In the Times-Tribune.com account “Secrecy still name of game”, a paragraph mentions “Lackawanna County Stadium was renamed PNC Field in 2007 after SWB Yankees reached a three-year, $1.1 million deal with PNC. That deal was ratified by the authority. The public body should insist on ratifying the extension, which would require public disclosure of the terms.”

Readers may recall that in another example of extraordinary overreach, S. Dale High personally (who isn’t even a party to any contract)  was given certain exclusive rights over the naming of the Lancaster Convention Center Project.  By permitting him to match an offer by another, it both discourages bidding and sets a possible situation for outright abuse.

Perhaps naming of the Convention Center isn’t worth as much as the naming of  Clipper Stadium or PNC Stadium in Scranton.  But it likely would contribute a hundred thousand a year on upwards to help off set the recently announced ‘unanticipated’ added operating loss of around a million dollars a year.  (This is without taking into consideration debt service which comes out of the Hotel Room Sales Tax, assuming there is enough …which is another story.)

High’s firms have already received millions in consulting and tens of millions in construction fees and an eventual half interest in the Marriott Hotel when it has paid off its bonds.   Isn’t it time for High to release the Authority from the dubious and one sided naming rights obligation?

From the NEW YORK TIMES:

Sales of existing home in January fell 7.2 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.05 million, according to a report by the National Association of Realtors.  Analysts had expected an increase of 0.9 percent….

Worries that the housing market could slip into another downturn resurfaced this week in the wake of several disappointing reports. Applications for mortgages dropped to the lowest level in 13 years last week. Sales of new homes fell to the lowest level since record-keeping began in 1963. Home prices in major cities increased only slightly in December, according to one barometer, and a broader index showed prices actually falling…

Click here to read the full article.

From the FINANCIAL TIMES:

…The trap the Democrats had hoped to spring was to say to Republicans, “Here is our plan. Where is yours? Why aren’t you bringing anything to the table?” With the opposition exposed as a nullity, reconciliation would look more respectable. It didn’t work. The Republicans outmanoeuvred the Democrats, not the other way round. They mostly let spokesmen with relevant experience and expertise carry the burden, and they stuck to a simple script that said, “Let’s do this step by step, starting with things we agree on, instead of trying to do everything at once, which we can’t afford.”

Substantively, that is a weak argument, in my view, for familiar reasons. Successful healthcare reform has to be a big package: crucially, for instance, you cannot do guaranteed issue and community rating without the individual mandate. But superficially the Republican line is very appealing, and Democrats failed to knock it down…

Click here to read the full article.

From the PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER:

Reform state government! Clean house! To a man, the candidates vying to succeed Gov. Rendell are heeding the mood of Pennsylvania’s electorate and promising to change the culture of Harrisburg.

But the same old political interests are financing their campaigns, according to an Inquirer analysis of campaign reports for 2009.

Unions are with the Democrats; banks and insurance companies are behind the Republicans; and lawyers are working both sides; and lawyers are working both sides…

Click here to read the full article.

From the NEW YORK TIMES:

The main lesson to draw from Thursday’s health care forum is that differences between Democrats and Republicans are too profound to be bridged. That means that it is up to the Democrats to fix the country’s dysfunctional and hugely costly health care system…

Mr. Obama should jettison any illusions that he can win Republican support by making a few more changes in bills that already include many Republican ideas. Republican speakers made clear that the only thing they would accept is starting over from scratch. That would be the end of sweeping reform….

The president and Speaker Nancy Pelosi should push the House to accept the fundamentally sound Senate bill. If they still cannot garner enough votes from their own caucus, they should alter the Senate bill slightly with parallel legislation that could be passed with budget reconciliation.

Click here to read the full article.

AOL.COM:

(Feb. 25) –GM’s Hummer — the gas-guzzling behemoth people either love or hate — is headed for the scrap heap of automotive history. A deal to sell the brand to a Chinese company has collapsed, and General Motors says it will shut down production.

