Franklin County voters will have the opportunity to approve a 0.75-mill property tax on May 5, 2009.

Why now?
Metro Parks’ current 10-year levy expires at the end of 2009. Central Ohio residents have enjoyed the benefits of the previous 10-year levy. This levy will allow Metro Parks to continue to operate clean, well-maintained, safe parks that are open daily throughout the year and are free to the public while continuing to acquire and manage natural areas to protect wildlife and water resources.

Did Metro Parks fulfill all of its promises during the last levy?
Yes. During the current levy period, Metro Parks added five new parks, acquired more than 7,500 acres of land, built 80 miles of trails, provided educational programming for more than 50,000 school children and thousands of visitors each year, developed programs for senior citizens and urban youth, enhanced protection of wildlife habitat especially in the Darby Watershed, and increased yearly visitation by more than a million people. Each year more than 6 million people enjoy a visit to a Metro Park.

How much will the levy cost?
The cost to the owner of a $100,000 home would be about $23 a year or about six cents a day.

How long will the levy last?
The ballot issue is a proposed 10-year levy, so it would run until 2019.

How much money would the levy provide?
The 0.75- mill levy will provide about $21.5 million a year.

How will Metro Parks use the money from the levy?
Metro Parks will:

• Maintain existing park grounds, trails and other facilities, as well as provide programs and activities throughout the 15 Metro Parks
• Expand programming for school children, senior citizens, and special populations and continue the urban youth initiative
• Build a nature center in the Darby Watershed and develop programs and exhibits to highlight the importance of this valuable water resource to the community
• Acquire land and build 50 miles of trails and manage more of the Greenways Trail system
• Expand the Scioto Audubon Metro Park on the Whittier Peninsula near downtown Columbus
• Open three new parks: 1. Within the Rocky Fork Headwaters in northeast Franklin County in Plain Township near New Albany 2. Along Little Walnut Creek in Madison Township near Canal Winchester and Groveport 3. Along the Scioto River in southern Franklin County near Grove City
• Acquire land and restore habitat to further protect the rare species of Big Darby Creek as a partner in the Darby Accord
• Restore 1,000 acres of wetlands to attract wildlife and improve water quality, continue programs to enhance the forests and prairies at existing parks

How can you help? The levy committee needs phone bankers, people to display yard signs, letters to the editor, and financial support.

For more information, visit the Metro Parks Levy website.

How is it that so-called political and financial experts turn out to be a stunningly poor source of expertise? After twenty years of tracking 82,000 predictions by 284 experts, Prof Tetlock gives the answer:

Talent bookers for television shows and reporters tended to call up experts who provided strong, coherent points of view, who saw things in blacks and whites. People who shouted — like, yes, Jim Cramer!

Mr. Tetlock called experts such as these the “hedgehogs,”... Hedgehogs tend to have a focused worldview, an ideological leaning, strong convictions; foxes are more cautious, more centrist, more likely to adjust their views, more pragmatic, more prone to self-doubt, more inclined to see complexity and nuance. And it turns out that while foxes don’t give great sound-bites, they are far more likely to get things right.

The marketplace of ideas doesn’t clear out bad pundits and bad ideas partly because there’s no accountability. As Prof. Tetlock suggests, we need a Consumer Reports for punditry. Here's a YouTube video of Tetlock speaking on the topic.

The New Yorker has in-depth article on Tetlock's work.

Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, made this prediction in 1999 in a NYTimes article is titled, "Congress Passes Wide-Ranging Bill Easing Bank Laws" about the repeal of Glass-Steagall a Depression-Era law to separate bankers and brokers:

"I think we will look back in 10 years' time and say we should not have done this but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, and that that which is true in the 1930's is true in 2010. I wasn't around during the 1930's or the debate over Glass-Steagall. But I was here in the early 1980's when it was decided to allow the expansion of savings and loans. We have now decided in the name of modernization to forget the lessons of the past, of safety and of soundness,"

- Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, November 5, 1999.

Byron was one of only 8 Senators to vote against the bill. He was joined by six Democrats: Barbara Boxer of California, Richard H. Bryan of Nevada, Russell D. Feingold of Wisconsin, Tom Harkin of Iowa, Barbara A. Mikulski of Maryland, and Paul Wellstone, and one Republican Senator, Richard C. Shelby of Alabama,

Senator Paul Wellstone, Democrat of Minnesota, said that Congress had ''seemed determined to unlearn the lessons from our past mistakes.''

