Category: News and Opinion

A quick glance through the campaign sites of the candidates for NYC Comptroller shows that all of them avoid talking about the two most important questions in state and local public finance, the questions whose answers determine how much worse off people will be in the future than today (as taxpayers, service recipients, future public employees, or all three), and how much more will today’s interests be allowed to take from that future. When determining how much money the City of New York has to contribute to its pension funds, and the cost of past and future retroactive pension enrichments for past and present public employees, what is the rate of return on pension assets that is fair and reasonable to assume, and from what level of assets? And how much more will people have to pay in the future to fund the retiree health insurance being granted in return for services provided today?

Is it just me, or is does the Working Families Party (WFP) only endorse candidates whose pants are on fire?

This may be appropriate for a political institution whose departing treasurer, when called upon to explain his exit (amidst accusations of violating campaign finance laws and very conveniently missing two filing deadlines), took the press equivalent of the Fifth Amendment and referred all questions to his attorney.

A similar reluctance to give a straight answer extends to its candidates.

From CITY HALL NEWS

Independence Party Mailers Tout Union Ties For Anti-WFP Candidates

When one sticks ones neck out, and says the candidate has no clothes, vindication is very sweet. 

TABLET MAGAZINE: “The editor of Der Blatt, Alexander Deutsch, told Tablet—via our columnist Eddy Portnoy, a professor of Yiddish at Rutgers University—that, after being contacted by Lander’s Satmar-community liaison Rabbi Yitzhok Fleischer, he “received copy for a paid advertisement and put it in just like any other ad.” Fleischer, he said, “bought the advertisement in the name of the Lander campaign,” and thus Der Blatt sent the campaign a bill (which is now around the internet).”

http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/15436/did-nyc-candidate-publish-anti-gay-ad-to-attract-satmars/print/

In last week’s Sunday’s Daily News, Errol Louis wrote about my problems with one of my opponents in this race (Leithland “Rickie” Tulloch). I didn’t blog about it before, mainly because I didn’t want to sensationalize the issue of intimidation in politics. But since Errol used his column to put it out there, I will now elaborate: albeit in a nutshell. Believe me that there is a lot more to this and I will blog on it eventually. 

Way back when this race was shaping up and there were many potential candidates, I had a few short conversations with Mr. Tulloch. And after a while all he seemed to want was for me to get out of the race. I found him to be disrespectful. I used to have him on my e-mail list, and would even send him my blog column long before it was openly published. I took him off my list because I don’t think he is a nice person. I arrived at this conclusion after he berated a few people when they told him that they were supporting (or considering) me over him for the 40th council seat. There is much more to this. 

ONLY THE BLOG KNOWS BROOKLYN: ‘Sadly, it seems pretty clear that someone associated with one of the other campaigns or some kind of political entity is working pretty hard to attack Brad Lander (candidate for City Council in the 39th district) with a wild and crazy fake ad in a Yiddish newspaper..”

Bolstered by the Times endorsement and still considered the likely victor in the race for City Council , candidate Brad Lander’s campaign has gone on the offensive, in every meaning of the word, trying to make lemons into lemonade by turning their campaign’s darkest moment into his purported victim-hood at the hands of an evil and shadowy conspiracy which took out an ad in a Yiddish language paper in which Lander is portrayed as the one candidate committed to fighting the dreaded scourge of fellatio (usually translated as “toeivah,” which literally mean abomination, but not really if one is doing it correctly).

Council Candidate John Heyer’s website (http://www.johnheyer.org/) contains endorsements extolling his commitment to public education from six present or former public school teachers:

Lana Hoerburger, NYC Public School Teacher Retired
Laura Scott, Principal, PS 10
Carolyn Zodda, NYC Public Teacher Retired
Janet Lattey, UFT Member & Park Slope Resident
Robert Scott, NYC Public School Teacher
Assemblywoman Joan L. Millman

It contains no mention of his stand in favor of tuition tax credits, or his belief we should be using public dollars to shrink the public school population.

In the City Council district where I live there is a rare event going on: a contested election for a legislative office in New York City. The election is being contested because the seat is open, and the seat is open because its current occupant – Councilmember Bill DeBlasio – is running for something else. Generally, aside from citywide and statewide positions such as Mayor, Governor, and Senator, we don’t really have contested elections in New York. The House of Representatives and state legislature can barely be considered elective offices in New York State at this point – incumbents can keep citizen challengers off the ballot, challengers motivated primarily by ambition don’t bother taking on the long odds of running against an incumbent, the media has over the pasts 25 years generally only covered incumbents, and retiring legislators generally leave mid-term, so a new perpetual incumbent can be appointed in a special election few people know about.

At the New York City Council, however, we have had real democratic elections, thanks to term limits. Term limits are not popular with incumbent members of the City Council, even those who say otherwise, because they would like the office to once again be a permanent sinecure that can be willed to the next generation, like the state legislature. Faced with their own possible political demise the Council, working with Mayor Bloomberg, has already voted to modify the limit to three four-year terms, rather than two four year terms, over the heads of voters who had endorsed a two-term limit by referendum, twice. The courts upheld their right, under the City Charter, to change the number of terms as they see fit, even if voters are opposed. The question is what happens next? “Extending” term limits to ten terms, a de facto repeal? Unfortunately, the only candidate I trust on this all-important issue is Rock Hackshaw, who is a candidate in a different district.

Please Disregard.

This space was previously used to solicit a copy of recording of Saturday night's Dov Hikind radio program to check out whether an email report of the show's contents was accurate. When soliciting the info, I posted my own suspicions that the assertions made within were unlikely to be true.

When someone provided the recording (a link of which is here: http://www.sendspace.com/file/cwel4v), I took the solicitation down.

A bout of insomnia has caused me to listen to the contents; as I suspected, the veracity of the allegations in the email ranged from arguable to unveriable, although this may because I was half asleep. However, everyone I've sent the recording to who listened and emailed back agreed with my conclusion.