The FAA is the new Wisconsin.

Keep an eye on Wisconsin next Tuesday. Six of the union-busting Republican incumbent state senators will be running in recall elections, as well as two incumbent Democratic state senators. (One incumbent Democratic state senator has already won his recall election.) A switch of three seats from Republican to Democratic will put the state senate in Democratic control, which is why the Republicans are furiously passing as much legislation as they can before next Tuesday.

And welcome to Wisconsin on the national level, other wise known as the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) mess. I'm sure you have seen reports on the network news programs concerning the 74,000 people thrown out of work when airport improvement projects were halted by the failure of Congress to pass legislation authorizing the continued authority of the FAA. 

You may also have heard that the FAA's authority to collect the 10% tax on airline tickets has also lapsed, and that airlines have simply been pocketing the money rather than reducing fares by 10%. This amounts to a loss of federal revenue of about $30 million each day. (So much for the argument that if taxes are reduced, costs to consumers will also go down.)

And, you may have heard that the House passed the legislation to reauthorize the FAA, but the senate went on vacation--along with the rest of the Congress--after the debt-ceiling debacle. True, but as the late Paul Harvey used to say, here's the "rest of the story."

When the Republican-controlled house passed the FAA legislation, they added a nice little wrinkle in an attempt to make it much more difficult for the airline workers to unionize, or to keep their unions. The new legislation would count all those not voting in an election to certify ( or re-certify) union representation as "no" votes. Imagine trying to pass a school budget if all those eligible to vote, but not voting, were counted as "no" votes! The bald-faced unfairness of this is why the Senate would not pass the FAA legislation.

Apparently, the public was a little upset that 74,000 people were being thrown out of work when we have high unemployment. They were also a bit miffed about giving away $30 million/day in tax revenue to the airlines. One would guess that when members of Congress left the looney-bin of Washington, where everybody is convinced that the deficit is the biggest problem we face, and arrived in their home districts, where polls show that many more people are concerned about putting 25 million people back to work and getting the economy on its feet, they got an earful from their constituents. A deal was quickly agreed to which, as I understand it from my perspective in the Cable TV-free wilds of the Adirondack woods, puts those 74,000 people back to work and starts collecting taxes again. I believe that the anti-union fight has been put off until another day.

But keep your eyes and ears open. Maybe someday all the people who don't bother to vote in national elections will be counted as Republican votes!

Posts less often for next 2 weeks.

Posts will be less often for the next two weeks. We're in the Adirondacks, and the nearest WiFi hotspot is reached by a boat trip to the mainland (we're on an island) and then a 12-mile drive.

Since we're on an island, there is no cable TV and the tall pines keep us from getting a satellite TV signal, so we rely on a rooftop antenna which gets us NBC and PBS. That's it, only 2 channels! (We're keeping up on the news via satellite radio.)

Teenagers visiting the island are devastated to learn that there is no internet access, and cell phone coverage is super-spotty. "Hey, I can get one bar if I climb the tall pine tree!"

Is Congress trying to break up with us?

An editorial in this morning's NY Times points out that, in his speech last evening, the president "...embraced the proposal made over the weekend by the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, which gave Republicans virtually everything they said they wanted when they ignited this artificial crisis: $2.7 trillion from government spending over the next decade, with no revenue increases. It is, in fact, an awful plan, which cuts spending far too deeply at a time when the government should be summoning all its resources to solve the real economic problem of unemployment. It asks for absolutely no sacrifice from those who have prospered immensely as economic inequality has grown."


"Mr. Reid’s proposal does at least protect Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. And about half of its savings comes from the winding down of two wars, which naturally has drawn Republican opposition. (Though Republicans counted the same savings in their budgets.)"


"We agreed strongly when Mr. Obama said Americans should be “offended” by this display and that they “may have voted for divided government but they didn’t vote for a dysfunctional government.” "


Also last evening, Jon Stewart pointed out the absurdity of the situation, and asked, "Is Congress trying to break up with us?"

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Those "hair-on-fire" emails.

I received an email this morning from one of our WNY retired teachers. It contained an email that had been sent to her by someone else. In fact, she said she had received it twice in recent days from other retired teachers. She wondered if I could check it out.

The basis of the email was that:"

President Obama's finance team is recommending a transaction tax. His plan is  to sneak it in after the November election to keep it under the radar. This is a 1% tax on all transactions at any financial institution i. e. Banks, Credit Unions, etc.. Any deposit you make, or move around within your account, i. e. transfer to, will have a 1% tax charged. If your pay check or your social Security or whatever is direct deposit, 1% tax charged. If you hand carry a check in to deposit, 1% tax charged, If you take cash in to deposit, 1% tax charged. This is from the man who promised that if you make under $250,000 per year, you will not see one penny of new tax. Keep your eyes and ears open, you will be amazed at what you learn.

It also claimed:

I checked this out on Truth or Fiction and it is true.  The bill is HR-4646 introduced by US Rep Peter DeFazio D-Oregon and US Senator Tom Harkin D-Iowa.  It is now in committee and will probably not be brought out until after the Nov. elections.

