Category: News and Opinion

It’s over, and it’s not by 23 or 24 votes, as originally reported, but by only 19.  

Surest Election Bet:

Fleshbot does a "Binders Full of Women" Feature. 

What has become as toxic as the Fresh Kills landfill, but doesn't smell as good?

The City’s only real three way general election is bound to produce its share of stories, and the 45^th AD certainly has been living up to this opportunity.

Unlike the author of this piece, I'm not questioning Mitt’s right to do what he did as a Mormon Bishop.  If you don’t like it, don’t be a Mormon.

Domestic Partner put down The Times to let me know that Gail Collins had made the same observation about Paul Ryan’s water consumption that Dybbuk loudly complained of during the debate.  

I’m going to repeat the style I used to discuss public employment this year, and toss off some comments on trends in public finance rather than provide, yet again, an exhaustive number-laden description. I assume there are many Room Eight readers who have read these over and over are as bored with it as I am, but I’ll keep doing it as long as New York’s public agencies – the City Comptroller, the State Comptroller, the Independent Budget Office, etc. do not.

There is much in our relative situation that doesn’t fit the propaganda narrative that the public employee union and contractor interests that control most of our state and local politicians wish to hear. Notably the high tax burden here, which raises questions about what is being provided in return, even among those who would otherwise be inclined to be “pro-government.” Thus to the extent you see government finance data discussed, in its totality rather than selectively only when favorable, it is generally the right wing Manhattan Institute and its Empire Center doing the talking. But the facts don’t fully fit the right wing narrative either. Notably the fact that the high taxes cannot be entirely or even primarily explained by the minority immigrant urban poor. And the fact that costs deferred from the past do explain a great deal of the excess burden, given that somehow since 1980 “conservative” has come to mean “buy now pay later.” But on to an attempt to say the unsaid and, unusually for me, say it briefly.

I had an amusing thought. A while back I came across the movie “Blue State” on Netflix, “a romantic comedy about a disgruntled Democrat who actually follows through on a drunken campaign promise to move to Canada if George ‘Dubya’ Bush gets re-elected” back in 2004. Didn’t want to live in that kind of country anymore. The movie wasn’t great, and I didn’t watch it to the end, but it was an interesting premise. Disgruntled Democrats had lots of countries to flee to at the time. Almost all of Europe, for example.

This is a rare occasion where I would say “fortunately” to the fact we don’t live in a swing state, because we are being spared the deluge of deception and overwrought emotion being pumped in there. Those of us who don’t have cable, at least. But I’d bet there would be plenty of people out in the Red States who would have a similarly nuts reaction to an Obama re-election. The question is, what countries will disgruntled Republicans be able to flee to if Obama is re-elected in 2012? I couldn’t think of any, and of course the idea of calling them “red countries,” for those of us who were around before 1989, is ironic in itself. Switzerland, Monaco and Hong Kong don’t count, except for those in Romney’s tax bracket, who probably have multiple countries to flee to anyway. But lots of people like that from elsewhere are buying condos in New York. Any suggestions?

Can we have Biden do the next two debates?   

Back in 2000, a widely held pre-election suspicion was that George W. Bush was going to win the popular vote, but that Al Gore was going to triumph in the Electoral College.