''Scores of banks failed in the Great Depression as a result of unsound banking practices, and their failure only deepened the crisis,'' Mr. Wellstone said. ''Glass-Steagall was intended to protect our financial system by insulating commercial banking from other forms of risk. It was one of several stabilizers designed to keep a similar tragedy from recurring. Now Congress is about to repeal that economic stabilizer without putting any comparable safeguard in its place.''

By Kari Lydersen
Washington Post Staff Writers


Sunday, February 15, 2009; A03

CHICAGO, Feb. 14 -- The pace of global warming is likely to be much faster than recent predictions, because industrial greenhouse gas emissions have increased more quickly than expected and higher temperatures are triggering self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms in global ecosystems, scientists said Saturday.

"We are basically looking now at a future climate that's beyond anything we've considered seriously in climate model simulations," Christopher Field, founding director of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, said at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Field, a member of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said emissions from burning fossil fuels since 2000 have largely outpaced the estimates used in the U.N. panel's 2007 reports. The higher emissions are largely the result of the increased burning of coal in developing countries, he said

Read the rest of the story here.

The Senate bill is now inferior to the House's in terms of stimulative effect.

• Out: Education and State aid: The compromise Senate bill "cuts all $16 billion from the original bill for K-12 school construction, [and] trims more than $1 billion from Head Start programs for youngsters." Of the $83 billion cut by the Nelson-Collins gang, $40 billion of it was for state stabilization funding. This is incredibly important funding meant for "helping states and localities avoid wide-scale cuts in services and layoffs of public employees."
• In: Ineffective tax breaks: One example --- Republicans added the "house flipping subsidy", a $15,000 home-buyers credit, Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy Research calls this the “flip your house to your brother” provision: it will cost a lot of money while doing nothing to help the economy.

Want to learn about what's in the stimulus package in the first place? Try Recovery and Reinvestment 101 and the 'A Guide to How the Stimulus Works' video.

Interestingly, the most criticized provisions of Obama's stimulus package comprise a very small portion (less than 2%) of the total economic recovery legislation. Read about this in 'Republicans Mount Mini-Criticisms of Stimulus in the Media'.

Here are some programs that have been cut, either entirely or partially in the latest Senate version:

Partially cut:

• $3.5 billion for energy-efficient federal buildings (original bill $7 billion)
• $75 million from Smithsonian (original bill $150 million)
• $200 million from Environmental Protection Agency Superfund (original bill $800 million)
• $100 million from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (original bill $427 million)
• $100 million from law enforcement wireless (original bill $200 million)
• $300 million from federal fleet of hybrid vehicles (original bill $600 million)
• $100 million from FBI construction (original bill $400 million)

Fully eliminated

• $55 million for historic preservation
• $122 million for Coast Guard polar icebreaker/cutters
• $100 million for Farm Service Agency modernization
• $50 million for Cooperative State Research, Education and Extension Service
• $65 million for watershed rehabilitation
• $100 million for distance learning
• $98 million for school nutrition
• $50 million for aquaculture
• $2 billion for broadband
• $100 million for National Institute of Standards and Technology
• $50 million for detention trustee
• $25 million for Marshalls Construction
• $300 million for federal prisons
• $300 million for BYRNE Formula grant program
• $140 million for BYRNE Competitive grant program
• $10 million state and local law enforcement
• $50 million for NASA
• $50 million for aeronautics
• $50 million for exploration
• $50 million for Cross Agency Support
• $200 million for National Science Foundation
• $100 million for science
• $1 billion for Energy Loan Guarantees
• $4.5 billion for General Services Administration
• $89 million General Services Administration operations
• $50 million from Department of Homeland Security
• $200 million Transportation Security Administration
• $122 million for Coast Guard Cutters, modifies use
• $25 million for Fish and Wildlife
• $20 million for working capital fund
• $165 million for Forest Service capital improvement
• $90 million for State and Private Wildlife Fire Management
• $1 billion for Head Start/Early Start
• $5.8 billion for Health Prevention Activity
• $2 billion for Health Information Technology Grants
• $600 million for Title I (No Child Left Behind)
• $16 billion for school construction
• $3.5 billion for higher education construction
• $1.25 billion for project based rental
• $2.25 billion for Neighborhood Stabilization

The Other Paper is reporting that Jym Ganahl is going public that he is a global warming denier. Jym is Columbus-based NBC 4 chief meteorologist.

NBC 4's Jym Ganahl denies the connection between CO2 levels and global temperature increases.

"At times we are under a lot of criticism for our thinking about global warming. And they wanted to take away our credentials and shut us down as meteorologists without any scientific basis or fact behind what they are saying." [Emphasis added]

Ganahl believes that a vast mind-control conspiracy encompassing virtually every media outlet is to blame:

"Remember when 'War of the Worlds' first came out with Orson Wells with mind control and controlling people through the media and you can see how that can happen. That over the course of the years -- with swine flu, with west nile --- we panic the population and then it turns out to be false. But it's amazing to me that people believe what they see --and the Internet is another tool for that --- and they can be controlled. And it's remarkable how invasive that can be."

