So far, there are no campaign events for either Harris or Walz scheduled to be live-streamed. If that changes and I’m around, I’ll post.
Meanwhile, what the hell is going on in the Adams administration?
đ„ Readers added even more context
What started as the arrest of a fare-beater ended up with four people being shot, all by a single police officer. Yet the early headlines made the public believe there was a shootout on train when thatâs not what happened at all.
Then theâŠ
â urban myths, legends (@urbanmyths) September 16, 2024
Screenshot of that full tweet so you don’t have to click over, unless you want to weigh in on deporting Elon since that’s trending on the hellscape:
Wasn’t Maya Wiley his opponent? Seems that might have been a better choice.
A 49-year-old bystander remained in critical condition Monday, one of two passengers hit by police bullets when NYPD officers opened fire on a subway platform in Brooklyn during a confrontation with an alleged fare-beater a day ago.
The 49-year-old was hit in the head. A 26-year-old woman, another bystander, also was grazed. A police officer was wounded, too. All shots were believed to be fired by the NYPD, authorities have said.
The two officers who opened fire were assigned to patrol the Sutter Avenue subway stop in the 73rd precinct when they spotted a man skip the station turnstile and walk through an open gate toward the train platform, Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey explained at a Sunday evening press conference from Brookdale Hospital.
The uniformed duo followed the alleged fare-beater up the stairs to the elevated L train platform around 3 p.m., when they gave him commands to stop and turn around. Maddrey said during a verbal altercation, they “became aware of a knife.”
Body-worn camera footage, which Maddrey said he reviewed before the press conference, allegedly showed the man make a verbal threat to the officers. He told the cops, “I’m going to kill you if you don’t stop following me,” the chief said.
As the encounter continued to escalate, a northbound L train pulled into the station. The train cars opened and the man jumped inside, according to police.
Maddrey said the officers followed the man, each firing a Taser which proved ineffective in subduing the man. He then exited the train while it was still at the station and charged the officers with the knife, the chief said.
I know nothing about NYC politics, so residents weigh in, but this doesn’t seem good:
@CNNÂ New York City Mayor Eric Adamsâs administration is unraveling.
Late Saturday night, the mayor abruptly announced the resignation of his top lawyer and most ardent public defender. Days earlier, his police commissioner stepped down under pressure as a quartet of federal probes targeting numerous members of Adamsâs inner circle hits a boil.
The stunning departure of chief counsel Lisa Zornberg, a former federal prosecutor, opened up a new and troubling chapter in the political and legal crisis now gripping City Hall.
âI am tendering my resignation, effective today,â Zornberg wrote in a short letter, âas I have concluded that I can no longer effectively serve in my position.â Adams in a statement thanked her and said he would name a temporary replacement in the coming days.
âThese are hard jobs and we donât expect anyone to stay in them forever,â Adams added in a bid to downplay the remarkable nature of Zornbergâs decision.
Adams has been fending off allegations that corruption and malfeasance permeate the highest ranks of his administration for months, first stemming from an active federal investigation into corruption and illegal campaign donations linked to Turkey and foreign travel, according to a source familiar with the matter. Adams is now entering an already fraught 2025 re-election bid under the cloud of at least four separate federal investigations â a political and legal onslaught that New York Democrats broadly expect to ramp up in the coming weeks and months.
Adams has not been accused of any wrongdoing and the administration has said it will cooperate with all investigations.
Brian Blais, a former assistant US attorney for the Southern District of New York, spoke to CNN about the potential problems Adams could face.
âIf campaign finance related charges are brought, or FARA (foreign agent registration act) charges relating to acting as an agent of the Turkish government, or bribery charges to the extent he was taking favorable actions in exchange for those campaign contributions, those are all serious charges, and those carry significant consequences,â said Blais.
âThereâs at least some real degree of legal peril for the mayor.âThe growing probes â underscored by increasingly aggressive tactics from prosecutors, who stopped Adams on the street last year to seize his phone â also signal mounting political trouble for the retired police captain who outlasted a crowded field of Democrats in 2021 on his way to winning the cityâs top job. Even before he was elected, Adams embraced the national media spotlight, declaring himself the âface of the new Democratic Partyâ and, after being invited to the White House, described himself as âthe Biden of Brooklyn.â
But the luster quickly faded. First with Biden, after Adams publicly criticized the presidentâs handling of the border and a migrant crisis that hit hard in New York. The mayorâs reputation for enjoying the nightlife â at the expense, Adamsâs critics say, of his day job â and repeated clashes over city spending, especially on education, dimmed his political star.
Adamsâs political troubles, though, have been magnified and multiplied by the federal probes, which are picking up pace as the 2024 political season heats up.
Investigators in the Southern District of New York have been circling Adams and his administration for nearly a year. Last November, the mayorâs chief fundraiser was raided by FBI agents. Days later, Adams himself was presented with a federal search warrant for his electronics. That remarkable escalation by federal prosecutor Damian Williams was followed by a period of relative quiet until last week, when FBI officials issued search warrants and showed up at the homes of several Adams administration officials.  Read the entire article here.
I’m off to see clients. I’m sure there are other things to talk about, so Open Thread
Baud
IIRC, she got caught up in Defund the Police and that cost her votes.
Anoniminous
Put a Woman in Charge
Anonymous At Work
@Baud: Strategic Republican voting. Not sure if they even bothered to run a guy.
WaterGirl
Before anyone asks what happened, I pulled the fundraising post I had put up 5 minutes before this one. Â It will go back up in an hour.
Baud
@Anonymous At Work:
Don’t know about them. This was the election where Andrew Yang had his last hurrah in public life. That’s how messed up it was.
WaterGirl
I do not understand why we cannot get good Democratic governors in New York.
KatKapCC
Mm-hmmmm. Were they watching Chicago right before this? “And then he ran into my knife! He ran into my knife ten times.”
BR
A positive story from someone who put a Harris sign out in Tennessee:
https://www.tiktok.com/@cars_and_concealer/video/7414987952956149023
Baud
@WaterGirl:
My guess is that NY Democratic politics is so factionalized that whoever ends up on top is going to be a horse trader.
Old Man Shadow
So where was the good guy with the gun to stop the bad guy cop shooting up a subway station?
Belafon
I think what’s happening with the Adams administration is the same thing that has happened here in Dallas with the Johnson administration, the only difference being that Adams was too scared to change his party affiliation after the election (for those that don’t know, Johnson ran as a Democrat, and then changed his party affiliation to Republican after winning the election).
Chris
“Mr. Morris…Â WHAT IN HELL GOES ON IN NEW YORK!?!”
satby
So, sorry if mentioned elsewhere, but the “attempted assassination” has resulted in just gun charges. Fascinating.
Kaitlan Collins @kaitlancollins 27m
Ryan Wesley Routh has been charged with two counts, including possession of a fire arm while a convicted felon and possession of a firearm with an obliterated serial number. He’ll be arraigned in two weeks.
Tony G
I don’t know the details of this shooting, nor do I currently live in New York City (now 10 miles away in New Jersey) — but at least since the election of Giuliani thirty years ago, New York City cannot logically be called a “liberal” or “progressive” city. Â A lot of New York City voters just want the police to be able to do what they want and shoot who they want. Â About half of the NYC police officers live outside of the city, a fact that might foster a hostile attitude toward the NYC residents on the part of the police.
