Monday, September 8, 2014

New York note

Sledding on cardboard in Upper West Trumplandia, on the hill between chain-link fences that separates Riverside Park South from the world's saddest-looking unaffordable housing project.
Tomorrow is Primary Tuesday in New York. Tonight is the Mid-Autumn Festival in the ancient Chinese calendar, and we celebrate, so I just want to pause to remind New York Democrats to vote tomorrow, preferably to vote for Zephyr Teachout and Timothy Wu for governor and lieutenant governor respectively.

Endorsing Wu in his primary against Kathy Hochul, the Times remarked that his inexperience wasn't as important as Teachout's because the lieutenant governor doesn't actually have to do anything, which I thought was poorly thought out: the lieutenant governor's only constitutional function is to become governor should anything god forbid happen to the governor, like if Andrew Cuomo comes under indictment, so hmm. So you should just make up your mind that experience isn't everything.

There's also a lot of rather exciting action in the state Senate primaries, where those traitor Democrats who went into coalition with Republicans two years ago to give the GOP a majority (with Cuomo's evident blessing) may be facing serious opposition. In some of the Bronx, voters from the Democratic wing of the Democratic party can vote for Oliver Koppell against Jeff Klein, and in parts of Queens, for my favorite candidate in last year's mayoral election, John Liu, against Tony Avella.

I will probably vote for a bit of an insurgency here in Manhattan against incumbent Adriano Espaillat, who seems to think of the Senate as a sort of rest and recreation venue between bouts of trying and failing to push Charlie Rangel out of Congress (Espaillat's attendance record was the second worst in the state Senate in 2012, first worst in 2013-2014), in favor of the good old leftist councilman Robert Jackson, though everybody from Congressman Jerry Nadler to Mayor de Blasio is asking me not to. Before I absolutely make up my mind I'll watch last week's debate.

Anyway, later.

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