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Fresh off a setback on his tax reform plan, Puerto Rico's governor laid out a recovery roadmap on Thursday for the U.S. commonwealth's struggling finances. In his state of the Commonwealth address, Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla chastised the Puerto Rico House of Representatives for rejecting tax changes critical to his financial recovery plan, saying it made recovery harder but not impossible. Padilla said he will form a group of financial experts charged with improving Puerto Rico's liquidity and another to take on a reorganization of the government. He also released an agenda that calls for spending cuts in all government...

Puerto Rico is in trouble, after years of bad policies, mismanagement, excessive debt and bad luck. Its economy has been shrinking or stagnant for a decade and the unemployment rate sits at nearly 12 percent. The commonwealth and its utilities have a debt of $73 billion, its public pension funds are woefully underfunded and one state agency has warned that the government could be forced to shut down soon because it might run out of money. Lawmakers in Washington and San Juan need to come up with a plan that addresses the financial and economic problems of the territory, which...

Puerto Rico's Government Development Bank warned Wednesday that it is very likely the U.S. territory's government could be forced to shut down in the next three months because of a lack of funds. The bank made the warning in a letter made public a day after it was sent to Gov. Alejandro Garcia Padilla and the presidents of the island's Senate and House of Representatives. "The island's financial state is extremely uncertain," the letter said. "A government shutdown would have a devastating impact on the economy, with salary and public service cuts, and a long and painful recovery."

Puerto Rico's top finance officials said the government of the US territory will most likely shut down in three months because of a looming liquidity crisis, and they warned of a devastating impact on the island's economy. In a letter to leading lawmakers, including Gov. Alejandro Padilla, the officials said a financing deal that could potentially salvage the government's finances looked unlikely to succeed. It warned of laying off government employees and reducing public services. "A government shutdown is very probable in the next three months due to the absence of liquidity to operate," the officials said. "The likelihood of...

Antonio Weiss, the former Wall Street banker who became a top adviser to the Treasury secretary this year, has made two trips to Puerto Rico in recent weeks. Kent Hiteshew, who runs the Treasury Department’s office of state and local finance, has also met with government officials in San Juan multiple times this spring. The Treasury Department is quietly stepping up its involvement in Puerto Rico, indicating that the island’s financial problems, which have been simmering for years, are reaching a critical point. High-ranking officials have been shuttling between Washington and Puerto Rico, advising commonwealth officials as they try to...

Professors who rail against the imprisonment of blacks rarely show as much interest in black victims of crime. “In 1980, there were 500,000 Americans in prison or jail,” Jason Stanley writes in The Chronicle Review. “By 2013, there were more than 2.3 million.” “The explosion in incarceration has fallen disproportionately on the descendants of slaves. White Americans are 77 percent of the U.S. population, and black Americans 13 percent. Yet more blacks are incarcerated than whites.” Stanley is a philosophy professor at Yale. His conclusions resemble those of 20 scholars who recently completed a study under the auspices of the...

How do you fix a failing high school? Change the grades. Under pressure to boost student achievement, the state-designated “out of time” Automotive HS in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, has resorted to rigging Regents exam scores. The failing scores of five students who took the Regents in January were switched to passing scores of 65 or higher on their transcripts, the city Department of Education has confirmed. One junior saw his scores upped to pass two exams required for graduation — Living Environment (biology) and algebra — even though he had failed both classes. The student insisted he deserved a break on...

Dodd acknowledged his role in the change after a Treasury Department official told CNN the administration pushed for the language. Both Dodd and the official, who asked not to be named, said it was because administration officials were afraid the government would face numerous lawsuits without the new language. ---snip-- "I agreed reluctantly," Dodd said. "I was changing the amendment because others were insistent."

Dr. Gary Dee figured the state’s fiscal troubles would lead radiologists like him to face a cut in their Medicaid payment rates. But he wasn’t anticipating the 42.5 percent cut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s administration imposed this spring. Now, Dee’s private practice has stopped taking new Medicaid patients. “The reimbursement is to the point where we can’t take care of these patients. They’re going to lose access,” said Dee, president of MidState Radiology Associates in Meriden. The result is that it could become harder for the more than 725,000 state residents with Medicaid to find specialists to treat them, undermining...

Ten years ago, on June 23, 2005, the United States Supreme Court dropped a judicial thunderbolt in Kelo v. City of New London. By a narrow five-to-four margin it rejected a spirited challenge that Susette Kelo and her neighboring landowners had raised against the ambitious land-use development plan put forward by the City of New London, Ct. The formulaic account of the holding is that a local government does not violate the “public use” component of the Constitution’s takings clause — “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation” — when it condemns property that will...

