ATLmalcontent
Switching the domain back to atlmalcontent.wordpress.com -- soon atlmalcontent.com will route you to the old (new) site.
This site is ovah. Sorry for the confusion.
ATL malcontent
Contributors
What $400 mil would buy
Excellent column by the AJC's Kyle Wingfield detailing what the money earmarked for an unnecessary football stadium could go toward instead:
For example, it could go to cutting property taxes. Atlanta takes in $18 million to $20 million in general funds for each mill of property taxes. (A mill equals a dollar of tax for every $1,000 of a home’s assessed value.)
If the city were to lower property taxes by one mill and replace the revenue with hotel taxes, the owner of a $250,000 home would save $250 a year. (Hey, that’s about what it costs to take a family of four to a Falcons game!)
On the other hand, we could continue to spend the money, just not on a new stadium. The list of potential projects is long. Here are some possibilities, not all of which I’m endorsing simply by including them here.
For $400 million, we could build the entire 44-mile network of high-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes planned to help ease congestion in the region. Or we could make a number of improvements to freeway interchanges choked by traffic.
For those more interested in public transportation, the city could complete about a third of the BeltLine’s 22-mile transit loop. Alternatively, it could more than cover the first phase of the proposed streetcar route along the Peachtree corridor (a project I’d personally put at the bottom of the list).
Or the city could do the opposite of what governments tend to do and reduce the burden on future taxpayers.
With $400 million, the city could erase more than a quarter of its $1.5 billion pension funds deficit. Or it could pay for a big chunk of its continuing, $4 billion water and sewer infrastructure repairs. Those costs are inescapable. Why pass them on to unborn Atlantans when visitors could help us pay them down now?
Or we could give the money to one of the state's five billionaires.
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by ATLmalcontent
Arizona determined to become nation's most back-assward state
Watch out, Alabama -- Arizona's gunning for you. Literally.
The Arizona State Legislature has passed a bill allowing individuals to carry guns at public events. The bill’s passage comes less than two months after Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot during a public event in Tucson, Arizona.
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by ATLmalcontent
Thoughts on the NPR scandal
*Fired NPR exec Ron Schiller's indulgence of Zionist conspiracies bothers me much more than his putdown of tea partiers. Though I wouldn't go as far as Wonkette's Ken Layne ...
a crumbling nation of fat slobs who ignore their kleptocrat kings and instead point their corn-dog fingers at Scary Mooslims and the “Kenyan president” and then get their little racist feelings hurt when anybody says, “Hey, look at those racist clowns.”
... I have a hard time feeling sorry for a movement that empowers nutjobs like Bachmann Palin Overdrive. The tape doesn't lie.
*Talk about the pot-bellied calling the kettle Negro. Conservative blowhards complaining about "hateful rhetoric" from a heretofore anonymous NPR exec must not listen to their own broadcasts. One difference: Ron Schiller was fired.
*James O'Keefe is not a journalist. As the National Review's Michael Walsh notes, "There ought to be a sharp line between ethical professional journalism and activist citizen-journalism, because the professionals generally have the technical experience to extract answers to questions without resorting to subterfuge." O'Keefe's resume includes getting a heroic teacher suspended and plotting to embarrass a CNN correspondent by recording a meeting on hidden cameras aboard a floating “palace of pleasure” and making sexually suggestive comments.
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by ATLmalcontent
Morbidly obese gasbag plays the sloth card
We all know Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid, but unemployment compensation? The payment of unemployment benefits is almost as high as Social Security in this country. Folks, we are not going to survive as a nation, not the way we've been founded, with this kind of sloth and laziness and feeding at the public trough.
That's a big fuck you from Rush Limbaugh to anyone who's ever been laid off. He fails to note that unemployment benefits are financed through federal and state employer payroll taxes -- hardly a handout, nor did he mention that payments (which barely cover essentials) are withheld unless you supply evidence that you've looked for work.
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by ATLmalcontent
Thank Allah for the First Amendment
Andrew Sullivan underscores the importance of the First Amendment following a British judge's wrongheaded decision to fine a Muslim extremist for orchestrating a vile protest during an Armistice Day ceremony.
The same goes with charges (ultimately dropped) against a preacher in Cumbria inveighing against homosexuality on the sidewalk. Ditto Britain's banning of Fred Phelps compared with last week's First Amendment decision. Free speech is being chipped away in Britain and Europe. Thank the Founders - one more time - for the First Amendment.
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by ATLmalcontent
Man cannot live on $900 million alone
Forbes lists Arthur Blank's net worth at $1.3 billion. Taxpayers are being asked to provide $400 million toward a new stadium (to replace one barely two decades old) for Blank's Falcons.
Glad to see Georgia's General Assembly taking care of one of the state's five billionaires. The rest of their constitutents can suck it.
“Economists have studied the economic impact of stadiums to death, and the clear consensus is that there is no positive impact,” said author and sports economist J.C. Bradbury of Kennesaw State University. “Economists don’t agree on a lot, but right wing, left wing, they all agree on that.”
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by ATLmalcontent
3/10, a day to forget
Something in the stars? Osama bin Laden, James Earl Ray and Sharon Stone were all born March 10.
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by ATLmalcontent
We're a laughingstock!
The Economist informs the world of the year's stupidest legislation, the so-called "birther bill" passed by Georgia Republicans.
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by ATLmalcontent
You lost me at 'shame'
Memo to protesters: Regardless of your cause, you lose me when start chanting "Shame!"
Please stop.
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by ATLmalcontent
