the phone rings again and trump tells josrpgh g cairo to hive nassau otb employees or at least only the trump fsithful a 3.1 % raise retroactive to 2008 when the last collective bargaining agreement was signed
Congress is set to provide federal civilian employees with an average pay raise of 3.1% next year as part of a spending deal that must pass before Friday’s deadline to avert a government shutdown. According to a House Democratic aide, language in the spending legislation, which ...
the faithful of nassau otb will receive their rights under ny vondt art 1sec 3 when the holy church of nassau otb will be open.
Claude Solnik
Long Island Business News
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Home > LI Confidential > Stop scratching on holidays
Stop scratching on holidays
Published: June 1, 2012
Off Track Betting in New York State has been racing into a crisis called shrinking revenue. Some people have spitballed a solution: Don’t close on holidays.
New York State Racing Law bars racing on Christmas, Easter and Palm Sunday, and the state has ruled OTBs can’t handle action on those days, even though they could easily broadcast races from out of state.
“You should be able to bet whenever you want,” said Jackson Leeds, a Nassau OTB employee who makes an occasional bet. He added some irrefutable logic: “How is the business going to make money if you’re not open to take people’s bets?”
Elias Tsekerides, president of the Federation of Hellenic Societies of Greater New York, said OTB is open on Greek Orthodox Easter and Palm Sunday.
“I don’t want discrimination,” Tsekerides said. “They close for the Catholics, but open for the Greek Orthodox? It’s either open for all or not open.”
OTB officials have said they lose millions by closing on Palm Sunday alone, with tracks such as Gulfstream, Santa Anita, Turf Paradise and Hawthorne running.
One option: OTBs could just stay open and face the consequences. New York City OTB did just that back in 2003. The handle was about $1.5 million – and OTB was fined $5,000.
Easy money.
Sunday, April 12, 2020
| Track Code | Track Name | Entry | Scratch | 1st Post ET | 1st Post Local | Time Zone | Stakes Race(s) | Stakes Grade | T.V. Indicator |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SA | SANTA ANITA PARK | 72 | 48 | 3:00 PM | 12:00 PM | PDT | |||
| SUN | SUNLAND PARK | 168 | 24 | 2:30 PM | 12:30 PM | MDT | Mt. Cristo Rey H. | ||
| TAM | TAMPA BAY DOWNS | 72 | 0 | 12:35 PM | 12:35 PM | EDT |
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Evangelical Leaders Close Ranks With Trump After Scathing Editorial
Christianity Today’s call for President Trump’s removal gave voice to his evangelical critics. But they remain a minority in a political movement that Mr. Trump has reshaped in his own mold.
By Elizabeth Dias and
The publication is small, reaching just a fraction of the evangelical movement.
But when Christianity Today called for President Trump’s removal in a blistering editorial on Thursday, it met the full force and fury of the president and his most prominent allies in the Christian conservative world. If the response seemed disproportionate, it vividly reflected the fact that white evangelicals are the cornerstone of Mr. Trump’s political base and their leaders are among his most visible and influential supporters.
In the background, however, is a more nuanced reality that Christianity Today’s editorial hints at: a number of conservative Christians remain deeply uncomfortable with an alliance with the president.
Mr. Trump, after being impeached this week, is extremely sensitive to any signs of a fracture in his political coalition and has repeatedly insisted that the Republican Party and its voters are unanimously behind him. And on Friday he lashed out on two separate occasions at Christianity Today, seeking to brand it as a “far left magazine” that was doing the Democratic Party’s bidding.
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“I guess the magazine, ‘Christianity Today,’ is looking for Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, or those of the socialist/communist bent, to guard their religion,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter. “How about Sleepy Joe? The fact is, no President has ever done what I have done for Evangelicals, or religion itself!”
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Evidently leaving little to chance, Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign announced on Friday evening that he would go to Miami on Jan. 3 to start an “Evangelicals for Trump’’ coalition.
The response from his leading Christian supporters was laced with animosity that mimicked Mr. Trump’s signature style, and reflected the extent to which they have moved into lock step with him, even in rhetoric.
Ralph Reed, founder of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, said on Twitter that he was “sad” to see the publication “echo the arguments of The Squad & the Resistance & deepen its irrelevance among Christians.”
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Franklin Graham, whose father, the Rev. Billy Graham, founded Christianity Today, said in a Facebook post that the editorial was a “totally partisan attack” and said that the elder Graham had voted for the president in 2016, a little more than a year before he died.
Mr. Graham went on to tally numerous accomplishments that he said Mr. Trump had achieved, and to ask “Why would Christianity Today choose to take the side of the Democrat left whose only goal is to discredit and smear the name of a sitting president?”
The power of the evangelicals as a voting bloc is in their sheer size, and in their symbiotic relationship with the president. “Because they are a third of the Republican base, Trump needs white evangelical Protestants to get elected,” said Robert P. Jones, chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute. “And because white evangelicals see themselves as a shrinking minority, in both racial and religious terms, they need Trump.”