Listen Live: Sound Off Connecticut with Jim Vicevich 9 a.m. to noon ET (Daily Thread)Sound Off Connecticut is a popular conservative/libertarian call in talk show hosted by Jim Vicevich weekday mornings from 9 a.m. to noon ET. Although based in Connecticut, the show welcomes callers from all over the United States! This is your chance to sound off America! Call into the show toll free (800) 966-9842! Listen to the LIVE AUDIO STREAM at http://wtic.com - it's free and NO registration is required! If you're in southern New England listen over the air to WTIC 1080 AM, the 50,000 watt...

Witnesses say the white gunman who killed nine people at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., was quite vocal about his motives: He wanted to kill black people. Sylvia Johnson, whose cousin the Rev. Clementa Pinckney was one of three ministers killed in the church, said a survivor of the horror told her the shooter muttered, "I have to do it. You rape our women and you're taking over our country. And you have to go." In Charleston, a slaughter in the sanctuary In Charleston, a slaughter in the sanctuary Facebook photos and other evidence suggest...

A new study in the American Journal of Public Health claims that the state of Connecticut’s 1995 gun licensing law has reduced firearm homicide rates by 40 percent. But this just released study gives academics a bad name. Not surprisingly, anti-gun activist and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and the left-wing Joyce Foundation funded the research. The study cherry picks which states with gun licensing laws are examined, which years are looked at, and the type of crime to study. Any normal researcher would look at all the states in the country that have passed a similar law...

Now that we know that race is a state of mind, rather than a genetic inheritance, the question must be asked: is Barack Obama secretly a white man? Perhaps, like Rachel Dolezal, he tells people that he is black, but he is actually white. Again, black is an attitude, a state of mind. Sure, it helps if you braid your hair into long ropes and tie it on top of your head like Dolezal did, or have an afro during your pot- and cocaine-using days like Obama. But what really counts is what is going on inside your mind. And...

Rachel Dolezal sued historically black Howard University for discriminating against her because she was white, according to a report The woman who resigned today as head of a civil rights group after being "outed" as white by her parents sued a university for discriminating against her for being white, according to a report by The Smoking Gun website. Rachel Dolezal, 37, has stepped down today as president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Spokane, Washington after it was revealed that she had pretended to be black for several years:

Listen Live: Sound Off Connecticut with Jim Vicevich 9 a.m. to noon ET (Daily Thread)Sound Off Connecticut is a popular conservative/libertarian call in talk show hosted by Jim Vicevich weekday mornings from 9 a.m. to noon ET. Although based in Connecticut, the show welcomes callers from all over the United States! This is your chance to sound off America! Call into the show toll free (800) 966-9842! Listen to the LIVE AUDIO STREAM at http://wtic.com - it's free and NO registration is required! If you're in southern New England listen over the air to WTIC 1080 AM, the 50,000 watt...

The Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University put out this press release on a paper by Rudolph, Stuart, Vernick, and Webster: "A 1995 Connecticut law requiring a permit or license – contingent on passing a background check – in order to purchase a handgun was associated with a 40 percent reduction in the state’s firearm-related homicide rate, new research suggests. "Researchers from the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, part of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, compared Connecticut’s homicide rates during the 10 years following the law’s implementation to the rates that...

At a Hartford, Connecticut rally supposedly called to protest five homicides of young people in the city over the past two weeks – four of them shootings – Rev. Al Sharpton was challenged Saturday by a black pastor for asking every preacher present to donate $100 to Sharpton’s civil rights organization, National Action Network (NAN). Pastor Marcus Mosiah Jarvis of Christ the Cornerstone Praise and Western Tabernacle, however, shouted at Sharpton as he strode down the center aisle of the crowded church, “How dare you ask the people of Hartford to give you their money! You’re nothing but a pimp!”

HARTFORD — Police arrested 17 protesters who blocked Central Row during rush hour Monday afternoon as part of a Moral Monday demonstration. The protest began at 4 p.m. as protesters locked arms and stood in the street. Many held signs saying "Black Lives Matter."

Listen Live: Sound Off Connecticut with Jim Vicevich 9 a.m. to noon ET (Daily Thread)Sound Off Connecticut is a popular conservative/libertarian call in talk show hosted by Jim Vicevich weekday mornings from 9 a.m. to noon ET. Although based in Connecticut, the show welcomes callers from all over the United States! This is your chance to sound off America! Call into the show toll free (800) 966-9842! Listen to the LIVE AUDIO STREAM at http://wtic.com - it's free and NO registration is required! If you're in southern New England listen over the air to WTIC 1080 AM, the 50,000 watt...