Journalist @baltimoresun writer artist runner #amwriting Chaplain PIO #partylikeajournalist

Journalist @baltimoresun writer artist runner #amwriting Chaplain PIO #partylikeajournalist
Journalist @baltimoresun writer artist runner #amwriting Md Troopers Assoc #20 & Westminster Md Fire Dept Chaplain PIO #partylikeajournalist

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Bryan Sears - Towson Patch: Councilman Oliver's State Job Raises Questions

Councilman Oliver's State Job Raises Questions

Baltimore County Charter prohibits council members from working for state government. Councilman Ken Oliver says the law doesn't apply to him because he's a contract employee.
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For the past nine months Baltimore County Councilman Ken Oliver has held a paid, full-time contract position with a state government agency, a job that appears to run afoul of a County Charter rule prohibiting such employment.
Oliver, a Randallstown Democrat, was hired as a finance specialist by the state Department of Business and Economic Development in February, just two months into his third four-year term on the council.
The County Charter prohibits county council members from working for state agencies during their terms in office... 

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Community Banker Today: “Bank Transfer Day” Gaining Traction on Facebook

Community Banker Today: “Bank Transfer Day” Gaining Traction on Facebook


OCTOBER 13, 2011

A social media–based campaign, started by a disgruntled customer, to transfer bank accounts from big banks to credit unions is growing. More than 30,000 people have signed onto the "Bank Transfer Day" Facebook event page, which instructs participants to transfer their accounts on Nov. 5 from large banks to local credit unions.

ICBA is taking the opportunity to remind reporters and consumers that community banks are a great, hometown banking alternative. As part of its "go local" movement, ICBA is encouraging consumers to realize the litany of benefits associated with community banks, including a relationship-based banking experience and superior customer service.

ICBA also continues to offer its Community Bank Locator to help consumers find a community bank in their area.











From the Wires





From the Regulators



From Congress


Community Banker News & Events






[20111013 Community Banker Today BTD Gaining Traction on FB]


“Fish Fish” by Kevin Dayhoff








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Newsbusters - Bozell Column: Protesters Occupy the Liberal Media

Bozell Column: Protesters Occupy the Liberal Media


When the Tea Party movement erupted in the spring of 2009, the media elites dismissed them as corporate-generated “Astroturf” noise. They found them barely worth covering, even to besmirch them.

But when the “Occupy Wall Street” protests began on September 17, the liberal media was quickly bombarded with complaints from the Left that the media were ignoring this massive “news” story. NPR executive editor Dick Meyer said the early protests “did not involve large numbers of people, prominent people, a great disruption, or an especially clear objective.” So the protesters went out and blocked the Brooklyn Bridge and drew 700 arrests – voila, a national story.

Contemplate this: the “Occupy” folks drew more broadcast network stories in the first nine days of coverage (24) than the Tea Party drew in the first nine months (19).

NBC’s Michelle Franzen was the first promoter – okay, she calls herself a “reporter” – on the scene. "Protesters fed up with the economy and social inequality turned out en masse over the weekend,” she announced on “Today” on October 3. “Voicing their discontent and marching for change." Her expert source, Columbia professor Dorian Warren, dutifully proclaimed the Wall Street protests were "a liberal version of the Tea Party" that “could potentially carry over into the 2012 elections and get people to the polls."

So let’s get this straight. The protests were like a stumbling little fawn trying to find its legs. They’d been in existence for about two weeks, and NBC was already suggesting the “potential” for what the Tea Party achieved in 2010 – a massive Democratic wave election in 2012. Journalists are either easily impressed or very energetic practitioners of wishful thinking… http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/brent-bozell/2011/10/11/bozell-column-protesters-occupy-liberal-media 

20111011 Bozell Column Protesters Occupy the Liberal Media

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Pete Kasperowicz News from The Hill: House looks to repeal controversial 3 percent withhold law next week



News from The Hill:

House looks to repeal controversial 3 percent withhold law next week 
By Pete Kasperowicz 
House Republicans may take up bipartisan legislation next week to repeal a widely scorned law requiring all levels of government to withhold 3 percent of most payments to contractors, Medicare recipients, farmers and vendors.

The House Ways & Means Committee marked up the bill, H.R. 674, last week, and it's high up on the list of GOP priorities for legislation to help create the conditions for job growth. As of the middle of this week, House aides said GOP leaders seemed to be shooting for floor action next week.

