Collective Effervescence

 

Margaret Mead Green in Theodore Roosevelt Park, Manhattan, with the new Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation looming in the background. Photo by Alvaro Keding for American Museum of Natural History.

Sunday morning, after the spectacular finish of the NBA final, I was in the greenmarket outside the American Museum of Natural History, being an out-there citizen for once and helping to pass out fliers for one of the candidates in the Democratic primary for New York's 12th congressional district, Micah Lasher, who I regard as the natural successor of the departing Jerry Nadler, if you need to know—the museum entrance on that block of Columbus Avenue is the way to an early voting location, so the point wasn't so much to give them another flier (incredible amounts of money are being spent in this campaign, and we've been getting five or ten of them every day in our mailboxes) as just to remind them of our candidate's name, in case they were there to vote. 

Lasher and Nadler were there, a block or so away from my station, and I went down there to be introduced and shake their hands. When I got back, there was a Black lady sitting on one of the park benches outside the museum, taking advantage as I was of a bit of shade from the trees in the Margaret Mead Green (a little meadow park where we used to wander freely before it got fenced in some years ago, making room for the bright white shotcrete wildness of the Gilder Center), and talking with great animation on her cell phone about what a great day it was and how she just had to get outdoors and into the atmosphere of the city, and I thought how wild it was that I knew exactly what she was talking about—the Knicks—and felt similar. Then a little old white lady in a respirator mask came and sat down beside her and they began to engage in more Knicks conversation, which got into still more metaphysical territory with the discussion of civic unity and the sense of some kind of redemption. And lastly she went off to finish her shopping and the original lady was greeted by a couple of friends talking about plans for the day; one of them, a big bald Black man with a gray beard and extraordinary resonant voice, was recognizably the wonderful writer Jelani Cobb. I, standing there with my fliers, in a green shirt in the sea of orange and blue, on a different errand, was shy enough already, and this made me shyer, so I kept quiet and focused on the customers, who were hardly making eye contact, though every once in a while one of them would give me a thumb up or whisper, "Already voted for him," but I certainly did all the same feel myself to be a full participant in the Jalen Brunson communion that was bringing us all together, what Émile Durkheim called the "opposite of grief", a "collective effervescence" that can help to restore social solidarity following a collapse. 

Bye, Elise

 

21st congressional district, New York, via Wikipedia,

Some gossip, mostly from a caller from New York's 21st congressional district, on the radio WNYC Brian Lehrer, unable to link at the moment), about Rep. Elise Stefanik: that she's never liked the district, the state's largest geographically and most sparsely populated and of course poorest, if only because it's too cold, not too mention plagued by awful unemployment and alcohol and drug abuse. She's not even from there but from Albany; she's a carpetbagger, claiming residence on the basis of what upstaters call a "camp", or summer place, owned by her parents. She hasn't done a town hall for six years, and in what the local press categorized as a "rare visit" for a ceremonial function in August, to Plattsburgh, the booing stopped her from addressing a crowd consisting mostly of anti-Trumpers:

"Well, Elise has not shown up in our district for months and months," said protester Mavis Agnew. "She won't hold a town hall, she won't take questions. She's never in her office. People show up at her office constantly, door's closed. Her representatives, her employees won't talk to her... So this was her first appearance, the first opportunity we had to let her know we're unhappy."

She got a more positive response in February, but that was what was advertised as her farewell tour, when she was expecting to leave the House for a stint as US ambassador. Then, when Trump ordered her to stay in Congress instead to protect his razor-thin majority, a visit to Saranac Lake celebrating a federal grant for the firehouse (in an appropriation signed by President Biden) was received with "mixed emotions".

The other thing is, the district isn't inevitably Republican; it was held by Democrat Bill Owens, defeating a GOP torn by culture war issues, from 2009 through 2015, and voted for Obama twice, along with Schumer and Gillibrand (whose 20th congressional district overlapped a good deal with where the 21st is today).

Her dropping out of the governor's race is pretty easy to understand: she was certain to win the Republican primary, but very likely to lose the general election, and certain to lose, at least as long as Trump refused to endorse her, which he did for his own Trumpy reasons; perhaps he was mad at her for even considering giving up the congressional seat, like she valued herself more than him. You can see how that would be hard for him to take. Whatever happens to her next, she's certainly an instance of the Trump Curse. I"m sure she'd love a job in Washington, but I really feel she's headed for being relatively alive on the proverbial Farm Upstate. 

