Boone County Watchdog: 01/14/19

Monday, January 14, 2019

Belvidere North High School students propose backyard chickens ordinance

Local high school students look to change a law that's been in place for decades in Belvidere.

Click on the following to see TV Clip: https://www.wifr.com/content/news/Belvidere-backyard-chickens-ordinance-504350141.html

BELVIDERE, Ill (WIFR) -- The city of Belvidere prohibits chickens to be raised on residential properties. While this law has been in effect for decades, some local high school students are looking to change that. The students want to prove the myths wrong about chickens being a nuisance, such as being loud and quite dirty.

Two students from Belvidere North High School have a proposed ordinance on the city council agenda that would allow Belvidere residents to own and raise chickens on their property. Gina DelRose, Community Development Planner for the City of Belvidere, says this isn't the first time students contacted the city and the ordinance still has a long way to go.

She says, "At the beginning of this school year, the students contacted me again. They are very passionate about chickens and think they're a great thing to have in your backyards, the fresh eggs and just interacting with the chickens themselves are all beneficial. They thought they could try and get the city of Belvidere to allow them."

Residents in bigger cities such as Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles can keep chickens. Around the Rock River Valley, attempts have been made in the past to make chicken coops legal in residential lots. However, these attempts have failed.

In 2013, the Village Board in Machesney Park rejected a proposal to allow chicken hen coops where up to six hens can live on a single residential lot. The City of Rockford also does not allow chickens in residential neighborhoods. In Roscoe, roosters are prohibited but chickens are allowed as long as the chickens on residential lots don't produce noise loud enough to disturb the noise ordinances of local neighborhoods.

The Belvidere North students proposal would minimize nuisances by banning crowing roosters over six months old and limiting the number of chickens allowed on a single lot to five.

The ordinance will be on the Belvidere city council agenda at their next meeting.

Trump promises on coal, steel and China trade are all falling flat

David Knowles

Editor

Yahoo News•January 14, 2019

President Trump speaks at the American Farm Bureau Federation’s 100th annual convention in New Orleans on Monday. (Photo: Jacquelyn Martin/AP)

While President Trump regularly boasts that he has singlehandedly saved the U.S. coal and steel industries after years of decline while simultaneously tackling America’s trade imbalance with China, new data shows none of those claims to be true.

Trade deficit with China

The president has long argued that the quickest way to rectify a massive trade imbalance between the United States and China is to impose tariffs on Chinese imports.

Donald J. Trump
✔@realDonaldTrump
China is robbing us blind in trade deficits and stealing our jobs, yet our leaders are claiming 'progress' http://reut.rs/Ub64mP SAD!
79
2:51 PM - Dec 20, 2012
Twitter Ads info and privacy

427 people are talking about this

“Trade wars are good and easy to win,” he tweeted last March.

In an address Monday to the American Farm Bureau Federation, Trump said his negotiations with China were “going very well,” but figures released Monday by the Chinese government showed that his plan isn’t working. Instead the U.S. trade deficit with China grew 17 percent in 2018, to a record $323.32 billion. Over the past year, as Trump launched a trade war with Beijing, Chinese exports to the U.S. grew by 11.3 percent, while China’s imports of American goods rose just 0.7 percent. American farmers have borne the biggest short term brunt of Trump’s policies, with U.S. soybean exports to China falling 98 percent in 2018 as Beijing retaliated against tariffs imposed by the president.

Steel

“Our Steel Industry is the talk of the World. It has been given new life, and is thriving. Billions of Dollars is being spent on new plants all around the country!”

A 25 percent tariff on imports led to a temporary spike in steel prices last year but also hurt sales and profits at companies that buy steel, such as General Motors. And as manufacturers substituted other materials or cut production, steel prices have fallen back to where they were before the tariffs and stock prices for the largest U.S. producers fell by as much as 47 percent, the New York Timesreported Monday. While Trump rightly notes that some companies have announced plans to either build new steel mills or refurbish existing ones, his most frequent and extravagant boast — that “U.S. Steel just announced that they’re building six new steel mills” — has no basis in fact.

Industry experts point out that employment in the steel industry will almost certainly continue to decline as a consequence of automation, even if production and profits increase. As the conservative think tank AEI points out, “Mr. Trump’s tariffs are trying to revive a world of steel production that no longer exists. He is taxing steel-consuming industries that employ 6.5 million and have the potential to grow more jobs to help a declining industry that employs only 140,000.”

Perhaps this explains why Trump has warmed to the idea of constructing a border wall on the U.S. border with Mexico out of steel rather than concrete. In an interview with NPR, Tom Gibson, president and CEO of the American Iron and Steel Institute estimated that the barrier would require a hefty order of 3 million tons of steel.

Coal

“You know what you can’t hurt? Coal. You can do whatever you want to coal. Very important. … We are back. The coal industry is back.” — President Trump at a 2018 rally in Charleston, W.V.

After running in 2016 on a promise to save the coal industry, Trump was, after being elected, quick to proclaim victory on that score. He signed legislation overturning environmental regulations put in place during the Obama administration that industry opposed. And he tweeted in celebration when a Pennsylvania mine opened for business.

Donald J. Trump
✔@realDonaldTrump
Congratulations!
'First New Coal Mine of Trump Era Opens in Pennsylvania' http://insider.foxnews.com/2017/06/10/new-coal-mine-donald-trump-pennsylvania-fossil-fuels-regulations …

First New Coal Mine of Trump Era Opens in Pennsylvania
President Trump lauded the opening of the nation's first new coal mine in recent memory.
insider.foxnews.com

But an analysis of coal-fired power plants in the U.S. found that the industry as a whole continues its downward trajectory. In fact, more coal-fired power plants have closed during the first two years of Trump’s presidency than in all of former President Barack Obama’s first term, Reuters reported Monday.

Above is from: https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-promises-coal-steel-china-trade-falling-flat-235120673.html

50 Moments That Define an Improbable Presidency

Jeffrey Goldberg

Editor in chief of The Atlantic

In an October 2016 editorial, The Atlantic wrote of Donald Trump: “He is a demagogue, a xenophobe, a sexist, a know-nothing, and a liar.” We argued that Trump “expresses admiration for authoritarian rulers, and evinces authoritarian tendencies himself.” Trump, we also noted, “is easily goaded, a poor quality for someone seeking control of America’s nuclear arsenal. He is an enemy of fact-based discourse; he is ignorant of, and indifferent to, the Constitution; he appears not to read.”

In retrospect, we may be guilty of understatement.

There was a hope, in the bewildering days following the 2016 election, that the office would temper the man—that Trump, in short, would change.

He has not changed.

This week marks the midway point of Trump’s term. Like many Americans, we sometimes find the velocity of chaos unmanageable. We find it hard to believe, for example, that we are engaged in a serious debate about whether the president of the United States is a Russian-intelligence asset. So we decided to pause for a moment and analyze 50 of the most improbable, norm-bending, and destructive incidents of this presidency to date.

Our 2016 editorial was a repudiation of Donald Trump’s character as much as it was an endorsement of Hillary Clinton for president. It was not meant to be partisan. The Atlantic’s founders promised their readers that we would be “of no party or clique.” This remains a core governing principle of the magazine today. What follows is a catalog of incidents, ranked—highly subjectively!—according to both their outlandishness and their importance. In most any previous presidency, Democratic or Republican, each moment on this list would have been unthinkable.

50.

Donald Trump touches the magic orb

By James Parker

49.

A Cabinet officer likes private planes too much

By Elaina Plott

48.

The president praises the congressman who body-slammed a reporter

By David French

47.

An overcompensating press secretary lies about crowd size

By Megan Garber