New York note

 

The second Campaign for Fiscal Equity March on Albany, in October 2016, via Schott Foundation—that's Jackson in the T-shirt in front, characteristically making sure somebody else gets time at stage center. Via Schott Foundation.

Something I didn't know about my state senator, Robert Jackson, who I've been cheerfully voting for two or three seasons and who finally won in 2018—actually a few things, thanks to Wikipedia, none of which played much of a role in his campaigns, that although he is Black, his father was a Chinese immigrant called Eddie Chu, and that he's a Muslim, and during his time on the City Council from 2002 to 2013, which is when I first heard of him, he was the only Muslim there. 

But before that, back in 1993, when I was living in Brooklyn, he was president of a local Manhattan community school board frustrated by the unfairness of the way New York City schools in the state budgeting process, and joined together with the board's lawyer, Michael Rebell, to found an organization known as the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, which sues the state on the grounds that it was violating its own constitution, which guarantees that

The legislature shall provide for the maintenance and support of a system of free common schools, wherein all the children of this state may be educated.

They won the principle in the Court of Appeals in 1995, with a ruling that the constitution does indeed require the state to provide every child with a "sound basic education",  during which Rebell became moderately famous and Jackson did not. And another in 2001 (by which time we were living in Manhattan, with two kids in the school system) that the school funding system was itself unconstitutional, affirmed on then-governor Pataki's appeal in 2003, but even after a 150-mile march to Albany (which I certainly remember hearing about, but I don't remember hearing Jackson's name in connection with the march, which he in fact led), but still the state did nothing. in 2005 Judge Leland DeGrasse tried to make it clearer: the state owed the city $5.6 billion in annual operating aid and an additional $9.2 billion over five years in capital spending for building, renovating, and leasing facilities; the state did nothing. In 2006 the legislature finally did pass the capital spending, but failed to pass the annual operating aid even when the Court of Appeals reduced the demand to a  suggestion, for $2 billion a year, and the effort to comply through a succession of Democratic governors, Spitzer, Patterson, and Cuomo, faltered after the 2008 financial crisis and seemed to have permanently died.

Until now, you see, when the state senate has finally achieved a veto-proof Democratic majority, and Cuomo can no longer play the houses against each other, and with the help of federal funding under the Biden American Rescue the plan is finally fully funded, with Senator Jackson's vote, of course, and he's finally accepting some congratulations:

We did it!

Today is a historic day; the NYS legislator has finally agreed to phase in the FULL Foundation Aid owed to NY's schools!

After three decades, I can finally say that we walk the walk and won for our children! pic.twitter.com/VhHCMvxbl6

— Robert Jackson (@SenatorRJackson) April 6, 2021

I just think this is so cool, as an example of what's happening right now. That arc was getting so long!

Busted

Gang signals? Cuomo and Silver last June, via Politics on the Hudson.

Photo caption in the Times on the arrest of Speaker Shelly Silver:

The investigation of Sheldon Silver, right, the speaker of the New York State Assembly, picked up speed after Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in March abruptly shut down an anticorruption commission.

The Times and WNYC have kept repeating similar sentences in various versions of the story all morning. They are both not saying this, but are kind of forcing us to say it with this continual association of Cuomo's shutting down the Morland Commission and the feds doubling down on their investigations of Silver: that Cuomo closed the commission at least in part because it was looking too closely at Shelly.

The allegations are to my mind shocking enough:

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.

Sharia lonesome tonight?

So Newt Gingrich, no doubt mainly to distract us from the increasing evidence of his complicity with a dark cabal of Belgian colonialist terrorists, has come out to say that he, like so many Americans,  is absolutely terrified that our great American legal system is about to be taken over by Islamic jurisprudence. So is that surprising, that a former Republican politician pretending to be running for president as a gimmick for his book tour/reality show projects, and suddenly finding that he is being taken seriously in certain gullible quarters in Iowa and the press box, should be tapping into our deepest irrational fears?

Um, no. It is not surprising at all. It is precisely what one would expect. What I have trouble wrapping my head around is the question of what, exactly, we are scared of. What is supposed to happen? When a group of those Stealth Jihadis sets about imposing Sharia law on an unsuspecting population, how does it work?