Marco Rubio’s school voucher plan shows strong Jeb Bush ties

U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio immediately followed his rebuttal to the president’s State of the Union address Tuesday night by releasing a “school-choice” bill to allow taxpayers to subsidize private-school education for poor kids.

By putting legislation where his mouth is, Rubio wanted to reinforce the theme of his speech — that conservative policy is good for the poor and working class.

The legislation, which revolves around tax credits, also makes good on a 2010 Rubio campaign pledge, and reinforces his strong ties to former Republican Gov. Jeb Bush, his friend and mentor whose nonprofit education foundation helped shape the legislation.

Bush passed a similar school-choice voucher program in 2001, which Rubio voted for while he served in the Florida House.

If Florida’s experience is any measure, though, Democrats, teacher unions and some church-and-state separatists will oppose the scholarship-voucher program, saying it indirectly uses tax money to fund private, and often religious education.

“It’s not about unions. It’s not about school administrators,” Rubio said in an interview. “This is about parents. The only parents in America who don’t have a choice where their kids go to school are poor parents.”

Though Rubio’s rhetoric adopts longstanding Democratic talking points about the disadvantaged, the legislation will have a tough time in the Democratic-controlled U.S. Senate.

Across the nation, Democrats and teacher unions have faced off with Bush and his nonprofit foundation as it pushes for more school-choice legislation. Rubio’s legislation, in conjunction with Bush’s lobbying efforts, could bring the fight to Capitol Hill.

It can be a good wedge issue as well for Republicans; black lawmakers, who tend to be Democratic, often support school-choice laws aimed at poor children.

The legislation also highlights the closeness of Rubio and Bush amid Washington speculation that the two might have a rivalry as each eyes a White House bid. Associates of the two say it’s far more likely Rubio will run than Bush; and there’s no real rivalry between them as both take leadership roles in the national immigration debate.

Rubio’s involvement in rounding up conservative support for immigration reform was a key factor in his selection by GOP leaders to rebut President Barack Obama’s speech. Rubio, however, doesn’t want to be limited to immigration policy — a reason he announced his Educational Opportunities Act right after his speech. The legislation should be introduced Wednesday.

Before his Tuesday night national address, Democrats accused him of supporting “extreme” budget policies that would cut social-welfare programs.

Democrats are sure to zero in on a potential irony of his legislation: It could technically increase the debt at the same time Rubio is talking about debt reduction.

Rubio said he doesn’t know how much the legislation could cost the federal treasury. It has not been analyzed yet, or scored, by the Congressional Budget Office. About 11 states have similar tax-credit programs with about $405 million in tax credits for 148,300 students.

Under Rubio’s legislation, corporations or individuals could annually donate a maximum $100,000 or $4,500, respectively. The money, for which the donor receives a dollar-for-dollar tax credit, flows to a nonprofit “Scholarship Grant Organization,” which then distributes money to private schools on behalf of thousands of students.

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Oscar Nominees Before They Were Famous

As hard as it may be to believe, Oscar nominees Bradley Cooper, Ben Affleck, Jessica Chastain, Anne Hathaway and Jennifer Lawrence were once fresh-faced actors itching for their big break in the biz.

Pics: Star Sightings!

Click the video to see the five stars (before they became famous) in their very first on-screen roles!

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Who failed Chicago?

Michelle Malkin

As her husband delivered his annual State of the Union Address last night, First Lady Michelle Obama hosted the parents of an innocent teenage girl shot and killed by Chicago gang thug. On Friday, President Obama will travel to the Windy City to decry violence and crusade for more gun laws in the town with the strictest gun laws and bloodiest gun-related death tolls in America.

Does the White House really want to open up a national conversation about the state of Chicago? OK, let’s talk.

Obama, his wife, his campaign strategists, his closest cronies, and his biggest bundlers all hail from Chicago. Senior adviser and former Chicago real estate mogul/city planning commissioner Valerie Jarrett and her old boss, Richard Daley, presided over a massive “Plan for Transformation” in the mid-1990s to rescue taxpayer-subsidized public housing from its bloody hellhole. How’d that work out for you, Chicago?