Marleedog
Adams is a POS.
Betty Cracker
Adams is corrupt and incompetent. DeBlasio was merely incompetent but not a crook, right? Or maybe he was corrupt too; it’s one scandal after another with Adams, so perhaps the corruption is just more visible. You’d think out of 8M people, a majority of them liberal, NYC could find better mayors than the recent parade of clowns…
MisterForkbeard
@satby: I assume they can’t prove he was out to assassinate Trump, and he didn’t actually take any shots.
Everything else was basically legal so long as he wasn’t on private land. So they have to nail him on gun possession charges.
The real question is “how did this nutbar get guns?”
TaMara
@Chris: Oh, good one!
Leto
Again just an n+1 example of why Iâm skeptical about weapons training, even among civilians. There are so many documented stories about police essentially choosing the âspray and prayâ method of firing, and the bystanders who get hit as a result. There has to be reform on this, but I donât know what it is or how to get it implemented (police union/political angle). Another outcome of our unregulated gun society.
Chris
This doesn’t answer the present problem, but for those who care about such things (and only after you’re done pelting me with tomatoes for linking to LGM), this might be interesting reading:
Review of the last fifty years’ worth of New York governors: https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2023/07/history-blogging-ranking-ny-governors
Review of the last fifty years’ worth of New York mayors: https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2023/07/history-blogging-rating-nyc-mayors
Going back farther, and on a somewhat happier note, Tumblr post on the “most formative mayors of New York City”… which quickly turns into just a review of the Fiorello LaGuardia era, and why the man was fucking awesome: https://racefortheironthrone.tumblr.com/post/735718346718363648/who-do-you-consider-to-have-been-some-of-the-most
All written last year by Steve Attewell, rest in peace.
daveNYC
@Anonymous At Work: NY Republicans are pretty awful, so unless you get someone like Bloomberg as the candidate the Democratic primary is basically the general and everyone registers and votes accordingly.
Baud
@satby:
They can add later. They needed something to hold him on.
AnonPhenom
Adams is a Republican cuckoo egg that was laid in NYC’s nest.
(The GOP’s best chance of getting elected is to run in the Democratic Primary. I mean, it ain’t like Jay Jacobs or the rest of the party leaders are gonna stop ’em…they’re to busy fighting off The Working Families Party and everyone to their left)
Chris
Just tried posting this with links, but it apparently got eaten (suspect it was mistaken for spam): for those who care to google it and don’t mind giving LGM the page clicks, Steve Attewell (RIP) did a good post last year reviewing the last fifty years’ worth of New York state governors, followed by one reviewing the last fifty years’ worth of New York City mayors. It’s not happy reading, exactly, but still a pretty good short history.
Betty Cracker
Trump is on Fox News today mewling about how nutcases are trying to shoot him because Democrats say mean things:
Jesus. That’s possibly the most un-self-aware quote ever uttered.
Splitting Image
@WaterGirl:
New York has the same urban/exurb/rural divide that the rest of the country has, but it’s complicated by the fact that the city is home to the seat of American royal power: Wall Street.
A lot of people who, in any other city, would be sensible to the notion that a city needs to be governed by people who can focus on urban problems, vote instead like royalists intent on protecting the royal court from the barbarians at the gate (otherwise known as New Yorkers).
Or to put it another way, they buy into the idea that the business capital of the country ought to have a “business-friendly” government, where “business-friendly” means Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump.
ETA: In Canada, Toronto suffers from the same problem. Arguably the most liberal city in the country, but elects people like Mel Lastman and Rob Ford. You know, “business-friendly” (i.e. corrupt as sin)
satby
@MisterForkbeard: because Trump signed a law passed by his nutcase party to enable people with mental health issues to get guns. Sow, reap.
TaMara
@Chris: Yeah, it ended up trashed. I believe 3 links is too many. But I fished it out and it should now be there.
With that, I’m off… (well, y’all knew that, but I’m out the door).
TBone
@BR: đ brave, like wearing a Cat Ladies for Kamala shirt to the red county Walmart. Bravo!
(I got some teary-eyed thank yous as well).
ETA there were more “fuck yeah!” female reactions tho đ
satby
@Baud: he didn’t fire, and it doesn’t seem he was even trespassing on the golf course. It’s an open carry state, he could have been outside a school and they couldn’t arrest him. It’s hinky all the way down.
scav
@Baud: This is in Florida though. Â Won’t they maybe need to pass some very-tailored laws restricting guns near certain individuals before they can charge him with anything?
Eolirin
@WaterGirl: This is mayor of NYC.
And honestly Hochul isn’t awful, she’s just mediocre.
Old School
@MisterForkbeard:
It was a concept of an assassination plot.
Chris
@Tony G:
TBH, New York City’s reputation as a liberal Mecca, historically, seems massively overdone. It was a Loyalist cesspool during the Revolution, it was a Copperhead cesspool during the Civil War, and, well, as you say, then there’s the last few decades. Supposedly, in 1984, Mondale picked Geraldine Ferraro as a running mate in part because it was still believed that having a New Yorker on the ticket would make him look more conservative (!!!)
The high water mark of NYC liberalism was the 1930s with LaGuardia, when it basically turned into the ground zero for FDR’s New Deal. But, well, that was then.
(To some extent, you can say this about any American big city. Urban America is ground zero for all of the nation’s big business sectors, and also ground zero for American Catholicism, which means there will never not be a seat at the table for both business conservatism and social conservatism, and it’ll be a loud voice. That’s before you even get to all the shitty little power centers from cops to small businessmen to certain unions to just scared white people. It’s just that in the big city, those voices aren’t enough to constantly override and suppress everybody else to the point where they’re the only ones shaping politics. According to the red staters, that’s enough to make them extreme-left woke trans DEI CRT commuslimunist dystopias. And since, in our beloved social discourse, the red staters get to set the narrative…)
CaseyL
NYC always strikes me being medieval in its political structure. It’s a very old city (one of the first European-settled cities in the country) with a long, long history of jostling powerful interest groups. More like tiny fiefdoms within the city, and every one of them commands a fair segment of voters.
It’s “liberal” in a social sense, not necessarily in an economic one. Each fiefdom is primarily concerned with protecting its own economic interest – and that makes for some interesting collisions between the union groups and the Wall Streeters. NYC unions, sad to say, are still very corrupt and co-opted.
Chris
@TaMara:
Oh, thanks!
Served
It feels like the largest ‘blue’ cities in solid blue states have this issue (NYC, Chicago, LA). Speaking from experience in Chicago, it seems like the biggest problem is that our effective administrators and politicians have larger aspirations (state office, senate, etc), and being mayor is a thankless task, so all that’s left at the municipal level are the two-bit personalities and egos.
satby
@Old School: but they’re fundraising off it and using it to claim it’s Democratic party rhetoric that’s inciting violence. And yet both of the people presumed to try to assassinate the convict were right leaning types. Do I think they were staged? Dunno, but these are weird specs for the usual kinds of assassins.
