Blacking Out the FCC
For backers and/or masochists, buying a ticket is the best way to see a Buffalo Bills game. But those who choose to tailgate in the kitchen deserve to be able to catch the action in the den.
That’s true regardless of whether every in-person seat is filled. After all, they’ve also thrown money on owner Ralph Wilson’s pile just by paying taxes in the the Evil Empire State.
Football partisans can’t just enjoy cheering for their preferred sport: they must also contemplate Washington’s puzzlingly invasive role in it, which is especially galling considering that the hometown Redskins are presently barely better than the horrid Bills.
As a result, fans contemplate whether it’s worse for one government to fund a private business or another to decide if they will be stuck listening to their team on fall Sundays if a few hundred seats remain unsold. Thinking about which Bills squad since 2000 has most insulted the game of football is miserable enough.
This republic won’t let us call our own plays. Fans are left begging the FCC to please let us watch our fantastically lousy local football side on our home screens:
The Federal Communications Commission is looking for the public to comment on the NFL’s blackout rules.
The move by the FCC came in response to a petition filed by groups who object to the rule.
The feds have a say for the same reason that they choose which failing companies deserve to be propped up with our money, namely because they feel like it:
An FCC rule dating back to 1976, requires all other broadcasters, including cable and satellite companies, to abide by the blackout agreement.
But now, the FCC is taking a second look at that rule.
They’re checking to see where their power to set arbitrary rules is found in the Constitution. Just kidding. Fans are understandably ticked that the availability of tickets is even an issue in whether a contest is broadcast locally:
Brian Frederick, Sports Fan Coalition: ”Well it’s extremely important, and it’s even more important that fans speak out now because what the FCC is looking for is to hear from fans in these affected areas. So it’s going to be up to the fan bases in Buffalo and Tampa and Cincinnati where there have been pervasive blackouts to say ‘enough is enough, where we shouldn’t have to pay for the stadium with our tax dollars and then be blacked out at home as well.’”
He’s certainly correct that locals who fund the stadium should be able to see games played within it. But the issue lies with why the community pays for stadiums with tax dollars in the first place.
Forget trying to grow the area’s economy so that there are naturally more NFL nuts than tickets. New York’s stimulus-style approach assumes that businesses will only set up shop and remain if politicians who coincidentally haven’t succeeded in the private sector offer suspiciously generous gift bags.
We couldn’t dare let people figure out if they want to invest in industries like professional athletics by themselves. Instead, we get massive compulsory spending of our own money with a rotten economy as a reward.
But at least the Bills might continue to play home games in Orchard Park and Toronto instead of Southern California if they get more state money in exchange for playing not particularly decent football. Of course, Albany must first tax the stuffing out of us to raise enough so they can throw more from the communal pile at an affluent private business.
Big public-money spenders like Andrew Cuomo claim they aim to keep the Bills around. But their schemes in fact initiate the exact government-initiated drag that leads to unfilled seats. Their solution creates the problem. They can never determine why filling a 73,079-seat stadium is a struggle despite all their bribes.
Stadiums should be run as for-profit private enterprises owned by whoever thinks they’re good business investments, including the one in suburban Buffalo. Subsidizing a participant in a multibillion-dollar enterprise does not quite qualify as helping the less fortunate.
Either way, we’re left figuring out how the FCC has any say in a football league’s broadcast decisions. Of course, winning football played in a thriving town would inherently lead to sellouts. And owners like Wilson could get off the dole and set any blackout rules they want. But it’s easier to bribe an official who doesn’t even know the game’s rules.
99 Percent Chance of Shivering
Rumor holds that inclement weather may be an annual event in Buffalo. This year’s scheduled bout with brutally stimulating temperatures also served as a sign, namely that certain grown infants should go stink up someplace indoors that’s also private property.
Occupy Buffalo didn’t seem to realize that it would get chilly around calendar-changing time, which fails to portend well for their ability to make accurate political predictions. Still, the unsurprising frigidity may bring a merciful end to a movement that’s as relevant as a video from the Huntsman daughters.