Answer: This social-justice experiment failed miserably. A Chicago Tribune investigation found that after Daley/Jarrett dumped nearly $500 million of federal funding into crime-ridden housing projects, the housing complexes (including the infamous Altgeld-Murray homes) remained dangerous, drug-infested, racially segregated ghettos.

Altgeld is a long-troubled public housing complex on Chicago’s South Side where youth violence has proven immune to “community organizing” solutions and the grand redevelopment schemes championed by Obama and company.

In fact, as I’ve reported previously, it’s the same nightmarish ’hood where Obama cut his teeth as a community activist — and exaggerated his role in cleaning up asbestos in the neighborhood, according to fellow progressive foot soldiers. As always, Obama’s claims to success there were far more aspirational than concrete.

In the meantime, lucrative contracts went to politically-connected Daley pals in the developer world to “save” Chicago youth and families. Another ghetto housing project, the Grove Parc slum, was managed by Jarrett’s former real-estate empire, Habitat, Inc. Jarrett refused to answer questions about the dilapidated housing development after becoming the top consigliere in the Obama administration.

But as the Boston Globe’s Binyamin Appelbaum, who visited the slums several years ago, reported: “Federal inspectors graded the condition of the complex an 11 on a 100-point scale — a score so bad the buildings now face demolition. . . . [Jarrett] co-managed an even larger subsidized complex in Chicago that was seized by the federal government in 2006, after city inspectors found widespread problems.”

Grove Parc and several other monumental housing flops “were developed and managed by Obama’s close friends and political supporters. Those people profited from the [federal] subsidies even as many of Obama’s constituents suffered.”

Democrats poured another $30 million in public money into the city’s public schools to curb youth violence over the last three years. The New York Times hailed the big-government plan to fund more social workers, community organizers and mentors and create jobs for at-risk youth.

But watchdogs on the ground exposed it as a wasteful “makework scheme.” One local activist nicknamed it “Jobs for Jerks” because “it rewards some of the worst students in the school system with incredibly rare employment opportunities while leaving good students to fend for themselves.”

Obama and his ineffectual champions of Chicago’s youth will demand more taxpayer “investments” to throw at the problem. But money is no cure for the soaring fatherlessness, illegitimacy and family disintegration that have characterized Chicago inner-city life since Obama’s hero Saul Alinsky pounded the pavement.

As City Journal’s Heather MacDonald noted in a damning indictment of the do-gooders’ failures, “official silence about illegitimacy and its relation to youth violence remains as carefully preserved in today’s Chicago as it was during Obama’s organizing time there.”

Team Obama will find perverted ways to lay blame for Chicago’s youth violence crisis on the NRA, Fox News, George Bush and the Tea Party. But as the community organizer-in-chief prepares to evade responsibility again, he should remember: When you point one finger at everyone else, four other fingers point right back at you-know-who.

malkinblog@gmail.com

Have a comment on this PostOpinion column? Send it in to LETTERS@NYPOST.COM!

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Green cards for sale at a South Beach hotel: Competition is on for EB5 investment visas

If David Hart gets his way, South Beach’s 42-room Astor Hotel will be on a hiring spree this year as it adds concierge service, a roof-top pool, an all-night diner, spa and private-car service available 24 hours a day.

New hires will be crucial to Hart’s business plan, since foreign investors have agreed to pay about $50,000 for each job created by the Art Deco boutique.

The Miami immigration lawyer specializes in arranging visas for wealthy foreign citizens under a special program that trades green cards for investment dollars. Businesses get the money and must use it to boost payroll. The minimum investment is $500,000 to add at least 10 jobs to the economy. That puts the pressure on Hart and his partners at the Astor to beef up payroll dramatically, with plans to take a hotel with roughly 20 employees to one with as many as 100 workers.

“My primary responsibility is to make something happen here over the next two years that will create the jobs we need,’’ Hart said a few steps away from a nearly empty restaurant on a recent weekday morning. “It’s all going to be transformed.”

Though established in the 1990s, the “EB5” visas soared in popularity during the recession as developers sought foreign cash to replace dried-up credit markets in the United States.

