This a test to see how and you and your candidate think alike.

 This a test to see how and you and your candidate think alike. 

 

 

I found this interesting and may help you decide in case you haven・€・t made up your mind. 

This is an ABC survey that doesn’t give you any idea of who said what. You click on the answer to the question that is being asked and at the end it will tell you which candidate you are leaning towards!  Just click on the link below    http://abcnews.go.com/politics/MatchoMatic/fullpage?id=5542139

Prostitution law aimed at saving young

BY GLENN BLAIN
DAILY NEWS ALBANY BUREAU

Friday, September 26th 2008, 9:59 PM

ALBANY – Child prostitutes will be treated as crime victims – not criminals – under a new law Gov. Paterson signed into law Friday.

The legislation decriminalizes child prostitution and requires that people under 18 who are arrested for sexually-oriented crimes be given needed social services, including emergency shelter and crisis counseling.

“What we are talking about is addressing the problem right from the start and helping these kids rehabilitate their lives,” said Craig Miller, a spokesman for state Sen. Dale Volker, who sponsored the measure.

The bill was among dozens that Paterson signed into law this week, his office announced Friday.

Also approved was legislation allowing the city to operate its planned Gansevoort peninsula marine recycling transfer station near W. 14th St. in Manhattan and a measure outlawing protests within 300 feet of funerals.

The funeral bill was prompted by a fundamentalist Kansas church that pickets military funerals across the country in the belief that the Iraq war is punishment for the nation’s tolerance of homosexuality.

Paterson also vetoed 39 bills, including one pushed by Westchester Assemblyman Richard Brodsky that required the city to use “the best technology available” to estimate evacuation times. Brodsky has criticized the city’s disaster preparedness.

Paterson, in his veto message, said the city has the technology.

gblain@nydailynews.com

House rejects President Bush’s $700B bailout plan; Stocks plummet on news

 

House rejects President Bush’s $700B

 bailout plan; Stocks plummet on news

BY HELEN KENNEDY
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Updated Monday, September 29th 2008, 2:55 PM

Kamm/Getty

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson had urged passage of the bailout bill.

The stock market suffered one of its biggest plunges ever Monday after a rebellious Congress killed President Bush’s $700 billion Wall Street bailout.

The Dow Jones was down as much as 734 points in the hour before the closing bell – worse even than the historic 684 point drop in the wake of 9/11 – but rebounded slightly to be 573 points down five minutes before trading ended.

The market chaos came after the stunning populist rebellion in the House, where rank-and-file members defied their party leaders and defeated the measure 228-205.

RELATED: SEE HOW NY HOUSE MEMBERS VOTED ON THE BAILOUT

“This is a huge cow patty with a piece of marshmallow stuck in the middle and I’m not going to eat that cow patty,” declared Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.).

Congress is supposed to recess this week and lawmakers were unsure if they could revive a bill they said was vital to save an failing economy.

RELATED: CITIGROUP TO BUY WACHOVIA BANKING OPERATIONS

“I don’t know that we know the path forward at this time,” House Minority Leader John Boehner said.

“I’m disappointed in the vote,” said Bush, stung by the defections in his own party. “We will work with leaders of Congress on a way forward.”

Markets around the world also too big slides.

RELATED: STOCKS SHARPLY LOWER AHEAD OF BAILOUT VOTE

During the roll call vote, lawmakers began shouting news of the Dow, which was falling dramatically.

“Six hundred points!” yelled Rep. Joe Crowley (D-Queens), holding up a thumbs down.

When it was over, partisan squabbling immediately broke out.
Boehner blamed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, saying she pushed some wavering Republicans off the fence with a last-minute speech blistering Bush and the GOP. He said she “poisoned” the delicate debate.

Democrats countered that Republicans should have mustered enough votes to back the President and mocked the idea that an insulting speech could sway a principled vote.

“Because somebody hurt their feelings, they decided to punish the country?” said Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.

The bill was backed by the President, leaders of both parties in the House and Senate, and the two presidential candidates.
Bush warned of dire financial chaos on Main Street if Wall Street didn’t get immediate help.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson even went down on his knees – literally – to Pelosi, begging her to pass his bill.
Rank-and-file members were always leery.