America has “always been obsessed with largeness, equating it with bounty and success … Being big and powerful is essential to our national identity,” Tunku Varadarajan wrote Thursday on The Daily Beast. But in a time when fuel costs are high and money is tight, bigness begins to signify excess and self-indulgence, he added.

Click here to read the full article.

In a report released this week from the Pew Center on the States, Pennsylvania was among nine states given a failing score for their provision of children’s dental care. Pennsylvania only met national averages in two of eight separate categories for policy improvement, including

1. Share of high-risk schools with sealant programs
2. Hygienists placing sealants with dentist’s prior exam
3. Share of residents on fluoridated water supplies
4. Share of Medicaid-enrolled children getting dental care
5. Share of dentists’ median retail fees reimbursed by Medicaid
6. Paying medical providers for early preventive dental care
7. Authorizing new primary care dental providers
8. Tracking data on children’s dental health

Of these, the state only passed on #2 and #8. Other states to receive a failing grade were Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Louisiana, New Jersey, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

The problem largely stems from the scarcity of dental care providers available and willing to provide care to individuals covered by public medical assistance. According to the study, more than half of Pennsylvania children on Medicaid received no dental care in 2007.

As Dan Jurman of SouthEast Lancaster Health Services (SELHS) told NewsLanc in an earlier interview, the SELHS dental clinic stands as the only place in the Lancaster County where such services are provided for those under medical assistance. They are never under capacity.

The report also cited a variety of other reasons for Pennsylvania’s shortfall:

Although they make efficient use of hygienists, the state’s school-based sealant programs reach less than a quarter of high-risk schools, and just under a third of Medicaid-enrolled children in Pennsylvania received dental services in 2007, the latest year for which data are available. As a result, the state was one of 13 identified for investigation in 2008 by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which found that it needs to do more to ensure adequate access to dental providers. Pennsylvania recently created a Medicaid pay-for-performance program to award bonuses to dentists providing continuous care to children (and other vulnerable populations, such as pregnant women), but it does not reimburse primary care physicians for providing basic dental preventive services. The Keystone State provides fluoridated water to just over half of its population, well short of the national goal.

To read the report in its entirety, click here.

USA TODAY:

As the jobless rate hovers around 10%, unemployment in construction jumped to 24.7%, highest on record since 1976. Construction has accounted for nearly a quarter of all job losses the past year, though the industry employs 4.3% of non-farm employees. Even manufacturing added 11,000 jobs in January, its first net increase since the recession began in December 2007.

Click here to read the full article.

In “Zero tolerance makes zero sense”, columnist Larry Alexander writes,

“…School officials say Alexa used a green marker to write on her school desk, ‘I love my friends Abby and Faith. Lex was here 2/1/10,’ followed by a smiley face…

“The appropriate, common-sense reaction would have been to punish the girl by making her clean the markings from the desk or have them removed professionally and bill her parents for the cost.

“The zero-tolerance reaction chosen by the school was to have police escort the crying child from the building in handcuffs in front of her classmates…

“Come on. Even criminals get three strikes.”

WATCHDOG: A wag of the tail!

FINANCIAL TIMES:

Any hopes for reaching cross-party agreement at President Barack Obama’s  healthcare summit on Thursday were soon dashed, when Republicans and Democrats quickly descended into bickering over whether reform would raise health insurance premiums.

Democratic and Republican leaders sat down with the president on Thursday morning for a much-hyped bipartisan summit, which analysts said would be more about politics than policy.

Mr Obama, making a new push to overhaul the $2,500bn health care system, tried to highlight the areas of reform on which both parties can agree at the start of the summit…

Republican Lamar Alexander from Tennessee, a senator with a track record of bipartisan voting, swiftly put paid to hopes for progress when he delivered the Republicans’ opening remarks by calling for the healthcare reform process to be scrapped…

Democrats are warming to the idea of using the “reconciliation” process, which would allow them to pass the legislation in the upper chamber with only a simple majority of 51 votes but which is supposed to be used only for budget-related bills.

Click here to read the full article.