Art Shad that would cut salaries in half from $45,000 for council members and $60,000 for the council president. Shad says the pay is too high for part-time employees. Bill No. 2009-645
Action: Denied, 16-1
Issue: Tentative budget process
What it means: The council is expected to pass an ordinance that would create a tentative budget process that would precede the formal budget process that begins in mid-July. The bill would require the mayor to supply projected revenues and expenditures to council members by May 1, and the council must provide feedback by June 30. Bill No. 2009-701
Action: Approved, 17-0.
Issue: City elections
What it means: Councilman Jack Webb is asking to withdraw a bill that would have started the process of moving city elections to fall 2011. The move wouldn’t save any money but would allow city leaders to transition in January, months ahead of the summer. Council members have indicated they want to let voters weigh in. Bill No. 2009-716
Action: Withdrawn, 17-0.
Issue: Sports complex renovations
What it means: There will be a public hearing and vote on a bill that would funnel additional bed-tax dollars to help fund maintenance at the sports complex. Now that the Prime Osborn Convention Center renovations are complete, the $5 million a year in bed-tax revenue it receives can be redirected. Bill No. 2009-817
Action: Approved, 15-0.
The final rule, which comes amid intense congressional scrutiny of bank overdraft practices, will take effect by July 1, 2010, for new customers and Aug. 15, 2010, for existing customers. The Fed released a preliminary rule on debit card and ATM overdrafts late last year, but didn't say then if it would require banks to get consumers' consent before signing them up for these programs.
Although such a "bundled payments" approach does not figure in current U.S. healthcare reform legislation, it would go a long way to controlling costs, the team at the non-profit Rand Corporation said.
The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that bundled payments could save the U.S. healthcare system about a billion dollars a year but the Rand team said broadening the approach, already used by Medicare in some areas, could save more than that.But the companies' profits still represent a miniscule percentage of the $2.5 trillion Americans spend every year on health care.
"Insurance company profits in the large picture have very little to do with the overall rising cost of health care," said health care expert Henry Aaron, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Carroll and others pointed out that the profit margins the health insurance companies report -- often below 5 percent -- pace some industries and lag behind many others.
"From a net margin basis, it's not that much," said Steve Shubitz, an analyst at Edward Jones. "The bottom line is any business needs to make money. That's why you're in business."
The most dangerous cities in the 2007-2008 year were Orlando, Tampa, Miami and Jacksonville. They were followed by Memphis, Raleigh, Louisville, Houston, Birmingham and Atlanta.
The report found cities are spending less than 1.5 percent of total federal funds on pedestrian safety, despite the fact that pedestrians currently make up 11.8 percent of traffic deaths.
The group said 43,000 Americans have died this decade while walking along streets; it has consistently ranked Jacksonville among the worst for walker safety.
As Washington reels from the news of 10.2 percent unemployment, the Center for Responsive Politics is out with a new report describing the wealth of members of Congress.
Among the highlights: Two-hundred-and-thirty-seven members of Congress are millionaires. That’s 44 percent of the body – compared to about 1 percent of Americans overall.
CRP says California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa is the richest lawmaker on Capitol Hill, with a net worth estimated at about $251 million. Next in line: Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), worth about $244.7 million; Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.), worth about $214.5 million; Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), worth about $209.7 million; and Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), worth about $208.8 million.
All told, at least seven lawmakers have net worths greater than $100 million, according to the Center’s 2008 figures.
Someone who goes into the Southside’s Memorial Hospital to get treatment for a heart attack can expect to be charged $81,301. But if that patient travels instead to Baptist Medical Center Downtown, just five miles down the road, the bill would plummet to $39,032.
Same illness. Same part of town. More than $42,000 difference between the bills.
How can one hospital charge so much more than another? Is it because Memorial’s heart attack patients get far superior care?
It doesn’t appear so. Readmission rates, a crucial quality indicator, are nearly identical at the two hospitals for heart attack patients — 10.7 percent at Baptist and 11.7 at Memorial.
Memorial and its sister hospital, Orange Park Medical Center, tend to charge patients much more than their Northeast Florida competitors, according to a Times-Union analysis of area hospitals’ self-reported charges. And the only discernible difference between the two hospitals and the rest is that they operate to make a profit for shareholders.
