POWIP Piece of Work In Progress

Harry Reid: Republicans Call Those Seeking Work “Bums” and “Hobos”

Well, not exactly.

Reid’s Deputy Communications Director Regan Lachapelle told CNSNews.com that when Reid said Republicans had referred to unemployed people as "bums" and "hobos" he was referring to comments made by Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and Rep. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) over the extension of unemployment benefits.

Sen. Kyl had said that unemployment insurance “doesn't create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work.”

When questioning the need for extending unemployment benefits, Rep. Heller had asked, “Is the government now creating hobos?”

Leader Reid’s office referred these stories to CNSNews.com.

Meanwhile, in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building . . .

Heading up a Middle Class Task Force roundtable discussion on Wednesday, Vice President Joe Biden said that one of the benefits of the $787 billion stimulus package signed into law in February is that it has generated new ideas for dealing with economic problems, including unemployment.

Biden said he and Melody Barnes, White House Domestic Policy Council director, have talked at length about ways to “generate new ideas about how to deal with future employment needs,” Biden said. “We have new ideas about how to spend government money wisely.”

He said that there was “virtually no fraud” associated with the spending so far of the billions allocated for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The government, according to recovery.gov, has distributed just over one half of the $787 billion.

“I might add, I’m very proud to say, that’s there’s been virtually no – knock on wood – virtually no fraud associated with the $787 billion program overall,” Biden said as he banged his fist on the table and against his head.

*******

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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Whatever policy you’re trying to change, d’ye seriously think that’s going to make a difference?

David Thompson has great video of Wanker Central in front of Parliament, his idea of hell.

The video also presents the time-travel appearance of the young Boy George at about the 7 minute mark.

In David's comments, Julia M. says that the Ethical Barbecue is her idea of hell, which makes sense, considering it might have been an alternate title for Dante's Inferno.

Dude, I'm having a barbecue Saturday night. Want to come?

It's not an ethical barbecue, is it?

Related: Various officials to be grilled on Capitol Hill.

I found my grill (bump ba dee dee bump dee doo)
On Capitol Hill
Where Congressmen shill
While oil still spills.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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The Insemination of Liberty Belle

Soiled Conception

Update x1

A scene here

"Demons exist whether you believe in them or not"

A Trailer here

Enoch_Root

AKA. Bobby Donn Brubaker (the most popular man in Mesa, AZ), the Umbrella of Terror, Jack Ketch.

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Seasoning the Open Hatchet Wound

Home Sweet Home

Enoch_Root

AKA. Bobby Donn Brubaker (the most popular man in Mesa, AZ), the Umbrella of Terror, Jack Ketch.

Website - More Posts

Remember that time that guy deliberately drove through the side of my house

and I put up a shrine to him where the wall used to be?  No, neither do I.

William Teach:

All I have to say is, this is very disappointing. Oh, and despicable

After a raucous hearing, a Manhattan community board backed a proposal on Tuesday evening to build a Muslim community center near the World Trade Center.

The 29-to-1 vote, with 10 abstentions, followed a four-hour back-and-forth between those who said the community center would be a monument to tolerance and those who believed it would be an affront to victims of the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The board’s vote was advisory — it did not have the power to scrap plans for a center — but it was seen as an important barometer of community sentiment.

Yes, there are mosques all over the country. Most of them are for good folks. And many teach the harsh version of Islam, the one where the infidel is to be killed and women are to be treated as property. No one knows where the money for this “community center” is coming from. Quite a bit is from overseas. What do they believe?

C. Lee Hanson, 77, whose son Peter was killed in the attacks, said he opposed the center not because he was intolerant, but because he believed that building a tribute to Islam so close to the World Trade Center would be insensitive.

Obviously, the people building the center couldn’t care less. Personally, I couldn’t care less about being called intolerant, when it comes to building a religious center near the site where Islamists killed 2,996 of our friends, neighbors, and loved ones.

Charles Winecoff sends along this email:

This is an ACTION ALERT! Please take a moment and contact Mayor Bloomberg. We all must do our part in preventing a Mosque being built on Ground Zero

Here is the info:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg can be reached by phone: 311. By fax: (212) 788 8123. By email: http://www.nyc.gov/html/mail/html/mayor.html.

Community Board One can be reached by phone: (212) 442 5050. By fax: (212) 442 5055.

By email: man01@cb.nyc.gov

Their street address is: 49-51 Chambers Street Room 715, New York, NY 10007-1209.

Walid Shoebat on taquiyah and the moonbats.

The most important reading of the day, in all likelihood, is Richard Fernandez' article on Rumsfeld's contingency plans for Iran and North Korea, which Obama may be forced to consider.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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Jerry Wilson’s Mom

passed away yesterday.  Please keep him and his family in your prayers.

If you're not familiar with Jerry's work, you're missing out.  His book (on the largely forgotten first generation of Christian rockers) gets a mention in this series of interviews on Christianity and homosexuality.

He's been toiling away in the blogosphere for years at Goldfish and Clowns, and most recently at a paying gig at the CSE blog, The Human Touch, where he's busy humanizing the eeeeevil insurance companies, from a perspective somewhat different from Meep's, though in line with her critiques.