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

New York Note

 Happy Election Day! I don't feel like I need to give you a lot of advice about the candidates in New York City, but I thought it might be useful (if late, considering how many people have already voted by now) to say a couple of things about the six ballot propositions, for which the argumentation on both sides, seems to be just diabolically badly written.

Proposal #1: Amendment to Allow an Olympic Sports Complex on Forest Preserve 

This state question is really irritating, because voting for it will ratify an old crime, but voting against it will make it impossible to do anything about it. The crime was the development for the Mount Van Hoevenberg Winter Sports Complex for the Winter Olympics in 1932 and 1980 and other events, in particular the bobsled run, on land that was constitutionally required to be kept "forever wild". You can't actually "allow" it, regardless of what the language of the amendment may say; that train left the station a long time ago. 

What the amendment does, rather, is to say "It's not illegal any more!" Voters are offering them a pardon. Instead there is some restitution; a package of 2,500 acres of Adirondacks land that will remain forever wild in place of the original (which is frankly not that wild, I think—it's been settled, however sparsely, for centuries, and that's just the white people). 

But given that the land in question is already lost, it's probably the best that can be done. I'll vote yes.

Proposal #2: Fast Track Affordable Housing to Build More Across the City

Three proposed revisions to the city charter have to do with affordable housing; they were the creations of a Charter Revision Commission appointed by Mayor Eric Adams, they're ostensibly aimed at  breaking down some of the bureaucratic barriers, but some have also suspected some kind of plot on the mayor's part to grab some of the City Council's power. The pleasant thing about that is that Eric Adams is definitely not going to be the next New York mayor, so we can look at the proposals on their own merits.

Proposal #2 creates two  new processes for fast-tracking affordable housing projects; one keyed to publicly financed projects, and the other to the 12 community board districts with the lowest rates of affordable housing development over the past five years. Both remove City Council approval from the list of requirements, which may sound undemocratic, but the community board review might be thought more Democratic. After long hesitation, I'm inclining to Yes.

Proposal #3: Simplify Review of Modest Housing and Infrastructure Projects

This fast-tracks small-scale projects, also subject to community board review but not City Council. Again, Yes.

Proposal #4: Establish an Affordable Housing Appeals Board with Council, Borough and Citywide Representation

This is the most charged. Projects that are not fast-tracked will be approved, as always, by the City Council, with the member whose district is affected enjoying a kind of courtesy veto right. Whenever the City Council rejects an affordable housing project, though, the decision can be appealed to a board consisting of three people: the Council Speaker, the borough president, and the mayor. There is a question of NIMBYism operating here, and maybe a question of particular Council members. I love my own member, Gale Brewer, known as a staunch progressive and have loved her for years, for various reasons, but it's come to my attention that there has not been one single affordable unit built in my Upper West Side neighborhood, even as awful luxury condos spring up along Broadway without pause, and I don't think that's right. Voting Yes on this one too. (Non-billionaire Greenwich Village residents might like to think about this too.)

Proposal #5: Create a Digital City Map to Modernize City Operations

Are you kidding? Of course!

Proposal #6: Move Local Elections to Presidential Election Years

Why do we have to hold our mayoral election in the year before a presidential election? It's said that holding an election when nothing else is going on decreases turnout, but this is just an awfully funny year for worrying about that, because the turnout is already exceptionally high (factors are the horror at Donald Trump and his terrible presidency looming over the Republican Party and Zohran Mamdani and his extraordinarily attractive mayoral candidacy lighting up the Democrats in two different directions.

On the other hand, the small number of contests in an odd-numbered year, in Virginia, New Jersey, and New York City, attracts a tremendous amount of attention from the punditry to issues, ours, that don't always get a lot of attention, and what they represent for the current state of party politics.

Also, nobody's explaining how it's done: do all the City Council members just get their terms cut short by a year in 2028? 

So I'm actually voting No on this one.