TBone
Here’s my opportunity to share another important life lesson. Heed it well, my friends!
https://youtu.be/d-7o9xYp7eE
Harrison Wesley
Did the police officers become aware that he had a knife, or did they become aware that he had the concept of a knife?
satby
@CaseyL: you also just described Chicago.
sdhays
@Betty Cracker: Iâm not a New Yorker, but  my impression of DeBlasio was someone who was ok when he was engaged, but got bored and didnât actually like doing the job. So he was sort of ok in his first term and then just really phoned it in as he looked for something more fun. Like running for President!
He was also always fighting with Cuomo, andâŠI expect Iâd side with DeBlasio most of the time there.
BR
Anyone know any good underfunded campaigns / election efforts in North Carolina that could use some contributions? (I’ve already contributed to several of the young candidates in NC on my list of state house/senate campaigns list, and Sarah Taber for NC ag commissioner.)
Lynn Dee
For those who are interested, this tweet includes a gift link to the NY Times article from yesterday by Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak regarding Supreme Court memos that reveal, among other things, CJ Roberts’s ghastly thinking from the get-go in taking charge of the immunity decision:
https://x.com/theblatt/status/1835335687102398923
AnonPhenom
@Anonymous At Work:
The Republican candidate was the Red Beret/vigilante guy, Curtis Sliwa.
BR
Here’s the website for the Oprah event with Kamala Harris on Sep. 19th:
https://uniteforamerica2024.com/
CaseyL
@satby: It would actually be really interesting to do a deep dive into the power structures of the two cities – particularly, in Chicago’s case, the impact of early-to-mid 20th Century organized crime.
NYC had its “Five Families,” but the Mafia (SFAIK) as a major political power originated in Chicago, with deep tentacles in the trades and police forces. NYC is older than Chicago, and its power centers more diffuse – again, speaking pretty much out my ass, since I have only a small lay knowledge of both cities’ histories.
But damn, it would be an interesting project!
PJ
@Baud: The 2021 primary election was the first in which ranked choice voting was used. There were thirteen candidates in the Democratic race. Effectively, this meant that the more liberal candidates canceled each other out, and the most prominent conservative candidate won. With 30.7% of the vote in the first round, Adams would have won right away if the election were decided by whomever had the plurality. But I think if it had actually been a plurality vote, more of the liberal candidates would have dropped out to focus on one or two who had a legitimate chance.
Adams’ corruption problems were not unexpected. If the mayoral candidate lies about actually living in the city, it stands to reason he might be lying about other significant issues. There were also rumors about sketchy close associates.
One of the problems of the decline of local newspapers, leaving behind a few “national” papers, is that nobody did any real reporting on the backgrounds of the candidates (not to mention the lack of reporting on George Santos.) The NYT used to have strong metro section, but they ditched all of that reporting several years ago. So while there were all these rumors about Adams, none of them were investigated by the press.
Another problem is that most prominent politicians do not want to run for mayor. It is a thankless job, and has never led to higher office statewide or nationally in over 100 years (I don’t know about before that).
Searcher
What you have to understand is that New Yorkers, by tradition, just elect the worst person as the mayor.
That way, when the city is mismanaged for reasons which are only somewhat in the mayor’s control, and we all hate the mayor as the primary symbol of the problem, we at least have the satisfaction of knowing we’re hating someone who deserves it, even if it’s not their fault in this particular instance.
Baud
Some Monday hopium
TBone
@Lynn Dee: đ keep it going!
Baud
@PJ:
There’s no canceling out in ranked choice voting.
Chief Oshkosh
But did anyone think to collect on the $2.90 fare?
/s
Chet Murthy
@Betty Cracker: I remember when De Blasio tried to rein in the po-po: they made it clear to him that the weren’t gonna comply (remember that funeral where the cops all turned their back on him) and that his family was in the cross-hairs (remember when they arrested his daughter?) He got scared-off, and that was that for his administration confronting the po-po.
Chris
@CaseyL:
My extremely non-expert theory is that big cities in the northeast quadrant of the U.S. (of which NYC is the prime example) largely “solidified” into their current shape during the industrial era between the mid nineteenth and the mid twentieth centuries, IOW, during the golden age of machine politics, and despite lots of changes in society since then, that still molds their politics to a significant extent.
Sometimes, that’s even a good thing (the fact that unions still matter more there than in most other parts of the country is almost certainly a relic of this era). And sometimes, it’s a bad thing (race relations, general corruption, the sort of feudal balkanization that you describe).
A lot of cities in the rest of the country hit their growth spurt later, and in some cases (Sun Belt especially) are still living through it, so while they’ve all got their own pathologies, they aren’t necessarily the same ones, which makes politics in the older Industrial Age strongholds look odd or even retro.
trollhattan
@Chief Oshkosh:
They’ll recoup by charging everyone involved one buck/bullet.
PJ
@sdhays: DeBlasio did one good thing as soon as he got elected, which was to pass universal pre-K. But then he frittered away political capital on things like trying to get horse carriages banned so that his friends in the real estate industry could snap up the horse stables. He also seemed to have little interest in actually governing, and, as you note, thought for some reason that he should be running for President. He spent several weeks in 2016 – when he was a first term mayor – knocking on doors for Hillary Clinton in Iowa, ostensibly to help her campaign, but obviously to raise his name recognition there for a later run (which he made in 2020). That level of delusion and vanity is hard to come by, even in politicians.
With regard to Cuomo, yes, he was a dick and often acted against NYC, but if you are the mayor, you have to work with the governor, no matter how awful they are, to help the city because so much about the city is decided by the state. Turning it into a personal beef was just stupid.
SatanicPanic
@Chief Oshkosh: I know it’s one of those things that sets the average person off, but what if we just don’t chase people who don’t pay their fares? The vast majority of people are going to pay them without having to be chased down.
Anyway
@BR:
Gawd, I hate Oprah. She pushed charlatans like Oz, Phil, the author of The Secret etc. Blech. Hope MVP isn’t attending…
PJ
@Baud: There absolutely is. People split their all of their ranked choices among the “liberal” candidates, while the conservative cruises to victory. There’s no incentive for candidates to drop out, because there’s the hope that even if they are polling behind other candidates, they will somehow pick up more votes in the later rounds.
AnonPhenom
@PJ:Â â
It can’t be left up to reporters and newpapers. Even then, party “insiders” should be feeding info/ oppo research to the reporters.
RE:George Santos (who had run before in Nassau County) you’d think the Dem Chair of Nassau County (who also just happens to be the State Party Chair) would have had a folder an inch thick on the guy, no?
Or maybe, gee wizz, nobody asked him!
Baud
@SatanicPanic:
Doesn’t mean an over zealous response is called for, but I think ignoring it is not a viable solution.
Baud
@PJ:
If they did that, then there would be a liberal candidate who ends up with all those votes.
The system fails only if liberal voters don’t rank all liberal candidates.
Anyway
My Manhattan-residing friend liked Kathryn Garcia in the NYC mayoral D primary
Betty Cracker
@satby: Weirdly, Florida isnât an open carry state. People can carry concealed weapons without a license but canât openly parade around with weapons except under specific circumstances.