About 90 percent of hospitals in the United States are operated as nonprofits, a proportion that mirrors Jacksonville’s health care landscape. Instead of having to share profits with investors, the Jacksonville area’s 11 nonprofit hospitals can plow that money into new medical equipment, additional staff, facility upgrades and other improvements.
As nonprofits, they receive tax incentives, most notably a pass on paying property taxes, which can add millions of dollars a year to a for-profit hospital’s expense ledger. To make good on their nonprofit status, hospitals are supposed to provide benefits to the community, such as writing off care to the poor and uninsured as charity.
In a victory for President Barack Obama, the Democratic-controlled House narrowly passed landmark health care legislation Saturday night to expand coverage to tens of millions who lack it and place tough new restrictions on the insurance industry. Republican opposition was nearly unanimous.
The 220-215 vote cleared the way for the Senate to begin debate on the issue that has come to overshadow all others in Congress.
Local Representative Corrine Brown voted for the proposal, while area members Ander Crenshaw, John Mica, Cliff Stearns and Jack Kingston from Georgia voted against it.
Brown said " For Floridians in particular, where more than one in five residents do not have health insurance, and for my constituents in Florida's third congressional district and minority communities nationwide, the need for health care reform is obvious. It is imperative."
Representative John Mica said "It is a sad day for Congress and in particular a sad day for Americans who lack health care coverage. The Democrats totally miss the mark. People want lower premiums, increased access, less costs and red tape. They want choice and quality health care."
"It's not just disturbing. It's a call to action," James A. Kelly, former deputy assistant secretary of defense, said Thursday during a telephone news conference from Washington.
Kelly is one of nearly 100 former and current military leaders who came together last year to form an organization called Mission: Readiness to draw attention to the status of potential recruits. In a study it calls "Ready, Willing and Unable to Serve," the group says Pentagon analysts have concluded that 75 percent of people ages 17 to 24 could not qualify for military service because they are obese or have some other health problem, lack a high school diploma or have a serious criminal history.
Here's a better way to honor Munley: End the ban on women in combat.
Department of Defense policy states that "women shall be excluded from assignment to units below the brigade level whose primary mission is to engage in direct combat on the ground." According to the policy, "Direct ground combat takes place well forward on the battlefield."Politico points out that last November House Republican leaders John Boehner and Eric Cantor formed a committee on earmark reform to bring “meaningful change to the process by which Washington spends taxpayers’ hard-earned money.”
How much change did we get?
(T)he vast majority of House Republicans — including eight of the 10 on the committee — have continued to seek earmarks.
Committee Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) has requested roughly $129 million in earmarks so far this year. Her staff defended her panel’s work, saying it has “inspired” a GOP website that lists all members’ earmark requests and also inspired “the Republican transparency initiative” that is being pushed now on Capitol Hill...
Florida State College at Jacksonville has received a $250,000 grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as part of an initiative to improve graduation rates among low-income students.
FSCJ is one of seven colleges or city agencies to receive Gates Foundation grants nationwide.
The money will help fund a nine-month National League of Cities initiative that aims to help young adults attend and graduate from FSCJ, the University of North Florida, Jacksonville University and Edward Waters College.
The single biggest cause of hospital death was septicemia, an overwhelming infection of the blood, which killed 15 percent of patients, the team at the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality found.
Eight percent died of respiratory failure, 6 percent died of stroke and 5 percent had fatal heart attacks in the hospital, according to the report, available here
"In 2007, it is estimated by the Centers for Disease Control that 2,423,995 people died in the United States. Of these, we estimate that 765,651 died in the hospital," the agency's Yafu Zhao and William Encinosa wrote.
Patients covered by Medicare, the federal health insurance plan for the elderly and disabled, accounted for 67 percent of in-hospital deaths and $12 billion in hospital costs.
Private insurance covered 20 percent of patients who died at a cost of $4 billion. Medicaid patients made up 2 percent and uninsured patients accounted for 3 percent and $630 million in costs.
"Overall, the costs of hospitalizations ending in death were $20 billion, which accounted for 5.2 percent of total in-patient hospital costs in the U.S. in 2007," they wrote.
The Obama administration's support for local government debt was launched in the thick of the credit crunch, as an effort to keep debt markets open to municipalities. In that, it succeeded: states and cities have relied on the Build America Bond program to sell more than $47 billion in bonds since March. But it's an expensive and questionable subsidy, said Philip Condon, head of municipal bond management at DWS Investments, the asset management arm of Deutsche Bank. He expects the support to get trimmed.
