Pennsbury Basketball: Calling out the Bucks County Courier Times

One of the best high school basketball programs (boys') in the Philadelphia area belongs to the Pennsbury Falcons. Alums of Pennsbury include Bucknell guard Jason Vegotsky and Temple center Lavoy Allen. Senior swingman Dalton Pepper is headed to West Virginia. The Falcons' come close to selling out their home games. Coach Frank Sciolla is a renaissance man -- a well-read English teacher who already has won 250 games (he's not even 40 yet).

Sciolla also gives back to the community. He and his players run clinics for young players in local recreational leagues on Saturday mornings. Well over 100 kids attend each Saturday during the season. Moreover, Sciolla encourages these kids to come up to him during the junior varsity games that precede the varsity's contests. If a young kid looks Coach Sciolla in the eye, says hello and tells him what book he's reading, that kid gets to go into the locker room for the pre-game talk and at half-time for the half-time talk. That's a pretty nice reward, isn't it?

And where are the Falcons? In the top 10 in southeastern Pennsylvania. It's an outstanding program.

The team plays most of its games on Tuesday and Friday nights. The team has won most of its games. And yet, it gets almost no (and sometimes no) coverage in the Saturday morning edition of the Bucks County Courier Times, the local paper for communities in what's called Lower Bucks County. How can this be? Now, the Saturday edition is almost a non-edition, a sparse tabloid that testifies to the financial position of the Caulkins Newspaper group more than anything else. Still, it should be covering the best team in the area, shouldn't it?

Why type of grudge is the paper bringing to bear here? Why aren't the Falcons getting top billing on the back-page of the paper? They have a great coach, good kids in the program and a wonderful program.

And they deserve a whole lot better from this paper.

Source..

Read more...

Top Obama Economic Adviser Admits Stimulus Bill Might not Create Jobs

The great secret about President Obama’s stimulus bill is that it is not a stimulus bill. With only 12 cents on the dollar going to actual stimulating projects this bill is actually the biggest spending bill ever proposed in congress. And people wonder why Democrats are called tax and spend liberals. A close look at this bill is justification of that label.
One of the claims that then president-elect Obama claimed was that this stimulus bill would create 3 million jobs. This claim was later amended to the less aggressive claim that the bill would create or save 3 million jobs.
Now that has changed again because according to this article President Obama’s top economic adviser is admitting that there is “considerable uncertainty” in regards to any of Obama’s claims of job creation. And this is coming from the woman who created that number in the first place.
It should be understood that all of the estimates presented in this memo are subject to significant margins of error,” they said. “There is the obvious uncertainty that comes from modeling a hypothetical package rather than the final legislation passed by the Congress. But, there is the more fundamental uncertainty that comes with any estimate of the effects of a program. Our estimates of economic relationships and rules of thumb are derived from historical experience and so will not apply exactly in any given episode. Furthermore, the uncertainty is surely higher than normal now because the current recession is unusual both in its fundamental causes and its severity.
Let me sum up that statement for you.
President Obama had no real plan, that is evidenced by the phrase, “There is the obvious uncertainty that comes from modeling a hypothetical package”, he has to wait to see what congress sends him. There is a huge margin of error calculated into the number of jobs that would be created even though the administration promoted these numbers as facts, so in other words, either President Obama, or more likely Christina Romer, pulled these numbers out of his/her ass.
I think they can put these numbers right back where they came from.

Source..

Read more...