Chinese investors dominate the transactions, accounting for about 65 percent of the nearly 9,000 EB5 visas granted since 2006. South Korea finishes a distant second at 12 percent and the United Kingdom holds the third-place slot at 3 percent. If Latin America and the Caribbean were one country, they would rank No. 4 on the list, with 231 EB5 visas granted, or about 3 percent of the total.

Competition has gotten stiffer for the deep-pocketed foreign investors willing to pay for green cards. The University of Miami’s bio-science research park near the Jackson hospital system raised $20 million from 40 foreign investors under the EB5 program, most of them from Asia. The money went into the park’s first building; visa brokers are waiting to see if the second building will proceed so they can offer a new pool of potential green-card sales.

In Hollywood, the stalled $131 million Margaritaville resort had hoped to raise about $75 million from EB5 investors before ditching that plan last year to pursue more traditional financing. A retail complex by developer Jeff Berkowitz in Coral Gables also launched a program to raise $50 million in EB5 money for the project, Gables Station. Hart worked with other EB5 investors to back pizza restaurants in Miami and South Beach. A limestone mine in Martin County also was backed by EB5 dollars.

This year, the city of Miami itself is expected to get into the business by setting up an EB5 program to raise foreign cash for a range of city businesses and developments. The first would be the tallest building in the city — developer Tibor Hollo’s planned 85-story apartment tower, the Panorama, in downtown Miami.

With a construction cost of about $700 million, Miami’s debut EB5 venture hopes to raise about $100 million from foreign investors, said Laura Reiff, the Greenberg Traurig lawyer in Virginia working with Miami on the EB5 effort. “This is a marquis project,’’ she said.

The arrangement is a novel one for Miami, with the city planning to help a private developer raise funds overseas for a new high-rise. And it would allow Hollo and future participants to tout the city of Miami’s endorsement when competing with other Miami-area projects for EB5 dollars. “We will have the benefit of the brand of the city of Miami,’’ said Mikki Canton, the $6,000-a-month city consultant heading Miami’s EB5 effort. “A lot of these others are privately owned and they won’t have that brand.”

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Related could give jolt to long overdue Watson Island development plans

The long overdue development of Watson Island, stalled for a dozen years by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and a collapsed economy, may have received a huge jolt when New York’s Related Companies agreed to study the plan and possibly join forces in its development.

Developer Mehmet Bayraktar, who won the right to develop on the waterfront crown jewel back in 2001, said Monday that the company run by Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross has signed a Letter of Intent to “co-develop” the entire project.

“They will come in and we will work together jointly on the whole project. We’re co-developers or co-investors,” Bayraktar said Monday.

He described a Letter of Intent as a non-binding agreement in which both sides agree to do due diligence and spend time and money studying the plans. “It’s like an engagement, or a promissory note,” he said.

Ross was out of town Monday and couldn’t be reached for comment. Ric Katz, a public relations hand hired to help the Dolphins with the push to get public money for Sun Life Stadium renovations, couldn’t confirm the agreement late Monday.

According to Bayraktar, Related would be involved in three main components of the proposal: a hotel and residential complex, retail and a giant mega-yacht facility meant to lure some of the wealthiest people in the world. He estimated the project he won with a $281 million bid in 2001would likely balloon to a cost of about $800 million today. If Related absorbs 50 percent of the deal, it could put Ross’ investment close to $400 million.

“We’re planning to start building this fall,” said Bayraktar, who said he’s known Ross for many years.

The news was all good to Miami leaders who have struggled in dealing with Bayraktar, especially the past three years, when he fell behind in rent by as much as $500,000.

Several times they’ve threatened to kill the plan and reopen the bid to prospective developers. Each time, however, Bayraktar has been able to make required payments before the city rebid the project. Other times lobbyist Brian May was persuasive enough in pleading Bayraktar’s case that commissioners stalled killing the deal. “It’s fantastic news,” said Miami Commissioner Marc Sarnoff, who represents the district that encompasses Watson Island, a large circular spit of land that links Miami Beach to the mainland. “It shows we have someone who has the ability to get the ball across the goal. This type of project is right up his [Ross’] alley.”

