House Speaker John A. Boehner threw down the gauntlet at an Economic Club of New York dinner tonight, calling for trillions of dollars in federal budget cuts in exchange for House Republican votes to raise the debt limit.

Tonight’s statement vastly ups the ante on the upcoming debt ceiling vote. What was beginning to be seen as a non-issue, now looks like a showdown again. It will be a game of chicken with massive stakes.  My money is on the Ohio congressman not to flinch.

I was at the dinner where he made his remarks tonight and I almost missed the news. Boehner doesn’t do hyperbole, and his words came across as a simple matter of fact, which would worry me if I were  Messrs. Reid and Obama. It will be a hot May in Washington after all.

Chris Bragg of City Hall newspaper just broke a report commissioned by the Bloomberg Administration on the so-called “Living Wage Bill” being advanced in the New York City Council by the Working Families Party (WFP) and other leftist groups. The bill would force companies with business before the City to pay workers $10 per hour if they provide health insurance, and $11.50 if they do not — well over New York’s minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.

Mayor Bloomberg and other fiscally educated New Yorkers have argued that this legislation would drive more business out of New York and into other states — New York already is ranked dead last in business friendliness in America — and the report, unsurprisingly, concurs with their hypothesis. It suggests and quantifies, in fact, that the Living Wage Bill would do the most damage to the people the WFP and others are purporting to help, by drying up tens of thousands of entry jobs in the Big Apple.

The study was conducted by Charles River Associates in Boston.

Are there any MBA’s in the City Council today? Anyone with any economic background?

My wife is obsessed with checking real estate prices.  If you live within 100 miles of us, chances are that Corrinne knows what you paid for your house, what it’s worth now,  even what your real estate taxes might be. Perhaps that’s the lot of anyone buying near the peak of the market, which we did in December 2007. You just can’t let it go — even after you “let it go.”

At any given moment during the weekend, I can expect Corrinne to steal a look at her home computer screen and let out a little gasp. It’s not that she’s complaining.  We love our house and we have been blessed in so many ways; we don’t need to have been tapped by the Real Estate Fairy, too. Besides, we’re in our house for the long term, God willing. It’s just that she’s amazed by HOW MUCH BETTER A DEAL WE COULD HAVE GOTTEN THREE YEARS LATER!. But no obsessing.  No recalculating mortgage costs. No what ifs.

I don’t normally pay much attention to my wife’s findings — it would take away time I can spend teasing her about this neurosis — but, lately she has shown me the prices of some homes we looked at four or five years ago that are now back on the market.  I’ll admit it.  They are a freak out.

Now we read that real estate prices are again falling fast — faster than at any time since the supposed bottom-out year of 2008.  The new bottom prediction is late 2012.  The $22 billion the federal government spent trying to artificially prop up the market was a bust.

At some point prices are going to get so low that people will begin buying again.  Right?

Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), in typical Chuck Schumer fashion, is taking his cut of the bin Laden story by proposing a “No Ride List” for Amtrak trains.  Evidence collected in the terrorist’s lair evidently suggests that al Qaeda has considered attacking U.S. trains! How could we have overlooked that?

Schumer’s list would emulate the “No Fly List”, which prevents suspected terrorists from boarding commercial airline flights. (If no Amtrak watch list exists, why do we have to show ID when taking Amtrak?)

This, of course, is simple headline grabbing.  If Schumer really wants to protect passengers his “No Ride List” would logically extend to every train, subway car, trolley (and bus) in America.  Any one of them is a terrorist target.  Check points woud have to be erected, of course, to prevent illegal boardings, and metal detectors, wands, and body scanners also would have to be employed.  In this case. we would need armed guards as well, every half mile or so, along the hundreds of thousands of miles of U.S. railway track, because one doesn’t need to board a train to take it out. A quiet bend, 20 minutes, and a crowbar will do the trick.

And even if Amtrak could be thoroughly “hardened”, doing so would only make softer targets like commuter rail more attractive.

