On the strength of a goal by senior Egor Mironov, the Niagara men’s hockey team (12-19-4, 6-10-2 CHA) will play for the last College Hockey America championship, after defeating top-seeded and nationally-ranked Bemidji State (23-9-3, 14-3-1 CHA) at Dwyer Arena on Friday night.
The game-winning goal came halfway through the third period, when a shot from [...]
The University at Buffalo softball team kicked off their weekend campaign at the Long Beach State Invitational this afternoon, falling to Notre Dame, 1-0, but coming back to defeat San Diego, 5-3, as they move to 7-9 on the season.
Against Notre Dame, both teams played a strong defensive game, with the only [...]
The Canisius College hockey team won game one of a best-of-three Atlantic Hockey quarterfinal series, defeating Mercyhurst, 5-1, on Friday night. The Griffs move to within one win of reaching the conference semifinals for the first time since 2004.
“I don’t think the score was indicative of the play tonight,” said Canisius head coach Dave Smith. [...]
Environmental tests at a Hertel Avenue police station that was closed last month following the discovery of mold uncovered no health hazards, city officials said Friday.
Environmental tests at a Hertel Avenue police station that was closed last month following the discovery of mold uncovered no health hazards, city officials said Friday.
The Buffalo Sabres saw their three game winning streak end Friday night with a 3-1 home loss to the Minnesota Wild.
Patrick Lalime, getting a rare start in place of Ryan Miller in net, let a pair of bad goals in the net during the first period. The Wild would eventually build a 3-0 lead before [...]
Bills linebacker Kawika Mitchell is teaming up with New York Giants defensive end Mathias Kiwanuka in a charity effort to help villages in Kiwanuka’s native Uganda, while also taking in some of the...
A lecture and presentation of photos that showcase the historic Black Rock neighborhood will be given Sunday in the Buffalo & Erie County Historical Society Museum, 25 Nottingham Court.
Steve Mesler's whirlwind, whistlestop victory tour of Buffalo ended Friday, and the closing ceremonies included a loud pep rally at the school where his athletic career took shape -- City Honors School.
I always try to make a stop at Prime 490 during Local Restaurant Week. They always have such fresh meat and vegetables. Their restaurant week menu is always full of delicious choices, including an assortment of seafood, house-made pasta, red meat and chicken dishes.
Music is Art (MiA) is a not for profit organization that works
to promote music of all genres for all ages. Founded by Goo Goo Dolls bassist
Robby Takac in 2004, MiA holds numerous events to educate people and encourage
appreciation of music.
This March, high school bands are encouraged to apply to
participate in the MiA Battle
of the Bands. Applications for bands of every genre are accepted, but only
six bands will be selected. For the third year in a row, bands will compete during
the Scotty Bowman Cup
games at HSBC Arena on March 29th. Selected bands play before the
games and in between periods, with the performances shown on HD screens.
Bands can submit either an mp3 or direct link to one song to info@musicisart.org up until 5 PM on March 18th. According to the
Battle of the Bands rules, any school in Erie. Niagara, or Chautauqua Counties can compete, on the condition that at
least 75% of a prospective band attends the high school they represent. In addition, one teacher must act as a sponsor
for each band, taking responsibility before, after and during the competition.
The winning band will earn a performance slot at the Music is
Art Festival, which will be held on September 11th, 2010. In past
years, winners have also received recording time at Takac's studio GCR Audio, professional photo shoots and
more.
According to MiA Executive Director Tod Kniazuk, MiA does not use
one specific set of guidelines in picking the top six schools. Every genre of
music is accepted and seriously considered. The 2008 winner, Inlite, is a rock/indie band from
Grand Island High School. And in 2009, the ska/pop punk/rock band Abominable Killer Snowmen, was voted the
winner.
The construction of the long anticipated mixed-use development at the corner of Elmwood and Bryant streets is well underway. After a few months of foundation work, the skeleton of the new three-story, 20,000 sq.ft. building has already brought new life to this section of the Elmwood Strip.
Coffee Culture will anchor the ground floor commecial space. Additonal space remains available. The building is expected to be ready for occupancy this summer.