Related, which specializes in high-end residential properties, also built New York’s Time Warner Center and CityPlace in West Palm Beach; it is currently working on the high-profile 26-acre Hudson Yards project on Manhattan’s West Side.

Bayraktar has been beset by problems since he won the right through a public vote to develop on Watson Island in November 2001.

The original $281 million plan would have yielded Miami a pair of ritzy hotels, one 18 floors and the other 28 floors. Shops, gardens, and restaurants were planned for more than 221,000 square feet of retail space, and a 54-slip mega-yacht complex called for matching 470-foot platforms.

Bayraktar’s company, the Flagstone Property Group, was to pay Miami $1 million a year in rent during the two years it would take to build, then $2 million a year and a percentage of retail and hotel room sales. Miami leaders drooled at the thought of $250 million into its coffers over the project’s 45-year lease.

But construction stalled as banks backed away after 9/11 and Bayraktar fought lawsuits and money issues. When the economy began to tank again in 2007 and banks again wouldn’t commit to the plan, the city granted him extensions.

Bayraktar and May have been a constant presence at City Hall since early 2010, soon after Tomás Regalado was elected mayor and made saving the Flagstone plan one of his top priorities.

“We expect to be open by 2016,” said Bayraktar.

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Bachelor Recap Sean's Sister Provides Perspective on Tierra

Apparently there is one girl whose words have weight enough to sway The Bachelor from his affections for Tierra, and that's his sister Shay.

One week prior to the all-important hometown dates, Sean flies his sister to St. Croix to help him work out his feelings for the remaining six. Harking back to her sage, sisterly advice before he embarked on his Bachelor adventure, Shay tells Sean not to "end up with a girl no one likes." The words strike a painful chord with him seeing as Tierra's alienation from the other ladies is no longer a secret.

Pics: 'The Bachelor' Scorecard (Did the Relationships Sizzle or Fizzle?)

Inspired to test his sister's intuition, Sean decides to introduce Tierra to his sibling, but when he arrives to the ladies' hotel, the resident mean girl is found weeping after an all-out war of words with AshLee. At first dismayed by her pain, Sean comes to realize the humane thing to do would be to send Tierra home, fearing she won't be able to handle the more stressful weeks ahead.

"I can't believe they did this to me!" are Tierra's departing words as she is sent packing. "I hope the girls got what they wanted."

During the final rose ceremony in St. Croix, Lesley is cut loose from the remaining five. Despite their incredible connection and friendship, Sean worries that the relationship had gone stagnant.

Pics: Meet 'Bachelor' Sean Lowe's Lucky Ladies!

A confused, crying Catherine takes Lesley's elimination especially hard as she believed that Sean and Les, in her opinion, were better suited for eachother than she will ever be with Mr. Lowe.

Next Monday on ABC, Desiree, Lindsay, Catherine and AshLee will get to introduce their maybe-husband-to-be to the family, but it seems the hometown dates don't go over as well for Des in particular, whose protective brother appears unwilling to accept her "playboy" boyfriend.

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Bus strike: ayor Mike wins

Michael Benjamin

This afternoon, it will be checkmate for the school-bus strikers. The strike essentially ends — thanks to the Bloomberg gambit.

The mayor played it perfectly, and willingly sacrificed pieces to achieve his endgame.

At midday today, the Office of Pupil Transportation will open the bid packages for the K-12 school-bus routes. It can start service under the new contracts before September — though not as soon as parents hope, since the contracts must go through the city’s lengthy review process. Still, those bids are what the strike was supposed to stop.

AP

Losers: Local 1181 boss Michael Cordiello (r.) with International ATU chief Larry Hanley.

But yesterday, in a bid to be competitive, several bus companies went to court to void the employee protections in current contracts and to halt the new bids.

If that suit fails, a mix of new and currently-contracted bus companies will likely win contracts. Meanwhile, a number of bus companies with current contracts will probably decline to submit bids, because their union contracts would leave them uncompetitive. Their unionized employees, now on strike, would be out of jobs as of June 30.

