By Phil West Special to The Commercial Appeal Tuesday, February 3, 2009
JACKSON, Miss. -- House Speaker Billy McCoy appeared incredulous Monday that Gov. Haley Barbour is willing to reject $2.6 billion in badly needed federal stimulus money while state government deals with a shortfall that could reach $310 million by June 30.
quote:Barbour, who was quoted over the weekend as saying he was not certain he would accept the stimulus money, repeated his concerns Monday about strings being attached and states having to pick up the tab when the programs expire in July 2010.
Barbour may end up being a hero for quality thinking like that. If true that the states would be required to continue AND FUND programs started or grown under this "stimulus", then he would be very smart to turn down the stimulus money.
quote:"The law in our state is clear. Before you can get unemployment, you have to be ready, willing and able to work full-time," he said.
AMEN!
quote:Mississippi employers, he said, would be left with a tax increase to pay for that change once the stimulus money expires, Barbour said.
"I will say, I suspect, that most of the money will either have strings attached that are insignificant or they're manageable. But there are some that are not. And if I consider them to be against the best interest of the state, then I will oppose them."
At least there is ONE politician remaining in the United States with some common sense. I thought they were extinct!
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Barbour may end up being a hero for quality thinking like that. If true that the states would be required to continue AND FUND programs started or grown under this "stimulus", then he would be very smart to turn down the stimulus money.
Barbour was lying.
he'll take the money and grumble about it.
when are you going to realise we don't live in a cartoon world?
these guys in the GOP are thrilled they don't have to take responsibity for the mess they created and can turn people like you to complaining about the failure of their policies, and the resulting "repairs".
it would be funny if it wasn't so pitiful.
it is well understood in MS that we were able to balance the budget because of Katrina, not in spite of Katrina.
December 7, 2005 News Articles
Governor's relative is big contract winner Rosemary Barbour happens to be married to a nephew of Mississippi's governor, Haley Barbour. The New York Times reports that she also happens to be one of the biggest Mississippi-based winners of federal contracts for Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts. The $6.4 million in contracts received by her company, Alcatec LLC, have raised questions about possible favoritism.
posted
here's how your "conservative hero" operates:
The FBI raid involved another relative of the governor, Rosemary Ramirez Barbour, who's married to Henry's and Austin's brother Charles, 44, a member of the Hinds County board of supervisors. Rosemary owns a Jackson company, Alcatec LLC; OMB Watch, a Washington organization that monitors federal spending, says the company has received almost $27 million in U.S. contracts to maintain trailers used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the government's disaster-relief arm.
On June 21, FBI agents searched three Alcatec offices, seizing computers and documents as part of an investigation into what the warrant said was possible mail fraud. The company didn't respond to repeated requests for comment.
Brunini, Haley Barbour's lawyer, said in a telephone interview that the governor ``doesn't have any connection with Charles Barbour, and certainly not with his wife.'' Smith, the governor's spokesman, declined to comment.
It isn't just Barbour relatives who have found opportunities in Katrina-related work; lobbyists at the governor's former firm, Washington-based Barbour Griffith & Rogers LLC, have profited from Katrina, too.
Salvaging a Casino
On Feb. 9 of this year, the governor's two partners, Ed Rogers and Lanny Griffith, filed forms with the state of Mississippi disclosing lobbying they did last year for Leucadia National Corp., a New York-based buyout firm that acquired the Hard Rock Casino in Biloxi, which had been ravaged by Katrina just days before its scheduled grand opening.
The lobbyists used their personal addresses instead of the business office that still bears Barbour's name. They faxed the forms from a FedEx Kinko's store in Washington. Rogers, 48, said in an e-mail that he and Griffith, 56, used their personal addresses because Mississippi asks lobbyists to file as individuals. The state form asks for a ``physical address.'' Lobbyists such as Henry Barbour commonly use a business address.
Arctic Sea Ice Underestimated for Weeks Due to Faulty Sensor Email | Print | A A A
By Alex Morales
Feb. 20 (Bloomberg) -- A glitch in satellite sensors caused scientists to underestimate the extent of Arctic sea ice by 500,000 square kilometers (193,000 square miles), a California- size area, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center said.
The error, due to a problem called “sensor drift,” began in early January and caused a slowly growing underestimation of sea ice extent until mid-February. That’s when “puzzled readers” alerted the NSIDC about data showing ice-covered areas as stretches of open ocean, the Boulder, Colorado-based group said on its Web site.
“Sensor drift, although infrequent, does occasionally occur and it is one of the things that we account for during quality- control measures prior to archiving the data,” the center said. “Although we believe that data prior to early January are reliable, we will conduct a full quality check.’’
The extent of Arctic sea ice is seen as a key measure of how rising temperatures are affecting the Earth. The cap retreated in 2007 to its lowest extent ever and last year posted its second- lowest annual minimum at the end of the yearly melt season. The recent error doesn’t change findings that Arctic ice is retreating, the NSIDC said.
The center said real-time data on sea ice is always less reliable than archived numbers because full checks haven’t yet been carried out. Historical data is checked across other sources, it said.
The NSIDC uses Department of Defense satellites to obtain its Arctic sea ice data rather than more accurate National Aeronautics and Space Administration equipment. That’s because the defense satellites have a longer period of historical data, enabling scientists to draw conclusions about long-term ice melt, the center said.
“There is a balance between being as accurate as possible at any given moment and being as consistent as possible through long time-periods,” NSIDC said. “Our main scientific focus is on the long-term changes in Arctic sea ice.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Alex Morales in London at amorales2*bloomberg.net.
-------------------- It isn't so much that liberals are ignorant. It's just that they know so many things that aren't so.
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