Other than that:

Manhattan District Attorney (a state office):

Alvin Bragg, the only prosecutor who has ever gotten a criminal conviction against Donald J. Trump, 34 of them in fact.  He has also implemented bail reform with extremely good results, defeating the fear that letting more defendants off cash bail would lead to rises in crime rates, which has driven the Republicans to insanity (even as the city reaches historic lows in violent crime, they can't stop lying about it). There's a slightly mysterious candidate, Diana Florence, under the label A Safer Manhattan, and she has a gigantic advertising budget—one of her things has been to take over the marquee of the Beacon Theater (the venue for many high-end comedians and beloved rock revival tours, Bob Dylan was there not long ago)—I think there's something suspicious about her, but I'm hopeful it won't matter.

Other than that, there's not a lot I need to say, but for the sake of completeness:

Manhattan Borough President:

State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal

Mayor of New York City:

Zohran Mamdani!!!

City Comptroller:

Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine

Public Advocate:

incumbent Jumaane Williams

City Council Member:

incumbent Gale Brewer (running unopposed)

New York Note

@zohran_k_mamdani

Los neoyorquinos latinos son el corazón de esta ciudad y merecen un alcalde que les hable directamente. Este vídeo es un esfuerzo a presentar nuestra visión a la comunidad latina, para que podamos trabajar juntos para construir la ciudad que todos merecemos. Latino New Yorkers are the heart of this city — and they deserve a mayor who will speak to them directly. This video is an effort to introduce our vision to the Latino community, so we can work together to build the city we all deserve.

♬ original sound - Zohran Mamdani

This is pretty irritating, from the New York Times Editorial Board keeping its promise not to endorse any candidates in local elections any more:

Given those polls [showing Cuomo and Mamdani dominating over the other nine candidates] the crucial choice may end up being where, if at all, voters decide to rank Mr. Cuomo or Mr. Mamdani. We do not believe that Mr. Mamdani deserves a spot on New Yorkers’ ballots. His experience is too thin, and his agenda reads like a turbocharged version of Mr. de Blasio’s dismaying mayoralty. As for Mr. Cuomo, we have serious objections to his ethics and conduct, even if he would be better for New York’s future than Mr. Mamdani.

For any voters tempted to leave both off their ballots, it is important to understand that this decision would be tantamount to expressing no preference between the two. It is similar to voting for neither major-party candidate in a traditional election. 

"We refuse to choose, because it's beneath our awesome dignity, but if you follow our example you're a moral coward. Also, you should choose the ethically challenged Cuomo." As they make clear by devoting three paragraphs to Zohran Mamdani's shortcomings, condemning his ideology, policy ideas, and inexperience, and the way he reminds them of de Blasio, and just one to Andrew Cuomo's—the issue of his weird though probably not criminal mistreatment of women, over which he resigned from the state governorship four years ago, on the advice of this same editorial board, which now seems to think that was less serious a fault than advocating a minimum wage hike or free buses, as Mamdani does.

In the first place, the argument is bullshit. It's a rank-choice vote among 11 candidates, and it is not similar to voting for neither major-party candidate in a traditional election. With the much smaller (and better informed) turnout you expect in a primary, and only Democrats voting in New York's closed-primary system, it's easy to imagine one or two of the other candidates emerging if enough people decided not to rank the two frontrunners, and if the frontrunners are as bad as the board seems to think they are, that's what the board ought to call for, instead of using this backhanded technique of pushing us in one direction.

Then, Cuomo's ethical failings aren't limited to the #MeToo moments that helped to drive him out of office. In the middle of his first term as governor, in 2013, he named what's called a "Moreland Commission" in New York to fight corruption in state government, then abruptly shut it down halfway through its 18-month appointed lifetime. It later became apparent that Cuomo and his aides had never really allowed it to function, as The Times reported:

Literary Corner: Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa

by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States

It’s a disgrace. Mother Teresa
could not beat those charges.
These charges are rigged.
The whole thing is rigged.
The country's a mess
between the borders
and fake elections and
you have a trial like this,
where the judge is so
conflicted he can’t breathe.
He’s got to do his job.
It's not for me,
that I can tell you.
It's a disgrace. And I
mean that. Mother Teresa
could not beat these charges.
But we'll see. We'll see how we do.
It’s a very disgraceful situation.

Actually, I've been trying to give some thought to this—to the idea of Mother Teresa, learning that adult film star Randy Jackhammer has been pitching a story to the National Enquirer, "My One-Night Stand With Mother Teresa", recounting their years-ago tryst, with some vivid detail, even anatomical. Which did not happen, as far as I know, but if it did. 