For these workers, the only rational decision will be to return to work. Already in the last few days, workers have crossed union picket lines to return to their jobs.

After today (assuming the bus companies’ suit fails), it will make sense for more striking drivers and attendants to return for their last few months of pay and benefits, especially their health-care coverage. And it makes even more sense for these workers to seek work with the new companies.

In a sense, the worker-protection bubble finally burst. Small bus companies and their workers are collateral victims; the worker protections put those companies, already operating on a slim margin, at a competitive disadvantage.

When the city, citing court rulings, put out for bid new bus contracts that didn’t require the employee protections (as these contracts had for 35 years), that didn’t mean the bus companies could break their contracts with the unions to provide those priveleges. That left them handicapped in bidding, since they’d have higher labor costs than firms without the generous protections.

To stay competitive, the companies needed the union to work with them to lower costs. But the union instead went on strike — trying to force Bloomberg to retain the protections, and even to get the state to pass a new law to undo the court ruling.

When the National Labor Relations Board this month failed to force even a temporary resolution favorable to the union, the end was in sight.

Mind you, Mayor Bloomberg sacrificed a number of chess pieces to achieve his endgame.

Parents, especially of special-needs children, are angry at him for four weeks of educational disruption. The stress on special-needs kids is incalculable. The city schools lose federal funding for students who couldn’t attend during the strike.

Bloomberg alienated the bus company operators — who feel caught in the middle of the dispute — by not paying them for service they didn’t (couldn’t) deliver during the strike.

Finally, after more than a decade of fairly good labor relations, he will be remembered for breaking one union’s hold on an industry.

Bloomberg’s bold gambit will benefit his successors, who won’t be saddled with needlessly high school-busing costs.

If the city’s lucky, the mayor in his final months in office will use similar gambits to tackle some of the much larger union-benefit issues that are consuming ever-larger chunks of the municipal budget.

Have a comment on this PostOpinion column? Send it in to LETTERS@NYPOST.COM!

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Green cards for sale at a South Beach hotel: Competition is on for EB5 investment visas

If David Hart gets his way, South Beach’s 42-room Astor Hotel will be on a hiring spree this year as it adds concierge service, a roof-top pool, an all-night diner, spa and private-car service available 24 hours a day.

New hires will be crucial to Hart’s business plan, since foreign investors have agreed to pay about $50,000 for each job created by the Art Deco boutique.

The Miami immigration lawyer specializes in arranging visas for wealthy foreign citizens under a special program that trades green cards for investment dollars. Businesses get the money and must use it to boost payroll. The minimum investment is $500,000 to add at least 10 jobs to the economy. That puts the pressure on Hart and his partners at the Astor to beef up payroll dramatically, with plans to take a hotel with roughly 20 employees to one with as many as 100 workers.

“My primary responsibility is to make something happen here over the next two years that will create the jobs we need,’’ Hart said a few steps away from a nearly empty restaurant on a recent weekday morning. “It’s all going to be transformed.”

Though established in the 1990s, the “EB5” visas soared in popularity during the recession as developers sought foreign cash to replace dried-up credit markets in the United States.

Chinese investors dominate the transactions, accounting for about 65 percent of the nearly 9,000 EB5 visas granted since 2006. South Korea finishes a distant second at 12 percent and the United Kingdom holds the third-place slot at 3 percent. If Latin America and the Caribbean were one country, they would rank No. 4 on the list, with 231 EB5 visas granted, or about 3 percent of the total.

Competition has gotten stiffer for the deep-pocketed foreign investors willing to pay for green cards. The University of Miami’s bio-science research park near the Jackson hospital system raised $20 million from 40 foreign investors under the EB5 program, most of them from Asia. The money went into the park’s first building; visa brokers are waiting to see if the second building will proceed so they can offer a new pool of potential green-card sales.

In Hollywood, the stalled $131 million Margaritaville resort had hoped to raise about $75 million from EB5 investors before ditching that plan last year to pursue more traditional financing. A retail complex by developer Jeff Berkowitz in Coral Gables also launched a program to raise $50 million in EB5 money for the project, Gables Station. Hart worked with other EB5 investors to back pizza restaurants in Miami and South Beach. A limestone mine in Martin County also was backed by EB5 dollars.