The simple truth is that we cannot harden every conceivable terrorist target in America, just as we cannot prevent Chuck Schumer from standing in front of television cameras every weekend with yet another opportunistic proposal to get his mug on TV.

I don’t mean to sound so harsh, but Schumer’s shtick is beyond tired.

Maureen Buckley O'Reilly (1933-1964)

Mother is the home we come from. She is nature, soil, ocean.
– Erich Fromm

Can you imagine?

On this day every year my dear friend Nick Viest and I trudge down to OTB on Third Avenue and place bets on the Kentucky Derby.  He then returns Monday morning to collect his winnings.  I go straight to work.

We were set to do the same this year, until we remembered that there is no New York City OTB anymore.  It was shut down because it was losing money.  I must not have bet enough on “Dublin” last year, or maybe Nick hit his trifecta again.

I wonder how many other people have quite forgotten that OTB no longer exists in the city, or that it ever existed at all.  Then again, the clusters of smoking bettors outside of each of them made them hard to miss.

I also wonder how many other city-funded institutions might escape notice if they were shuttered…

For the record, if there were still a New York City Off Track Betting storefront,  I would have put $20 on the nose on “Stay Thirsty” in an upset win.

Here’s the official line: (all the links below are live with great information and videos.)

Uncle Mo scratched from Derby

It’s unsettling to read about friends in the religious and conservative communities mobilizing against the gay marriage bill in New York. It’s not that I’m surprised at their conviction on the issue – they hold genuine and deeply held beliefs on it – it’s that I find myself in the uncomfortable position of opposing people I have worked closely alongside for years.

These are people I respect, and their opposition to gay marriage instinctively gives me pause. It makes me want to check and re-check my math.  But I have, over and over again, and each time I come to the same conclusion:  civil marriage is an equal-rights-under-the-law issue. Republicans should support it. Equals rights under the law is the philosophical doctrine on which the GOP was founded. Remember the “Black Republicans”?

“Civil” is the operative word in this debate.  If government was trying to force gay marriage on the church, any church, I would strap on a vest. Government has no right to interfere with religion in this country, and I would fight tooth-and-nail alongside anyone fending off government encroachment in that area. But this is the opposite. Gay marriage in New York would be purely civil in nature. It has zero to do with religion.

A handful of Republicans will be needed to pass this bill in the state senate, and any caught on the fence will come under withering friendly fire. How awkward. They will know their would-be executioners.

I can only pray for their strength in voting their consciences, on whichever side of the issues that puts them.

The Obama Administration is beginning to get  pounded for its handling of the communications surrounding the elimination of Osama bin Laden.  It’s not so much happening here as it is overseas.  The Telegraph has an excoriating piece today saying that the White House is in jeopardy of ruining a perfectly good operation:

‘President Obama is coming dangerously close to snatching defeat from the jaws of victory,” The Telegraph writes. “Somehow, he and his Press Secretary have created the impression that Operation Geronimo was carried out by the Keystone Kops rather than an elite unit of Navy SEALs. In fact, the only amateurs in this unfolding story are in the White House.”

Others are questioning details of the raid, here, here, here, and just about everywhere else.

What is most unfortunate is that the Obama Administration did not need to give any details of the raid.  It could have simply said: “OBL was killed tonight in a raid by US forces.  Here is the photo. We do not provide details of our military operations.  End of story.”

This is genuinely painful to watch. Here is President Obama’s biggest victory.  Are they really going to blow this?

President Obama is now considering a plan to tax American drivers based on how many miles they drive, The Hill reports this morning. The idea is to include an electronic tracking device on every American vehicle, which would record the number of miles driven.  Drivers would pay the federal tax each time they fill up at a gas station (where they already pay federal and state tax on every gallon of gas they pump.)

The ostensible reason for the tax would be raising money for highway maintenance.  I wonder what ever happened to all that stimulus funding?

Is there no end to the machinations from the Washington gremlins?  Could they arrive at a creepier tax scheme?