Potemkin Prison Postscript

 

Photo by Todd Maisel/New York Daily News.

Just a note from Gothamist on that tour of the Riker's Island jail complex where the New York City Council Common Sense Caucus had such a swell time and councilmember Vicky Paladino got to play table tennis with an inmate: Deputy federal monitor Anna Freidberg asks us to note that on the same day, the jail had

29 uses of force, four stabbings, 12 detainee fights, seven fires, two allegations of staff and sexual assault. Freidberg also listed the contraband recovered, including: nine grams of cocaine, 2 grams of fentanyl, 21 grams of marijuana, 17 pills of Prozac, 18 pills of Ambien, 15 sharp objects and two iPhones.

Seven fires.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

Potemkin Prison

Empress Catherine II touring the newly conquered lands along the Dnieper in 1787 greeted by her "Amazonskaya Rota" (Company of Amazons) under Captain Elena Ivanovna Sarandova, from a 1911 military encyclopedia. The myths are really myths (Prince Potemkin's enemies claimed that Kherson and Sevastopol didn't really exist but were just false fronts erected on the roadside), but it's time we started facing the fact that the journey really was propaganda for an imperial seizure that maybe should never have taken place. Image via German Wikipedia.

New York note: on Rikers Island, the New York City jail complex in the East River where 6,000 criminal defendants await trial because they don't qualify to do that at home on their own recognizance, is a notorious horror, which works so badly that it routinely fails to get detainees not only to their medical appointments but even to their own court dates

Councilmembers said it is unclear exactly how many make their court appearances, since state court data conflicts with stats reported by the Department of Correction, but it appears that appearance rates for incarcerated people are plummeting, and are about the same for those who are free before trial.

One Rikers detainee told investigators that he was taken to a courthouse six times for hearings on his case, but was never brought to the actual courtroom to see a judge. Other detainees complained to their defense attorneys that they missed their court dates because correction officers failed to bring them and then falsely accused them of refusing to get on a bus to go.

and where seven inmates so far this year have died, and 19 last year, likely to be put into federal receivership later this year because, as a federal monitor said in a report issued last month, of a

You Had One Job Department

 

How bad is New York City's jail at Rikers Island? You've heard about the weapons, the drugs, the urine and feces and blood on the floors, the gangs in charge because the guards let them—with unlimited sick leave in their contracts, they don't even show up for work half the time. You've heard of the escalating violence, the inability to get inmates to medical care, the horrifying death rate (19 prisoners died there in 2022, in a population of around 6,000). Here's another one, from today's Gothamist—they now can't even reliably get inmates to their court dates:

According to the most recent Mayor’s Management Report, just 72.2% of those detained from September through December last year were brought to court on time. In the prior fiscal year, it was 79.1%, which was the lowest annual rate since at least before 1999. In years prior, this wasn’t a problem: As recently as the 2021 fiscal year, the percentage of detainees brought to court on time was 94.6%, and every year from 1999 to 2012 it was higher than 95%.

Detainees are typically woken up around 4 a.m. to be handcuffed, shackled and transported by bus from the island in the East River to one of the borough courthouses where their cases are heard. Detainees have about 12,000 court appearances each month, according to Department of Correction data.

People, that's the entire purpose of jail. Some judge at arraignment decides this person can't be trusted to show up for trial, or the person can't raise bail, so they park them in jail while the court system does whatever it does to follow the Sixth Amendment's promise of a speedy trial, though

The average length of stay in DOC custody has steadily gone up over the past three years, records posted online show. The average number was 125 days as of July this year, up from 105 in 2021, 90 in 2020, and 82 in 2019. Those figures include people who were in and out of custody within one day.  

And also includes some who have been there six, seven, ten years. 

Meanwhile, in the one state where serious bail reform has been implemented, New Jersey, since 2017,

The number of people imprisoned pre-trial on bail of $2,500 or less fell from more than 1,500 before the bail reform laws to just 14 people last year, according to the New Jersey court system. At the same time, the rate of people awaiting trial who commit additional “indictable offenses” has remained flat at 13.8%. And the appearance rate — how often people awaiting trial come back to court — increased slightly last year, from 90% in 2019 to 90.9% in 2020. 

