Search this site
Matching entries from BatesLine
Oklahoma 2022: Tulsa area legislative races
Two State Senate districts and six State House districts that overlap with Tulsa County have general elections on November 8, 2022. Neighboring counties add in four additional State House seats. Here's an overview with my recommendations in six of the races; details after the jump, and more to be added....
Oklahoma SQ 805: Lighter sentences for career criminals
Oklahoma State Question 805 would insert a new article into the Oklahoma Constitution to ban longer sentences for repeat felony offenders. The question arises from an initiative petition. (UPDATE: On October 30, 2020, I spoke with Jeremie Poplin, filling in for Pat Campbell on Talk Radio 1170 KFAQ, about both...
Tulsa teachers leaving for other Oklahoma districts, lower pay
A significant number of the 35% of Tulsa Public Schools who left the district in the last two years did not head to greener pastures out-of-state, but to other Oklahoma school districts with comparable pay, according to an investigation led by Tulsa World education reporter Andrea Eger. Teachers interviewed for...
2017 Tulsa election: Proposition 6: City employees allowed to campaign
The sixth of the seven charter change propositions on the City of Tulsa November 14, 2017, ballot would change the rules regarding the political involvement of city employees protected under civil service and sworn public safety employees. A yes vote on Proposition No. 6 would allow civil service city employees...
What I told the <em>Guardian</em> about Oklahoma's budget crisis and what the <em>Grauniad</em> published
If you're wondering why people believe the mainstream news media is more interested in pushing a narrative rather than reporting the facts, I've got a story for you. If you want to know why you shouldn't trust a mainstream news outlet to give you multiple reasoned perspectives on a complex...
Rick Steves needs to tour his own country "through the back door"
For many Americans, Rick Steves is the guru of European travel, specifically of an approach to travel he calls "through the back door" -- skipping the high-priced hotels, chain restaurants, and tourist traps which insulate you in an American bubble, and instead encountering authentic local culture, staying at B&Bs, hostels,...
National Youth Orchestra of the USA tonight at Carnegie Hall
The National Youth Orchestra of the USA will perform its second and final stateside concert tonight, July 14, 2016, at Carnegie Hall before leaving for a two-week tour of European concert halls in Prague, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Montpellier. Two young Oklahoma musicians are a part of the orchestra: cellist Ben...
Scotland's independence referendum
Polls are now closed in Scotland, but it will be several hours until all the votes are counted in the referendum to decide whether its 307-year-old membership in the United Kingdom will be dissolved in favor of independence. The question on the ballot is simple: "Should Scotland be an independent...
On the George Zimmerman verdict and being a strange pedestrian
A few thoughts: I'm disheartened by the outraged reaction from my liberal friends, who are certain that justice was denied, and that a racist murderer has been set free. NBC, CNN, President Obama, and other public figures and opinionators did race relations and common sense in America a grave disservice...
Meet Squeezy, the public employees pension python
Illinois Governor Mark Quinn offers a clear and creative explanation of the crisis faced by his state as a result of decades of underfunding contributions to public pensions: Quinn avoids casting blame on the public employees or their unions, putting the blame instead on politicians who didn't worry about making...
Bad bureaucrats: Pension logrolling, hidden funds, expenses fiddling
A few news items of interest, while you wait for me to publish some sort of analysis of last Tuesday's results: Reuters: Special Report: How a vicious circle of self-interest sank a California city -- long, but a must-read: Yet on close examination, the city's decades-long journey from prosperous, middle-class...
AfP tracks Oklahoma legislature key bills
The Oklahoma chapter of Americans for Prosperity has posted its list of key bills for the Oklahoma legislature's 2012 session. Groups like AfP use their announced key bills as the basis for rankings of state representatives and state senators. Each bill has information on the sponsor, the purpose of the...
Rick Santorum rallies full house in Tulsa
This is a preliminary report, mainly so I can get the audio and some photos online. I plan to transcribe additional quotes as I have opportunity. Sen. Rick Santorum spoke to a standing-room only crowd of about 1000 people at Grace Church last night, March 4, 2012, focusing attention on...
The real Margaret Thatcher
White House photo: Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, 1988 There's this new movie with Meryl Streep as Maggie. I'm not sure why one would bother paying $10 to see a fake Thatcher, when you can find so much on the web about the real Iron Lady. Here's the real...
George Kaiser and tax avoidance
Last week the Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group published a detailed history of George Kaiser's fortune, a fortune built with care to avoid paying taxes, according to the story's author, Bill Allison. Allison co-authored The Cheating of America, a 2001 book on "wealthy individuals and powerful corporations avoid taxes." The article...
2011 Oklahoma Republican Convention tweets and retweets
Technical note: Copying and pasting tweets into this post was a very frustrating and time-consuming process. In the end, I had to paste the HTML into an Emacs buffer, use a series of regex replacements to clean the text up enough so everything would post without messing up everything else...
Cowboy poets, public radio, and unfunded pensions
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) is upset about the Republican House budget plan, which would eliminate federal funding to the National Endowment for the Humanities, which funds the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering every January in Elko, Nevada. "The mean-spirited bill, H.R. 1 ... eliminates the National Endowment of the...
SEIU to protest in Oklahoma City
The Service Employees International Union has sent an email calling members and sympathizers to rally at the Oklahoma State Capitol at noon today (Saturday, February 26, 2011). Here's the email from SEIU president Mary Kay Henry. Note that the signup links are directed to moveon.org: SEIU brothers and sisters, Join...
Eyewitnesses of the Tiananmen Square Massacre
Two must-read articles for today, the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, when the Chinese army, under orders from the Communist government, crushed a peaceful protest for democracy and liberty, killing hundreds. Claudia Rosett of the Wall Street Journal was there in the pre-dawn hours of June 4 when...
McGreevey and McKee
No, this is not satire (Hat tip: WorldMagBlog): Former Gov. James E. McGreevey has started the process to become a priest in his newly adopted Episcopal faith and hopes to begin a three-year seminary program in the fall. McGreevey, who often described himself as a devout Catholic while in public...
Feed Subscription
If you use an RSS reader, you can subscribe to a feed of all future entries matching 'pensions'. [What is this?]
