Full disclosure demands that I admit the following: I have been a friendly, but not familiar acquaintance of Councilman Michael McMahon’s brother, Tom, for about 25 years. Despite this, Councilman McMahon was not my preferred candidate in his 2001 race for City Council (that would have been John Del Giorno). However, in late 2002, my family moved to an apartment on Tom McMahon’s block and during one winter snowstorm, Tom leant me his snow shovel so I could dig out my car. Therefore, I am not without personal bias concerning the McMahon clan, including the Councilman, who’ve I’ve met twice, once in 2003 and once recently, for a combined period of about ten minutes.
Category: News and Opinion
What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? (Corrected and Revised)
|"[Congressional candidate Steve] Harrison also questions [City Councilman Michael] McMahon's position on the Iraq war: Was McMahon for it before he was against it?
Harrison was irked in particular by a line in the city delegation's endorsement of McMahon [for Congress in the 13th CD] last week that said McMahon "will play an important role in bringing our troops home from Iraq."
‘I will not let that statement stand,’ Harrison told us. ‘Mike clearly endorsed the war.’
As evidence, Harrison points to the fact that McMahon was one of 17 Council members who voted against a 2003 resolution, which passed the Council, opposing any U.S. attack on Iraq until all diplomatic avenues were exhausted.
‘To me, this is somebody who is pandering,’ Harrison said. ‘The question is where he really stands. We won't know until he gets to Washington.’
Badloss? (The Daily News Are The Village Green Preservation Society)
|Michael Goodwin’s Op-Ed in today’s Daily News “Keep Albany a two-party town”, presents a perfect way to end the legislative session with some mindless summer fun. Yes, the session must truly be over, and things must be slowing down, for only two parties makes for a very slow night indeed in that Babylon north of the Bear Mountain Bridge.
How to Settle the City Budget
|From what I understand, the Mayor and City Council are having trouble agreeing to a New York City budget because they disagree how bad the city’s fiscal situation is likely to get. The Mayor wants to raise taxes on the less important people who don’t get Bloomberg checks, don’t sell clothes, and are not retired, and reduce services that less important people rely on, to start getting people used to what the future will hold. The Council wants to pretend all will be well, but tax people from out of town staying in hotels at a much higher rate than is paid in tax for other services, while continuing to allow out-of-towners to buy expensive clothes made in China with cheap dollars without paying any city sales tax at all. Like most U.S. politicians, if they aren’t creating a future which is truly horrible, the Council Members feel they haven’t done enough today to “fight for the people” who don’t care about that future.
My own view is that both the Mayor and Council are underestimating how bad things will get. The city’s revenue base is somewhat insulated from the coming recession because the property bubble is only partially reflected in property tax revenues here, and (if we don’t discourage them from coming and make they pay it) spending by foreign visitors will support sales tax revenues even as city residents become poorer and spend less. But the city is heading for a massive decline in personal and corporate income tax revenues. More importantly, the state will be hit even harder by those declines, because such taxes are a bigger part of its revenue base, it the likely result will be state tax increases and spending cuts specifically targeted to hurt New York City as much as possible while sparing other parts of the state, as in the past. We are heading for a crisis a bad as the early- to mid-1990s, with the exception that this time most of the country will be even worse off, not better off as it was back then. In the face of this, I suggest the following…
Insane/Fine Goal (AKA Tutti Fruiti)
|“The excitement underpinning Senator Barack Obama’s campaign rests considerably on his evocative vows to depart from self-interested politics. Unfortunately, Mr. Obama has come up short of that standard with his decision to reject public spending limitations and opt instead for unlimited private financing in the general election.”
-New York Times Editorial 6/20/08
WRONG!
Michael Kinsley’s famous rule that “the scandal isn’t what’s illegal, it’s what’s legal“, now has “Gatemouth’s converse“: “the ideal imperfectly replicated in a reform may be preferable to the status quo (or status quo ante), but it is not to be mistaken for the ideal itself.”
Muslim Voter Turnout
|Tuesday New York Times features a story about leaders of the American Muslim community complaining about the Obama campaign not treating them well enough.