People can get themselves to ther pretrial trial and trial appearances much more reliably than Rikers Island can (and there's no evidence, whatever Mayor Eric Adams may profess to believe, of a relationship between bail reform and the increase in crime rates of 2020-21). Rikers simply does not do anything worth doing. It must be closed.

New York Note

Image via NY1 television.

Ironic moment from last night's debate among the Democratic primary candidates in my idiotic new congressional district, New York's 12th, which has smashed together Manhattan's mutually hostile Upper East and Upper West Sides and forced two liberal titans, Carolyn Maloney and Jerry Nadler, to run against each other, along with a hopeful spoiler, Obama campaign veteran Suraj Patel, who claims to have "fresh ideas" but mostly says it's time for older politicians to give way to the young (Nadler is 75 and Maloney 76)—asked if Joe Biden should run for reelection in 2024, when he'll be a few weeks shy of his 82nd birthday, Patel, the 34-year-old champion of generational change, said "Yes", while the oldsters sought ways of not answering:

“It’s too early to say,” Nadler said. “It doesn't serve the purposes of the Democratic Party to deal with that until after the midterms.”

Maloney was more direct: “I don’t believe he’s running for re-election.”

Oh well. 

Personally, I think Nadler's answer was the correct one; it's stupid to be talking about the 2024 election when the one we're facing is so extremely important, and I wish people would stop doing it.

For the record, I'll be voting for the West Side's Nadler, not just because he's been my congressman ever since we moved to Manhattan a long time ago and won two impeachments of Trump, but also because on the rare occasions when he and Maloney have been in disagreement, he was on the right side, voting against the Iraq war and for the Iran nuclear deal (of Jewish congressmembers and New York City congressmembers, he's been consistently the most independent of pressure from the Israeli government), while she has a history not exactly of believing that childhood vaccines cause autism but of being friendly to the idea (she's been over it for years, though). I'll gladly vote for whoever wins the primary nevertheless.

Election Day

 

Image via The Geek Anthropologist.

New Yorkers from upstate and Long Island may not even realize it, but today is Election Day for them—an election in which hardly anybody normally bothers to vote, for their local school boards (in New York City, we don't have them at all, having surrendered the Education Department to mayoral control under the Bloomberg administration), because how is that even important?

It's becoming important now, as a key component of the web in which Republicans are attempting to take control with the bogus issues of "critical race theory" and anti-trans terror focusing on girls' bathrooms and sports teams, and the right to bully LGTBQ+ kids in general, and COVID masking and shutdowns. The enemy can bring out voters in some force, no doubt generally old people with no schoolchildren of their own; former GOP lieutenant governor and celebrated Pants-on-Fire liar Betsey McCaughey warns readers at the New York Post that 

In school-board elections from Long Island to Albany and westward Tuesday, New York parents outraged by the indoctrination and sexualization of their children will try to wrest control.

Don't let them succeed. Please please please check with your local media and find out what you can about the candidates and vote! On other races...

Subway

36th Street station on the D line was also the site of a slashing incident in August. Uncredited photo via WPIX TV.

I don't really have anything vital to say about the shooting incident in Brooklyn this morning except to think about how much time I spent in that station, 36th Street at 8th Avenue, when we lived 20 blocks west of there in Brooklyn's Chinatown in the later 90s and it was the best stop for changing between the R local and the D express on the way to and from Manhattan, through the toddlerhoods of two kids, often in an unfolded stroller hung around the handles with plastic bags from shopping, which I had to wangle up and down the stairs (occasionally with the unexpected assistance of some friendly volunteer out of nowhere). It's just such a profoundly ordinary place.

End gun violence, please.

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?

New York Note: Excelsior

 

Brouwerij Corsendonk, Turnhout, Belgium.

Just a note for the pleasure of having a scoop:

Following a lengthy statement of what sounded like his defense against a criminal case and followed by a less lengthy statement of what a great governor he's been (tbf there have been real accomplishments). And apology for "mistakes".

— CHANNEL YOUR PARANOIA (@Yastreblyansky) August 10, 2021

Excelsior!