Ganahl's belief about the causes of global warming contradicts the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) , which represents consensus in the scientific community. The IPCC concluded that the dominant causes for recent climate change result from these 3 human activities

• increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases,
• global changes to land surface, such as deforestation,
• increasing atmospheric concentrations of aerosols.

Ganahl insists that the primarily cause of global warming is sun spots.

Here are the three critical points, backed up by science:

1. The empirical evidence that human activity has and continues to add meaningful quantities of Green House Gases to the biosphere is overwhelming.

2. Recent observed increased global temperature and other events around the world are highly correlated to those increased Green House Gas levels.

3. Past climate models which predicted that an increase in Green House Gases from human activity would produce defined, specific consequences have been borne out.
   

Continental has done excellent work in other communities as evidenced by this photo from their web site. Unfortunately, the proposal they made for Kingsdale does not include the pedestrian-friendly, tree-lined streets with on-street parking, widened sidewalks, or areas for street-side cafes shown here.

by Sue Grant

[UAPA collaborated with Sue Grant to create and publish this story. Sue is a landscape architect, OSU grad and UA resident and has been doing her homework on Kingsdale.]

On January 5, 2009 the new plan for the Kingsdale Regency property was presented at the Board of Zoning and Planning meeting. There were only a handful of community members in the audience. It has been a year since the last plan was unveiled. And the plan before that? Who remembers? Talk about this property has gone on and on for so long that we are all getting tired of hearing about it. We are also getting tired of looking at it, too. And we are tired of the diminishing services that it is providing.

A pivotal point for Kingsdale

More importantly, we are now at a point at which we have never been before – a pivotal one in which we could make the difference between having just ‘something’ happen, and making something really spectacular happen. But it will take more than just a handful of people to make that a reality, more than just a handful to make it so that this is the last time we have to hear about what it is ‘going’ to be, more than just a handful to ensure that instead, in the coming years, we hear about its success.

A talented developer offers less at Kingsdale than for other communities

A very talented developer has come to the table to play the game of turning this crucial piece of land into something – the question is what. Although its roots are local in the Columbus area and they do work here, Continental Real Estate Companies’ expertise has been far reaching in its impact on numerous small and large communities across the country.

Continental Real Estate Companies is no normal developer. They are good and they are creative. This is evidenced on their website. The character of some of their projects is people-oriented, with tree-lined streets, wide sidewalks with sidewalk cafes, and town squares. Frank Kass, of Continental, was even voted a #1 business owner in Pittsburgh with his innovative Waterfront development in Pittsburgh years ago, at a time when others said this unique project could not be done. Upper Arlington is indeed fortunate to have them interested in Kingsdale.

So why, then, is the current proposal for Kingsdale just another version of what currently exists there: another retail strip mall? It is because, as Frank Kass put it in his presentation of the plan on January 5, this plan is all about Giant Eagle and its parking; it is the big gorilla in the room. He even admitted that it isn’t about walking or strolling. The ‘pedestrian experience’ will be walking from your car in a parking lot, to the store, then back to the your car.

"How, for example, should conservatives react to stimulus and bailout proposals in the face of an economic meltdown? The wall between government and the private sector is an essential feature of our democracy. At the same time, if there is a dominant identifier of conservatism -- political, social, psychological -- it is prudence.

If proposals seem unworkable or unwise (if they do not contain provisions for taxpayers to recoup their investment; if they do not allow for taxpayers, as de facto shareholders, to insist on sound management practices; if they would allow government officials to make production and pricing decisions), conservatives have a responsibility to resist. But they also have an obligation to propose alternative solutions. It is government's job -- Reagan again -- to provide opportunity and foster productivity. With the nation in financial collapse, nothing is more imprudent -- more antithetical to true conservatism -- than to do nothing."

Reagan wouldn't recognized this GOP

By Mickey Edwards
January 24, 2009

In my mind's eye, I can see Ronald Reagan, wearing wings and a Stetson, perched on a cloud and watching all the goings-on down here in his old earthly home. Laughing, rolling his eyes and whacking his forehead over the absurdities he sees, he's watching his old political party as it twists itself into ever more complex knots, punctuated only by pauses to invoke the Gipper's name. It's been said that God would be amazed by what his followers ascribe to him; believe me, Reagan would be similarly amazed by what his most fervent admirers cite in their desire to be seen as true-blue Reaganites.