AWOL
@Betty Cracker: DeBlasio was not incompetent. He and his family faced death threats from the police—a Chinese faction because a Chinese cop shot a Black man to death in cold blood and walked—the day he took office. DeBlasio wanted justice in a city owned by a Thousand Trumps. To add to his woes, Andrew Cuomo made DeBlasio’s life hell, especially with the MTA.
PJ
@PJ: In a first past the post system, if there’s no majority winner, it narrows down to two candidates, which allows voters a clear choice, instead of trying to figure out how to distribute their ranked choices among several similar candidates. It’s either the conservative or the liberal, take your choice.
CaseyL
@SatanicPanic: Seattle has that with its LightRail system. No turnstiles, and they rely on the honor system for people to buy tickets or scan their ORCA cards.
Seattle LightRail is losing money hand over fist.
Too many people WILL ride for free if they can.
It’s not sustainable. Maybe having turnstiles – but with no penalty for people who leap over them – would be better, since even most people who’d like to ride for free will buy a ticket rather than jump over a turnstile.
It is a conundrum. I certainly don’t want people to be shot for not paying to ride; but I don’t like seeing mass transit systems wither because of all the free riders!
cain
@Betty Cracker:
Liberal voters don’t always translate to electing good people. The trash fire of the City of Portland is an example. Similar issues with a police force that doesn’t live in Portland and some have connections with the Proud Boys.
I still want to post something about public school systems here after the election.
Chris
@SatanicPanic:
Yeah, it annoys the shit out of me. I’ve seen it plenty of times in recent years here, and I’ve never followed the example, but it strikes me as exactly the kind of situation where actual enforcement would be far more trouble than just eating the cost.
AnonPhenom
@Baud:Â â
BINGO!
It was the first time it was used and many didn’t understand it yet.
SatanicPanic
@Baud: More people would stop paying, but I’m not sure it would reach very high levels. But who knows.
PJ
@AWOL: He was either incompetent or indifferent. He accomplished nothing notable after universal pre-K, which was in his first year.
Sister Golden Bear
@satby: Doesn’t mean much. It’s pretty common to initially charge someone with a slam-dunk charge, like illegal gun possession as a felon, as a way to keep them in custody while more complex charges are investigated
The real question is what, if any, follow-up charges get filed.
trollhattan
@CaseyL: Basically describes our light rail system, which is walk on/walk off. There is no affordable way to convert to controlled entry here, the cost/station would be enormous and I imagine the space for needed facilities doesn’t exist at most current stations.
They’ve never recovered the pre-covid ridership, in part because the state has lots of workers WFH 50% and in part folks just got used to finding other ways to get around.
Transit is a hard sell, overall.
Baud
@CaseyL:
Actual free public transportation would be awesome, but very few cities around the world have implemented it, so I wouldn’t expect it here anytime soon.
Madeleine
@PJ: Hi PJ! As an actual New Yorker, I think PJâs account of the situation is accurate and well informed, more of both than other commenters.
PJ
@CaseyL: In some places outside of the US, there is a six foot or so high glass screen that opens after you pay your fare. That’s a lot harder to get over than a turnstile.
TBone
@Searcher: best explanation yet.
Chris
@Baud:
That would indeed be ideal.
SatanicPanic
@CaseyL: They don’t have security doing random checks? That’s how it works here- no turnstiles but security gets on every now and then and asks to see fares. They claim that results in 98% compliance, but I am a bit skeptical.
EDIT- here being San Diego
Fester Addams
@scav:
I was expecting Florida Firearm Protective Services to ring him up for negligent care of the rifle.
trollhattan
Boots wants himself some camera time, so….
“Gator done it.”
sab
@satby: Was there a provable assasination attempt, or just a (white) nut with a gun near the candidate?
Other MJS
@satby: How do they know he wasn’t a “good guy with a gun” there to protect Trump?
TBone
@Anyway: yes, she has a lot to answer for. However, we will accept her as an ally because she can bring older women and others with her. What BR is committed to doing (posting positive things about our Dems and this election) is heartily welcomed by me and I’m sure others here appreciate it. So I welcome Oprah, for now, also too.
LeftCoastYankee
NYC is essentially a “one party state” containing 8M+ people and 5 counties/boroughs. It has been Dem since Tammany Hall days, so a candidate with a (D) in NYC isn’t equivalent of one elsewhere. The practice of allowing candidates to appear on multiple lines on a ballot (if this is still a thing) and actual endorsements tell more.
In the shadow of Wall Street, NYC has a long history of celebrating “colorful” local grifters and corruption.
Like most other cities, NYPD has a large portion of their workforce living outside the city, and “business leaders” who live outside the city as well. They have outsized influence in how the actual residents are treated within their city.
So, “Adams (D)” may seem out of character, but “Adams (former NYPD Police Captain)” aligns pretty well with what’s happening now.
I hope they got the $2.90 from the guy though….
Sister Golden Bear
@trollhattan:
I’ve used subways in several European cities where there’s no controlled entry, but there are roving teams of ticket inspectors, who will demand to see your tickets, with hefty fines if you don’t have one.
No gonna weigh in on the pros/cons, but simply noting there are alternate methods of enforcing fares.
Harrison Wesley
@SatanicPanic: They solved the problem a while back here in Manatee County, Florida – public transit is free within the county (there are one or two Sarasota County bus lines that run through here, and they still charge).
TBone
@Betty Cracker: my inner Wednesday Addams is about to get me banhammered.
KatKapCC
@Anyway: Well, it says “with Kamala Harris” so unless there’s another woman with that name…
Also, you don’t have to like Oprah to be aware that she has a massive and very loyal following, and her endorsement and support can bring in a shitload of others.
Searcher
@Chris: The background here is that, because there was a spate of SUBWAY ATTACKS!!! in the news the NYPD/MTAPD responded by Doing Something, namely, having lots of uniformed police (with so many weapons hanging off them they look like they’re Rennfair cosplayers from the 31st century) standing around subway stations, occasionally hassling people (of color?).
So you have a bunch of bored police officers standing around doing nothing, because it’s not like there’s an hourly stabbing at each station for them to interrupt, and they see a person jump the turnstyle/go through the exit gate/whatever. A fare evader! A criminal! Now they have another opportunity to Do Something!
And when bored police officers Do Something, casualties are to be expected.
TBone
@Harrison Wesley: kapow, problem solved! People can get to their jobs! Climate change can suck an egg! Electric Buspooling!
Belafon
@Madeleine: Which probably means people didn’t fill out their ballots correctly. What should have happened is that if the supporters had filled out and ranked all of liberal candidates, and none of them fill out the Republican, the bottom candidate would have been dropped, and the Democrats would have kept seeing a few Democrats get higher vote totals until one won.
The Democrat won in Alaska with ranked choice voting because even though she wasn’t the first choice of a majority, enough Republicans gave her their second place vote to let her win.
TBone
@Searcher: can confirm from IRL experience.
different-church-lady
Twitter still needs to die (no matter what it’s called).
trollhattan
@Sister Golden Bear: Basically describes what’s done hereâthey intermittently fare-check passengers and ticket those who didn’t hop off in time. It’s infrequent enough that it’s hard to say whether it’s incentive enough to get more riders to pay.
Also a sticking point for homeless advocates who complain about ticketing the indigent, who often ride just to be somewhere else than outside.