For the past several years, conservative American politics, and white evangelical Christianity along with it, has realigned steadily and solidly around Mr. Trump and his coalition. Much like the “Never Trump” voices within the Republican Party, evangelical detractors have receded into the background.
Their absence from the national conversation was partly why the editorial was so jolting. And for the Christians who felt the same way, the piece was a catharsis.
Peter Wehner, a conservative columnist and author who writes about religion and who worked as a speechwriter for former President George W. Bush, said that Mr. Trump’s most outspoken defenders had created a misleading impression that evangelical Christians universally embraced the president.
“They speak as if they define the movement,” he said. “And a lot of people who aren’t familiar with evangelical Christianity see this and say, ‘Well, they must be representing all Christians.’”
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“That’s the significance of what Christianity Today did,” Mr. Wehner added. “They stood up and they said: ‘No, that’s not right. We can’t continue with this charade, this moral freak show anymore.’”
The editorial is also a reminder that the evangelical movement is not monolithic and includes people who may appreciate some of the president’s actions, like the appointment of conservative judges, but are repelled by his inflammatory rhetoric on issues like race and immigration and his denigration of political opponents.
That sentiment was clearly expressed in the Christianity Today editorial by Mark Galli, the magazine’s editor in chief, who wrote that Mr. Trump “has dumbed down the idea of morality in his administration.’’
“His Twitter feed alone — with its habitual string of mischaracterizations, lies, and slanders — is a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused,’’ Mr. Galli wrote.
Mr. Galli also expressed a view on impeachment that echoed the Democrats, saying: “The president of the United States attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of the president’s political opponents. That is not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is profoundly immoral.”
Christianity Today, based in the Chicago suburbs, has about 80,000 print subscribers and publishes news and commentary to appeal to evangelical audiences, in the tradition of Billy Graham.
No leaders in the evangelical movement said they could see any clear signs of an organized resistance to Mr. Trump rising from the editorial. And even dissenters like Mr. Wehner acknowledge they are vastly outnumbered.
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According to a recent poll from the Public Religion Research Institute, 77 percent of white evangelical Protestants approves of the job Mr. Trump is doing in office, including half who strongly approves. And nearly all — 98 percent — of Republican white evangelical Protestants said they opposed Mr. Trump’s impeachment, the institute found.
In 2016, 81 percent of them voted for Mr. Trump over Hillary Clinton, most likely helping him carry states like Florida and Michigan, which allowed him to win the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote. The Trump campaign is putting an intense focus on turning them out to vote next year, with groups like Mr. Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition pledging to raise millions of dollars and deploy tens of thousands of volunteers on his behalf.
Many young evangelicals, however, are more socially liberal on issues like same-sex marriage and troubled by Trump administration policies like separating migrant families at the border and denying climate change.
Mr. Galli appeared to reach out to future generations of evangelicals when he wrote, “If we don’t reverse course now, will anyone take anything we say about justice and righteousness with any seriousness for decades to come?”
The reaction to the editorial, while perhaps not signaling the beginning of a wave of defections among white evangelicals, could be another sign that the middle is disappearing in American Christianity, just as it is in politics. It was also a reminder that the upcoming presidential election would be a test not only of Mr. Trump’s political strength, but also of the future of the faith that abetted his rise.
Evangelicals who are troubled by the president’s conduct said they feared that he had done long-term damage to their cause, and that the lack of pushback had only hurt them more, especially with young people. Peggy Wehmeyer, a journalist based in Dallas who writes often about her faith, said she heard a lot of “Thank God Mark Galli said this,” among her friends.
“The word evangelical has been sullied in a serious way,” she added. “I don’t like to call myself that anymore.”
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Ms. Wehmeyer said what she and other evangelicals found so resonant about the piece was the way it drew out the competing emotions that many of them felt.
“What has really troubled me from the beginning,” she said, “is why can’t people say on the one hand, ‘We love what he’s done on religious liberty, abortion and the economy?’ But on the other hand say that ‘As Christians whose allegiance is to Jesus Christ, his behavior is despicable’?”
What the editorial seemed to say, she added, was “You can support this man’s policies, but if the witness of this church is going to survive, you must speak out against sin.”
Recent events may have helped push tensions to a head. A Republican congressman said on the House floor this week that Jesus had received fairer treatment before his crucifixion than Mr. Trump did during his impeachment. Rick Perry, the former Texas governor, said in an interview with Fox News that he had told Mr. Trump that he was the “chosen one.”
Rick Tyler, a strategist who has served as a liaison between Republican politicians and the evangelical community, said that Mr. Trump’s rise had left the evangelical faith with a leadership vacuum.
“I don’t know who represents the evangelical community anymore,” he said. “In the old days, Ralph Reed and Jerry Falwell had a stick to swing. They had real power.”
Now, he said, “Trump has their power.”
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