Even mailmen claim they work through crummy weather. But it’s apparently only worth fighting to plunder the income of others when there are leaves on the ground, not snow:
Though organizers of Occupy Buffalo say the recent cold and snow hasn’t affected them, the recent evidence may suggest differently.
“This snow is not a problem. I don’t know how clearly I can say that,” said Heron Simmonds-Price, an Occupy Buffalo organizer.
Learning of an Occupier’s troubled relationship with the truth is as shocking as finding a sign advocating free tuition in one of their shantytowns. The Buffalo breeze is stronger than the will to publicly demand regular checks from the Treasury as a reward for not figuring how to make much:
Over the past few days, the cold, wind and snow seems to have sent many of the permanent protesters on a winter vacation. Though with recent temperatures dropping into single digits at times and wind gusts reaching over 40 m.p.h., few could blame them.
Still, it’s important to distinguish between lightweights and Occupiers who are hardcore about wanting other people’s money:
Admittedly, Simmonds-Price also added that the movement is made of folks with different preparedness and commitment levels.
Sunday afternoon, most of the tents that dot Niagara Square lay empty, some even sit wide-open, completely “un-occupied”. No protesters could be found outside, and about three were gathered in a large, enclosed tent structure.
Zip the flaps shut, ya goofs! The professional whiners don’t seem to grasp that people can’t see inside tents, which my research indicates tend to be opaque; that tactic only works if the doors are closed.
The weird thing is that they’ve been artificially inflating their attendance numbers for some time by cluttering the public space with sneakily vacant outdoor abodes, so perhaps they’ve just gotten tired and sloppy. As evidence, many are quitting their non-jobs:
Does that mean the movement is losing steam, or just that the cold weather is thinning out the less dedicated? Only time will tell.
Time has already told that their detestable purpose is to seize the gains of other people’s labor. The geodesic entitlement dome was supposed to warm their whiny hides, but temperature-based discomfort is apparently too much to bear in the eternal quest for personal bailouts.
Sure, the protesters could thaw in an office building where they could be paid for doing tasks. But the redistributive policies they advocate will strangle the economy and thus make it even harder to find employment. So, they’d get exactly what they want. Work is for robber barons.
The weather doesn’t matter. Even after Erie County defrosts, they’ll still self-righteously believe that the system should be changed so it’s unfair in their favor. As with Western New York experiencing four seasons every year, some things are entirely predictable.
Sabre Rattling
The performances of specifically woeful attorneys general such as unctuous lizard Eliot Spitzer and present miserable governor Andrew Cuomo will affect New York well into the future. For example, incumbent Eric Schneiderman apparently feels so ashamed of his post that he’s concluded there’s nothing better to do than waste his time telling a cable provider and channel to make a deal.
Some may even suggest that there’s real crime in this state about which to worry. For one, there’s the matter of how politicians like the AG draw checks they clearly don’t earn.
To wit, wags have been joking that not being able to see the presently mediocre Buffalo Sabres is a blessing. Regardless, the office is now being used to mediate something as extraneous as a cable feud:
The State Attorney General is stepping in the rink to referee the dispute that’s put Buffalo Sabres fans with cable in the penalty box.
Attorney General Eric Schneiderman released a statement Friday, the day after some Buffalo lawmakers asked him to step in, saying he would ask both MSG and Time Warner officials to meet in his office next week. Time Warner customers would couldn’t watch the game turned out by the thousands to watch the Sabres play the Carolina Canes at First Niagara Center Friday night.
So, the franchise figured out a way to show the games despite the dispute? The inventive solution provided an opportunity for fans to demonstrate their dedication to a frustratingly underachieving squad. Naturally, the attorney general doesn’t care:
The Sabres opened up the arena and let fans in for free, giving them free popcorn and pop on day six of MSG’s decision to pull Sabres’ games off of Time Warner. But now, the NYS Attorney General hopes to mediate an end to the dispute, saying, “We have had constructive discussions with Time Warner Cable and MSG Networks as part of an ongoing effort to facilitate progress in their talks. We are hopeful that the two parties will come to an agreement in short order so that Sabres, Rangers, and Knicks games are available to subscribing New Yorkers as soon as possible.”