There's a piece in the New York Times today featuring the four Albright-Knox Art Gallery works of art that were released as stamps this past Thursday. Writer Roberta Smith is correct in pointing out that though each artist's name appears on the front of the stamp, with information on the back, it is unfortunate that the respective gallery and location was not mentioned and easily could have been.
The Abstract Expressionists commemorative postage stamps, featuring works by Hans Hoffmann, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Joan Mitchell, should not only shine a light on the movement, they should credit the galleries that experimented with the style and gave wall space to the risk-takers. Over the years the Albright-Knox has taken a lot of heat for sticking with its modernist ways - it's times like these that the decisions made should also be commemorated.
Albright-Knox Art Gallery
1285 Elmwood Avenue
Buffalo, NY 14222-1096
(716) 882-8700
More rain is in the forecast today, with a high temperature of 44 degrees. It will also be a bit breezy, with winds from the east at between 17 and 24 mph. Areas of fog will persist tonight, with more rain, a low of about 36, and stronger winds from the east, between 22 and 30 mph. Gusts could be as high as 43 mph. A flood watch is in effect throughout the region, with puddling and ponding galore.
The Buffalo News is vilified as a pinko outfit by conservatives, and condemned as a right-wing rag by liberals. Usually, that would be evidence of evenhandedness and equal-opportunity advocacy.
On Friday, it wrote something that was quite literally a parroting of right-wing talking points. If that editorial wasn’t ghost-written by someone like Andy Rudnick, Bob Wilmers, or some other wealthy and well-connected plutocrat, then I’m shocked. Every single bitchy little disingenuous Republican complaint about health care reform was in there.
Luckily for us, Paul Krugman disembowelled each one in the Times that same day.
The crux of the op-ed piece is that costs aren’t brought down by health care reform.
Instead, he has thrown his weight behind an expensive collection of entitlements, mandates and regulations that will only raise the deficit again. And he has turned away from some obvious steps that would reduce costs.
Increased competition between health insurance companies, by allowing them to sell nationwide, is the traditional American way to bring costs down. Medical malpractice reform must be addressed with reasonable caps on damages, so that doctors and hospitals will make costly diagnostic and care decisions based less on fears over lawsuits.
And as the debates rage despite the Democrats’ intent simply to push through the plan they want, it remains puzzling that so little attention is being paid to the health reform plan — as opposed to the health reform rhetoric — advanced by Republicans. The Common Sense Health Care Reform and Affordability Act has a lot of the things that the public is asking for and could lower costs as well.
Included in that plan are items worthy of actual debate instead of political posturing. Among them are provisions that would allow children to stay on their parents’ policies longer, guarantee that people with pre-existing health problems will be able to get insurance and not allow insurance companies to drop people if they get sick
Wow, that Republican plan seems great! Why won’t the Democrats include those things?
While those provisions also are in the Democrats’ plan, so are a slew of others — all costing a lot of dollars, which the Democrats say would be covered by an unlikely combination of scenarios including future congressional cuts in popular programs. The Republican proposal is contained in 219 pages. There are 2,000 pages in the Democrats’ bill.
In an editorial where the Buffalo News decries Democratic “posturing” on health insurance reform, it’s downright shocking to see it take up the dumbest anti-intellectual meme the Republicans have – how many pages a bill has.
Where was this editorial when massive tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans were passed through reconciliation during George W. Bush’s administration? Tax cuts that exponentially grew the deficit, and which still make up the vast bulk of it today.
Buffalo News:
With health care already tied to a sixth of the American economy and heading higher, that cost control is essential. The difference essentially is that the Republicans first want to control costs and Democrats first want to expand entitlements. In this case, expansion should follow cost control — not undermine it.
Well, if having the government regulate and subsidize health insurance is a “takeover,” that takeover happened long ago. Medicare, Medicaid, and other government programs already pay for almost half of American health care, while private insurance pays for barely more than a third (the rest is mostly out-of-pocket expenses). And the great bulk of that private insurance is provided via employee plans, which are both subsidized with tax exemptions and tightly regulated.