It would have been the most sweeping government interference in the free market since President Franklin Roosevelt rewrote the American economy in the 1930s.

Party leaders were convinced by the warnings of onrushing doom, but ordinary Americans could only see a monstrous handout to the same high-flying Wall Street fat cats who made the mess in the first place.

Lawmakers were deluged with angry calls from constituents who didn’t buy the scare tactics.

Leaders of both parties said they hated the bill but said the choice was to vote for the bailout or see ordinary Americans lose their jobs and homes.

“The meltdown would begin, it is true, in a few square miles of downtown Manhattan. But before it was over, no small town in America would be untouched,” said Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), the majority leader.

Boehner’s voice cracked when he made an emotional plea to his members. “These are the votes that separate the men from the boys and the girls from the women,” he said. “These are the kind of votes where we have to look into our souls.”

Dozens of congressmen just said no.

Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Tex.) warned America was on a “slippery slope toward socialism.”

Broun questioned why more government money should be thrown after the $200 billion given to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the $85 billion used to save AIG and $30 to save Bear Stearns.

“This is the same old story. We’re just going further down the road,” he said.

The effect of the bill’s failure will be hard to gauge.

Even before the dramatic reversal in Washington, Wachovia sold itself to Citigroup this morning, another huge bank failure that means most of America’s deposits are now in the hands of just three banks: Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America.

In the last two weeks, Wall Street titans have fallen like dominos, from Lehman Brothers to Merrill Lynch to AIG to Washington Mutual.

The credit crisis was spreading across the world.

In London, regulators swooped in with a $280 billion seizure of mortgage lender Bradford & Bingley, sending UK stocks to a three-year low.

The sprawling Belgian-Dutch financial group Fortis also needed a massive bailout from Benelux.

Washington’s big bailout aims to unfreeze short-term lending between banks and corporations by buying up the widespread housing-related bad debts that are paralyzing financial companies.

In a Town Apart, the Pride and Trials of Black Life

Going Down the Road

By DAMIEN CAVE

EATONVILLE, Fla. — Hidden in the theme-park sprawl of greater Orlando, a few miles from the shiny, the loud and the gargantuan, lies a quiet town where the pride and complications of the African-American experience come to life.

Eatonville, the first all-black town to incorporate in the country and the childhood home of Zora Neale Hurston, is no longer as simple as she described it in 1935: “the city of five lakes, three croquet courts, 300 brown skins, 300 good swimmers, plenty guavas, two schools and no jailhouse.” It is now a place of pilgrimage. Alice Walker, Toni Morrison and Ruby Dee have come to the annual Zora! Festival in Eatonville to pay their respects to Hurston, the most famous female writer of the Harlem Renaissance.

And yet in many ways, the town she described — and made a tourist stop by including it in the Florida travel guide produced by the Depression-era Federal Writers’ Project — remains a place apart. It is as independent, dignified and private as it was in the 1930s, when Hurston wrote that rural blacks in Florida often resisted sharing their true thoughts with the white man, who “knowing so little about us, he doesn’t know what he is missing.”

Even now, in a year when a black presidential nominee, Senator Barack Obama, has called for an open conversation about race, many here remain wary of the outsider’s gaze.

“We’re very cautious about how our story is told,” said Hortense Jones, 59, a lifelong resident and member of the town’s oldest church. “It needs to be right.”

Eatonville has long been defined as a paradox of triumph and struggle. It is both a historic model of black empowerment and a community of nearly 2,400 where the poverty rates are twice the national average. It is a literary hub but also an oak-shaded example of rural Southern black culture — sometimes disdained, sometimes praised — that was born of American slavery. Not surprisingly, residents here are both proud and protective.

And the concern about Eatonville’s image really began with Zora, which is all anyone here calls Hurston. She introduced the world to her hometown through heartfelt, dialect-heavy books like “Mules and Men” (1935) and “Their Eyes Were Watching God” (1937).