I want my Knicks games! That’s pro basketball, right? Maybe an elected official can intimidate people into whatever results he thinks would be fair:
Sherry Park isn’t sure if that will make a difference and said, “I don’t know. It’d kind of hard. Everybody’s trying to step in and stuff. Hopefully, being the Attorney General, I hope he can make a bigger difference.”
He’ll make a bigger difference, all right. Using the state’s chief law enforcement officer to tell businesses how they should resolve their dispute should unsettle everyone. At least somebody thinks the government has no place trying to referee this game:
“It’s a shame that the Attorney General of New York has to waste his time. With the stuff that we have going on in New York, because a company wants to raise 52 percent. I mean, I can see where you can make a raise, but not many of us get a 52 percent raise when we go in to do our jobs,” said Jeff Schultz.
MSG denies asking for a 52 percent raise and says, “We appreciate the Attorney General’s offer to meet with us to discuss our dispute with Time Warner Cable and we look forward to meeting with him.”
It’s hard to judge who’s being a jerk without knowing the intricacies regarding standard cable channel compensation rates. Either way, the one thing that could make the frustrating situation worse is the government deciding that it has a role to play.
As with the criminally inept Bills getting free sugar from Erie County no matter how consistently they fail, the popularity of professional athletics is lamentably strong enough to trump the principle of governmental nonintervention. People can decide on their own what’s fun and what they should pay for it. The business of sports is none of the state’s business.
The line brawl involves two private enterprises hashing out different ideas of how much one party’s product is worth. Wanting the state to stay out of the matter has nothing to do with cheering for a franchise like the Sabres that we find endearing no matter how frustratingly they play.
If you want to watch your team, yell at your cable provider and/or the channel that carries them. Just don’t yell at the government.
Shaming Buffalo Bill
It should be impossible for an NFL team to miss the playoffs for 12 straight seasons. But nothing is impossible for the Buffalo Bills, who magically find new ways to soar to unfathomable depths every year. They specialize in teaching supporters valuable lessons about patience and life’s patent unfairness.
The soul-crushing franchise found a new way to tease its fans this season, namely by pretending to be good for a few weeks. The jubilation following a 5-2 start almost seemed like it couldn’t be real, and it truly wasn’t.
Winning after Halloween would have just been greedy. They couldn’t even sell out the game against despised rivals the Miami Dolphins; the fan base’s general unwillingness to taunt the tropical franchise about their chilly hides stands as yet one more telling low.
This team has taken on the personality of its coach, unfortunately. Chan Gailey is the latest in a series of uninspiring oafs to lead this squad, and mumbled excuses about rebuilding don’t conceal that he’s won 9 of 30 games.
Gailey embodies a franchise that is comical in its incompetence. They make puzzling draft picks like that of C.J. Spiller, who is ill-suited enough for pro football that the NFL version of the Peter principle should be named after him.
Only the Bills would draft a running back when they needed everything but a running back. The team hopes fans are fooled by a good show against another junior varsity team in the Dolphins. It still didn’t keep the Bills from getting swept in the season series.
Meanwhile, management put its faith in quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick, with mutually rotten results. Contract extension in hand, he apparently figures it’s fine to play while wearing a blindfold. For his next Fitzmagic trick, he’ll throw into quadruple coverage, ta da! It’s apparently asking too much of the enriched Fitzpatrick to get a passer rating that’s higher than his Wonderlic score.
And why not break what works? Before Gailey’s unceremonious arrival, the team deployed a 4-3 defense that sort-of stopped other offenses. Naturally, they changed to a 3-4 alignment that has been as effective as putting 11 turnstiles on the field; abandoning it at times as a response hasn’t quite worked at all. Their efforts are not aided by how this team does strength and conditioning on the cheap, which is partly why they seem to send 15 or 20 guys to injured reserve nearly every season.
