It sometimes seems as if Mike Bloomberg is actually a conspiracy, put on earth as proof that the preposterous right wing fantasies about liberals wanting to create a mommy-state, which impairs all our personal freedoms, are really true.
Yes, legally, adulthood is less a bright-line than one would assume (you can be ordered to pay child support for a 20 year old), but none of the statistically provable public safety logic concerning a 21 year old drinking age applies to cigarette purchases.
Lord, I need a drink (think I'll have a supersized Red Bull). http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/23/nyregion/new-york-proposes-raising-minimum-age-for-cigarette-purchases.html?_r=1&
Quinn Spokesman: "It's sad that former Congressman Weiner is already pointing fingers…"
Gate: What would you prefer he point? http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/politics/2013/04/8529393/weiner-offended-quinn-term-limits-says-he-was-sexting-couple-years
Weiner’s apparently intent on Anglicizing his name. After, reading this I think it’s more appropriate to call him “Dick.” http://politicker.com/2013/04/anthony-weiners-peculiar-press-strategy/
Of course Republicans support the use of drones; have you ever seen them staff an administration? http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/ny_drone_rangers_4nAq16pAESCdE6jsFUsYoL
Barkan does a nice rundown on the race for Council Speaker. http://barkanreport.com/post/48609765466/a-degenerate-political-junkies-guide-to-the-city
Liberal idiocy watch: Maureen Dowd on Obama on Guns. http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/04/22/modo-on-obama/
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/04/where-is-your-chart-president-obama.html
Point: CHAIT: "Last Thursday, the Post splashed a front-page photo of two olive-skinned males under the headline BAG MEN. This was, of course, a tabloid pun of sorts. A bagman is a mob figure who collects money from victims. The deeper insinuation of criminality lay in the menacingly large luggage strapped around their shoulders. Why else would Arab-looking men be carrying a bulky bag to a six-hour-long spectator event? A smaller text box beneath the headline noted, “There is no direct evidence linking them to the crime, but authorities want to identify them.”
The “bag men” turned out to be a pair of innocent young men. One of them, Salah Eddin Barhoum, is a Moroccan-American teen who runs track and plays soccer for his high-school team and works at Subway. He and his friend had no connection to the bombing, as he established when he went to the police to clear his name.
Barhoum was not the first innocent person smeared as a potential terrorist. He was not even the first one so smeared in the Post. Three days earlier, it had breathlessly reported, “Investigators have a suspect—a Saudi-Arabian national.” The man’s suspicious behavior, other than skin, amounted to smelling of gunpowder and running away from the explosion, both of which also unfortunately tend happen to targets of bomb strikes.
The Post is hardly the only news organization rushing fragments of pseudo-fact into the public domain and then retracting them…But its recklessness displays an almost smarmy, legalistic disregard for its own swath of destruction. When the “Bag Men” scoop disintegrated, editor Col Allan replied, “We stand by our story. The image was e-mailed to law-enforcement agencies yesterday afternoon seeking information about these men, as our story reported. We did not identify them as suspects.”
Counterpoint: THE POST: "In a brazen show of hysterical hypocrisy, New York’s Jonathan Chait bends over backwards to argue that The Post “seems determined to revive the old xenophobic paranoia” in its coverage of the Boston bombings. Chait bemoans our utterly factual report that a Saudi national was an early suspect, and ignores the fact that numerous other liberal news outlets confirmed it. Likewise, he breathlessly accuses us of racism for our “Bag Men” cover, which once again was entirely factual."
Does anyone think the Post won this exchange?
Remember Disco?
Push, push for the Busch! http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/politics/2013/04/8529380/gillibrand-makes-last-minute-push-colbert-busch
I end today with an announcement that I will be dialing it down more than a bit for a mental health break of some indeterminate period of time which I suspect will run somewhere between six weeks and five months. During that time, I will be posting sporadically, if at all.
There are a perfect storm of reasons. I haven’t gotten past page 200 of a great book I started last fall; I’d like to pay more attention to DP, Dybbuk and Cerberus; I’d like to re-start walking the Brooklyn Bridge, so I could lose some weight; after seven years, I think it might be time to rethink this thing of ours; I’d like some time to work on another project; I’d like people to stop hating me, at least for awhile.
It seems like as good as time as any. Local politics looks more and more like a discussion of matters under pending and impeding litigation. Recent national news may auger the same. Truth is, I’m a bit tired, and a bit stale, and don’t draw many links these days, and maybe it’s time to let people know that they might miss me if I were gone (or not; WTF really knows?).