Unlike other municipal debt, Build America Bonds are taxable. They pay a higher interest rate than tax-free municipal bonds but are a cheaper form of borrowing for cities and states, because the federal government picks up 35% of the interest payments. The support has come in especially handy for cash-strapped California, which has sold more than $7 billion. The state is currently marketing $908 million of the bonds in a sale managed by CitigroupForbes magazine has ranked Jacksonville among the nation’s “most toxic” cities.
Jacksonville ranked 33rd out of the country’s 40 biggest cities. Atlanta was the most toxic and Las Vegas was the least toxic.
Forbes said it looked at the country’s 40 largest metropolitan statistical areas based on data provided by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. It then counted the number of facilities that reported releasing toxins into the environment, the total pounds of certain toxic chemicals released into the air, water and earth, the days per year that air pollution was above healthy levels, and the total number of Superfund sites (contaminated areas that the federal government has designated for cleanup efforts) in each city.
The $787 billion stimulus bill was passed in February and was promised as a job saver and economy booster. Here is where some of the money went:
- $300,000 for a GPS-equipped helicopter to hunt for radioactive rabbit droppings at the Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington state.
- $30 million for a spring training baseball complex for the Arizona Diamondbacks and Colorado Rockies.
- $11 million for Microsoft to build a bridge connecting its two headquarter campuses in Redmond, Wash., which are separated by a highway.
- $430,000 to repair a bridge in Iowa County, Wis., that carries 10 or fewer cars per day.
- $800,000 for the John Murtha Airport in Johnstown, Pa., serving about 20 passengers per day, to build a backup runway.
- $219,000 for Syracuse University to study the sex lives of freshmen women.
- $2.3 million for the U.S. Forest Service to rear large numbers of arthropods, including the Asian longhorned beetle, the nun moth and the woolly adelgid.
- $3.4 million for a 13-foot tunnel for turtles and other wildlife attempting to cross U.S. 27 in Lake Jackson, Fla.
- $1.15 million to install a guardrail for a persistently dry lake bed in Guymon, Okla.
- $9.38 million to renovate a century-old train depot in Lancaster County, Pa., that has not been used for three decades.
- $2.5 million in stimulus checks sent to the deceased.
- $6 million for a snow-making facility in Duluth, Minn.
- $173,834 to weatherize eight pickup trucks in Madison County, Ill.
- $20,000 for a fish sperm freezer at the Gavins Point National Fish Hatchery in South Dakota.
- $380,000 to spay and neuter pets in Wichita, Kan.
- $300 apiece for thousands of signs at road construction sites across the country announcing that the projects are funded by stimulus money.
- $1.5 million for a fence to block would-be jumpers from leaping off the All-American Bridge in Akron, Ohio.
- $1 million to study the health effects of environmentally friendly public housing on 300 people in Chicago.
- $356,000 for Indiana University to study childhood comprehension of foreign accents compared with native speech.
- $983,952 for street beautification in Ann Arbor, Mich., including decorative lighting, trees, benches and bike paths.
- $148,438 for Washington State University to analyze the use of marijuana in conjunction with medications like morphine.
- $462,000 to purchase 22 concrete toilets for use in the Mark Twain National Forest in Missouri
- $3.1 million to transform a canal barge into a floating museum that will travel the Erie Canal in New York state.
- $1.3 million on government arts jobs in Maine, including $30,000 for basket makers, $20,000 for storytelling and $12,500 for a music festival.
- $71,000 for a hybrid car to be used by student drivers in Colchester, Vt., as well as a plug-in hybrid for town workers decked out with a sign touting the vehicle's energy efficiency.
- $1 million for Portland, Ore., to replace 100 aging bike lockers and build a garage that would house 250 bicycles.
Sources: News reports, Office of the Senate Minority Leader, Office of Sen. Tom Coburn
Tens of millions of people, or about 40 percent of all private-sector workers, do not receive paid sick days, and as a result many of them cannot afford to stay home when they are ill. Even some companies that provide paid sick days have policies that make it difficult to call in sick, like giving demerits each time someone misses a day.
Public health experts say policies like these encourage many people with H1N1, commonly called swine flu, to report to work despite official warnings from the government and most companies that they should stay home.“If you’re sick, they encourage you to stay home, but I couldn’t afford to take off if I wasn’t going to get paid,” said Ms. Carter, 29, who said she stuck to her small work area to avoid spreading the flu.
Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, a group of 30,000 public health professionals, said, “Providing workers with paid sick days is essential if we’re going to get serious about the public health recommendations for swine flu — stay home until 24 hours after your fever is broken. That usually takes about five days.”
For many businesses, H1N1 has created a dilemma. “This is a very difficult issue for companies,” said Nina G. Stillman, a lawyer with Morgan, Lewis & Bockius who advises companies on sick-leave policy. “Employers who do not offer sick days are not prepared to offer them now, and they recognize that this may result in not achieving what they say they would like, which is that people who are sick stay home.”Marti Harkness, who specializes in criminal justice issues in the Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability, said better options would be to bar offenders from smaller zones near places where children gather and keeping tabs on them with electronic monitoring.
Florida prohibits certain sex offenders from living within 1,000 feet of schools, day care centers, parks and other places that attract children, but some local governments have expanded the ban to as much as 2,500 feet, most notably in South Florida.
Those limits made it so difficult for sexual predators to find affordable housing in Miami-Dade County that some offenders have been living under a bridge in view of tourists and others using the span, creating a backlash against the restrictions.
Harkness cited studies on repeat sex offenders in Minnesota, Colorado and Florida, which turned up no connection between where they lived and where they committed new crimes. The Minnesota study also showed no children were victimized near schools or other restricted places but 79 percent of the offenders knew their victims.
The company, Silver Spring Networks, produces hardware and software to make the electricity grid more efficient. It came to Mr. Gore’s firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of Silicon Valley’s top venture capital providers, looking for $75 million to expand its partnerships with utilities seeking to install millions of so-called smart meters in homes and businesses.
Mr. Gore and his partners decided to back the company, and in gratitude Silver Spring retained him and John Doerr, another Kleiner Perkins partner, as unpaid corporate advisers.
The deal appeared to pay off in a big way last week, when the Energy Department announced $3.4 billion in smart grid grants. Of the total, more than $560 million went to utilities with which Silver Spring has contracts. Kleiner Perkins and its partners, including Mr. Gore, could recoup their investment many times over in coming years.Mr. Gore has invested a significant portion of the tens of millions of dollars he has earned since leaving government in 2001 in a broad array of environmentally friendly energy and technology business ventures, like carbon trading markets, solar cells and waterless urinals.
He has also given away millions more to finance the nonprofit he founded, the Alliance for Climate Protection, and to another group, the Climate Project, which trains people to present the slide show that was the basis of his documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.” Royalties from his new book on climate change, “Our Choice,” printed on 100 percent recycled paper, will go to the alliance, an aide said.While thousands of people partied all over the city this weekend law enforcement was in the crowds too looking for underage drinking.
And from Thursday through game day officers and agents made more than 250 underage drinking arrests.
The operation used more than 25 officers working at the Landing, RV city and the lots all around the stadium.KPMG has released its annual global survey of corporate tax systems. For the 10th consecutive year, the average corporate tax rate fell, and it is now down to 25.5 percent — and just 23.2 percent in the European Union!
In the United States, unfortunately, the corporate tax rates remains stuck at about 40 percent. Only one developed nation, Japan, has a more punitive regime.
Workers at Ford's truck assembly plant near the automaker's Dearborn, Michigan headquarters voted 93 percent to reject the deal and workers at two Kentucky assembly plants voted 84 percent against it, adding to a growing number of rank-and-file workers lining up against the proposed contract changes.
A federal judge Friday rejected a plea for probation from a New York businessman who admitted concealing $8 million in secret Swiss bank accounts, imposing instead a three-month prison term in the high-profile tax evasion case.
U.S. District Judge James I. Cohn said toy salesman Jeffrey Chernick deserves credit for his cooperation in the broad U.S. probe of Swiss bank UBS AG. But he said allowing Chernick to avoid prison for filing a false tax return "sends the wrong message" in a case that has made international headlines.
"If the court issues a slap on the wrist, to me the notoriety becomes negative," Cohn said. "It essentially informs the public that you can cheat on your income taxes and get away with probation."
Chernick, 70, had faced between 18 months and two years under federal sentencing guidelines. Prosecutors asked Cohn for a nine-month prison term, noting that Chernick's disclosures led directly to the indictments of a Swiss banker and Swiss lawyer on conspiracy charges as well as charges against other UBS clients in the U.S.