The withholding rule became law in 2005, and was meant to help close the gap between taxes owned and taxes collected. But it was never implemented, and was delayed further under the 2009 stimulus bill until the end of 2011.

Republicans are not the only ones who oppose current law — even President Obama has called the possible withholding rules "burdensome withholding requirements that keep capital out of the hands of job creators." The IRS earlier this year delayed implementing it again until the end of 2012.

Read the complete story here.


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Dairy industry shrinks across Maryland

Dairy industry shrinks across Maryland

Andy and Mary Laudenklos each spend more than 70 hours a week caring for their 600 cows, delivering calves and overseeing the milking at their Carroll County dairy farm — and they're also raising three young sons.

The couple and their three-year-old business, East West Farm outside Union Bridge in Carroll County, are struggling. ...

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bs-md-dairy-20110926,0,2690328.story

Kevin E. Dayhoff - TheTentacle.com: Bank Transfer Day

October 19, 2011

Bank Transfer Day
Kevin E. Dayhoff
http://www.thetentacle.com/ShowArticle.cfm?mydocid=4695



The continuing saga of the crusade against the vampire squids… I’m just saying…

While everyone was distracted by what Charles Krauthammer delightfully described as, the “Starbucks-sipping, Levi’s-clad, iPhone-clutching protesters (of the Occupy Wall Street movement who) denounce corporate America even as they weep for Steve Jobs, corporate titan, billionaire eight times over…,” a new social uprising term has entered the public discourse. Saturday, November 5 is “Bank Transfer Day.”

According to the uprising’s meager beginnings on Facebook, created by a small business owner, Kristen Christian, 27, a small art gallery owner in Los Angles, citizens are encouraged to take their money out of the blood-sucking vampire squid mega-banks and put it in smaller community banks or more specifically, credit unions.

Ms. Christian owns “Le Spec,” an independent art gallery. She spoke for many when she answered a question from Jen Doll, in a Village Voice article: Why did you decide to do this?

“Mostly just, I was tired. I was tired of being charged bank fee after bank fee after bank fee… When they decided to react so negatively to the Durbin Amendment, that made me sick…”

As opposed to the Occupy Wall Street protests, which appear to be a mobocracy of themeless, clueless anarchists on holiday, Bank Transfer Day has a well-defined and articulated goal, with a specific action plan.

Even National Public Radio, which never met a leftist cause it could not wholeheartedly support, with our tax dollars, could not fathom what the Occupy Wall Street protestors were trying to say

Much of the mainstream media and leftist Democrats want you to believe that Bank Transfer Day is an offshoot grass-roots effort spawned by the Occupy Wall Street anarchists-without-a-clue.

Nothing could be farther from the truth...  

http://www.thetentacle.com/ShowArticle.cfm?mydocid=4695


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Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Douglas Schoen - Wall Street journal: Polling the Occupy Wall Street Crowd



OCTOBER 18, 2011

Polling the Occupy Wall Street Crowd

In interviews, protesters show that they are leftists out of step with most American voters. Yet Democrats are embracing them anyway.



President Obama and the Democratic leadership are making a critical error in embracing the Occupy Wall Street movement—and it may cost them the 2012 election.

Last week, senior White House adviser David Plouffe said that "the protests you're seeing are the same conversations people are having in living rooms and kitchens all across America. . . . People are frustrated by an economy that does not reward hard work and responsibility, where Wall Street and Main Street don't seem to play by the same set of rules." Nancy Pelosi and others have echoed the message.

Yet the Occupy Wall Street movement reflects values that are dangerously out of touch with the broad mass of the American people—and particularly with swing voters who are largely independent and have been trending away from the president since the debate over health-care reform.

The protesters have a distinct ideology and are bound by a deep commitment to radical left-wing policies. On Oct. 10 and 11, Arielle Alter Confino, a senior researcher at my polling firm, interviewed nearly 200 protesters in New York's Zuccotti Park. Our findings probably represent the first systematic random sample of Occupy Wall Street opinion.

Our research shows clearly that the movement doesn't represent unemployed America and is not ideologically diverse. Rather, it comprises an unrepresentative segment of the electorate that believes in radical redistribution of wealth, civil disobedience and, in some instances, violence. ...

[...]



20111018 Polling the Occupy Wall Street Crowd 

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100-Year-Old Marathoner Finishes Race



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