Amidst the more than half a billion Federal dollars to be spent as stimulus (and another $287 million in tax breaks), there is great news for Amtrak but maybe not so great news for the people who ride it most — those in the Northeast Corridor.
The final stimulus bill will give Amtrak $850 million for capital projects — tracks, trains, stations — with an emphasis on projects that can be started quickly thereby putting people to work. But there’s one final proviso: No more than 50% can be spent on projects …

Ummm. Haven’t we heard this before? The Treasury needs a ginormous wad of cash to bail out the financial system and it will explain just what it will do with all that money…later.
Yeah it’s deja vu in DC with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner doing his best Hank Paulson imitation while announcing the Obama Administration’s $2.5 trillion plan to save the banks.
Come again? Two-point-five-what? Trillion? As in 1,000,000,000,000? Yes, $2.5 trillion.
The plan is to use the unspent half of the original $700 billion “Bush bailout” and then commit as much as …

At first blush it may seem a bit un-American but the news that the Obama Administration will cap the salary of top executives at any firm receiving Federal bailout money at $500,000 was met with applause on both sides of the aisle on Capitol Hill (a rare feat of late).
Obama said the measure was aimed at curbing excess. “We don’t begrudge anybody for achieving success. And we believe that success should be rewarded. But what gets people upset — and rightfully so — are executives being rewarded for failure. Especially …

There’s really nothing quite so annoying (aside from your boss) as Albany’s A-team proclaiming themselves “great” leaders for solving some terrible crisis or another when they in fact do nothing of the sort.
Today’s episode features absurd statements from Democrats and Republicans alike after the Democratic majorities of the Assembly and State Senate reached an agreement with the Democratic Governor to close a $1.6 billion gap in the current budget (which ends in less than two months).
The agreement essentially avoids almost any of hard choices by using more than $630 million …

I know you’re all waking up this morning talking about the stimulus football but I can’t let pass what happened earlier on Sunday without notice.
The US government is about to spend 800 billion or 900 billion or a trillion dollars on a stimulus “program” and that was, rightly, the topic of every one of the major Sunday political television talk shows. Shows that are the closest thing America still has to relatively thorough discussions of critically important issues. Ha!
This week ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, and NBC showed just what they …

Rish Limbaugh is an idiot.
No, liberals, not because he makes outlandish statements about Democrats that rarely have even the scent of truth. Rush Limbaugh is an idiot for helping Barack Obama marginalize the Republican Party in it’s hour of need.
Some Obama supporters have worried that the President was foolish in even acknowledging the existence of Radio Rush after the talk-show host said he hoped Obama would fail. They said Obama only gave the Rotund One more attention and therefore more power.
Exactly.
At a time when the Republican Party is in a …

While it’s a relief that the month-long drama over who New York Governor David Paterson would pick to fill Hillary Clinton’s US Senate seat, at lease one of his claims at a news conference in Albany Friday was absurd and impossible on it’s face.
In his lengthy explanation of how he arrived at upstate Congresswoman Kirsten Gillibrand as “the best choice”, Paterson said, “This was not based on gender, on geographic location, on race, religion or sexual orientation. This decision was made on who the best candidate would actually be.”

Not based …