Fresh off of a spirited challenge for the 10th Congressional District this past summer, New York City Councilmember Charles Barron is now considering a run for Public Advocate in 2009. This morning, Barron informed me that given his frustration with the institutional responses to the “police brutality” issue, he believes that he could use the office of the Public Advocate as a platform for seriously dealing with issues like police abuses, racial discrimination, black-unemployment, and the like. He said that my recent challenge to him to run for public advocate, as a way of fighting for address to some of his hot-button issues, makes a lot of sense and he is now considering it. He said also that running for citywide office is so much more difficult than running for a congressional seat that he has to give it long hard thought. He will make a final decision sometime late next year, but intends to start exploring it with his main supporters and his organization “Operation Power”, ASAP.
The Latest
The Importance of Member Items
|With the release of details about who is responsible for which member items, there is likely to be a great deal of discussion of the member items per se. But the nature of what they fund is not their true significance.
While the amounts of money involved are not small, neither are they large in the context of overall state and local government spending in New York. And while most of the services funded with these grants are not useless, few are essential, or incapable of being funded locally if thought to be worth the money. Some parts of the state may be treated unfairly in the distribution of these grants, but the effect of this is not likely to be siginificant either in terms of the taxes they have to pay or the services most of them receive. The real importance of member items (and, at the federal level, earmarks) is that this sideshow is virually the sole focus of most of our elected representatives. And, it is the sole focus of elections for state legislature and Congress.
Mike Following Yoda
|In August, I wrote an entry criticizing John McCain's flip-flop on the issue of Ethanol under the headline –
John McCain – Just Another Pol
This week's New York Magazine has Bloomberg doing the same –
"He even singled out John McCain, whom he generally respects, for abandoning his position against ethanol subsidies as he prepares to curry favor in 2008 with Iowa caucusgoers."
A Brief Note
|Back on April 29th, I made some observations concerning how the NYS budget process actually works, which seemed so ludicrous and absurd that some people thought I was making the whole thing up. As one can now see, this story in today’s (12/3/06) New York Times pretty much confirms the process I’d outlined.
In My Blog There is a Problem (or The Church of the Poisoned Mind)
|Before the release of the motion picture bearing his name, the character “Borat”, portrayed by British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, was most famous for a sequence on Cohen’s TV series, "Da Ali G Show", where, at an amateur night in a Country and Western bar, he performs a song where he advocates "Throw[ing] the Jew Down the Well’’ to an appreciative audience of rednecks.
In an interview in “Rolling Stone”, Cohen, a Sabbath-observing Jew, admitted that the audience may not have been anti-Semitic, but merely humored the character to be polite. He nonetheless pointed out that such polite indifference and conformity to anti-Semitism led to the Holocaust.
Taking The 51st Shot
|About ten years ago I happened to be one of three guests on a television show, along with present NYC councilmember Charles Barron and activist-attorney Colin Moore. The name of the show was “Caribbean Roundtable”, one of the better Caribbean-American talk shows still around. The hostess (Verna Smith) was a Jamaican-born journalist, who just happened to be quite active in Brooklyn’s Caribbean-American political circles; thus her questions were not of the powder-puff variety; not at all, since Verna can be a tough interviewer at times. On Sunday mornings, you can usually catch the show on Cablevision, and at other times on Time Warner cable. The gist of that show was basically an analysis of the results of the 1997 Democratic primary elections, which had taken place a few weeks before. Just before the show ended, the topic of “police brutality” crept in. Given that Barron and Moore brought to the table, tremendous knowledge in this area, they immediately jumped on the issue, offering some insight into the whys and wherefores. When it was my turn to speak, I got a few things off my chest that I had wanted to say publicly for quite some time. My opinions riled both guests. I wasn’t really surprised. The events of last weekend brought back memories of that roundtable exchange. I will get to that in a second.
Pointless Counterpoint
|Submitted for your consideration, dueling headlines:
“Court Dismisses Suit Against Plan for Pier Parks” – Brooklyn Heights Press (11/30/06)
“Park backers lose waterfront lawsuit” – Brooklyn Papers (12/2/06)
So who’s right? Did those who want the park win, or those who want to stop it?
As I’ve documented, it’s been quite clear for well over a decade that the only way a Park was ever going to be built on the Brooklyn Heights Waterfront was if it were self supporting. The lawsuit mentioned in the headlines sought to block the use of the revenue sources (including apartment buildings) proposed in the plan to create “Brooklyn Bridge Park”. Those behind the lawsuit, brought by the Orwellingly named “Brooklyn Bridge Park Defense Fund”, include the Willowtown Association, which has opposed any park on the Brooklyn Bridge Waterfront, long before housing became part of the plan, because it would lead to people from outside the neighborhood walking past their homes (residents of Joralemon Street actually hung up signs saying "Don't Tread On Me"). Also in the opposition is Roy Sloane of the Cobble Hill Association, who has stated quite clearly that he opposes the building of any park except on his terms, which are fiscally insupportable. Thus, those who supported the lawsuit, including publisher Ed Weintrob of the Brooklyn Paper (a resident of Willowtown), can only be termed park opponents, since they oppose the only plan which has any hope of bringing a park to fruition.
“The popularity and importance of the political blogger”
|“Some bloggers just rattle…the anonymity of the computer gives them free reign to incessently idle about with their conspiracy theories and salacious gossip. GM didn't do that; he backed up the reasons for his statements (which is more than we can say for many bloggers). You may not have agreed with what he said … but the mere fact that we came back and engaged him – and ourselves – is a testament to the power of his words, and the popularity and importance of the political blogger."-Black Pride (5/23/06)
“The Hippocratic Oath begins with the injunction “First do no harm”. It is not a high standard to meet, but it is one at which the WFP has utterly failed. It is time to put the patient out of its misery and pull the plug on the WFP. Vote for Spitzer for Governor on the Democratic line”- Gatemouth (10/28/06)
Savings and Investment to the Dustbin of History
|Well Rumsfeld is finally gone, pushed out for being half right. He was right about how easy it would be to topple Sadaam, but wrong about how easy it would be to get Iraq up and running and get out. Too bad he wasn't completely wrong. By the time we took over the place, we'd have had enough troops, and we might be out by now. There is no such accountability in the economic policy realm, where interest trumps ideology and the same mantras are repeated regardless of the evidence. For example, what about all those Republicans who claimed that cutting taxes on investment returns, but eliminating tax breaks for consumer debt, would encourage savings and investment?
Talking Back
|Any month in which Chris Owens gets to issue a mission statement for a new political movement, or Charles Barron is given the opportunity to sound off about an unarmed black man hit by 50 bullets on the night before his wedding (while the shock of the underlying incident stuns Gatemouth into a failure to respond to his ill-chosen words), is bound to produce its share of unique rhetoric. Add to that the fact that most of November is devoted to post-election recrimination and spin, and the opportunities to pick low hanging fruit off the vine increase exponentially.
This is by no means a selection of the most ludicrous quotes in a month where the cup hath runneth over; it’s just a sampling of a few favorites, with some notes: