Category: News and Opinion

The Beach Boys have finally finished SMILE (sort of).

Though this may be the most distasteful title of all time, it is still less distasteful than its subject.  

TNR: “No publication is going to stop aggregating. But journalists might, as a collective whole pause to think about where our priorities ought to lie….Maybe we can establish a rough norm for ourselves: that we will continue to treat aggregation as a side project to what we really do…"

It was with deep regret that I read of Frank Rich’s departure from the Op Ed page of the New York Times. Its hard to imagine who will fill the center of that Sunday page. Perhaps it will be more than one columnist.

I think I speak for many bloggers when I say I am always waiting for the phone to ring with the New York Times to be on the line asking me to join the paper. Its not an ego thing and its not that I think I am a great writer.

Recently I had dinner with a political prospect from the far reaches of one of those areas of Brooklyn where my political knowledge is limited, and my reporting is mostly a matter of faking the funk.

During the dessert, he laid a bombshell in my lap.

“You can use this one: Diane Gordon told me she was running for the City Council.”

Governor Andrew Cuomo should grab federal super train money that short sighted Republican governors have rejected so as to build a bullet train line from New York to Albany to Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo.

The rejected funding could overcome hurdles that the New York to Albany run is too curvy for a super train. Perhaps running it along the Thruway would help.

I don't comment upon pending or impending matters of litigation in the United States of America or its territories.

This may mean I have to quit talking about New York State politics.

Luckily, there’s always The Blues to talk about, although there’s a top that these days has a one to one correspondence with more than one pol’s existence.

Liu's report compares private sector and public sector pay, and claims that NYC's public employees are underpaid and thus, one might assume, are being cheated and deserve to retailiate by doing less work in the coming year. But they way the comparisons are made shifts from one part of the analysis to the other, always in ways that would make public sector pay seem lower.

Neuter Gingrich Department:  

Gingrich says he dumped two wives because of "Love of COUNTRY."

Country, huh? Methinks his answer is one syllable too long. The Last Refuge krugman.blogs.nytimes.com