— CHANNEL YOUR PARANOIA (@Yastreblyansky) August 10, 2021

"Excelsior!" (Higher! or Upwards!) is the official New York state motto, which he used in his peroration of thanks to New York for its heroic response to the Covid pandemic. It was weird, and it would indeed have been easy to miss the resignation bit, which had to do with how competent the lieutenant governor is (I thought he was talking about a temporary pull-back during the coming impeachment, which I think would be mandated under the state constitution) and the inevitable not wanting to be a "distraction" during this time of crisis with the Delta and all.

I'm certainly very glad, for all of us (including him!) and for the state's Democrats, who really shouldn't have to be thinking about him as we prepare for next year's election of—I hope—somebody else (on my radio, they're starting to wonder if he's planning to go on an apology tour and then run again—no! no! no!). 

And just for the fun of it, this peak New York Times fact check (caught by Matthew Yglesias):

One employee said she was concerned because she thought a vaccine had caused the characters in the film “I Am Legend” to turn into zombies. People opposed to vaccines have circulated that claim about the movie’s plot widely on social media. But the plague that turned people into zombies in the movie was caused by a genetically reprogrammed virus, not by a vaccine.

Also, some Twitter participant points out,  they turned into vampires, not zombies. BUT THAT'S NOT WHY THE EMPLOYEE SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN CONCERNED. WHAT THE EMPLOYEE NEEDED TO KNOW WAS NOT THE DETAILS OF THE I AM LEGEND SCRIPT. THE EMPLOYEE NEEDED TO KNOW THAT NOBODY EVER TURNS INTO A ZOMBIE BECAUSE ZOMBIES DON'T EXIST! FFS.

It's so crazy how these people—Politifact is a frequent offender—seem to have no concept of what a fact check is meant to accomplish.

In Praise of Politicians

Screenshot from ABC7, via Discourse Blog, which may be saying something similar (paywall, which I'm not ready to accept): As one commenter put it, "Revolutionary ideas take time up until they don't and then change happens."

Eric Adams did a funny in his provisional-victory speech last night: along the lines of, "People on social media don't win elections, people on Social Security win elections." 

Which doesn't seem like a very wise thing to say, telling a bunch of New Yorkers that they're old, and revealing a little too much of the behind-the-scenes technique, a bit self-indulgent, but the crowd roared with pleasure, as they did at pretty much everything he said. It struck me what the real thing I've been noticing about him is—that he's just really good at being a politician, easy in his skin, enough in love with his voters that he enjoys teasing them, and in a lot of ways kind of traditional in a way that doesn't necessarily sound quite nice, even distasteful, as in David Freedlander's profile in New York magazine a week ago:

New York Note

 

Maya Wiley, via Gothamist.

Early voting started over the week for the local primary elections in New York City, selecting candidates for mayor, city council, and so on in the November general election, but given the overwhelmingly Democratic character of the electorate, the party primary's winners are all more than likely to win then, so this is probably the more significant contest. I'm waiting for Election Day, personally—I've always liked the celebratory aspect (though I understand it's not convenient for everybody and won't be unless unless and until they make it a holiday) and feeling it this year in particular because it's another mark of the conquest of the pandemic that we're going to feel safe (masked, of course). 

And of another kind of renewal: New York, for all its progressive reputation, long had some of the most restrictive voting regulations in the country, thanks to Republican domination of the State Senate (in which, in recent years, Governor Andrew Cuomo collaborated), but the Democratic waves of 2018 and 2020 have given them not only control but a supermajority, which they have used for election reform among other things, including the early voting and no-excuse absentee ballots (not officially in effect yet but Covid-19, including not wanting to catch it, serves as a temporary universal excuse), and a good deal more to come.

Retired Emperor Has Complaints

 

"The antipope of Mar-a-Lago": illustration by Jason Seiler for Politico. Can't really tell from the setting whether he's meant to be one of the historical antipopes or the Holy Father of Sherwood Forest, Pope Tuck I, but whatevs.

Retired emperor seems to be upset about something, at great length, on his antisocial medium website:

I have just learned, through leaks in the mainstream media, that after being under investigation from the time I came down the escalator 5 ½ years ago, including the fake Russia Russia Russia Hoax, the 2 year, $48M, No Collusion Mueller Witch Hunt, Impeachment Hoax #1, Impeachment Hoax #2, and others, that the Democrat New York Attorney General has “informed” my organization that their “investigation” is no longer just a civil matter but also potentially a “criminal” investigation working with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.