ÂŻ\_(ă)_/ÂŻ
TBone
All day, maybe all week, I’ma hit this bell with my hammer.
https://www.salon.com/2024/09/16/leaked-memos-reveal-john-roberts-role-in-shielding-from-prosecution/
UncleEbeneezer
@KatKapCC: Also, the fact that Oprah (like every other human being) has flaws, doesn’t change the fact that she’s a fucking, trail-blazing, Black Woman who became a Billionaire, Media Mogul and also an incredibly talented actor. Â She is hugely influential and greatly admired for good reason. Â I was glad to see her speak at the DNC and now campaigning for Harris/Walz. Â She is one of only a couple dozen people who are truly big enough to be known only by one name.
TBone
@different-church-lady: hard agree
CaseyL
@SatanicPanic: We do have “Fare Ambassadors,” who get on the train and check to see if people have paid their fare. But I don’t know what, if any, penalty there is for not having paid – I haven’t seen anyone ejected from the train, for example.
It’s more of a normative conditioning thing: people who will ride for free until they’re challenged on it, at which point they’ll start paying. Maybe. I dunno.
@PJ: I’ve seen that here – on the monorail, I think (the monorail only runs from downtown to Seattle Center and is a separate fare). It sounds like a good idea, but retrofitting ALL the stations with that would be VERY expensive.
I’m sure King County Transit calculates the cost of letting people ride free versus the cost of installing/retrofitting fare enforcement things like turnstiles or plexiglass doors, and so far it’s come up “Free riders are cheaper.”
Geminid
@PJ: Before NYC adopted Ranked-choice voting there was a runoff between the top two finishers if no one exceded 40%. Under that system Adams would have faced Kathy Garcia, the former Sanitation Commissioner, in the second round. As it was, Adams won by only 8,000 votes (I think) once all the choices had been allocated. It was condidered a low-turnout primary.
Adams made the news Saturday night when the city’s chief legal counsel, Lisa Nornberg, resigned after 14 months on the job. Nornberg is a former senior federal prosecuter. The day after, I looked up Adams’s polling. On May 30, Emerson College released a poll of New York voters that found 30% of NYC voters had a positive opinion of Adams, and 60% viewed him negatively.
karen marie
@Betty Cracker: “People of Springfield, Ohio, are on line one, sir, and they’ve got tears in their eyes.”
UncleEbeneezer
Damn, check out Hillary rocking the shades, in a cool dress with her new cut! (campaigning for Angela Alsobrooks for Senator of MD).
arrieve
As PJ notes above, Adams was elected in the first ranked choice voting election. He might have won anyway under the previous system, but I think Wiley might have had more of a chance. Adams also ran as a former cop, with constant scaremongering about out of control crime in the city, and I think talking about crime is unfortunately always pretty effective, no matter how many statistics you can quote to show that it simply isn’t true. And New Yorkers for some reason love our (pretty fascist) police force.
Apart from the fact that he’s almost as annoying to listen to as Trump, he’s been a disaster as mayor. He cut funding for libraries, and for CUNY, the 25 campus city university system. His last budget restored some of the CUNY funding, but not for the two-year community colleges, which have been decimated. (I take the CUNY part personally–I got my master’s in TESOL there a few years ago, and have been teaching English there since I graduated. It is an amazing, incredibly diverse institution that makes it possible for New Yorkers of all backgrounds and income levels to go to college.) But of course he also gave tons of money to the NYPD to pay for more overtime for cops.
TBone
Just think of all the free, electrified public transportation we could fund by overturning Citizens United and placing financial limits on campaign spending. And taxing the shit out of the billionaires.
I know, I know, and a pony!
schrodingers_cat
Ranked choice voting is not a pancea. No system is, when the winner wins only with a plurality of the vote and not a majority.
topclimber
@UncleEbeneezer: If normies don’t know enough about Kamala, Oprah is a great place to work on that.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
Ranked choice produces a majority
But you’re right that there is no perfect system.
Fair Economist
@TBone: Keep hitting it. John Roberts is finally getting exposed.
Tony G
@MisterForkbeard: In Our Great Nation, the easiest thing in the world is for a mentally ill person to get his hands on powerful guns and plenty of ammunition. Â Freedumb!
PJ
@CaseyL: There are many things that could be done to improve the safety and efficiency and fiscal health of the NY subway system, but the cost is prohibitive. The oldest parts of the subway are over 120 years old. Just as an example, the MTA is still in the process of upgrading from the manual signaling system that’s been around since the beginning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_block_system) and which breaks down all the time (stopping trains) with an automated system, but that is being installed piecemeal over different lines very slowly.
SatanicPanic
Biden signing the TikTok ban is one of the few outright dumb things he’s done. I hope it gets overturned. Harris should pledge to rescind it.
UncleEbeneezer
@topclimber: Exactly. Â In a country where far too many people don’t even bother to vote, we need all the help we can get. Â I detest Dr. Phil and Oz, as much as anyone, but that’s neither here nor there.
KatKapCC
@UncleEbeneezer: I remember seeing an interview with her where she talked about how hard it was to be taken seriously early on in her career by the mostly white men she was surrounded by. One time, she found out her male co-anchor at one of her first TV news jobs was making far more money than she was, even though they had similar experience, and her white male boss told her something along the lines of she didn’t need to make as much as the guy because he had a family to support, and then he also said something like “No one is ever going to pay you that much”. And in the interview, she recalled thinking “Huh…we’ll see about that.”
PJ
@Geminid: If there’s one good thing that comes out of Adams’ corruption and incompetence, it’s that he won’t get a second term. I think he’s toast. Hopefully Hochul will also get the boot in 2026.
burritoboy
The problem is one of the major conceptual problems in American politics – and it rears it’s head in many different ways that people can’t or don’t understand are very much connected: Â large urban centers must be operated and governed in very different ways than we Americans vulgarly understand democracy. Â Our narrative of democracy is a town meeting of a small Puritan township in New England in the early history of our polity (i.e. largely before the mid nineteenth century, if not even considerably before that.) That means that a huge amount of what Democrats (the concrete political party) do within that environment is actually determined by what we call “political machines, ” but what happens within political machines is extremely different both from our theoretical models of democracy, our stories of democracy, and what happens politically in the wealthy suburbs or college towns where (some of) the elite of our concrete political party live. Â What needs to happen in Brooklyn or the Bronx is very different from what can/should happen in Amherst or Palo Alto. Â Many of our followers are extremely unwilling to admit that there is a vast difference in what can (or should) happen in each, leading to (partially fake, and partially simply misguided) whining about conservatives-Dems.
trollhattan
I can’t be the only one who twitches immediately upon reading âU.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy.” And that’s before pondering his having a role in November’s election.
Well I feel better.
Geminid
@schrodingers_cat: I am sceptical about Ranked-choice, but people like it more than runoffs. I look for Alaska’s hybrid system to spread. They hold an all-comer, “jungle” primary, and then the top four advance to a Ranked-choice runoff in November.
In 2020, when Democrats held a primary to replace the Kennedy who ran against Senator Markey, Jake Auchingloss won with well under 30%. Auchingloss ran as a moderate, and there were complaints that one of the more liberal candidates would have won had there been Ranked-choice voting. But Auchingloss had no significant opposition this year so local Dems must like what they see.