I was struck by one paragraph that didn’t pass my smell test:
In 2006, the Virginia Muslim Political Action Committee arranged for 53 Muslim cabdrivers to skip their shifts at Dulles International Airport in Northern Virginia to transport voters to the polls for the midterm election. Of an estimated 60,000 registered Muslim voters in the state, 86 percent turned out and voted overwhelmingly for Jim Webb, a Democrat running for the Senate who subsequently won the election, according to data collected by the committee.
Coincidence?
|“A north country state senator has apparently opted to stand for re-election rather than accept an offer to run a state authority.
Reliable sources say Sen. Darrel J. Aubertine, D-Cape Vincent, was offered and turned down the chairmanship of the New York Power Authority.
Neither Mr. Aubertine nor a spokesman from the governor's office returned phone calls seeking comment by Friday evening.
Frank Rich Reads Yoda???
|His first general election ad, boosted by a large media buy in swing states this month, was all about war. It invoked his Vietnam heroism and tried to have it both ways on Iraq by at once presenting Mr. McCain as a stay-the-course warrior and taking a (timid) swipe at President Bush. “Only a fool or a fraud talks tough or romantically about war,” Mr. McCain said in his voice-over. That unnamed fool would be our cowboy president, who in March told American troops how he envied their “in some ways romantic” task of “confronting danger.”
OY-BOMB-WITLESS
|"A longshot local candidate in New York, who is trying to unseat the state's Assembly Speaker in lower Manhattan, gets in on the action." (From Ben's Politico Blog)
Just to put things in perspective here, in the 64th Assembly District, where Newell is running, Hillary Clinton received 61% of the vote in her primary against Senator Obama.
While the 64th AD does contain most of Battery Park City, and some pieces of Soho, Little Italy and the East Village (though the East Village portion is predominately senior citizens living in Mitchell-Lamas developments and public housing), the district is dominated by the Lower East Side and Chinatown. And make no mistake about it; the district's Lower East Side portion almost entirely consists of a wall of housing developments full of middle and lower class Latinos, Asians, Orthodox Jews and senior citizens. Once the district gets north of Delancey Street, it carefully winds its way to take in whatever similar developments it can, while carefully avoiding picking up too many young hipsters.
The Ravitch Plan for 20/50
|Governor Patterson has appointed a commission on MTA finances headed by former MTA head Richard Ravitch. The commission, according to the Daily News, includes state budget director Laura Anglin, city budget chief Mark Page, state AFL-CIO President Denis Hughes, Fordham University President Father Joseph McShane, Con Ed Chairman Kevin Burke and Mysore Nagaraja, former president of the MTA Capital Construction Co. The purpose of the commission is to absorb the blame for fare increases, service cuts, higher taxes on wages, property and jobs – but not retirement income — and the cancellation disguised as a “deferral” of long-promised and repeatedly borrowed for projects such as the Second Avenue Subway. The money will be used to allow transit workers to retire at age 50 with full pension, health care and other retirement benefits after working for just 20 years, rather than at age 55 after working for just 25 years. Once the cost of that benefit is admitted to, after first having being described as “free,” maintenance will be perpetually deferred, and the transit system allowed to deteriorate to the point of collapse, due to “circumstances beyond our control.”
No, that’s not what Governor Patterson said. No, that’s not what the commission will say. That probably isn’t what Mr. Ravitch and the commission members will intend. At this point, however, we have enough experience with the current generation of leadership, particularly at the state level, to predict the future. Our elected officials know that the New York Metropolitan area desperately needs a viable and improving transit system to support its economy. Just as they know that New Yorkers desperately want a Second Avenue Subway to relieve the awful overcrowding on the east side. And they know that city residents, who pay some of the nation’s highest taxes, desperately want viable schools. And at the federal level, this generation of politicians knows Americans desperately need universal affordable health care and a secure Social Security system to avoid poverty due to ill health and old age. So they add extra taxes and/or borrow money allegedly for those purposes, divert it to their friends, and leave the rest with nothing. Then they blame someone else, like a commission, an arbitrator, or the “unaccountable” MTA.