Star:
Kansas City, Kan., school officials are proposing an increase of 9 mills, or $9 on each $1,000 of assessed value. School boards in Shawnee Mission and Blue Valley are seeking increases of 3 mills and almost 4 mills, respectively. Olathe is the only large district in the two counties not proposing a property tax increase.
In Tulare, California, officials shut down seven-year-old Daniela Earnest’s roadside lemonade stand. She was trying to raise money to send her family to Disneyland. But the city code enforcer didn’t like the fact that Daniela’s stand was near a busy intersection. And horrors, the lemonade stand didn’t have the proper permits!
AKRON, Ohio – When you’re following a script on how to beat Tiger Woods, it’s best not to improvise with the curtain call imminent. So what was that slapstick routine that Padraig Harrington introduced into the drama unfolding at Firestone Country Club on Sunday afternoon?
Now that Roger Federer has surpassed Pete Sampras as the all-time leader in Grand Slam titles, attention will now be refocused upon Federer’s good friend Tiger Woods as he continues his quest to overtake Jack Nicklaus’ historic mark of 18 major titles. Indeed, it’s a quarry that Tiger has concentrated on since he was a young boy in California gazing at the list of Nicklaus’ accomplishments that the prodigy pinned to his bedroom wall.
The NFL owners Jesse Jackson accused of colluding against Michael Vick are members of the same group that made Vick the No. 1 pick of the 2001 draft and handed the poor-passing quarterback more than $100 million in contracts.
CORTLAND, N.Y. – Inside the Jets’ locker room, James Dearth counts 20 married men among his teammates. Like Jay Feely, the kicker who outkicked his coverage and proposed 11 years ago. And Kris Jenkins, the nose tackle who tied the knot last month.
That Patrick Kane might have at the very least committed an incredibly immature act resulting in his early-morning arrest Sunday is believable enough. The Blackhawks star is 20 years old, after all. Might alcohol have played a role in Kane’s embarrassing alleged altercation with a cab driver? The details, if true, make it seem likely.
TERRE HAUTE, Ind. – Peyton Manning(notes) has always been one to goof on his own celebrity, finding humor in the frenzy that marks his every public move. On Friday, after a morning practice at the Indianapolis Colts’ training camp at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, the grinning quarterback ventured over to a fence to sign autographs for a crowd of kids – and adults acting like them – and invited me to share in the spectacle.
Since Rashard Lewis was caught using steroids a few days ago, the fallout has been spectacular. Every last one of us owes a debt of gratitude to Lewis, because he has made us witnesses to two pieces of history.
First, there’s the matter of the steroids. Lewis becomes the first NBA star, though I use that word loosely, to get busted on steroids — and we were privileged to be here to see it. I feel like the first guy who saw Halley’s Comet. I assume his name was Halley. I don’t much care if it wasn’t.
It is nearly 10 a.m. in the arid wasteland known as Badwater Basin, and already the temperature has soared to 105 degrees as the final and fastest wave of runners approaches the start line.
The setting is as brutal as it is beautiful: a salt-encrusted dead sea in the middle of Death Valley.
Perry Edinger waits quietly for the start. He has 135 miles ahead of him in the race known as the Badwater Ultramarathon.
Every time the David Ortiz “thing” came up during Saturday’s Red Sox-Yankees Fox telecast, there also arose a sense of dread and tedium; words were prefaced with a sigh. Naturally. Baseball’s PED issue has worn thin and the “Enough, already!” sentiment has grown, perhaps, to an overwhelming majority. You read it, hear it on TV, radio and on the street: “Enough, let’s move on.”
I’ve been combing twitter, reading every article I can get my hands on, and mock drafting away and here are six early picks I’ve gleaned for breakout wide receivers plus five bonus guys to keep an eye on.
I define a breakout wide receiver as one who fulfills two criteria. First, I expect him to perform at a much higher level than he has at the NFL level to this point – or very well at the NFL level right off the bat, in the case of rookies. Second, he must be a guy we project to significantly outperform his ADP. You’re all more than welcome to make your picks for breakout wideouts in the comments section.
WASHINGTON – One of the bewildering ironies of the health care debate is that President Obama claims to be attacking the status quo when he’s actually embracing it. Ever since Congress created Medicare and Medicaid in 1965, health politics has followed a simple logic: Expand benefits and talk about controlling costs. That’s the status quo, and Obama faithfully adheres to it. While denouncing skyrocketing health spending, he would increase it by extending government health insurance to millions more Americans.
Spontaneous or contrived, the shouting, shoving and other shenanigans at lawmakers’ town-hall-style meetings point to one probable outcome: the demise of bipartisan health care negotiations.
Reporting from Washington — To win the White House, Barack Obama and his political team built a vast grass-roots network of supporters and volunteers that came to be considered one of the most valuable assets in American politics. Their ambition after the election was to reshape the network, with its trained organizers and 13 million e-mail addresses, into a ground-level force to push the new president’s policy goals.
Aug. 10, 2009 | I’m a strong supporter of universal health insurance, and a fan of the Obama administration. But I’m appalled by the deal the White House has made with the pharmaceutical industry’s lobbying arm to buy their support.
The first round of protests against the Obama administration’s chaotic and rapid-fire expansion of government came in the form of grass-roots “tea parties,” which were predictably met with scorn by the Democrat-Media Complex (the natural coalition of the Democratic Party and the mainstream media.)
My sister nailed it many years ago when she said, “Your basic human is not such a hot item.”
Keep that filed in your head as I tell my little tale.
About five or six years ago, roughly, I was solicited to write a column every two weeks for the Sunday New York Times Business Section. I was really thrilled. I have written for the Washington Post (when I was a teenager), for the Wall Street Journal edit page under the legendary Bob Bartley, for Barron’s, under the really great Alan Abelson and Jim Meagher, for my beloved American Spectator, under the great Bob and Wlady, and now having a regular column at the Times was going to be great stuff.
In East Asia where Confucian thought is still influential from Seoul to Singapore, former President Bill Clinton’s visit to Pyongyang to meet North Korea’s Kim Jong Il was immediately seen as a triumph for the North Korean leader who had maneuvered the American into being a supplicant seeking a favor.
Aug. 10 (Bloomberg) — President Barack Obama told his Mexican counterpart Felipe Calderon that he is committed to resolving a dispute over truck access to U.S. highways.