Jackie
@Baud: Iâm rooting hard for Allred! His former NFL career will pull many Texas football worshippers to him. And, Cancun Ted really isnât liked – even by republicans.
topclimber
@Geminid:Long ago I read an urban planning article with a line I have never forgotten: Great Cities don’t attract jobs, they generate them.
I think the same is true of city leaders. Which brings me to my semi-annual “AOC for mayor” pitch. She is the foremost political talent NYC has produced in at least a generation. She has a huge base independent of the pathetic Dem establishment and a social media game second to none.
I think she will get along with Gov. Hochul far better than any Dem mayor ever did with Cuomo. She will have an international profile when it comes to dealing with one of her top issues, climate change, as an executive rather than a legislator. And I doubt she will take one bit more of police union crap than she has to.
There’s more to add, but for now I will restrain my inner fan boy.
TBone
@Fair Economist: đđŻ
JML
NYC has all kinds of challenges from their electoral systems to their government structure to the basic fact that they’re still not really 1 city but 5 of them glued together.
Ranked choice might eventually get a decent mayor in place, but these ballots with 10+ candidates can be an absolute mess and people who aren’t politically engaged struggle with them. (and it’s even worse for most people people for whom English is not their first language; it’s been shown time and again that ballot complexity is a huge barrier to voting)
Adams is a pro-cop yahoo who doesn’t really know how to do much, doesn’t have much of a proactive agenda, and is pretty much a DINO. I’m not sure he’s actually corrupt (possibly covering up for the police, but we’ll see), more likely he hired bad and useless people because he didn’t have any of the right experience going in to do the job.
Last decent Mayor NYC has had was Dinkins. they’ve had a lot of bad one: Rudy was a drunk fascist, Koch was a weaselly asshole, Bloomberg a soulless corporatist…
Dadadadadadada
@Anonymous At Work: they ran convicted kidnapper and all-around lunatic Curtis Sliwa, possibly the only person in the city who would’ve been a worse mayor than Adams.
Searcher
@PJ: Yeah, the problem the US in general and NYC in specific has is that (a) it’s never been bombed and (b) we have been industrious and prosperous long enough that we built the new infrastructure as soon as it was possible.
So our subway network in NY is state of the art for 1930, our train tracks are great for the 1880s, our broadband infrastructure is the envy of the 90’s and 00’s.
TBone
@trollhattan: I combat my unease in that regard by getting my ballot via US Mail, but returning it, in person, by handing it, on Election Day, to the County girls in charge of receiving. Bonus: since my County office is not a polling location, I get to wear my political gear advertising Dems! And my N95 mask! And with online ballot tracking, I know they can’t just throw it in the trash.
Geminid
@PJ: The Infrastructure bill passed in November of 2021 allocated $10 billion to New York’s MTA for capital improvements. That was a very underrated piece of legislation in my opinion. Now the money is being translated into tangible results. Hopefully the next Congress can pass an Infrastructure 2.0 bill with more mass transit funding. I expect the MTA could spend another $10 billion to good effect.
JML
@topclimber: I love AOC, but she’s in a perfect spot right now as a liberal back-bencher who pushes the party on issues but doesn’t sabotage the party as a whole with purity tests. The structure of NYC government isn’t well set up for someone like her to take control, and frankly she hasn’t had much administrative experience. It’s also a lot easier to master the PR side when a) you aren’t getting shanked from inside the house, and b) your opposition is Ted Cruz. As Mayor she’d immediately have 12 players coming for her, all with power bases that she can’t ignore.
NYC is a hard city to govern, and if you don’t think the cops would go after her twice as hard as they did De Blasio, you’re dreaming.
Another Scott
@Baud:
Made me look.
Warning Politico (from 2021):
Wikipedia says Adams got 30.7% in the first round.
The people there had lots and lots of choices – maybe too many. But they had ways to keep Adams out if they wanted.
People are weird.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
TBone
@SatanicPanic: I am a clueless dinosaur who doesn’t understand why we can’t make our own platforms to replace TikTok and Xitter. I know some are out there and maybe clunky in comparison. I don’t need a highly detailed explanation but, maybe if we were forced to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps in this area? I dunno!
Also, I’m not gonna get on any site where I am the product.
Jackie
@UncleEbeneezer: Hillary looked great at the DNC convention, too! Instead of aging, sheâs found the Fountain of Youth – w/o surgery! A few years away from running for office, not dealing with SoS stress, plus young grandkiddos is GOOD for her!
rikyrah
This entire story is CRAZY.
CRAZY
Geminid
@topclimber: Evidently Rep. Ocasio-Cortez is passing on next year’s Mayoral race, so we won’t get to see how many New Yorkers share your opinion of her.
State Senator Jessica Ramos threw her hat in the ring Saturday, so maybe another Puerto Rican-American will win the post.
Brent
@CaseyL: I don’t know the numbers in Seattle and for some reason I can’t seem to find any. But everything that I have ever seen on this in other cities suggests that with the sort of random check enforcement done in systems like Seattle, they typically find that like something like 1/5 to 1/3 of 1 percent of people are actually abusing the system. This costs the system some money of course, when you are talking about millions of trips in the aggregate. But the cost is typically negligible compared to what a more robust turnstile or other sort of system would cost.
As I say, I don’t know what Seattle has found so perhaps there are unique challenges in that particular city. But I believe the evidence suggests that cities can reliably run these sorts of systems with minimal losses from fare theft.
Captain C
@Betty Cracker:
DiBlasio got some good things done early (Pre-K, getting contracts done with city unions that were several years expired under Bloomberg, and a bit more) but ran into a lot of opposition, especially from an extremely hostile NYPD (who threatened his kids), and kind of checked out mentally his second term (and more so after his extremely failed Presidential primary bid). Â Adams will probably combine his incompetence, corruption, and not-entertaining-enough-to-humanize-him partying ways (and the possibility he actually lives in Fort Lee, NJ, or at least sleeps there most nights) to be a one-term mayor and one of the worst in my 50-year-plus lifetime.
You’d think, and yet…
One of the problems was it was the first election with the new ranked choice primary system, and enough people were unfamiliar with it that they felt they had to fill all five slots, instead of leaving one or more blank if they only wanted to vote for (5-X) candidates. Â I made sure to leave Adams off my ballot completely (I think I put in one of the far out ones for my 5th) but many did not.
In addition, Garcia, Wiley, and Stringer, the viable and more reasonable alternatives, did not run a voter education campaign on this and maybe mention that if you wanted to insure that certain candidates could be left out, you should leave them off the ballot, and vote for the other two of these three in whichever order you want. Â A few more people leaving Adams off the ballot and everything else breaking the same and Kathryn Garcia is the probably much better mayor of NYC right now, seeking her second term next year.
Betty
From what I know, the ranked choice voting ended up splitting votes among the good candidates. Adams apparently had a strong following in Brooklyn that made the difference. The media was focused on the crime rate so a cop seemed like a good choice to a lot of people. The other top candidates were women so not tough enough? The stories about Adams at the time revealed he was goofy, but they voted for him anyway.
trollhattan
@TBone: Our county has text notifications for both the ballot mailout to voters and for ballot receipt. They also open drop-off centers something like a month before election day, with more opening later as election day approaches.
