Good News!

Good cruise ship turning takes time—usually. Via.

1. You know how Bill de Blasio ran for the New York City mayoralty on a promise to do something about the "inequality crisis" as he called it in the 2013 campaign:

“Right now, as we’re gathered this morning, one New Yorker is rushing past an attended desk in the lobby of a majestic skyscraper,” de Blasio began. “A few miles away, a single mother is also rushing, holding her two young children by the hands as they hurry down the steps of the subway entrance…” The first New Yorker is thinking about how to profit from the bull market in stocks; the second is trying to figure out how to pay her grocery bill. 

And in the intervening years since he's been mayor every once in a while somebody pipes up to announce that he failed to do anything: from the not-at-all biased Manhattan Institute in 2017 to the not-at-all biased Manhattan Institute in late 2020. Well, I guess it wasn't that widespread. Still, de Blasio himself admitted just last month that he hadn't solved inequality in New York yet, in spite of having had eight whole years to do it.

On Wednesday, with his time in City Hall approaching its end, de Blasio sounded far less idealistic and admitted that his lofty promise to fix New York’s economic disparities remains unfulfilled.

“I don’t think anybody — literally, I don’t know a single person — who thought we were going to solve all the inequalities of society in four years or eight years,” he said in his daily morning briefing.

What a quitter, right? Not one single person? What about all his supporters at, you know, the Manhattan Institute, who were totally expecting him to fix inequality and so disappointed at his failure?

Anyway, guess what?

An education in itself

Question to Radio Yerevan: Did Elizabeth Warren use to agree with Betsy DeVos?

Answer: Oh boy don't get me started...

W.C. Fields in Leo McCarey's Six of a Kind (1934), and the entire thing (just over an hour and featuring Charlie Ruggles and George Burns and Gracie Allen) is watchable here. H/t Professor Fate!

Shorter David Brooks, "When Elizabeth Warren Agreed With Betsy DeVos", New York Times, 3 September 2019:

We should be deeply concerned about Senator Elizabeth Warren, once a Republican law professor with startlingly heterodox and innovative views who wrote an entire book on the problem of women being forced to work outside the home, or not, as the case may be, not that there's anything wrong with whichever one of them she was against, and advocating school vouchers as the solution, just like President Trump's heterodox and innovative secretary of education. Now, suspiciously just in time for the presidential primary campaign where she is running as a Democrat, she's suddenly turned around and started blaming everything on the bankers instead!

Well, maybe not exactly. I'm not certain when she became a registered Democrat (sometime after 1993 or so), but as one of the nation's foremost and most innovative experts in bankruptcy law she has had the bankers in her sights for a very long time; she just used to think ("capitalist to her bones") members of the Republican party were allowed to feel that way, when it was associated with nice little George Bailey Main Street banks as opposed to the behemoths that gave us 2008:

For the Record: Clown Car

Image by Daria Nabok/Coub.

You're saying none of the other candidates thought of "putting working people first"? That's what makes you special?

I've voted for you every chance I got, in three elections and a primary or two, and never regretted it, but I can't understand what you think you're doing.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) May 16, 2019

Welcome to the clown car Mayor de Blasio. Sure wish I had some idea what you were accomplishing.

With respect and baffled affection,
I remain,
Yours,
Etc.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) May 16, 2019

Breakup

Image by Justin Metz via The Economist.

Silliest response to the Amazon decision to give up on their Long Island City project was, I'm sorry to say, from Senator Professor Warren:

.@Amazon – one of the wealthiest companies on the planet – just walked away from billions in taxpayer bribes, all because some elected officials in New York aren't sucking up to them enough. How long will we allow giant corporations to hold our democracy hostage? https://t.co/O9pz7en43B

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) February 14, 2019

So now you're going to complain about corporations not taking bribes? There's just no satisfying you!

That said, it looks like the decision was for all the right reasons, and speaking as a New Yorker I'm feeling more and more not sorry it's ended this way:

New York note: In defense of Bill de Blasio, don't @ me

Photo by Yeong-Ung Yang/New York Times.