Five paragraphs in the Florida guidebook transformed the town, just off Route 17, a road that runs through the oft-forgotten center of Florida into a stage of black history and human drama. Bold as a bass drum in both life and literature, Hurston led readers to the store owned by Eatonville’s first mayor, Joe Clarke, then veered into more private areas. “Off the road on the left,” she wrote, “is the brown-with-white-trim modern public school, with its well-kept yards and playgrounds, which Howard Miller always looks after, though he can scarcely read and write.”

She also mentioned the new husband of Widow Dash and wrote that Lee Glenn “sells drinks of all kinds and whatever goes with transient rooms.”

So in just a few hundred words, Hurston linked Eatonville with self-government but also illiteracy, remarriage and sex. Clearly, Fodor’s this was not.

In fact, it was not a portrait everyone appreciated.

“Zora told it like it was,” said Ella Dinkins, 90, one of the Johnson girls Hurston immortalized by quoting men singing off-color songs about their beauty. She added: “Some people didn’t like that.”

Hurston is still remembered here as a vivacious eccentric who frequently returned after her family moved to Jacksonville, Fla. Augustus Franklin, 77, recalled that when Hurston sped into town, she usually arrived without notice in a thumping Chevrolet, smoking and wearing pants in a town that even today prides itself on dignified dress. Most residents were fascinated, Mr. Franklin said, while many sneered.

“People were always glad to see Zora,” Mr. Franklin said. But, he added, rocking in his chair on a back patio overlooking Lake Sabelia, where Hurston was most likely baptized, “she never did stay too long.”

When Hurston died in 1960, she was poor and her books had fallen out of print. Along with much of the world, Eatonville seemed to have forgotten her.. Though she was once a literary star, a contemporary of Langston Hughes and the only black woman at Barnard College in the 1920s, she was buried in an unmarked grave in Fort Pierce, Fla., where she had been living.

In Eatonville, there were no major memorial services, no grand public readings. “I don’t think they understood her contribution to the world or her legacy at all,” said Valerie Boyd, author of “Wrapped in Rainbows,” a Hurston biography published in 2003.

A turning point came in the 1980s. Orange County officials wanted to put a five-lane highway through town to replace Kennedy Boulevard, the community’s puttering two-lane main street. Orlando’s sprawl had already pushed Interstate 4 through the western edge of town. The proposal came as Eatonville was still recovering from a difficult period in its history.

Forced integration, among other things, had ended the community’s relatively idyllic isolation. In the 1950s, the fight over racial mixing brought hate to the community’s doorstep.

“During that time, a bunch of white boys, they would come through and throw oranges and things at people sitting down on the side,” Mr. Franklin said. “We actually had a lady that got killed from that once. They threw a watermelon out of the car.”

In a 1955 letter to The Orlando Sentinel, Hurston questioned the Supreme Court’s demand for forced integration, calling its decision in Brown v. Board of Education “insulting rather than honoring my race.” Residents now say that the desegregation of schools, while positive in some respects, diluted Eatonville’s cohesiveness and undermined the confidence of its youth.

“Black children were accustomed to being hugged — I remember this — you hugged your teacher in the morning, you hugged your teacher at night,” said N. Y. Nathiri, the daughter of Ella Dinkins and the executive director of Preserve the Eatonville Community, a nonprofit group.

That lasted, she added, until the teachers and students did not come from the same place. “You were not hugging your white teacher because your white teacher — I mean there’s a cultural divide there,” Ms. Nathiri said.

Civil rights, however, helped create space for many more Zora Neale Hurstons — black writers, actors and artists who rose above prejudice, like she did, with buoyant self-assurance and lines like: “How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company! It’s beyond me.”

In 1975, the writer Alice Walker trekked to Hurston’s unmarked grave and began fighting to resurrect her reputation. Five years later, an acclaimed Hurston biography by Robert E. Hemenway hit bookshelves, reintroducing her to the American canon.

The highway project arrived just as Eatonville’s most famous daughter had once again found the spotlight. And this time, Hurston’s old neighbors saw her as a savior.