But why would owner Ralph Wilson splurge on anything like coaches, staff, or the roster? He makes his money no matter how much his team sucks. By doing so, the hoary miser inadvertently provides an example of why corporate socialism kills any motivation to succeed.
Their slide into seemingly permanent oblivion is particularly egregious considering that the entire league is set up so losers can rebound quickly. Most obviously, the worst teams get the best draft picks; on top of that, a salary cap means that owners don’t have to worry about paying anything as crazy as a mutually-negotiated fair market salary to the players who enable their tremendous earnings.
And revenue sharing shows how Occupy slackers would be even less productive if they were handed the free stuff they want. The money teams automatically get creates a perverse incentive for some against trying too hard. In a league that strives to mandate parity, teams get payments without having to thrive. The system works as well as Obamanomics, and the Bills are the NFL’s Chevy Volt.
It’s not like rent is bankrupting them. By contrast, their subsidized stadium means they don’t have to worry about anything as pedestrian as operating expenses. Not many companies are fortunate enough to get paid for using their office space.
As a result of all their guaranteed income, the Bills have gotten fat and happy on welfare with no reason to excel. The goal should be to improve the area’s financial circumstances so the team can become a big-market franchise.
But that would require Wilson to care about the area as anything more than the source of some of the checks he holds in his Hall of Fame blazer’s pocket. He gets his money regardless of how much Buffalo has shrunk since it was awarded an American Football League franchise. But at least income inequality has been addressed so he doesn’t have to work to profit.
Until Buffalo gets a pro football team, fans will have to settle for cheering on the Bills. If it makes you feel better, both players and the owner still get paid even in the likely event they lose. Still, it would be nice if they could remember that they’re supposed to be on the inside when they circle the wagons.
Fibbing Into Debt
Calling a politician a liar is a serious charge, as his words are useless if he purposely reneges on them. So, let’s go ahead and accurately refer to Andrew Cuomo as one. To wit, he’s the governor who deliberately pretended that he didn’t want to take more money from people who are skilled at earning it.
He may be going back on his word by harvesting even more from the state’s most sumptuously-outfitted residents. But at least he’s doing so for a good reason, namely so he can junk the economy.
Maybe Cuomo the Younger is just trying to make his daddy look like less of a job-killing putz by comparison. Otherwise, he really thinks that his new yet old rabid desire to tax people who have made more than you will improve everyone’s finances, which we can only hope isn’t true.
On top of that, his latest actions are fundamentally incompatible his previous words. Consider what the then-new governor once astutely claimed about taxes:
“We can’t raise taxes because we will never attract jobs if New York is the tax capital of the nation.”
As odd as it seems now, something wise once came out of Cuomo’s mouth when he opened it. But that was way back in November 2010; his persistent case of chronic liberalism has flared in the meantime. Now, his word is as valuable as most of this state’s businesses.
Like him, circumstances didn’t really change, unless New York facing massive debt due to massively rampant spending counts as news. With crushing deficits in mind, he didn’t want to suggest anything rash like spending less than at present lunatic rates.
The rather mendacious executive said what he had to while campaigning, namely some sensible things. But you didn’t expect him to keep his word, did you? He couldn’t confiscate more income from those jerky tycoons who employ many of us if he stayed honest.
Unfortunately, decades of experience have shown that everything Cuomos believe is utterly wrong. It’s been a long while since the nickname “Empire State” was not used ironically. Dropping from 47 electoral votes in 1948 to 29 today is the price of a bloated, worthless state administration that never quite gets around to helping its citizens.
At least Cuomo is clever, in his way. The incumbent is perpetrating a cunning strategy of making the unemployment rate appear to drop by creating conditions so miserable that frustrated job-seekers depart for state with less robust governments. A similar strategy has been replicated nationally, with nearly identical phony and miserable results.
Without yet another rich-soaking, we couldn’t remain “the progressive capital of the nation,” which would naturally just be unacceptable. Albany simply must buy things for the lower and fat parts of the bell curve at the expense of people who had the nerve to be more successful than most.
