Here’s Jim Heaney’s recommended reading – and a little food for thought – for the past week. His recommended reading is part of WeeklyPost, emailed Sunday mornings. You can subscribe here.
In the wake of his injury last week, Damar Hamlin’s charity had raised $8,552,900 as of Sunday night. The GoFundMe page set up to assist the Buffalo family that lost five children in a house fire had raised $181,828. Just saying.
How much are the Buffalo Bills worth? Let’s just say Terry Pegula could build his new stadium on his own dime with the increased value of the team since he bought it for $1.4 billion. The Bills are now valued at $3.4 billion.
Erie County had $250 million to fork over to Pegula to build the Bills a new football stadium. Now, the county sheriff says there’s a need to build a new jail, as the two current facilities are woefully inadequate. To which I’ll add, they’ve probably contributed to the high number of prisoner deaths over the years. The initial response by County Executive Mark Poloncarz was something to the effect of “Geez, that would cost a lot of money.” To which I’ll add: “Yeah, but a lot less than what the county is going to spend on a stadium that will be used 10 times a year.”
It took the deaths of several dozen city residents, but the Common Council appears to be waking up. As reported by The Buffalo News, Council members are asking pointed questions and proposing significant action regarding the city’s inability to plow its streets after a snow storm. Mayor Byron Brown is trying to defuse the situation by retaining academics to study the city’s response to the Christmas blizzard, but he’s lost control of the narrative.
What price power? For Kevin McCarthy, whatever it took to round up the votes needed to become Speaker of the House of Representatives. The cost to the country, as reported by The New York Times: “Some of the concessions Mr. McCarthy agreed to would make the practical business of running the House next to impossible. It could be left unable to do basic things like fund the government or finance the federal debt. For the dissidents, that was the point. For the country, it could lead to some grim consequences.”
Speaking of consequences, a report from The Washington Post concluded that many of the insurrectionists charged in the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol are getting off relatively easy. Sentences handed down by judges were shorter than recommended by prosecutors three-quarters of the time and less than sentencing guidelines more than one-third of the time.
More Americans than ever are dying at the hands of police.
Red politicians behaving badly: forcing female inmates in Arizona to give birth prematurely and putting health care in Mississippi at financial risk by refusing federal aid.
Most of us spend a lot of time on our cell phones. ProPublica details the radiation risks of doing so. There are some.
All you hockey fans out there have taken note of Alexander Ovechkin’s push to usurp Wayne Gretzky as the NHL’s all-time leading goal scorer. Larry Brooks, the hockey writer for the New York Post, is not among those cheering Ovechkin on. The reason: his allegiance to Vladimir Putin. I would tend to agree.
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