Today’s Live Wire: Quick Links
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- Bill O’Reilly, Ass Imam
- Palm Coast’s Real Estate Rut
- Florida Sued Scott for Insider Trading
- State Budget Disasters
- “Lollipops Mom” Sentenced to Death
- Florida’s Abuse of Young Offenders
- Why the Rich Need Their Tax Cuts
- How Cell Phones Skew Polls
- The Tea Parties’ Coming Influence
- Justin Bieber, Pedophile
- A Few Good Links
- Mosque Madness and the Shame of New York
- Is Fox News a Terrorist Command Center? Stewart Asks, and Answers
- Experts: Argue All You Want, Mosque Project Is on Firm Legal Ground
- Krauthammer’s Sacrilege: When Reactionaries Fire Up their Sunday Missals–and Miss
- Governing Divide: Nurses Are for Sink, Doctors Are for Scott, Voters Still on Mars
- To Sink or Scott: Claims and Counterclaims
- Alex Sink and Rick Scott on Health Care: Sharp Clash of Opposites in Race for Governor
- Rick Scott would ban all abortions
- 1153 homes currently “For Sale” in Palm Coast, priced between $45,000 and $2,600,000.
- They’ve been on the market between 1 and 1872 days.
- 40% of the listed homes have been for sale for over 6 months and up to over 5 years.
- 34% of listings (391 homes) are short sales attempts.
- Only 3.7% of our listings (43 homes) are bank owned foreclosures. (“We are caught up in the world of pre-foreclosures… or foreclosure avoidance. But the foreclosures are coming, with over 300,000 notices issued per month for over 18 months in a row.”)
- We have sold 111 homes, or 9.6% of available inventory. 9.6% is known as the absorption rate. The implication is that if no new inventory came on the market, we could sell everything in about 10 months. It’s a fallacy, however, because 70% of our listings are over-priced and won’t sell in the foreseeable future. 60% of these sales were “distressed” sales – short sale or bank owned.
- Housing and Real Estate Data for Flagler County and Palm Coast, 2009 Census Bureau’s Community Survey
- Existing Home Sales Edge Up 5.2% in South, But Still at 15-Year Low
- County’s $3.5 Million Gamble on Pellicer Flats Raids Credibility of Land Program
- Graphic Grasp: Who benefits From Tax Cuts
- Taking Stockman: How Nixon, Reagan, Bush and their GOP Demolished the Economy
- Why I’m Voting republican
- Stetson lecture on the Death penalty, Oct. 18
- The Death Penalty and Racism
- Why Tea Parties Are More Bunkers than Bunker Hill
- Past Tea Party Bluster, Commissioners Eulogize Budget Season and Put Wailers On Notice
- The Other Tax Referendum: School District Battles Misperceptions to Preserve Levy
- Enterprise Flagler’s Tax-and-Build Plan Bombs as Tea Party Wags a Big No
- Obama is becoming McCain
- Lil’ Wayne sends letter from prison to Orlando soldier
- The Barack Obama Sr. I knew
- The craze for indoor pot growing
- Top 5 Developer Questions About HTML5 Answered
- On the advertising-editorial wall of separation. Tear it down?
You’re welcome to send your Live Wire news tips or suggestions to LiveWire@flaglerlive.com.
Today’s Live Wire: Quick Links
Live Wire Rewinds
That Bill O’Reilly makes an ass of himself isn’t news. It’s the O’Reilly Factor. But he did it on The View, the ABC chat show led by Barbara Walters,over the mosque planned near ground zero, indicting the entirety of Islam and Muslims before backtracking somewhat. “Today you’re a pinhead,” Walters told him (a pun on his latest glutes in hardcover, Pinheads and Patriots). Whoopie Goldberg and Joy Behar briefly walked out, which was a bit of theatrical bullshit on their part, earning them a reprimand from Walters, but they returned and endured more of the nation’s leading imam of inanity. Watch:
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Florida Sued Scott for Insider Trading
The book on this guy keeps getting thicker with crud. “In 1997,” the Miami Herald reports, “as the FBI unleashed a massive criminal investigation of Scott’s hospital chain, Florida’s State Board of Administration filed a civil lawsuit accusing Scott and his fellow hospital directors of profiting from a culture of corruption and selling stock 23 days before federal agents raided the company’s offices in Texas. Ultimately, the insider trading complaint was dismissed by a judge without trial, but not before an appeals court said that there was a chance that Scott should have known “of the arrangements that allegedly violated health care laws and regulations.” The Florida civil suit, which was separate from the federal investigation of Columbia/HCA that led to $1.7 billion in fines, was filed in Tennessee state court. But it was shelved in favor of a larger federal case that leveled many of the same claims as the Florida state suit. The list of defendants in the federal case also included Scott, who had been forced out as the company’s CEO on July 25, 1997, about two weeks before the civil actions were filed. The suit was settled six years later for about $14 million. Scott was never criminally charged.” And now he’s an allegedly legitimate contender for the governorship.
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Real estate blogger Frank Zedar has a few numbers summing up the real estate landscape in Palm Coast in the last 30 days, for single-family homes; not condos or land lots:
See the full post, with a few numbers on Flagler Beach as well.