Not confident everybody has this level of feedback and accountability but the state has gone to all-mail ballots and we don’t have voter suppression in place.
That DeJoy still has his job is deeply disturbing.
TBone
@rikyrah: oh the cop stories I could tell if I weren’t bound by attorney client privilege. But I will honor that to my grave, even though I’m only attorney-adjacent. I can tell my stepdad’s cop stories and my own experiences though đ
Just don’t talk to the mfers AT ALL if you can get away with that, other than saying “am I under arrest,” “am I free to go,” and “my attorney will answer for me.”
TBone
@trollhattan: agree 1,000%
SatanicPanic
@TBone: We could replace them, we just don’t because people are already using them. And maybe we wouldn’t- when Vine shut down no one got around to making a clone of it. People would probably just move on.
Either way, I don’t see the point of annoying millions of people by banning TikTok.
TBone
@SatanicPanic: it’s the spying from what I understand. But by that metric, Dumbvict would be in jail, so…
SatanicPanic
@TBone: That’s sort of baloney. They could get the same information from any number of data brokers. I think Biden probably wanted to blunt Trump’s claims that he is working for China or something. And probably there are some paranoid national security hawks that got in his ear.
topclimber
@Geminid: “Evidently Rep. Ocasio-Cortez is passing on next yearâs Mayoral race, so we wonât get to see how many New Yorkers share your opinion of her.”
Yet (or ever, TBF).
NotMax
@trollhattan
There are folks who don’t have or don’t want cell phones. Also a not insignificant percentage among seniors who have cellular service but eschew smartphones.
sdhays
@Betty: One of the things that I still canât wrap my head around is just how massive the NYPD is compared to other large city police departments worldwide. Itâs a fraction of the size of London Metropolitan Police.
The idea that it needs continuous expansion and ever more money is absurd. Having a police department that size relative to the size of the city is a social and policy failure.
Belafon
@TBone: The answer is that the building of the tools is only half the problem. The other part is getting the user base to move, which is why Twitter is still around while there are other replacements.
Geminid
@Betty: My understanding is that Eric Adams ran ahead of the field in Black and Latino precincts across the Outer Boroughs, while Kathy Garcia carried Manhattan. Garcia seemed to run as a competent technocrat, while Adams offered a tough on crime approach. It’s possible Adams attracted Black and Latino voters because crime was an important issue for them, and not a matter of hype.
Elizabelle
@PJ: Â Thank you. That’s an informative comment about ranked choice voting.
Come on NYC peeps. Â If France can get it right, and not run too many candidates against an obvious threat …
burritoboy
It is not at all random that big city mayors are almost all disappointments at best. Â (And if you think New York is an especial outlier in that, Chicago has tended to be….massively worse, and plenty of other major cities are either not that much better, or are equally mediocre, or only slightly different.) What that tends to indicate to me is that the job is likely structured or modeled or understood wrongly within the American polity, and this is not primarily due to individual failures (though the individual failures are likely a factor, to me it’s likely the problem is much more structural than personal.)
NotMax
@SatanicPanic
The Napster Syndrome: too quick out of the gate.
:)
Barbara
@Anyway: Just another person willing to throw a woman overboard because she isn’t perfect. It’s amazing to me how many people do this, including people who will swear every which way to Sunday that they are feminists.
It’s one of the key reasons we never had President Hillary Clinton.
cain
@topclimber: I think she’s better off being in the house for now. A lot less complex than trying to run that hot mess.
TBone
@SatanicPanic: I don’t know if US data brokers can legally sell to hostile (or any other) foreign governments. But you’re correct that it’s so frickin’ easy to get the data elsewhere. This article explains my understanding of the issue:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/08/tech/tiktok-data-china/index.html
I remember when a bonafide Chinese spy was caught on the grounds of Mar-A-Lardass, also too.
Soprano2
@LeftCoastYankee: We see some of this even in my city. Most of the police officers live outside the city; a long time ago, they even tried to get their preferred city council candidate elected. That failed, because even though they campaigned for him residents didn’t like the idea of people who don’t live here trying to dictate who our city council people are. They didn’t try it again. I wish they were required to live inside the city, but I also understand that would cause them recruitment problems. The people who live in the smaller towns around here think half of Springfield is a crime-ridden “murder zone” where crime is constant. It would be laughable if it didn’t influence so much.
Prometheus Shrugged
@SatanicPanic: Yeah, there’s no way the San Diego trolley is at 98% compliance. Over the past few months, I’ve taken it for jury duty (every day for a two week trial), to Padres games, and down to the pedestrian border crossing. Security agents boarded and checked tickets maybe twice in my ~100 trips. I even freeloaded by not scanning my transit pass way more than 2% of the time because I was rushing to catch the train.
Last year, I spent about a month in Germany, where people paid a (insanely low) monthly fee for unlimited travel on not only the local trolleys but also all other trains aside from the rapid intercity express. I can readily believe that there was near 100% compliance in that system, even though the security officers only checked my pass a handful of times there as well. I have no idea what the net revenue of that system might be, but it was incredibly convenient for me as a visitor.
TBone
@Prometheus Shrugged: I love Eurail Pass – now there’s a concept of a plan! Plus govt. funded public transport *chef’s kiss
SatanicPanic
@Prometheus Shrugged: I usually get checked more than that, but it’s not every day. I use it to commute so I tend to travel at peak hours. But I think I’ve only seen someone get kicked off once or twice so I assume most people are complying. But 98% seems like a lot. Who knows.
NotMax
@burritoboy
Remembering a contemporary quip after the three-way debate ahead of John Lindsay’s winning re-election as NYC mayor (this time on a third party line, not as a Republican).
From memory:
“In the debate John Lindsay stood on his record, John Marchi stood on his promises and Mario Procaccino stood on a phone book.”
(Mario was a very short dude.)
;)
Geminid
@topclimber: I can’t help sharing a meme I saw after the Infrastructure Bill passed. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez voted against the bill and was justifying her vote by pooh-poohing the bill’s value. New York’s subway sytem had undergone severe flooding that summer, so someone posted the picture of AOC in the white dress she wore to the Met Gala, the one with “Tax the Rich” on the back. But they showed her standing in a subway station, smiling over her shoulder with water up to her hips!
Not being a fan, I thought it was pretty funny.
Barbara
@Baud: It does depend on the overall method and how people respond. We had ranked choice voting for our recent county board election. There were five candidates, and you could only rank three out of the five. There were only two that I wanted to see win, so I chose them, and then selected for my number three the weakest of the remaining three, figuring my vote would never be allocated to the two “stronger” candidates I didn’t want to win.
If we had the choice to rank five, I would probably have done the same thing, but a lot of people will rank everyone, not understanding that if you really don’t want a specific person to win, you should not rank them at all. In my case, I really didn’t want a real estate agent elected to serve on the county board.
SatanicPanic
@TBone: The bigger risk I would think would be China using the platform to influence voters. But as we saw in 2016, a foreign country doesn’t need to own a platform to use it to influence elections.