And went on to claim:

His plan is to sneak it in after the November election to keep it under the radar.   See what Nancy has to say about this wonderful idea!http://tinyurl.com/24dn5ud

Whenever I receive one of these "hair-on-fire" emails asking me to play Paul Revere by "passing it on to everyone I know," I immediately ask myself whether I have heard anything about this in the newspapers or the electronic media. Surely something as important as this would be covered by the media. ("Well, " the originator of this email might say, "the left-wing, liberal lamestream media is hiding this from us." OK, can you find confirmation of this on the Fox News website. Oops, no you can't!)

By the way, you may have noticed that most newspapers and TV networks are now owned by large corporations, which have anything but a "liberal" point of view. Here's an interesting research project: Count the number of conservatives appearing on the Sunday morning talk shows in the last 6 months, then compare it with the number of "liberals" appearing. 

My "goto" site for the real scoop on things like this is snopes.com. Snopes.com is a well-known site whose purpose is to separate truth from "urban legend" on the web. The April 2009 edition of Readers' Digest had this article about Snopes.com. You can go to their site at www.snopes.com/snopes.asp to check out the latest "pass it on" email you received. Chance are if you got it, so did lots of other folks, and it will be listed under the "Hot 25" tag. They will explain what is true, partially true and downright untrue.

I looked for it on the "Hot 25," but couldn't find it so I searched the Snopes.com site for "financial transaction tax" and it took under a minute to locate the real story on this piece of junk email. Click here to go to the full story. (Turns out it was #3 on the "Hot 25" but it was listed as "Debt-Free America Act" so I didn't recognize it. That term did not appear in the email.

For those of you who don't want to bother to click the link to the Snopes site, here's a rundown of the misstatements in the email:

1) This is a bill that has been introduced every year since 2004 (well before President Obama) by Rep. Chaka Fattah of Pennsylvania. It's his pet idea to reduce the national debt. HR-4646 has no co-sponsors. Neither Rep. DeFazio nor Sen. Harkin are co-sponsors of the bill, nor have they ever supported it. This bill annually dies in committee. It has never had any support from the White House or Nancy Pelosi.

2) Snopes goes on:" The included link that supposedly shows Nancy Pelosi endorsing the Debt Free America Act antedates the introduction of that bill to Congress; her comments actually refer to a different, earlier transaction tax proposed in December 2009 by Rep. Peter DeFazio. That bill, known as the "Let Wall Street Pay for the Restoration of Main Street" Act (HR 4191) called for the funding of investment in middle class jobs by levying small percentage value taxes on the buying and selling of stocks, futures, swaps, options and securities. (Although Rep. DeFazio's bill had 31 co-sponsors, it too has since languished in committee without being brought to a vote.)"

Oh, and that reference to "I checked it out on Truth or Fiction and it is true"? Only if you cannot understand English. Click here to go to that site and read for yourself. 

What is most depressing about this is that teachers could send out such drivel with their name attached. We would be ashamed of seventh-grade students who could not determine within minutes that this email was full of errors. 

Will the markets drop tonight?

We've been paying attention to the debt-ceiling debate in Washington because not only is market performance important to our individual savings, it's also critical to the ability of the NYSTRS to fund our pensions. Sure, if the markets tank taxpayers will make up the difference. If that happens and employer contributions rates show a drastic jump, we'd be almost certain to see a constitutional convention which would likely remove the protections from our pensions.

The Washington Post's Ezra Klein is my goto person for an understanding of the mechanics and meaning of what's happening in Washington. His post Saturday evening is well worth reading:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/what-killed-the-deal-last-week-and-what-might-make-one-happen-this-week/2011/07/11/gIQADNccVI_blog.html?hpid=z1

Here's his concluding paragraph:

"....It’s more likely that what we’re really doing now is wasting time until the markets plummet and Boehner’s members decide that a deal is better than no deal. And there’s a very good chance that the first major show of market concern could come [Sunday] night, when the Asian markets open. Boehner is hoping to present a plan by then, but a plan is very different from a deal. A plan is something politicians can come up with. A deal, we’re increasingly finding, is something that we need the markets to force."

I'll bet you didn't know this about buying a car!

Steve Lehto. a practicing attorney, says that the most important thing you should know when buying a car is this:

"Car sales are controlled by the purchase agreement you will be asked to sign once a deal has been struck. Most of these are pre-printed forms smothered in boilerplate legalese. Among the gibberish they ask you to sign is a sentence or two confirming that "verbal statements made by the sales person are not binding on the seller." Yes, that means the salesman can tell you anything he wants; it won't mean a thing legally. "This car is brand new." "This is a one-owner car." "This car has never been wrecked." "This car was not pulled from the bottom of a canal and refurbished after we pulled out all the dead alligators." 


Lehto's column. "The most important car buying tip" explains ways to deal with this little wrinkle in the sales process. Here's the link:


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-lehto/used-car-salesmen_b_906511.html

Taking a break to laugh...

It's "safety-valve" day. Time to let off some steam by laughing at some of the funniest editorial cartoons with an education/kids theme:

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/07/18/117766_a117902/mcclatchy-cartoons-for-the-week.html

http://cartoonbox.slate.com/hottopic/?image=5&topicid=49

http://cartoonbox.slate.com/hottopic/?image=12&topicid=49

http://cartoonbox.slate.com/hottopic/?image=19&topicid=49

http://cartoonbox.slate.com/hottopic/?image=0&topicid=39