For those of you who haven't blogrolled Jerry, yet, I would like to say that, apart from his talents as a writer, he is about as good a friend as one could hope to find on the internet, and a person of deep convictions and values and kindness, and that is as great a tribute to a mom as I can imagine.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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Pension news roundup, 27May2010

• Brief bit on MEP bailouts
• Pension changes in Greece, warnings for other countries
• McQ on the proposed MEP bailout
• Social Security reform options – raise retirement age, reduce benefit formula, raise payroll taxes

A good overview for why we're having a public pension crisis:

The evaluation problem is a feature of defined benefit plans, which promise pensioners a specific benefit based on their compensation. Who knows exactly how much a defined benefit obligation that begins to pay off in 2040 will cost Yonkers? (A similar problem arises in analyzing health insurance for retirees; who knows the cost of providing workers with Cadillac health plans that deliver benefits 30 years from now?) It is far easier to figure out the cost of higher wages, so the negotiation between public-sector unions and local governments pushes compensation away from higher wages toward murkier forms of pay.

This system almost seems as if it were designed to bring about fiscal crisis after fiscal crisis. Because the unions and their bargaining partners have an incentive to understate the cost of future benefits, governments are never going to set aside enough money to pay for them.
As the system is designed to hide costs rather than deliver compensation in an efficient manner, plenty of social surplus is being left on the table. In other words, we could reduce the lifetime compensation of public servants without making them worse off or their jobs any less attractive. If I’m right that plenty of impatient cops are out there, then both police officers and taxpayers could be made better off by paying them more now in exchange for smaller pensions later.

How are these costs undervalued?

Did I mention that the valuation assumptions are set by the states or pension plans themselves? Remember that one post about discount rate? Yeah, that's almost always set by the client.

But not for private plans. It had been noticed with regards to these shenanigans, private plans could be much more underfunded than the valuations suggested, and so Congress has passed a variety of laws over the years, making rules about valuation and contributions much more rigorous. But not for public plans, and not for multi-employer plans.

Larry Littlefield has a bit harsher take on this:

Third, there is this sentence. "In virtually every case, the officials who granted the rich pensions thought they were offering something affordable, because the cost estimates were too low." No, this was not a mistake. The unions and those they keep in office sought out intentionally fraudulent cost estimates. The corrupt actuaries are no different than the corrupt accountants and executive compensation specialists pushing up executive pay, or the corrupt appraisers and bond raters who helped Wall Street pillage during the housing bubble. Get the right answer or you don't get the job. Nobody's gonna pay you to tell the truth.

Um, okay. I guess he won't be contributing to the “Up with Actuaries!” fund this year....

Meep

Meep is a member of the Irish Catholic mafia, having a suspiciously high number of green-eyed, red-haired friends. While she doesn’t have red hair herself [except when she goes into the sun (rare for any vampire)], she does have green eyes. She’s a raving Papist and is a life actuary on the side [i.e., she counts dead people]. An amateur pain-in-the-ass [willing to go pro!], she likes covering retirement, mortality, math, and education issues.

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Smoking Gun Nabs a Good One

From their weekly round-up of mug shots, charged with child molestation and being in the country illegally:

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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From Jerry Wilson’s Frazzled Brain

Did you know that he read 250ish high school essays for CSE's scholarship competition?  Well, here are this years most mind-bending similes and metaphors from high schoolers across the nation.

It is perhaps this sort of mind-expanding undertaking which prompts him to connect CSE and Stone Temple Pilots.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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Trifecta Month for Pedophile Teachers in WI

Public School Teacher, Sylvanus Tyler, Arrested

Police issued a warrant for 40-year-old Sylvanus Tyler accusing him of child enticement and sexual assault of a child by a person who works with children. Officers say he was arrested today at his parents' house.

McKinley Teacher, unnamed, tries to cover...

WGTD radio reports another McKinley teacher is charged with failing to report the alleged assault.

Meanwhile, Bryan Wendt kills the buzz in Oconomowoc...

Bryan Wendt, 27, faces two counts of sexual assault of a child and two counts of child enticement. He is a former student teacher at Waukesha Central Middle School. He is now a teacher at Summit Elementary and Park Lawn Elementary in Oconomowoc.

And if you think this is fucked up, read some of the completely morally-bankrupt parents covering for him here

momofsmartgirl wrote:That girl is just as dumb as the teacher. She was all giddy cause she's got a older man yet when things dont turn out the way she likes it, she cries about it. then mom and dad cry about it, only to find out their little girl is who-ring around!

She should change her handle to: I can't wait until my "smartgirl" comes home pregnant or loses her virginity! That will be a cause to celebrate, I am sure. Howabout a tramp-stamp while you're at it?

WOW. We are well and truly f**ked. Who are these people? Makes me wonder if these are a gaggle of his lovers from among the wives of the students. Not exactly kidding.

Enoch_Root

AKA. Bobby Donn Brubaker (the most popular man in Mesa, AZ), the Umbrella of Terror, Jack Ketch.

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