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.”
The Latest
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.
Well, I have to admit, I felt this chill going up my leg myself…
|Best unintentional pun of the week:
GLID Backs Connor, Tingling
GLID happens to be the Gay and Lesbian Independent Democrats, and it would not seem unusual for one getting “backed” by the Gay and Lesbian Independent Democrats to feel a tingle (I mean, they are an important club), or maybe it is GLID which is feeling the tingle from backing Connor.
California Judges
|The following appeared in Wednesday’s politico.com, concerning the start of Gay marriage in California:
http://www.politico.com/playbook/
***LEADING REPUBLICANS THINK THIS HELPS McCAIN BY GIVING CONSERVATIVES SOMETHING TO MOTIVATE THEM. A smart Republican: “It always helps to remind voters that regardless of their feelings for President Bush, the last eight years have seen the judicial benches filled with conservatives and this type of behavior is directly linked to activist judges and Democrats.
At Least, They Spelled Silver Correctly
|From Tuesday’s New York Sun –
http://www.nysun.com/opinion/stalking-horse-on-the-loose/80015/
But clearly, Mr. Silver is taking this race seriously. He's marshalling the resources of the Working Families Party and, according to a source, has hired a legislative aide to conduct opposition research on Mr. Newell, but not on Mr. Henry. On Friday, his campaign blanketed the East Village with fliers announcing in three languages (English, Spanish, and Chinese) that Mr. Silver was setting up a mobile district office to hear constituent complaints.
David Paterson versus Mike Bloomberg: there go them Harlem boys again.
|Today in the New York Post newspaper, columnist Fred Dicker sure lived up to his last name, since someone is surely going to get screwed by his front-page article. He reported that in private conversations, N.Y. Governor David Paterson said that, “Mayor Michael Bloomberg (NYC) is a nasty, tantrum-prone liar”. Dicker further states that Paterson claimed, “It is obvious that Bloomberg has little use for the kind of people who comes from Queens and Staten Island”. He further says of Bloomberg, that “you can’t trust him”. Look, I am not going to rehash the history of this dust-up; you can do your own research by going through the last four weeks of newspapers in this naked city. Also, I am not going to repeat all that Dicker claimed to have been said by our Cinderella governor (including the Spitzer comparison); go buy the paper yourself. I am however, going to accept (for now) that all of Dicker’s statements are true; at least until they are refuted or disclaimed by the governor.
CORRECTIONS AND CLARIFICATIONS: GATEMOUTH ATTEMPTS TO BE FAIR TO QUEENS INSURGENTS
|In fairness to the Queens County Democratic insurgents I recently attacked here for party disloyalty, I print this clarification.
Where previously I’d implied that State Senate hopeful Albert Baldeo was an untrustworthy character, this week Baldeo proved himself good to his word.
The Affordable Housing Crisis
|There is an affordable housing crisis in the United States, one that the Congress is struggling to address. The so-called crisis is that housing is getting more affordable. The generations now in power consider this a crisis because they were counting on being able to sell their homes to younger people at inflated prices, consigning them to a life of poverty, to finance a retirement that hasn’t saved for. The wealthy consider it a crisis because they are taking losses on mortgage bonds, and those who manage their money might receive somewhat less inflated pay packages next year. And those in some suburbs consider it a crisis because housing in their neighborhood might become affordable to someone no wealthier than they were when they first purchased, and different from them in other respects. So after 15 years of reductions in subsidies for the poorest, with public housing and Section 8 vouchers a perennial target of scorn, we now see desperate calls for the government to take on hundreds of billions of dollars in future liabilities to subsidize the past purchase of McMansions, and the hocking of houses to buy SUVs and plasma screen TVs and settle gambling debts for the ever-growing casino industry.
What everyone seems to be forgetting, is that housing becoming more affordable is a huge benefit to most current Americans, and all future Americans. And what everyone seems to be forgetting is that many if not most of those who will be forced to pay back those billions of dollars in future liabilities have probably been worse off, on average, than those who borrowed, spent, and are now facing foreclosure, and those who lent to them.
The Farmhands and the Cowgirls Should be Friends (A PLEA FOR PARTY UNITY with a Soundtrack by Rogers and Hammerstein)
|Will Barack Obama please have the Democratic Party Rules Committee restore the four piddling delegates it took away from Hillary in Michigan?
I know winning these delegates was an important victory for him, because after all, without them it would have taken an additional three and one half minutes to clinch the party’s nomination. Nonetheless, I implore him to forgo this ill-gotten gain so that those Hillary supporters who refuse to wake up and smell the coffee (I myself am fully caffeinated, and these days I take my coffee like my new candidate: not too light, and not too sweet) will have one less inconsequential complaint to whine about.