PA State Budget Crisis

Having a government with no budget is nuts. The state and state agencies have made promises and contracts with people and organizations and now they're not holding their end of the bargain. If an employee of a company fails this miserably at their job, they get canned and the company has to face lawsuits. I propose the following solutions:

1. If there is no passed budget for even a single day, the state government should be dissolved. Parliamentary democracies deal with this occasionally when they can't agree on important issues, and it forces them to compromise. Special elections should then be held ASAP to replace the government.
2. If it's illegal for the state to spend money, it should be illegal for them to collect taxes. Days with no budget should be sales-tax and income-tax free.
3. The state and the decision makers should not be immune from lawsuits for failure to properly run the government. I'm not talking about cash-grabbing: no huge punitive damages. I'm thinking of replacing lost wages of people who still need to eat and pay their rent but can't get paid because Pennsylvania isn't allowed to pay them.
4. They could avoid all of this by saying the budget stays the same, with inflation increases, unless otherwise ammended. This could be in the state Constitution. Then they can argue all year long about adding or removing individual items from the budget, just like they do for our body of laws. If they want a balanced budget, then base this year's spending on last year's revenue.
   

Satellite Radio News

Since I've been driving for over an hour a day, I got satellite radio. Depending on my mood, I may want to listen to rock, comedy, or news. NPR is only on Sirius, so that was an obvious choice. Unfortunately, none of the US-originated news stations is very good. There are several of them, but they're all seriously flawed. NPR only does hour-long programs like Fresh Air. This is a great program, but it doesn't suit commuting very well. The first problem is that I don't always manage to start driving at the top of the hour. The second is that I'll never get to listen to a whole show.

CNN, ABC, and Fox all have satellite radio stations, but they're mostly just an echo of their cable networks. Simply taking the audio stream from a video program doesn't work. Besides, listening to Steve Douche and friends laughing at each other all morning just isn't my thing.

What is pretty good is BBC News. They do 5 minutes or so of news every half-hour and the programs seem to be split into segments that provide context. If I start listening some random time, within a few minutes, they'll give a few-second summary of what the show is about. Another problem I have is that my attention gets interrupted. This isn't just ADHD; I'm driving. There's something more important going on. But if I get distracted from a long program for 30 seconds to deal with a car driven by someone crazier than myself, suddenly a long program is blown to bits. BBC News seems to avoid this problem somehow, possibly with their frequent summaries.

For a real model of what audio-streamed news is supposed to be like, the satellite networks should look at KYW news radio out of Philadelphia. They've been in the business a long time and they know what commuters want out of a radio station. Satellite networks might not need to put so many commercials in, but the general idea stays. Run a 10 minute cycle and talk about something for no longer than a few minutes.