AG James "informed" his organization but he learned about it through media leaks? Why didn't his organization tell him? Or are the scare quotes supposed to suggest that they didn't really inform his organization at all, and it's not really an "investigation", and "criminal" is an exaggeration of some kind? Or is the author just signaling subtly that we're dealing with an unreliable narrator here?

The Attorney General of New York literally campaigned on prosecuting Donald Trump even before she knew anything about me. She said that if elected, she would use her office to look into “every aspect” of my real estate dealings. She swore that she would “definitely sue” me. She boasted on video that she would be, and I quote, “a real pain in the ass.” She declared, “just wait until I’m in the Attorney General’s office,” and, ”I’ve got my eyes on Trump Tower.” She also promised that, if elected, she would “join with law enforcement and other Attorney Generals across this nation in removing this President from office,” and, “It’s important that everyone understand that the days of Donald Trump are coming to an end.”

Letitia James knew a good deal about Donald Trump by the time she was campaigning for attorney general in 2018, as indicated by the formal promises included in her campaign website, to

Centrist Escapism

One good reason for being pleased you're not at the center of the universe, according to nautil.us, would be that means you're not "he filth and mire of the world, the worst, lowest, most lifeless part of the universe, the bottom story of the house". Illustration by Rauner Special Collections Library.

Dr. Krugman savages Andrew Yang, mayoral candidate ("Andrew Yang Hasn't Done the Math"), over his claim in the 2020 presidential campaign that America's big problem is job loss due to rapid automation, for which the only cure is giving everybody a "universal" "basic" "income" of $1000 a month:

But that’s not what we’re seeing. In fact, the lead article in the current issue of the Monthly Labor Review, published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is an attempt to understand the productivity slowdown — the historically low growth in productivity since 2005. This slowdown has been especially pronounced in manufacturing, which has seen hardly any productivity rise over the past decade.

I made similar points back in 2019, eliciting a furious response from Yang, who decried “incomplete statistics” and declared that “I’ve done the math.” But if he had done the math, he didn’t share it with the rest of us; all he offered were anecdotes. Yes, at any given time there are always some workers being displaced by technology. The question is whether this is happening faster now than in the past. The numbers say that it isn’t.

Vaccine

Visualization of the SARS virus by 3D4MEDICAL, via NPR.

I forgot to mention that I got my first Impfung on Thursday, at a drug store in the valley east of University Heights. Moderna. A pretty long wait, though it was not a big crowd. The person ahead of me, an older Black lady chatting intensely with her husband. They were a sweet couple, but when her turn came up he looked up at the counter guy and said, "Jab her! Jab her good!" 

Afterwards I took a long walk through Central Park and out to Broadway. It was a glorious day, weatherwise. I signed three nominating petitions, one for Maya Wiley running for mayor, one for Liz Crotty of the Buffalo Crottys (her grandfather was Democratic boss of Buffalo before I lived there) who is the criminal lawyer who wants to be district attorney, an appealing concept, and one for a city council candidate I'm very unlikely to vote for (Maria Danzilo, who bills herself as "the moderate" and says she's all about the private sector, and allowed herself to get associated with the NIMBY mob who successfully hounded out the homeless guys parked in the Lucerne Hotel when de Blasio was moving people out of shelters to hotels to reduce the Covid danger, though she now claims to have a different and more conciliatory position than the mob did—the current member, Helen Rosenthal, a brave crusader for integration getting term-limited out, demonstrated in favor of the homeless guys, as did her predecessor, borough president Gale Brewer, who is also term-limited out and running to get her old job back). The vaccine is here and politics is coming back to the borough!

Zero thanks to The Former Guy for my injection, by the way, and not just because this idea that he ought to be thanked for the sake of comity or to get Democrats votes, to which our amiable but dim media have suddenly become so attached, is dumb politics, but especially since as far as I'm concerned he had nothing to do with it. In fact...

New York Note

I almost exercised my brand new right to vote before Election Day in New York, but the fact is my own polling place is less than two minutes away from home and news reports suggested early voting is doing great and it didn't need any encouragement from me to succeed and the fact is that while I enthusiastically endorse early voting as an option for those who have problems with Tuesdays, I also personally like participating in Election Day a lot, so I didn't.

