If in New York City education the signposts to the future are easy to see, that is even more the cast in health care, where an institutional collapse is slowly grinding on even as health care spending escalates. For the shrinking number of people with access to benefits paid for by others, ever more services of greater or lesser value continue to be provided at greater and greater cost — to someone else — with no end in sight. Meanwhile, a larger and larger number of people are entitled to less and less. The one thing that could head off a retirement crisis caused by rising lifespans, moreover, is that rising obesity and diabetes could slash the age of death or disability of those without the health insurance benefits to combat it. Average American life expectancy could fall as a result, the way it did in the former Soviet Union after its institutions collapsed, unless the increasingly long lives to those with the good deals are enough to bring up the average compared with the majority. Moreover, those facing pre-mature disability are, by and large, also those without access to retirement benefits other than an oversubscribed Social Security system. So we could have two classes — one that has to go on working though unable, and one that is able to work but doesn’t have to, and gets to live on while not working, and consuming lots of health care, for a very long time.
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Powell/Gatemouth Poetry Slam (With Special Guest Star Amiri Baraka)
|You have to hand it to Hip-Hop Philosopher and Congressional candidate Kevin Powell; he’s got two great virtues that serve him both as writer and political candidate. The first is an inability to blush, and the second is a boundless imagination.
FROM HYSTERICAL FRICTION TO HISTORICAL FICTION (an overly long and thoroughly botched token of sincerity)
|“So how did the DNC choose to recognize the growth of local blogs "in line with Governor Dean's 50-state strategy"? Mostly, they got it right. At least in 45 states. But they blew it big time in five others, dissing some of the best state bloggers in the country.
In New York, the excellent Albany Project was passed over for a site focused on NY City founded by the Politico's Ben Smith. Go to that site, and it's nothing but press releases. [Update: That press release page is a lower-level page, which I got when I clicked on the "blog" link in their navigation. They have real writers on their home page.]”
Daily Gotham First Annual Circle Jerk – All Dialogue Guaranteed (almost) Verbatim
|QB VII (EPISODE II OF THE JOE BRUNO DEMOCRATS)
Submitted by Gatemouth on 27 October 2007 – 6:20pm.
[Ed. note MB: Edited for clarity, politeness (Ed. note GM: this means he took out any comment about his friends he didn't like) and basic HTML standards compliance (Ed. note GM: this means he interjected nasty remarks about anything he didn't agree with)]
[2nd Ed. note: Good grief, enough of the drama already. Post has been removed by the author, and replaced with a link to the unedited piece on Room Eight, which you can access by clicking here.]
QB VII (Episode II of “The Joe Bruno Democrats”)
|[I know I promised that my next piece in this series would be about erstwhile Congressional candidate and unlikely left-hero, Steve Harrison, but my “The Daily Gotham” (TDG) posting of Part One (wherein I excoriate Joe Bruno, and outline his modis operandi in unsparing detail, like practically no one has ever done before), was answered almost solely with accusations that the entire series was a contract on behalf of Harrison’s likely primary opponent, Dominick Recchia.
#100
|“The Green Party consistently nominates really interesting eccentrics for Governor (Malachy McCourt won my heart when he did a one man show as George Washington Plunkett; Stanley Aronowitz is married to the World's Greatest Left Wing Writer; Al Lewis was Grandpa and, perhaps more importantly, Leo Schnauzer)”
Gatemouth 11/6/06
I’m going to have to stop invoking the names of my inspirations as a writer. One too many of my citations to Michael Kinsley's genius immediately preceded the announcement that he required brain surgery. Then, on August 30, in response to the news that Congressional candidate Chris Owens recorded an anti-war song, I listened to the supernal piece of crap and then wrote a review of it in the style of my favorite rock-crit, Robert Christgau (also a pretty fair political pundit in his own right). On September 1, Christgau was fired from his position as Music Editor of the Village Voice.
Tricks Not Treats From Some Republicans
|As a pre- Halloween gift to the gullible, Urban Elephants posted a third hand report claiming that dead people are voting for Democrats in New York.
Via Instapundit, just in time for Halloween, despite Republican John Ravitz serving as head of the Board of Elections, it seems that the dead still vote frequently here in NYC– generally for Democrats.
So what will it take to clean up the New York voter database once and for all?
Robert Novak – Wrong Again!
|Saturday’s Robert Novak column included this whopper –
“Recipients of mail from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) were surprised this past week to receive a fund-raising appeal signed by former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright.”
“Secretaries of state, by tradition, stay away from partisan politics while in office. Former holders of the position generally follow the same practice. Nobody can remember fund-raising solicitations from Colin Powell, Warren Christopher or Henry Kissinger.”
I Guess It All Depends Upon Your Definition of “Progress”
|The number of phone calls I’ve gotten urging me to support Chris Owens for Congress because he is the most “progressive” candidate, has gotten me thinking (always a dangerous activity). The term “progressive” is obviously meant as a shorthand, but shorthand for what? Earlier this year, WFP Executive Director Dan Cantor said Eliot Spitzer would be the most progressive Democratic governor since FDR, ignoring the fact that Roosevelt’s immediate successor, Herbert Lehman, was clearly more progressive than FDR. Moreover, depending upon how the word is defined, Spitzer might also be said to be less “Progressive” than Charles Poletti, Averill Harriman, Hugh Carey and Mario Cuomo. Mario’s WORDS were certainly more progressive than Spitzer’s; Mario’s DEEDS (to the extent he ever did anything but blame his complete lack of accomplishments on a Republican Senate he refused to expend any of his political capital, monetary or otherwise, on trying to alter for the better) may not so qualify.
The Sincerest Form of Flattery
|"A real discussion of Manton would be instructive; he took a party from self inflicted extremis and in two decades turned it into the ruling power in the City, while successfully transitioning it through tumultuous demographic changes. I didn’t care for the man’s politics or his tactics, but it is hard to think of him as anything but a giant. "
Gatemouth; posted on "Daily Politics" at 11:20 PM on 7/23/06
"Can there be another Tom Manton? He brought his county organization back from the wreckage of the Manes era, managing to impose something resembling unity on a wounded organization. And he did it in the face of massive change, staying ahead of Queens’ radically changing demographics by supporting candidates from emerging ethic(sic)communities."