Blame it on Spitzer! All of it!

We need a correction, please. The story, about big bills coming due to local counties because the state has kept open near-empty juvenile jails, has a howler in it:

Borges said the state simply failed to adjust the rates when it should have, from 2002 until 2006, when the Democratic regime of then-Gov. Eliot Spitzer was in place.

Um, actually, George Pataki, a Republican, was governor from 2002-2006.
Spitzer, despite his many diabolical talents, had not yet mastered time travel to stage a coup and unseat Pataki earlier in the century. The Luv Guv took office in 2007 and was gone the next year. And Spitzer tried to close the juvenile facilities but was out of office before he could follow through.

Squirrelly

Lost in the latest mayoral public display of outrage against city electrical workers (Angry Mayor Don is upset that employees let a guy with a camera too near them while they worked) is the fact that the Plattsburgh Municipal Lighting District employees did their jobs, and well.
A squirrel got caught in the works and shut down power in the middle of a winter's day. That's kind of scary up here. MLD solved it, pronto. That was impressive, so I wrote this letter to my councilman, Mike Kelly:

Mike,
I was already leaning this way, but today we had a power outage in our neighborhood, and MLD fixed the problem (an errant and now deceased squirrel caused it, we hear) within 30 minutes. We, like a lot of Plattsburghers, rely on electric heat. I hate to think what would happen if we had to go through a night, or several nights, without power.
A back of the envelope cost calculation: Do I pay $5 to $10 a month more, or buy a $4,000-$5,000 generator?
Those six jobs are a helluvan insurance policy.
Keep em.

I'm all for keeping paparazzi at bay. Pretty sure this could have been handled in private, though, no?

A bad idea

Jim Tedisco, 20th Congressional District candidate, in the New York Times yesterday:

Around the corner at the village’s aging sports complex, he vowed to “be the congressman who brings the Olympics back to Lake Placid.”

There's this, uh, financial crisis, and we just don't have the money to finance the facilities, pay for the security, build the hotels or pay off the bribes required to hold the Olympics here.
And that's assuming the IOC would ever consider the region again. 1980 was great. Time to move on.

We got Nate!

Nate Silver, that is, talking about why A-Rod won't pass Barry Bonds, statistical-projectionally speaking. Another reason to subscribe to Insider today!

The big picture

A couple of Monday readings.
This Atlantic piece by Richard Florida is getting lots of blogosphere attention, and the writer was on NPR today. Great stuff about the opportunities in the economic shakeup, including this passage:

Along with the rise of mega-regions, a second phenomenon is also reshaping the economic geography of the United States and the world. The ability of different cities and regions to attract highly educated people—or human capital—has diverged, according to research by the Harvard economists Edward Glaeser and Christopher Berry, among others. Thirty years ago, educational attainment was spread relatively uniformly throughout the country, but that’s no longer the case. Cities like Seattle, San Francisco, Austin, Raleigh, and Boston now have two or three times the concentration of college graduates of Akron or Buffalo. Among people with postgraduate degrees, the disparities are wider still. The geographic sorting of people by ability and educational attainment, on this scale, is unprecedented.
The University of Chicago economist and Nobel laureate Robert Lucas declared that the spillovers in knowledge that result from talent-clustering are the main cause of economic growth. Well-educated professionals and creative workers who live together in dense ecosystems, interacting directly, generate ideas and turn them into products and services faster than talented people in other places can. There is no evidence that globalization or the Internet has changed that. Indeed, as globalization has increased the financial return on innovation by widening the consumer market, the pull of innovative places, already dense with highly talented workers, has only grown stronger, creating a snowball effect. Talent-rich ecosystems are not easy to replicate, and to realize their full economic value, talented and ambitious people increasingly need to live within them.

Time for a SUNY Plattsburgh-McGill University-University of Vermont research triangle. Linked to New York, Montreal and Boston by Supertrains!
And if you want something a bit less optimistic--OK, a whole lot less--read this from Jim Kunstler.

Brushback pitch

Baseball Hall of Famer, U.S. Senator and, apparently, wannabe Surgeon General Jim Bunning plays some chin music for Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Classy!

Obama and sports

I hadn't realized my piece on the First Fan was on the free part of the magazine's web site. Come for the story, stay for the comments!