My distinguished tweep Nathan Newman lays out a reasonable schema for how we should feel about the deal making Long Island City, Queens, one of Amazon's new HQ2s:

Two things can be true. (1) Allowing cities to bid for jobs should be illegal since lets companies retain large chunk of value they create in those communities, (2) There is still significant value left over in communities in many cases, so bidding for those jobs is rational.

— Nathan Newman 🧭🌹 (@nathansnewman) November 14, 2018

That is, it's a horrible feature of late capitalism that giant companies should be playing off localities against each other in a race to the bottom in which they award the prize to the one that allows them to exploit it the most, but given that that's the way it is, and the feds won't do anything to stop it, local authorities would be irresponsible not to see if they can get something out of it for their citizens.

I've been listening to Mayor de Blasio on WNYC radio explaining the Amazon deal under questioning from Brian Lehrer and a couple of callers-in, and he's obviously kind of defensive, under intensive criticism from everybody from Alexandria Ocasio-Córtez and Jumaane Williams to Rod Dreher and the National Review, as Roy points out at the subscription site, but I'm inclined, on the whole, to think he may have done this thing right, or at the least that he's not just kidding when he presents himself as a kind of Mitterand figure:

Political hypochondriacs: Optimism report

Roller Coaster, by gechalx/DeviantArt. Nowhere to go but up! What's that you say?

It's so weird how we live now, like political hypochondriacs, constantly checking the national temperature for clues to how sick we are.

And that goes for Team Optimist as well as the despairing. I'm really pumped because yesterday was a Good Day, where Dutch voters decisively rejected fascism, I think, and Judge Derrick Watson in Honolulu and Judge Theodore Chuang in Greenbelt, Maryland both concluded in separate cases that President Trump's "travel order" is meant as the fulfillment of his often repeated campaign promises of a "complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering this country until our country's representatives can figure out just what in the hell is going on."

Place in the Sun

Concept art for Blade Runner (1982) by Syd Mead, the darkest movie I've ever seen, and I don't mean in spirit, I mean in inadequate lighting. I literally couldn't follow the plot, and I still don't really know what happened.

In a way, most of the miraculous Supreme Court decisions of this session weren't that miraculous: marriage equality was happening in any case, whether the Court managed to participate in it or not, and the Kennedy ruling was more a recognition of reality than a breaking of new ground; and the conservative attacks on the Arizona Redistricting Commission and the Affordable Care Act (the Moops-invading-Spain case) were so deeply stupid that it would have been really frightening if they had succeeded.

That's not so true of Texas Department of Housing v. Inclusive Communities Project, which we talked about last January, in which the Texas DOH appealed the decision of a federal district court against policies found to be furthering racial segregation, on the grounds that they weren't doing it on purpose ("Now that racism no longer exists, segregation can only happen by chance; nothing we can do about it"). The correct answer is that the Texas DOH policy (not issuing federal tax credits to landlords in the Dallas suburbs who wanted to rent to low-income and mostly African-American tenants, but only to landlords in the city itself) had a disparate impact on the African-American community and is thus illegal under the Fair Housing Act of 1968; but this kind of argument has fallen on hard times in recent years. In education it's virtually dead, as school systems South and North continue to resegregate and state authorities continue to seek ways to favor charter schools for black kids and private (often religious) schools for white ones. There was a real fear that the Court would be killing it in housing law as well, as it almost did in a couple of cases of 2012 (the parties settled under pressure from the Obama administration).

Anyway, it didn't happen; Kennedy's opinion in the Texas case ruled the right way, and as the Times notes in an editorial today, we're already starting to see some positive action:

Benevolent Despots

Bill de Blasio and Chirlane McCray arriving for the service. How the rank and file really feel when the PBA bosses aren't choreographing them. Photo by Mike Segar/Reuters in the Daily News.

I didn't fully get the picture that the cops turning their backs on Mayor de Blasio as he gave a eulogy for murdered officer Rafael Ramos yesterday were outdoors performing for the cameras, out of the mayor's sight, while inside the church things were different, as they should be:

Secret policy department

Photo via MobShield.