The community began planning in 1988 for a Hurston festival to show what the county could ruin with its highway. Thousands of fans came to the inaugural event two years later, and each January, many return for the celebration.

After several years, the county backed away from its road proposal. “The five-laning of the highway resurrected, it put in what you’d call warp speed, real civic pride,” Ms. Nathiri said.

Ms. Boyd put it more simply: “Zora saved Eatonville.”

Victory over the highway project has helped change the town’s self-image. Out-of-towners like Rachelle Munson, a lawyer who began coming to church here in 1993, started to appear in larger numbers, and residents started to revalue the past.

Eatonville joined the national historic registry in 1998. A new one-story library (named after Hurston, of course) opened in 2006 on a repaved and beautified Kennedy Boulevard.

Today, Eatonville remains a Florida anomaly: only six miles from downtown Orlando, it can, at times, feel like a back street in a summer rain, as small as it did when it was founded with just 27 black families in the 1880s. (It is 90 percent black today.) Outsiders who come looking for Eatonville’s story, its meaning, are often still treated with caution.

Advance permission is required for most interviews, and certain things — like the murals at Eatonville’s oldest church, painted by a white man, showing black men in the fields — are not allowed to be photographed.

Many in Eatonville, like Ms. Jones, a bold, confident teacher partial to bright red, still fear that their insular community will be misunderstood.

And yet, as the Hurston festival has expanded, a heightened level of hometown pride has also emerged. Young people, in particular, tend to see Eatonville as Hurston saw her entire race: beautiful, problems and all, no better, no worse and as proud, creative, hard-working, silly and mixed-up as other racial and ethnic groups in America.

It is sincere civic affection that can be heard in the voice of Mr. Franklin’s nephew, Edwin Harvey, 18, who plans to come back to Eatonville after college to work in local government or for the Police Department, which he said could use some help.

And even those who are younger, like Alondra and Alexia Kenon, 11-year-old twins from Winter Park, seem to have learned to describe Eatonville correctly.

“Most people, if they just drive through here, they’ll think, ‘Oh, this city is nothing compared to any of the other ones,’ ” Alondra Kenon said after church on a recent Sunday. “But if you actually stop and take a moment to look at the history, it’s a very nice city.”

Bloomberg: City’s gotta shake salt habit

Bloomberg: City’s gotta shake salt habit

Bloomberg: City’s gotta shake salt habit

By Erin Einhorn
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Saturday, September 27th 2008, 1:37 AM

First it was the cigarettes, then the doughnuts. Now, Mayor Bloomberg has your pretzels in his cross hairs.

And maybe your hot dog. Or that tasty bowl of ramen noodles.

“People are eating too much salt, me included,” Bloomberg told a crowd of health professionals gathered at the Pierre Hotel for an awards luncheon Friday.

He had just finished touting his public health campaigns – banning smoking in public places, forcing large restaurants to post calorie info and slashing the amount of artery-clogging trans fats in local eateries – then boasted that he’s not done.

“After this, we can keep going,” Bloomberg said. “People don’t like to have somebody come in and tell them what to do, but afterward, if it turns out to be something that’s in their interest, they sure as heck say thank you.”