Asked my family what they were planning to do and got one meaningful response, from the very smart Millennial who said she had sort of heard something about one of the five ballot propositions. Also, I hear that the propositions on the physical ballot or presented in 7-point type, and nobody's passing out magnifying glasses. So I decided that I should post a very short tutorial.

tl;dr: vote for all of them. Vote for Public Advocate Jumaane Williams to finish the term that Letitia James had to give up when she was elected state attorney general, and vote yes on everything else, viz., Propositions

1. Ranked Choice Voting in all primary and special elections for Mayor, Public Advocate, Comptroller, Borough President, and City Council as of January 2021, which permits voters to register their second through fifth choices, which can in turn be used to create a kind of runoff vote when nobody earns a majority and encourages unexpected candidacies and interesting results and has worked really well where it's been tried in the US;
2. increasing effectiveness of the Civilian Complaints Review Board for overseeing the city police, adding clout to the City Council and Public Advocate by giving them some nominations to the membership, and most importantly giving them more power to investigate cases, with subpoena power and the ability to investigate false cop statements;
3. a miscellany of anti-corruption and good government initiatives including restrictions on lobbying for ex-officials; it's got a bunch of stuff good people can disagree on, and if you want to vote no on something this would be the place, but I won't;
4. city budget reforms including a Rainy Day Fund, and
5. land use reforms, giving more power to borough presidents and community boards to deliberate on land use proposals.

More information at The Gothamist, New York's best local paper, all online and now the property of WNYC radio.

New York Note

Q: Which endorsement are you most proud of?

This may sound corny, but the endorsement I'm proudest of is my mom's.#NYCVotes pic.twitter.com/X1C6YwokrN

— Jumaane Williams (@JumaaneWilliams) February 7, 2019

Tomorrow is a special election in New York City, for the position of public advocate, a weird NYC institution dating back to 1993, in which the designated successor in case anything happens to the mayor is a kind of official opponent of the mayor, a citywide ombudsman or tribune whose main job is to complain to the city on behalf of the citizens and attempt to shame the mayor and city council and city agencies into action.

It's also become a significant factor in electoral politics, in that the last two public advocates have successfully used the job as a springboard to higher things, Bill de Blasio to the mayoralty and Tish James to the post of state attorney general, in last November's election, which is why this election is being held, to fill it until the coming November, when there will be another vote.

It's a nonpartisan contest, though I think in fact there are only two Republicans on the list. and there are 17 candidates, which is just insane; there is a statistical possibility that somebody could win with just 6% of the vote, which is clearly very unlikely, but a win with some horribly low number under 25% and an essentially random result based on the vagaries of turnout is not inconceivable at all, and there are candidates trying unapologetically to work this.

In particular, because my family is on I don't know exactly what list of of Chinese or Asian voters, our mailbox has been full of bilingual Chinese-English fliers from one of the Asian American candidates, Ron Kim, directly appealing to us to vote for "one of us", which really kind of bothers me (that's the Korean; the Chinese guy, Ben Yee, is not doing that at all)—it suggests the possibility that the election could be won by voters of a single ethnic group.

In the same way, one of the Republicans, Eric Ulrich, could quite possibly win just by uniting the tiny minority of Republicans; or Danny O'Donnell, who was a pioneer as a victorious openly gay candidate for the state assembly in 2003 and has served there ever since, could be swept into office by a unified gay vote. Or Nomiki Konst bringing together all the Young Turks fans or just those who have a sense they've seen her name before and she's some kind of celebrity. Not that there's anything wrong with any of these people, other than Konst—O'Donnell in particular has been a fine assemblymember and there's no reason to think he wouldn't be a fine public advocate. Most candidates seem to take very similar policy positions and indeed struggle to distinguish themselves from each other. But I hope whoever emerges from this circus will give a sense of having been backed by a cross-section.

To that end, I've had my eye on two candidates in particular, former city council president Melissa Mark-Viverito and Jumaane Williams, the city council member who was crazy enough to run as Cynthia Nixon's running mate in last year's gubernatorial primary but sober enough to be endorsed by the New York Times for tomorrow. And his mom likes him, as he has pointed out. Williams has been the favorite, and I'll be voting for him because of that, in the hopes of encouraging it to look like a mandate.