One of the most gratuitously bad policies anywhere in the Bloomberg administration was the one relating to students' use of cell phones in public schools, and I'm glad to hear that it is being revised under the Soviet dictatorship of Bill De Blasio and his educational minion Chancellor Fariña. But the message I've just received from Young Harry's school is not very encouraging, nor does it suggest the Most Transparent Administration in History:

Snow point in pretending

Like an overeager surfer leaping on a wave that isn't really there, the National Review's Rich Lowry in his Kips Bay office couldn't wait for the snow disaster to start before he started denouncing it, to demonstrate that our new bloodthirsty Bolshevik mayor is also incompetent, issuing a plaintive tweet as the traffic inconsiderately continued to flow into the evening rush hour:

None Durst Call it Treason

Apparently New York's crypto-Communist mayor-elect Bill de Blasio divulged his secret intentions of collectivizing the real estate market, some time before the election, according to the New York Post:

“Everything you heard about me is true. . . I am not a free-marketeer. . . I believe in the heavy hand of government,” de Blasio stated matter-of-factly during an hour-long presentation to some of the city’s biggest real-estate developers.

Author of the story is Fox Business reporter Charlie Gasparino, who also put it on the air yesterday. No source of any kind is cited other than Charlie's personal contacts who witnessed the remarkable performance.

Of course it stands to reason that if de Blasio wanted to reveal the terrifying truth to some group of people who could be trusted to understand and keep it quiet until after the election he would choose

 Jared Kushner of Kushner Properties, Stephen Green of SL Green Realty, Douglas Durst of the Durst Organization and Jeff Blau, chief executive of the Related Companies. Scott Rechler of RXR Realty... hosted the event at his offices.

Because those guys are naturally so sympathetic to Leninist attacks on private property rights. On Gasparino's general reliability, I'll let the trade speak:

@CGasparino Might be the last time you got one right, as well.
— Richard Melville (@richmelville) November 1, 2013

Cheap shots, hot shots, screen shots

I'm not even going to try to explain what I was doing on the above web page except to say that it was a totally legitimate part of my job, for which I get sort of paid, unlike these Blogspot effusions, to find out something about one of the Xu Xiaoping award winners  (I was actually trying to find out where a particular essay had been published, not whether it got a prize).  But I loved the somehow Russian pathos of that banner ad.

Mark Halperin below the fold, and much, much more!

How we roll in NYC

How we roll in Vienna? Wiener dackerl. Via.

Anthony Weiner keeps sending me emails informing me "how we roll in New York City", and asking for money. I feel like replying, Anthony, you may roll, but you do not rock. Seriously, I cannot understand what he thinks he is accomplishing, unless his secret aim is to elect Christine Quinn, the stop-'n'-frisk candidate, by hiving off support for the progressives. Come to think of it, perhaps that is the purpose: maybe it's all Bloomberg's plan.

He has, however, explained that his nom de sexte, Carlos Danger, is not meant as an affront to the Spanish-speaking community—

“It was a joke in my personal life between me and one person,” he responded.

“I’m not gonna comment on anything about the information that that person has chosen to release,” he added. “They can do whatever they want. They can try to harm me in any way that they want. I’m moving forward talking about the people of the City of New York.”

Weiner has, meanwhile, received a celebrity endorsement from Jimmy McMillan, late of the The Rent is Too Damn High Party, who may be able to provide the nervous candidate with some much needed go-with-the-flow attitude. He certainly rolls and rocks both.

Via Politico.

My own candidate looks more and more like Bill de Blasio, recently blessed with an endorsement from a celebrity of his own, the radical hero and musical icon Harry Belafonte (who is in turn beset by a peculiar quarrel with an oddly antagonistic young person called Sean Carter, whom you may know more about than I do—I can't keep up with all this, but if young Sean endorses Weiner it will be clearer).

De Blasio and Belafonte. From The Grio (MSNBC).