Category: News and Opinion

Between cultural events and parties, both of which are noted herein, my posts have been circling over the blogport all week, waiting for clearance to land.

Bet you didn’t you see this one coming. Merry Christmas. “Just over 200 years since traders first met under a buttonwood tree on Wall Street, the institution they created, the New York Stock Exchange, was acquired by an upstart electronic marketplace, the IntercontintalExchange (ICE), nominally based in Atlanta, Georgia, but more accurately located in the electronic stratosphere,” according to The Economist magazine.

“The deal was announced on December 20th, with little advance leakage, possibly because the participants did a particularly good job of keeping it a secret, or possibly because the importance of the exchange, owned by NYSE Euronext, has faded so much that few cared.” The stock exchange was already merged into Euronext in a “merger of equals.” No such fig leaf now.

I really was trying to take a respite this week and just attend parties, figuring that I’d round up my Facebook posts in one weekend Gateway piece.

State budget crisis.org, the Ravitch/Volker group, has just released its report on New York State's financial situation. Among the findings (p. 28) is yet another analysis showing the New York State pension plans, which also cover local employees outside NYC, are among the best funded in the country, with the NYC plans among the worst — worse than New Jersey. Even though NYC taxpayers have paid far more into the plans over the decades as a percent of employee wages, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

The report is a disappointment, in that it doesn't explain this. No one else had either. And the text is almost exclusively about the state plans, not the city plans. How taxpayer contribution levels fell to zero around 2000, how they are now soaring (to a level far below NYC but they don't say so), etc.

On Wednesday we did a segment on Richard French Live titled ‘Guns in America: Does America have a Problem?’ Tragically, neither any of the guests, nor myself realized just how timely the segment would be.

Whatever Dave Seifman’s flaws, he knows the City Hall beat.

But Seifman doesn’t know bupkes about the Satmar.

The tragedy in Connecticut may very well signal a chance for a political sea change on gun control, which only ever happens in the aftermath of tragedy.

The assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King set the stage for the first meaningful gun control in 1968. The attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan led us to the Brady Law.

I once had an experience so horrible I just wanted to run as far away from it as I could.  I was on a subway platform when a man rolled down the stairs onto the platform and onto the tracks.  I heard all of this, but did not see it only the sound of his tumble, the screams of onlookers and the oncoming train.  They did manage to get the man off the tracks in time.

The other day a prominent NYC columnist caused a fire storm with her column implying something nefarious about the DeBlasio family’s love life:

The Governor makes a pre-emptive reaction strike against the blowback from something he enabled in the first place.  http://politicker.com/2012/12/cuomo-warns-state-senate-coalition-that-hes-the-peoples-ins