courtesy of the NYDailynews

‘HOME’ WORK: CITY BIDS FOR ONLINE HIGH SCHOOLS

‘HOME’ WORK: CITY BIDS FOR ONLINE HIGH SCHOOLS By YOAV GONEN ord=1222693547; adid=”"; hfpg=”"; drStr = document.referrer.toString(); popup = (drStr.match(“www.yahoo.com”) ? “0″ : “1″); document.write(”); September 29, 2008 — The city is working to clear the way for students to be able to earn credits toward high-school graduation online. Department of Education officials said they’re working with the state on getting a waiver of the requirement that students spend a certain amount of hours per year in a classroom – known as “seat time” – to get credits for a course. That requirement has taken the online-course option off the table in New York high schools, even as nearly half of all school districts nationally offer their students some form of virtual education. At the center of the city’s push for the change is a new, high-tech school in Manhattan, the NYCiSchool, which for the first time is teaching its ninth-graders two online courses that conclude with a state Regents exam. For now, the school is meeting the seat-time mandate by having students take the online courses – global history and living environment – while still in a classroom supervised by a teacher. The iSchool “is looking to change the way business is done in New York City,” Troy Fischer, senior director of the DOE’s Office of Instructional Technology. “I think once they set the precedent for [online learning] and receive a waiver, then we can expand that option to lots of schools.” He said a waiver is not likely this year. The co-principal of NYCiSchool, Alisa Berger, said she envisioned the online coursework eventually expanding outside the classroom – giving older students the option to take internships during the day and to study at night. “We want 11th-graders to be able to take classes at 3 a.m. in their pajamas if they desire,” she said. Susan Patrick, president of the North American Council for Online Learning, said New York trails the rest of the country in virtual education largely because of a lack of initiative. Lawmakers in Michigan, by contrast, became the first in the nation to require an online course for high-school graduation in 2006, while educators in Florida have created the Florida Virtual School, which is expected to serve more than 80,000 students this year. “This isn’t a new innovation anymore,” said Patrick. The state Education Department did not respond to questions, but state Board of Regents member Saul Cohen suggested that New York couldn’t stay “silent” on the issue for much longer. “It’s something we certainly are going to delve into very seriously,” he said. yoav.gonen@nypost.com

City renters could be next victims of……………..

 mortgage mess

BY TINA MOORE

DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Sunday, September 28th 2008, 9:47 PM

An increasing number of apartment complexes face possible foreclosure and thousands of city renters could be the next victims of the mortgage crisis, housing advocates warn.

At least 580 buildings, containing 40,000 units, have one or more factors that could lead to mortgage default, Crain’s New York Business reported Sunday on its Web site.

Private equity firms bought at least 90,000 affordable housing units in the past four years, many at inflated prices in badly leveraged deals, according to the Partnership to Preserve Affordable Housing.

The Riverton apartments in Harlem and Stuyvesant Town on the East Side are both at risk, according to the Crain’s Web site. Riverton’s owners indicated last month that they were on the verge of defaulting.

And Savoy Park, a seven-building complex in Harlem, has been placed on a watch list. Apollo Real Estate Advisors and its partners bought the complex in 2006 for $175 million.

Apollo refinanced a year later, increasing its debt to $367.5 million, the credit rating agency Realpoint reported. The agency called the risk of default on the loan “moderate to high.”

Housing advocates told Crain’s that buyers had unrealistic goals about rent increases. The same lenders caught up in the mortgage free-for-all in single-family homes lent them money anyway.

tmoore@nydailynews.com

QTip for Free at Knitting Factory

Date: Monday, September 29th
Time: 8:00pm
Location: The Knitting Factory (74 Leonard Street)
Cost: Free with text (QTIP to 66937)

“Tribe Called Quest alum Q-Tip is all over the place these days, manning the DJ booths on Fridays at Santos, working on an upcoming hip hop group with Common, all on top of a new album to drop on November 4. Here’s your chance to witness Q-Tip, the legendary performer, coming from behind the turntables to preview his latest, The Renaissance, to the public for FREE at the Knitting Factory just by texting QTIP to 66937.”

McCain and Team Have Many Ties to Gambling Industry

McCain and Team Have Many Ties to Gambling Industry – NYTimes.com

McCain and Team Have Many Ties to Gambling Industry

By JO BECKER and DON VAN NATTA Jr.

Senator John McCain was on a roll. In a room reserved for high-stakes gamblers at the Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut, he tossed $100 chips around a hot craps table. When the marathon session ended around 2:30 a.m., the Arizona senator and his entourage emerged with thousands of dollars in winnings.

A lifelong gambler, Mr. McCain takes risks, both on and off the craps table. He was throwing dice that night not long after his failed 2000 presidential bid, in which he was skewered by the Republican Party’s evangelical base, opponents of gambling. Mr. McCain was betting at a casino he oversaw as a member of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, and he was doing so with the lobbyist who represents that casino, according to three associates of Mr. McCain.

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