The only part of health care in which there isn’t already a lot of federal intervention is the market in which individuals who can’t get employment-based coverage buy their own insurance. And that market, in case you hadn’t noticed, is a disaster — no coverage for people with pre-existing medical conditions, coverage dropped when you get sick, and huge premium increases in the middle of an economic crisis. It’s this sector, plus the plight of Americans with no insurance at all, that reform aims to fix. What’s wrong with that?
Buffalo News:
It is unclear whether the president is willing to get to the heart of the matter. Already, he has consumed 13 months on aggressively pushing health care as a top priority when the public, during a difficult recession, is concerned first about jobs. This is neither good political thinking nor good decision making.
Economies bounce back. Health insurance is still beyond the reach of 40+ million Americans – a number that grows each year, and is made worse by recessions.
Buffalo News:
If the sound economic approach in a time of huge federal debts and deficits demands health care cost control, do that first. And do it without saddling a new bill with a thousand pages that crushes real reform by expanding entitlements without really figuring out how to pay for them.
Finally, there is a difference between health insurance and health care. The latter is important not only from a cost standpoint, but also from the standpoint of quality delivery of medical care in this country. The president loves to talk about how excellent the care is and how low-cost the price is at the Cleveland Clinic and other such superior medical facilities. If that is the future he aspires to, where is the action to get there?
This obviously is no simple task, but if the president and the Congress would accomplish this improvement along with cost reduction, they will have advanced the public’s well being far beyond what has been presented so far.
Krugman:
The second myth is that the proposed reform does nothing to control costs. To support this claim, critics point to reports by the Medicare actuary, who predicts that total national health spending would be slightly higher in 2019 with reform than without it.
Even if this prediction were correct, it points to a pretty good bargain. The actuary’s assessment of the Senate bill, for example, finds that it would raise total health care spending by less than 1 percent, while extending coverage to 34 million Americans who would otherwise be uninsured. That’s a large expansion in coverage at an essentially trivial cost.
And it gets better as we go further into the future: the Congressional Budget Office has just concluded, in a new report, that the arithmetic of reform will look better in its second decade than it did in its first.
Furthermore, there’s good reason to believe that all such estimates are too pessimistic. There are many cost-saving efforts in the proposed reform, but nobody knows how well any one of these efforts will work. And as a result, official estimates don’t give the plan much credit for any of them. What the actuary and the budget office do is a bit like looking at an oil company’s prospecting efforts, concluding that any individual test hole it drills will probably come up dry, and predicting as a consequence that the company won’t find any oil at all — when the odds are, in fact, that some of the test holes will pan out, and produce big payoffs. Realistically, health reform is likely to do much better at controlling costs than any of the official projections suggest.
And to the Buffalo News’ general Republican talking point that the whole thing is fiscally irresponsible, Krugman:
How can people say this given Congressional Budget Office predictions — which, as I’ve already argued, are probably too pessimistic — that reform would actually reduce the deficit? Critics argue that we should ignore what’s actually in the legislation; when cost control actually starts to bite on Medicare, they insist, Congress will back down.
But this isn’t an argument against Obamacare, it’s a declaration that we can’t control Medicare costs no matter what. And it also flies in the face of history: contrary to legend, past efforts to limit Medicare spending have in fact “stuck,” rather than being withdrawn in the face of political pressure.
So what’s the reality of the proposed reform? Compared with the Platonic ideal of reform, Obamacare comes up short. If the votes were there, I would much prefer to see Medicare for all.
For a real piece of passable legislation, however, it looks very good. It wouldn’t transform our health care system; in fact, Americans whose jobs come with health coverage would see little effect. But it would make a huge difference to the less fortunate among us, even as it would do more to control costs than anything we’ve done before.
I don’t mind the Buffalo News taking a political stand that differs from mine. I do mind the Buffalo News acting as stenographer for FreedomWorks and the Republican National Committee, repeating half-truths and outright lies about a reasonable bill that probably doesn’t go far enough to expand insurance coverage to all Americans.
Maybe Stan Lipsey and the union guys who write editorials at the News don’t have to worry about how their medical care gets paid for. But a lot of working poor and middle-class people in Buffalo do. For the city’s only paper to advocate against insuring them based on make-believe concern trolling is sickening.
