Nearly a month later than normal, this Department begins its review of NYC’s November election results with a look at Bay Ridge.

On December 28, the NYC Board of Elections finally certified and published the returns for the election held on November 6^th, only 27 days after its legal deadline to do so.

I was having such a good time at Lori Knipel's holiday party, to which virtually every candidate for City wide office had made a pilgrimage (I'd seen three mayoral candidate by the time I left, and there was still more than an hour to go), but, against my better judgment, I left to make the trek to Italian Williamsburg's

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.

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.