Researcher Fizan Abdullah, MD, PhD, assistant professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, says the large study shows that “if you are a child without insurance, if you’re seriously ill and end up in the hospital, you are 60% more likely to die than the sick child in the next room who has insurance.” The research is being published in the Oct. 30 Journal of Public Health.
Abdullah and colleagues analyzed 23 million pediatric inpatient hospital records from 37 states covering the years 1988 to 2005, comparing the risk of death of children with insurance to those without it.
Jacksonville was second-to-last in a ranking of the safety of the 40 largest cities in the country by Forbes magazine. Only Miami was more dangerous.
The rankings are based on a city’s levels of violent crime, workplace fatality rates, traffic death rates and natural disaster risk.
The Jacksonville metro area ranked 30th in natural disaster risk, and that was the best showing in any of the four categories. The area was 35th for workplace fatalities, 37th for violent crime and 39th for traffic death rates.
Barack Obama, the US president, has signed into law a $680bn defence budget for the next fiscal year, which includes $170bn in funding for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The 2010 defence authorisation bill, which Obama signed at the White House on Wednesday, drops funding to several expensive projects.
"I have always rejected the notion that we have to waste billions of dollars of taxpayer money to keep this nation secure," Obama said at the signing ceremony, which was also attended by Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, and Joe Biden, the country's vice-president.
"I think wasting these dollars makes us less secure. That is why we have passed a defence bill that eliminates some of the waste and inefficiency in our defence process; reforms that will better protect our nation, better protect our troops and save taxpayers tens of billions of dollars," Obama said.
The bill also contained an expansion to the definition of federal hate crimes, to include criminal acts based on gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability.The AP reviewed a sample of federal contracts, not all 9,000 reported to date, and discovered errors in one in six jobs credited to the $787 billion stimulus program — or nearly 5,000 of the 30,000 jobs claimed so far.
Even in its limited review, the AP found job counts that were more than 10 times as high as the actual number of paid positions; jobs credited to the stimulus program that were counted two and sometimes more than four times; and other jobs that were credited to stimulus spending when none was produced.
House Resolution 784, "Honoring the 2560th anniversary of the birth of Confucius and recognizing his invaluable contributions to philosophy and social and political thought" turned out to be controversial for 60 different House members.
While 361 voted "Yes" - 47 voted against the resolution, and another 13 members voted "Present."
Democrats split 234-12-2 on Confucius and his legacy, while Republicans voted 127-35-11 on it. Here is a list of the 47 "Nays".
Akin (R-MO), Altmire (D-PA), Barton (R-TX), Berry (D-AR), Boccieri (D-OH), Broun (R-GA), Burgess (R-TX), Camp (R-MI), Carter (R-TX), Chaffetz (R-UT), Conaway (R-TX), Davis (R-KY), Davis (D-TN), Driehaus (D-OH), Ellsworth (D-IN), Emerson (R-MO), Flake (R-AZ), Fleming (R-LA), Graves (R-MO), Hoekstra (R-MI), Johnson (R-IL), Johnson (R-TX), Jordan (R-OH), LaTourette (R-OH), Latta (R-OH), Marchant (R-TX), Massa (D-NY), Matheson (D-UT), Mica (R-FL), Miller (R-FL), Platts (R-NE), Poe (R-TX), Radanovich (R-CA), Sensenbrenner (R-WI), Shadegg (R-AZ), Shimkus (R-IL), Simpson (R-ID), Skelton (D-MO), Souder (R-IN), Space (D-OH), Taylor (D-MS), Tiberi (R-OH), Walden (R-OR), Westmoreland (R-GA), Wilson (D-OH), Young (R-AK) and Young (R-FL).
That's a lot of "No" votes, considering that no one spoke against the resolution during debate on Tuesday.
Confucius wasn't very popular in the state of Ohio, where eight members of that state's delegation voted against the resolution. That is almost half of the state's 18 members in the U.S. House.
The month is almost over and Congress still hasn't finished work on the budget for the fiscal year that started on October 1st, so lawmakers are poised to extend a temporary budget until early December.
Lawmakers gave themselves extra time at the end of September, when they had only finished one of the dozen annual spending bills for the 2010 Fiscal Year.
And in the last four weeks, they managed to finish three more bills, with a fourth getting added in today.
* $1,000,000 for "Mass Marking of Hatchery Fish In The Great Lakes"
* $150,000 for the "Caddo Lake Institute of Texas"
* $16.8 million for employee housing at the Grand Canyon
* $3.8 million to preserve Meridian Hill Park in Washington, D.C.
* $3.25 million for Land Acquisition in the Virgin Islands National Park
* $1.2 million for Land Acquisition in the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest in Georgia
So there's just a few of the earmarks.
Many states declare students to have grade-level mastery of reading and math when they do not, the Education Department reported Thursday.
The agency compared state achievement standards to the more challenging standards behind the federally funded National Assessment of Educational Progress.
State standards were lower, and there were big differences in where each state set the bar.
Yet in his home state of Illinois, which lowered its eighth-grade math standard, Easton said officials were trying to make it easier to meet the goals of No Child Left Behind, the 2002 federal law that prods schools to boost test scores to meet annual improvement goals.
Easton said a bigger concern is the wide disparity in standards among the states. A student who is proficient in one state might not be proficient in another, the report said.
The report by the department's statistics arm compared state achievement levels to achievement levels on NAEP. It found that many states deemed children to be proficient or on grade level when they would rate below basic or lacking even partial mastery of reading and math under the NAEP standards.
Among the findings:
— Thirty-one states deemed fourth-graders proficient in reading when they would have rated below basic on NAEP. Mississippi's standards were lowest, and Massachusetts' were highest.
— Seventeen states deemed eighth-graders proficient at reading when they would have rated below basic on NAEP. Tennessee's standards were lowest, and South Carolina's were highest.
— Ten states deemed fourth- and eighth-graders proficient at math when they would have rated below basic on NAEP. Tennessee's standards were lowest; Massachusetts had the highest fourth-grade math standards, and South Carolina had the highest eighth-grade standards.
The Jaguars expect to blackout every home game this season. So for the first time ever, Jaguars owner Wayne Weaver acknowledged interest in playing one or two regular season games in Orlando.
"Wouldn't it make sense to play an out of market game to try to energize that fan base?" Weaver said last month.
But the idea faces some hurdles. Chief among them, an aging Citrus Bowl that isn't up to NFL standards, lacking box seats and premium suites.
The Citrus Bowl was built back in 1936. It only held 8,900 people. Over the decades it's gone through a series of expansions. One of the most recent, back in 1989, when the current seating capacity was reached at 70,000 people.
And now Mayor John Peyton is doing more than ever before, contractually, to make sure the RV's and the game stay in Jacksonville.
"We've had a lot of competition from other cities wanting this game so I think this contract with the arrangements we worked out is the best deal for the taxpayers," says Peyton. Among other incentives, Peyton is now offering to give each university $50,000 to help with expenses and the city will pay for air travel for the Georgia players directly to and from Jacksonville.
The nation’s real gross domestic product increased at an estimated annual rate of 3.5 percent in the third quarter, the Bureau of Economic Analysis said in an advance estimate Thursday.
In the second quarter, real GDP — the output of goods and services produced by labor and property in the United States — decreased 0.7 percent, the BEA said in a release.
The Constitution created 65 seats in the House of Representatives, set a minimum size of 30,000 residents for a Congressional district, and mandated a reapportionment after each census. As new states entered the union and the nation's population grew, the size of the House increased every decade until 1912, when it reached the current size of 435 and the average district had 210,000 residents.
Today the average district has a startling 650,000 people. The largest district – Nevada's Third – has 960,000 residents, and the smallest – Wyoming's single district – has 493,000.
These disparities will continue to grow. By 2040 the average district will have more than 900,000 residents. Districts could range from as few as 500,000 residents to more than 1.7 million. Almost one-third of the states in the "People's House" could have only one or two representatives. How can one person adequately represent the diversity encompassed in such a large district?
The death of eight troops in bomb attacks in southern Afghanistan on Tuesday pushed the October death toll to 53, topping the previous high of 51 deaths in August, officials said.
President Obama on Tuesday announced a $3.4 billion federal investment to modernize the country's outdated power grid.
The money will go to 100 projects in 49 states to add automated substations, digital transformers, electric meters in homes and other high-tech equipment to create a "smart" grid.
"We're going to create an energy superhighway," Mr. Obama said when making the announcement at Florida Power & Light Co.'s DeSoto Next Generation Solar Energy Center in Arcadia, Fla., one of the country's biggest solar-power facilities.
The money will be released in the form of grants through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and recipients will have to match the federal money with an equal amount of private investment.
Administration officials said that the program includes $4.7 billion in private investments and that grants range from $400,000 to $200 million.
The U.S. health care system wastes between $505 billion and $850 billion every year, the report from Robert Kelley, vice president of health care analytics at Thomson Reuters, found.
One example — a paper-based system that discourages sharing of medical records accounts for 6 percent of annual overspending."The average U.S. hospital spends one-quarter of its budget on billing and administration, nearly twice the average in Canada," reads the report, citing dozens of other research papers.
"American physicians spend nearly eight hours per week on paperwork and employ 1.66 clerical workers per doctor, far more than in Canada," it says, quoting a 2003 New England Journal of Medicine paper by Harvard University researcher Dr. Steffie Woolhandler.
The White House has declared the 2009 H1N1 "swine flu" pandemic a national emergency, a designation that will make it easier for medical facilities to handle a surge of patients infected with the potentially deadly virus.
The president's action on Saturday is intended to remove bureaucratic roadblocks and make it easier for the sick to seek treatment and medical providers to provide it immediately. It also will allow medical facilities to waive certain standard requirements for Medicare, Medicaid and other federal health insurance programs on a case-by-case basis.
But Mr. Obama said "given that the rapid increase in illness across the nation may overburden health care resources," raising the level of the virus to national emergency status was warranted.
The new declaration clears the way for medical providers to bypass federal requirements that, for example, could prevent hospitals from establishing off-site, alternate care facilities that could help them deal with emergency department demands.
As Jacksonville looks to plug gaping financial holes, the Police and Fire Pension Fund has acquired arguably the biggest bull's-eye in town.
It's the overall pension debate that the fund's director says motivated the City Council to slash the fund's budget and salaries by 3 percent - a move he says is illegal and wasn't done to any other independent agency.
As it stands now, the pension fund's eight full-time employees are the only people among 8,100 city workers with a budgeted pay reduction - which fund Executive Director John Keane says shows the pension is being unfairly targeted.
City attorneys, however, say the council is well within its rights, especially because the pension fund gets money directly from the city.
The city's contribution to the fund this year is more than $79 million, Council Auditor Kirk Sherman said.
The city did not impose 3 percent salary cuts for other agencies, which include the Jacksonville Transportation Authority, Jacksonville Aviation Authority and JEA, the city-owned electric, water and sewer utility. But none of those agencies receive money directly from the city's general fund like the pension fund does, Council President Richard Clark said.The White House and Federal Reserve moved Thursday to clamp down on executive pay at companies bailed out by taxpayers and at financial firms thriving during the recession.
President Barack Obama’s pay czar announced he would be slashing the salaries of 175 executives at seven companies that have yet to pay back bailout money in the past year.Jacksonville Mayor John Peyton hopes to add $6 million to city coffers by changing the way solid waste and stormwater fees are collected.
Peyton’s office is proposing adding the fees to property tax bills, which is expected to increase the number of households that actually pay the bill.
Since the fees were approved by the City Council in 2007, the city has been sending out separate bills and looking for a more efficient, less expensive way to collect the money.
About 83 percent of those billed have paid, but the city is projecting a 95 percent collection rate if the fees are on property tax bills, said Marcy Cook, manager of special initiatives for the Public Works Department.
The city is expected to collect about $40 million in solid waste and stormwater fees this year and is estimating bringing in $46 million if the switch is made, said Sherry Hall, a Peyton policy director.The city also spends $730,000 a year to mail the bills, which the Tax Collector’s Office could do for about $500,000 a year, Hall said.
Child-welfare advocates gathering for a rally and conference in Washington say America should be embarrassed to have a child-abuse death rate far higher than other wealthy democracies. They cite the latest federal figures showing that an estimated 1,760 U.S. children died from abuse and neglect in 2007 — up 35 percent from 2001.
"Child abuse and neglect are national problems that require national solutions," said Michael Petit, president of the Every Child Matters Education Fund. "That means federal lawmakers must work with states to address what causes it, be more consistent in how data about it are shared, and increase support for the agencies that work to stop it."
Among the report's recommendations:
—Up to $5 billion in additional federal funds to support child protection services.
Posts
All Comments