This year, the city of Miami itself is expected to get into the business by setting up an EB5 program to raise foreign cash for a range of city businesses and developments. The first would be the tallest building in the city — developer Tibor Hollo’s planned 85-story apartment tower, the Panorama, in downtown Miami.

With a construction cost of about $700 million, Miami’s debut EB5 venture hopes to raise about $100 million from foreign investors, said Laura Reiff, the Greenberg Traurig lawyer in Virginia working with Miami on the EB5 effort. “This is a marquis project,’’ she said.

The arrangement is a novel one for Miami, with the city planning to help a private developer raise funds overseas for a new high-rise. And it would allow Hollo and future participants to tout the city of Miami’s endorsement when competing with other Miami-area projects for EB5 dollars. “We will have the benefit of the brand of the city of Miami,’’ said Mikki Canton, the $6,000-a-month city consultant heading Miami’s EB5 effort. “A lot of these others are privately owned and they won’t have that brand.”

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Carnival cruise ship in Gulf of Mexico to be towed after engine fire

A Carnival cruise ship in the Gulf of Mexico with 3,000 passengers onboard will be towed to port after an engine fire Sunday morning left it drifting, a cruise line official said,

The fire occurs in the engine room of the Carnival Triumph, which is owned by the Miami-based company.

The fire left the ship with no propulsion, the cruise line says, CNN is reporting.

There were no injuries reported. Passengers and crew have food, water and electricity from generators. Another Carnival ship, the Elation, is transferring more food and drinks onto the Triumph

The cruise ship was in waters off the Yucatan Peninsula, heading back to Galveston, Tx., when the fire occurred, said Astevia Gonzalez from the Carnival Cruises family support team.

The ship's automatic fire extinguishing system kicked in and soon contained the blaze.

The fire still left the ship passengers and 1,000 crew members drifting about 150 miles off the Mexican coast, the cruise line said in a statement.

"The ship's technical crew has determined the vessel will need to be towed to port," Carnival said around 7:30 p.m. ET Sunday, CNN said. "A tugboat is en route to the ship's location and will tow the vessel to Progreso, Mexico, which is the closest port."

According to Gonzalez, the ship is expected to arrive in port Wednesday.

After they are towed to Progreso, those aboard the Carnival Triumph will be flown back to the United States at no cost to them, the cruise line said.

They will also get a full refund, credit that can be used toward a future trip and reimbursement for all expenses — except casino and gift shop purchases — for their current trip.

The vessel's next two departures, scheduled for Monday and Saturday, have been canceled. Those slated to be on those trips will get full refunds and discounts toward future cruises, the cruise line said.

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Up-Close with Grammy Stars The Lumineers at Clive Davis Bash

ET's Brooke Anderson was on the red carpet for Clive Davis' annual pre-Grammy bash and spoke to some of the industry's briggest stars, including one of the year's biggest phenomenons, the Grammy-nominated Lumineers!

"It feels pretty incredible. I mean we wrote music just to satisfy ourselves, so to be recognized at all is a huge honor for us," said Jeremiah Fraites of The Lumineers. When asked about what the band had planned for its Grammy performance, band mate Stelth Ulvang said the viewers would just have to tune in to find out. "We try to change it up every time, so we're still working on it."

PICS: Star Sightings

Jordin Sparks spoke to Brooke about the different tone of this year's party compared to 2012, when Whitney Houston passed away. "It's just crazy that it's been a year, but she (Whitney) would want everybody to have a good time and to be hear and celebrate music, because that is what she loved," Sparks said. "I'm happy to be here and to honor her in that way because I know she would want me to be here happy." 

This year's event -- sponsored by Davis and the Recording Academy -- honored Epic Records' Chairman and CEO Antonio L.A. Reid.

VIDEO: Flo Rida's Ready For His Big Grammy Moment

Watch the video for more interviews, including Kelsey Grammer on being a new dad again and Ryan Lochte on how he got in shape for his underwear ad!

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