Those liberals at the New York Times want to help you understand proposed changes in the U.S. budget.

Somehow we have not talked about the disaster that is the reduction in hours of New York City's small claims courts. (The shortened hours of criminal courts are their own disaster, but that'll probably have to be undone, as it's illegal to hold people longer than 24 hours without seeing a judge, and you know that's going to happen regularly.) Night sessions at small claims now happen just once a week, on Thursdays. Also, it's chaos down there. In this case, it's all Albany of course, so you know that you should be suing Andrew Cuomo over this eventually. So the headline "Despite Cutbacks, Night Court's Small [...]

When you read through the proposed New York City budget for fiscal year 2011, many of the budget cuts don't appear to be so terrible. And we are realists, and we know, when there's not a ton of cash and when the state is mucking one around, cuts gotta come from somewhere! So, they want to close four pools, close a homeless drop-in center, close 50 senior centers, get rid of a bunch of firefighters, and apparently really do in assistance to the libraries. It gets a little more harrowing when you look at the total City worker layoffs and attrition: almost 11,000 people across the board, and more [...]

"Gov. Rick Scott and the Florida Legislature face a $1.5 billion revenue shortfall, state economists said Tuesday….The projections are not what lawmakers had in mind last session when they cut regulations, slashed spending and eliminated more than 4,000 state jobs to balance the $69 billion budget…. Lawmakers also turned away billions in federal transpiration [um, sic?] and health care money, and tried to boost the economy by including $70 million in tax incentives." —Well, there you have it.

Today in City Hall Park—from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.—advocates for adult literacy will be protesting the Mayor's proposed budget. You should feel free to join them!

The City's money for literacy programs is a tiny, tiny part of the budget, but it's constantly being hacked at. All told, just $13 million in proposed cuts (in a $65.7 billion budget) impact thousands of people who are trying to master English.

The City should be throwing money at literacy, to make it the greatest city it could be. That something like a third of New York City residents aren't fully literate in English is a waste of human [...]

This Park Slope firehouse, Engine 220, is one of the 20 or so firehouses slated to be closed under the proposed City budget. So they're fighting back, with a big sign! So far, they report, they've saved 11 lives this year. Um, it's June already! That's like just two lives a month. What do the firefighters do the other 27 days of the month, you know?

We came very close today to radically reshaping America, at least in the House, by means of the Democrats sitting out voting to try to give the right-ward arm of the Republicans the budget they wanted. That would have been fantastic! I'm very impressed by this stunt. In the end, it was fun enough that Republicans had to vote against the proposed right-wing budget just to keep it from passing. But worry not! Then the House passed a budget almost as ridiculous.