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State Budget Disasters: Worst Since 1930s
From Brookings: “The worst recession since the 1930s has caused the steepest decline in state tax receipts on record. State tax revenues were 8.4 percent lower in the 2009 fiscal year than in 2008, and an additional 3.1 percent lower in 2010, while the need for state-funded services did not decline. As a result, even after making very deep spending cuts over the last two years, states continue to face large budget gaps. At least 46 states struggled to close shortfalls when adopting budgets for the current fiscal year (FY 2011, which began July 1 in most states). These came on top of the large shortfalls that 48 states faced in fiscal years 2009 and 2010. States will continue to struggle to find the revenue needed to support critical public services for a number of years, threatening hundreds of thousands of jobs.
“[…] States’ fiscal conditions remain extremely weak even as the economy appears to be moving in the direction of recovery. Indeed, historical experience and current economic projections suggest that due to declining federal assistance fiscal year 2012 will be more difficult than 2010 or 2011. In fiscal year 2011 states have mostly closed shortfalls that will total some $100 billion after taking federal aid into account. Taking all these factors into account, it is reasonable to expect that for 2012, shortfalls are likely to exceed $140 billion with only $6 billion in federal Recovery Act dollars remaining available.[2] Figure 2 shows the budget shortfalls that states faced and will face after taking into account the federal recovery act dollars.” See the full report.
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“Lollipops” Mom Sentenced to Death
A different way of following one barbaric act with another. From the Miami Herald: “For the second time, a jury has declared Ana Maria Cardona should be executed for starving, torturing and beating her toddler son known as “Baby Lollipops.” By a vote of 7-5, jurors on Thursday recommended the death penalty for Cardona, who was convicted in July of murdering Lazaro Figueroa, whose badly beaten body was discovered in the bushes of a Miami Beach home in November 1990. […] Back in 1992, jurors convicted Cardona, and she was sentenced to execution, the first woman in Florida to be sent to Death Row for murdering her own child. Sixteen women have received the death penalty in the state’s history. Only two have actually been executed. The others have either had their sentences commuted or been released. In Cardona’s case, the Florida Supreme Court overturned the conviction and a new trial was granted. She was convicted a second time this July of murdering the toddler. Unable at first to identify him, police dubbed the child “Baby Lollipops” for the candy design on his T-shirt.” At the original trial, Olivia Gonzalez–who had been Cardona’s lover and who eventually served 19 years (out of 40) on second degree murder conviction, “testified that Cardona hated the boy, and for months beat and starved the child, finally inflicting a fatal blow with a baseball bat.”
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Florida’s Abuse of Young Offenders
Since the 1990s the demonization of teens as predators has made a mockery of juvenile justice systems which were supposed to recognize the differences between adults and youths, even–and especially–when crimes are committed. Florida and Texas have always led the way in scraping the barrels of medievalism. Florida still does. From the Orlando Sentinel: “In June 2000, 486 juveniles in Central Florida counties were sent to adult court. That number continued to drop — bottoming out at 296 juveniles from July 2004 to June 2005. But the pendulum began to swing in the opposite direction, and in the fiscal year that ended in July 2009 — the most recent year for which data are available — more than 600 Central Florida juveniles were sent to adult court. University of Central Florida criminal-justice professor Kenneth Adams said the increase reflects a systemwide conundrum when dealing with violent repeat young offenders: The juvenile-justice system — oriented toward rehabilitating children — offers few alternatives for punishing young offenders who pose serious threats to the community, he said. […] If a youth is tried in juvenile court, the maximum sentence would keep him in prison until his 25th birthday. In adult court, a juvenile can be sentenced to life in prison for the most serious crimes, such as murder.” The full story.
Why The Rich Need Their Tax Cuts
Colbert explains it all:
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Tax Shelter Skelter | ||||
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From the Pew Center for the People and the Press: “The latest estimates of telephone coverage by the National Center for Health Statistics found that a quarter of U.S. households have only a cell phone and cannot be reached by a landline telephone. Cell-only adults are demographically and politically different from those who live in landline households; as a result, election polls that rely only on landline samples may be biased. Although some survey organizations now include cell phones in their samples, many — including virtually all of the automated polls — do not include interviews with people on their cell phones. (For more on the impact of the growing cell-only population on survey research, see “Assessing the Cell Phone Challenge,” May 20, 2010). In three of four election polls conducted since the spring of this year, estimates from the landline samples alone produced slightly more support for Republican candidates and less support for Democratic candidates, resulting in differences of four to six points in the margin. One poll showed no difference between the landline and combined samples.” See the report.
The Tea Parties Coming Influence
From The Times: “With a little more than two weeks till Election Day, 33 Tea Party-backed candidates are in tossup races or running in House districts that are solidly or leaning Republican, and 8 stand a good or better chance of winning Senate seats. While the numbers are relatively small, they could exert outsize influence, putting pressure on Republican leaders to carry out promises to significantly cut spending and taxes, to repeal health care legislation and financial regulations passed this year, and to phase out Social Security and Medicare in favor of personal savings accounts. Still, the bulk of the Tea Party candidates are running in districts that are solidly Democratic, meaning that most Tea Party efforts — no matter how energetic — are likely to register as basically a protest vote.” The full story.
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This just in, from the most trusted news source in the world next to the Daily Show:
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