And the governor has a moral obligation to tax the richest among us until they’re as poor as we are. That will at least work until the targeted class realizes that there are 49 other states from which to choose.
The problem is that we’ve already seen what happens when we get as many people as possible on the government drip. Namely, the rich get frustrated while everyone else feels more entitled, all while the economy nosedives. At least it’s an opportunity to pad the Medicaid rolls.
Of course, Mr. Sandra Lee is used to guiding the economy while pulling a governmental paycheck, with predictably apocalyptic results. Specifically, his ability to curtail the development of urban areas and housing as Housing and Urban Development secretary is still proving to be particularly toxic to all Americans, New Yorkers or not.
Cuomo has merely become more conniving, as seen by his radical role in altering both the economy and matrimony. His effort to foist gay marriage upon the state was just the start of radical social change.
A steeper income tax rate means a shifty left-wing governor gets even more say in how your life will proceed. His willingness to deliberately deceive isn’t even the worst thing about him.
New York Does the Bare Minimum
Why not make more? Work is hard enough without being paid less than you think you deserve. Best of all, there’s no possible catch to forcing the guy who signs your checks to issue them in bigger amounts.
Would a buck and a quarter more per hour make you happier? It’s easy for New York’s Democrats to push for a higher wage floor; after all, they wouldn’t be the ones covering the increase:
Naturally, the mean opposition thinks that the government promising you something good could have negative consequences, because they are not equipped with hearts and thus don’t believe in the power of compassion and love as expressed through making your boss pay you more to run a cash register:
The pay hike sounds great in the same sense that eating ice cream for dinner is appetizing for kindergartners. The man who has to choke down Sandra Lee’s cooking hasn’t yet revealed if he’s in favor of forcing work to dole out larger sugar rations:
Cuomo the Younger’s desire to make businesses like our state apparently somehow explains why he raised the state income tax for high earners and no longer bothers to make a show about cutting government to any serious degree. His ability to resist the urge to impose a more expensive mandate on employers will presumably be as strong as his desire to pretend he’s not a liberal.
The measure’s mere suggestion reaffirms that some head to Albany for the sole reason of micromanaging your life. Assembly stooges attempt to tell us what people should make when they’re not deciding what marriage is.
As with their unilateral redefinition of weddings, their economic theories seem to have been developed by humans who are new to society. Let’s hope that their viewpoints arise from mere unfamiliarity with our customs and discoveries.
In reality, people should be able to work for whatever rate to which they can obtain. Just like everything one buys is a negotiation with a seller, one’s wage should be freely agreed upon with an employer.
Companies want good and skilled workers; the bad news for them is that they have to compensate properly. Liberals assume we’d all be making 85 cents per hour without the government’s protection, as if laborers would settle for pocket change while employers in a competitive environment who wanted to attract talent wouldn’t offer bills.
The Assembly thinks it’s humiliatingly absurd for entry-level hopefuls to start low and earn that raise. But bosses are just trying to determine is how much value they can get out of a worker performing his task and compensate him accordingly. Or maybe they pay a small amount because they’re cruel and would rather gold-plate their moats than pay people to do economically useful tasks for them.
The result of the bill moving forward would be fewer jobs, as companies would divide the finite payroll budget among fewer people. But at least the openings would be higher-paying if they existed.
Workers could receive better compensation from millionaires if the latter didn’t have to send more to Albany. But our politicians would rather punish the successful until they learn that making money doesn’t pay.
Socking it to high earners harms those who are earn less. Class-on-class combat assumes that rich people won’t leave and will keep being as productive as they were before our leaders hiked taxes. On top of that, surrendering more to the proven dopes in the capital also means that they’re left with less left to pay janitors and secretaries.
Practitioners of envy similarly figure that employers will happily pay workers more than they may be worth. But a higher minimum wage just leads to a minimum number of starting jobs being available. Those who wage basement laws allegedly help will express their gratitude by desperately selling us their plasma.