Super Bowl host city still reeling over sports deals - Yahoo News:
"Glendale bet big on professional sports in the last 15 years, spending millions of dollars on a hockey arena for the Arizona Coyotes and investing heavily in a spring training ballpark for the Chicago White Sox and Los Angeles Dodgers.
Then the economy tanked, and the hockey team went through bankruptcy, with several different owners in recent years.
The city has found stronger financial footing since then and its bond rating has improved markedly, but not without having to raise taxes, trim 25 percent of the municipal workforce, cut back on paving projects, and reduce hours at municipal swimming pools and libraries.
The 9.2 percent sales tax that shoppers and diners pay in Glendale is among the highest in the state.
To fiscal conservatives, Glendale serves as a cautionary tale for suburban cities across the United States that want to throw public money at professional sports projects.
"Overall, it's a bad move for cities," said Kurt Altman, general counsel for the Arizona-based Goldwater Institute, which fought Glendale over its enticements to the hockey team.
"As much as they say it's going to make the city a destination, it just doesn't."
...Glendale is far from alone.
...As he navigates the financial situation, Glendale Mayor Jerry Weiers returns to a maxim he has repeated many times in his life: "I'm not living in the past. I'm just paying for it."
In the case of the Super Bowl, he believes the city is paying dearly.
He said Glendale will actually lose a "couple million dollars" by hosting the event. It's spending huge amounts of money on overtime and police and public safety costs for the Super Bowl but not getting much back.
Super Bowl visitors are mostly staying in Phoenix and Scottsdale and only showing up in Glendale on game day, meaning the city won't see much of a boost in tax revenue.
And the city was hoping the state would reimburse Glendale for its police overtime costs, but lawmakers have scoffed at the idea.
Weiers said it pains him that the city had to cut services and lay off workers, but the moves were necessary to ensure financial solvency.
He said the outlook has improved in the last year, a far cry from a couple years ago when Glendale was in jeopardy of joining the likes of Detroit in the category of municipal bankruptcies.
"I have to believe that if '1' is perfect as things could be and '10' was bankruptcy, I'd say we were a strong '8,'" Weiers said.
"We never had to go there, and I strongly believe we won't have to go there."
The U.S. State Department does not announce where it plans to send foreign refugees for resettlement within the United States, although the locations do eventually show up in a government database some weeks after they arrive in their host cities. Word of their anticipated arrivals will sometimes surface earlier in local media reports.
Mark Levin Lowers the Boom: Obama ‘Has All the Signals of an Anti-Semite’:
"Heated controversy and debate, filled with deep division between the political right and left, rages across America, over many issues. One of the contentious issues is the claim on one side of the deep divide, adamantly claiming that America is not, nor ever was, a Christian nation. On the opposite side of that great divide, is the declaration that America is, and has always been, a Christian nation. To this writer it is obvious that we Americans are a Christian nation, because the evidence is as clear as water from a mountain spring. Millions of words could be devoted to provide proof of this, but in perhaps a thousand words we can examine America’s Christian heritage and her exceptionalism through the lens of history and some irrefutable facts."
"This is one of those odd Obama moments the mainstream media is almost certain to ignore — a moment that some in the Obama-supporting press will see as trivial, while others might consider it too hot to touch.
"During a speech in 2009, Obama pledged that not only would his signature legislation of Obamacare cost ‘only’ $900 billion, or $30,000 per person insured, but also promised that it would not add one dime to the deficit.
"A man in Tomball, Texas, was startled out of his sleep by the sound of someone kicking in his front door on Monday night.
"The Obama administration’s refusal to acknowledge radical Islam is a “real problem” for the country, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) told Greta Van Susteren on Tuesday night.
When was George Washington president? Watters heard answers that ranged from 1776 to 1983 to “way before I was born.”
Watch: Trey Gowdy tussles with State Dept. liaison during uncomfortable back-and-forth | TheBlaze.com:
One of the recently unsealed documents, a Dec. 1 opinion by Judge Allegra, finally explains why in October the judge voided his original decision, made in August, to award Dobyns $173,000. (He later reversed his decision to void the judgment, which still stands.) The reason: The judge believed that Justice Department attorneys had “committed fraud on the court.”
"President Obama's healthcare law will spend about $2 trillion over the next decade on expanding insurance coverage but still leave 31 million Americans uninsured, according to an analysis from the Congressional Budget Office released on Monday.
