Neil deMause: The Website

If you missed my two-night musical tour of Brooklyn back in January, here’s your chance to make amends: I’ll be performing a set in support of the insanely fabulous Tatters and Rags (descendants of the equally fabulous The Victoria Lucas) at 11 pm sharp at Pete’s Candy Store in Williamsburg, next Wednesday, May 19. And I’ll be accompanied for the occasion by David Dyte on slide guitar, making this an incredibly rare partial reunion of the never-lived band 37 Dead Clerks (no MySpace link, sorry — what part of “never-lived” didn’t you understand?).

Tatters and Rags is the headliner but actually goes on first, making me the … closing act? The appendix? In any case, show up for their set at 10, as you won’t regret it. And we’ll all be done by midnight, I promise, so no need for worries there.

When Mayor Bloomberg threatened to cut all kinds of services back in January, turns out he wasn’t kidding:

The big headline from Mayor Bloomberg’s announcement yesterday of his final city budget plan was that 6,414 city school jobs would be eliminated in response to an anticipated $493 million in reduced state education funding to New York City. But buried in the 4,024-page budget itself are dozens more cuts that would affect scores of city services, from libraries to summer youth jobs… [read more]

Madison Square Garden is closing for renovations — but only if you’re a girl athlete:

Proving the old line that the best way to find real news in the Times is to read the stories end-to-beginning, the Paper of Record offers up a classic buried lede in its article today about the upcoming renovations to Madison Square Garden. Round about the sixth paragraph, sportswriter Richard Sandomir reveals:

One of [Madison Square Garden’s] properties, the Liberty of the W.N.B.A., will have to play home games elsewhere beginning in 2011. A possibility is the Prudential Center in Newark, where the Nets will play for two seasons before moving to their new home in Brooklyn.

That’s home games for three years, as that’s how long the $775 million-or-so plan to gut the World’s Most Famous Arena and build a new one inside its shell is scheduled take, in order to limit construction to summers and thus avoid inconveniencing the boy teams that play there in the wintertime… [read more]

Okay, maybe the crazy right-wingers who think the health care reform law will bring about the end of civilization have a case after all:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — An all-but-overlooked provision of the health reform law is threatening to swamp U.S. businesses with a flood of new tax paperwork.

Section 9006 of the health care bill — just a few lines buried in the 2,409-page document — mandates that beginning in 2012 all companies will have to issue 1099 tax forms not just to contract workers but to any individual or corporation from which they buy more than $600 in goods or services in a tax year… [read more]

I’ll be on 1010 AM CBS Sports Radio in Tampa Bay today at 4:05 pm, discussing the Rays’ campaign for a new baseball stadium. Tune in online if you’re not in the Tampa-St. Pete area; if you need a refresher course on the Tampa Bay stadium debates, you can start here and here.

Yes, three articles in one day. In this one, I delve into a much-hyped Bloomberg anti-poverty program that didn’t deliver as hoped:

When Mayor Bloomberg announced in 2007 that he was launching a pilot program to give cash incentives to poor New Yorkers for changing their behavior—including bonuses for such activities as attending parent-teacher conferences and holding down a job—the hope was to come up with a novel approach to ending poverty.

“Even though it turns my stomach to pay a mother $10 to see a doctor,” Chinese-American Planning Council executive director David Chen, a member of Bloomberg’s poverty commission, told City Limits at the time, “in a practical sense it works.”

Or maybe not… [read more]

When is a welfare scam not a welfare scam?

If you read the Which Lazy Bastards Are Ripping You Off section of yesterday’s tabloids — you can find it after the Who Is Sandra Bullock Not Sleeping With/Adopting section — you may have spotted the story that the Post headlined “Millionaires’ welfare ‘con’”: The Brooklyn DA’s office was prosecuting 32 New Yorkers for receiving nearly $1 million in welfare benefits they weren’t entitled to. The Post zeroed in on a couple of landlords with “three luxury vehicles” who’d lied about their assets to get taxpayer cash; for NY1, the hook was a married Brooks Brothers employee who claimed to be a single mom on her application, raking in $460,000.

Only one problem with the headlines (and Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes’ press release that started the whole thing): Welfare benefits — aka public assistance, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or whatever the government is calling the cash it allots to poor people to use for expenses other than food and medical care — turn out not to be involved at all… [read more]

Mayoral press release subject line opening of the day:

MAYOR BLOOMBERG, SIGOURNEY WEAVER AND OTHER OFFICIALS…

Now that New York City’s comptroller has charged that the city’s development arm illegally withheld $125 million in revenues from the city treasury, does he actually have a shot at getting it back?

Comptroller John Liu’s finding that the Economic Development Corporation (EDC) had shortchanged the city treasury by $125 million raises the question of whether the comptroller can force the EDC to return the monies.

Asked at a telephone press briefing on Wednesday if he’d use his power to refuse to sign off on city contracts to compel EDC to pass the money along (EDC, though effectively a branch of the mayor’s office, is technically a non-profit corporation that contracts with the city to do economic development), Liu replied: “I hope it doesn’t need to get any further beyond this point,” adding: “We will use every authority we have in this office, and I imagine the mayor will do the same thing, to get that $125 million.”

It seems unlikely, however, that the mayor will have Liu’s back, since two mayoral agencies have already signed off on the EDC’s practice… [read more]

A newspaper report claims the Tampa Bay Rays could reap $40 million a year in added revenue from a new stadium. Does it pass the smell test?

For those of you who read the Tampa Tribune religiously — and who doesn’t? — you no doubt saw the long piece yesterday running down everything that’s wrong with Tropicana Field. Among the complaints: The luxury boxes have obstructed views of flyballs, the catwalks get in the way (whether of flyballs or of watching them, the author doesn’t seem clear), and the food concessionnaire is crappy — which may be the first suggestion that a team should build a new stadium just to get out of a concessions contract since Tim Naehring declared Fenway Park to be obsolete for its lack of chef’s salads.

But the more interesting tidbit is one that’s almost brushed over in the article: Citing unnamed “experts,” the Trib claims that “without the amenities and attractions found at modern ballparks, the Tampa Bay Rays are missing out on a potential $40 million in additional revenue… [read more]