Geminid
@burritoboy: I wonder how Karen Bass is doing as LA Mayor.
trollhattan
Florida gunman didn’t “just happen to be in the neighborhood.”
One of his felony convictions was possession of a machine gun.
Fun guy, not sorry he’s no longer wandering free.
Spc123
@CaseyL: no inspection? Most honor systems have random ticket checkers at least.
trollhattan
@Geminid: TBH did not know she was LA’s mayor until the Paris Olympics closing ceremony.
TBone
@SatanicPanic: đ
BR
@Geminid:
Bass was recently talking about banning masks in LA…and then she got COVID. So that’s a small window into how things are going.
Geminid
@trollhattan: Los Angeles County also has a new Sheriff. That system really needs better management so I hope he’s up to the job.
gene108
@Geminid:
I wonder how much ranked choice voting played into Adamsâ primary win, considering no one was very close to 50% of the vote in the crowded primary field?
I wonder if a run-off between the top two wouldâve produced a different result?
Spc123
@Prometheus Shrugged: Compliance isn’t as high as you think it is but there are enough inspectors looking for “Schwarzfahrer” to keep riders in line. The 49 Euro pass is fairly recent post-Covid and I’m not sure it would survive a new government. A good thing while it lasts, but not forever. In my city (Munich), the single standard fare for in-city S-Bahn, U-Bahn, tram or bus is the most expensive I have ever seen anywhere – with the exception of London when you don’t get the Oyster card – although monthly passes before the 49 ticket were reasonable.
PJ
@topclimber:Â â
AOC will not run for Mayor because it would be the end of her political career. She has a prominent position in the House that it would be stupid to give up, and has a good shot at Senator when Schumer retires. Why would she want to give that up?
Geminid
@gene108: Since Adams did not clear 40% he would have faced Kathy Garcia in a runoff. It’s hard to say who would have won, but the head-to-head match-up would have had a different dynamic than the Ranked-choice election.
PJ
@Geminid: Another infrastructure bill would be huge and I also think it would be very popular, as effects from the current infrastructure bill start becoming visible.
TBone
Great news!
Scientific American
@sciam
For only the second time in our 179-year history, the editors of Scientific American are endorsing a candidate for president. That person is
@KamalaHarris
Geminid
@PJ: The first Infrastructure bill allocated $66 billion to Amtrak for capital improvements. I bet they could put another $30 billion to good use this decade.
Amtrak’s chief said that $66 billion exceeded total capital investment in the system since Amtrak’s creation, and that they were about to expand a service map that had remained static even as the nation added 130 million people. A lot of the expansion will be done in partnership with states and local governments. They maybe adding train service near you.
gene108
@Betty Cracker:
My brother moved to NYC about 30 years ago. I moved to Southern NJ 27 years ago.
Iâve been to NYC regularly over the years.
NYC seems to run on a certain level of inertia and entrenched interests. Being the financial capital of the Western hemisphere and probably the world, people can be socially liberal on some issues but take a harder view on things like crime – which used to be a real problem until it started dropping in the 1990âs* – than what online liberals would expect. They donât want problems like crime disrupting their day to day lives versus issues like police reform.
Also, between Gullianiâs two terms and Bloombergâs two terms as a Republican and one as an independent, Republicans had a 20 year run as mayor. I think Bloomberg did a good job, for the most part. His first in the nation ban on smoking in bars and nightclubs was a literal breath of fresh air.
DeBlasio succeeded Bloomberg and had a liberal ideology that did not align with a city, whose economy is largely dedicated to finding ways to make a buck, whether itâs a food truck or a Goldman Sachs executive creating a financial derivative. He was inflexible and basically ended up annoying everyone.
*Crime was very much on peopleâs minds in NYC until the mid-00âs, when people noticed itâd really gone down. In the 1990âs, Brooklyn was still considered a rundown and crime ridden, and not a hipster paradise. I sometimes wonder how much collective PTSD the city has regarding crime from the 1970âs to the 1990âs.
Ruckus
@WaterGirl:
I do not understand why we cannot get good Democratic governors in New York.
New York business is about money. Not about producing a product for money, it’s about money. How to make it, how to hold on to at least most of it and really – that’s it. To the powerful that is the entire ballgame. They make money from money. The powerful want someone that does not get in the way of making money.
These people have money but money is like heroin to them, they want it, they need it, they have to have it at any cost. And what they have is never enough.
And the thing is of course is that we all need money. Money makes the economy work. Money IS the economy. Making 20 million a year is MONEY. Collecting Social Security that one earned over 40-50 yrs of working is money. One can live with MONEY or with money. But to get MONEY, most people have to sell something. And that something is something that many – maybe most people do not want to sell. Themselves.
Elizabelle
@TBone: Â Did they say who was their first endorsement?
Good to know! Â Will look into this.
Monica Morse
I looked up the system for ranked choice voting in New York City, and it allows for listing up to five candidates. When Maya Wiley was eliminated just before the final round, many ballots were exhausted and eliminated. Itâs entirely possible that the exhausted votes would have gone to Kathryn Garcia rather than Adams if voters could list more than five candidates.
I lived in Maineâs 2nd Congressional District in 2018, and the only reason Jared Golden defeated the Republican incumbent then, and still holds the office now, is because of ranked choice voting. Maine has a long history of third parties splitting the vote, so they implemented ranked choice. Golden was behind the Republican after the first round, but ended up winning after the ranked choice procedure
JML
The city? Try the country. The GOP has been pushing law & order mantras for a very long time all over the country and they make money and and gain votes by portraying the urban centers as crime-ridden hell-holes. They’ve been pushing the idea that people are going to get shot (and by “people” they mean “white people”) by entering the city for decades. It’s not PTSD, it’s concerted political action keeping violent crime at the forefront.
cain
@TBone:
First one was Obama, right?
Old School
@Elizabelle:
@cain:
The first endorsement from Scientific American was Biden.
cain
Some great news, looks like Iran is signaling that they are ready to do talks again with the west.
https://press.coop/@FT/113148564421070419
Even better is Iran no longer on the side of Russia. This is bad news for Putin as well
ETA
lol – mastodon is having a fun hashtag “#misquoteyoda” great way to decompress.
cain
@Old School: Oh! Excellent. :)
Elizabelle
@Old School: Â Yep. Â Just looked that up.
Marvelous news. Â And Biden deserved that endorsement.
Chris
@Searcher:
Yeah, you’re definitely onto something here.
I very much believe that even if they’re self-aware or embarrassed enough to say otherwise on the application forms and during interviews, a ton of cops really do join because they believe being a cop is signing up for a lifetime of being John McClane or Martin Riggs, with exciting action sequences waiting around every corner. And then it turns out that 99% of being a cop is domestic disputes, speeding tickets, traffic control, and just waiting around bored stiff for something to happen. It’s boring, damn it! When do we get to shoot people?
Of course, when they run into the 1% of the job that actually is like the movies – hello, Uvalde! – most of them find out that they don’t actually have what it takes to be Martin Riggs even when given the opportunity. They signed up to roleplay as action heroes, not to actually be action heroes.
But hey, shooting a guy in the back while he runs away from a victimless crime? That, they’re perfectly up to. Then they go out for beers and talk about how totally heroic it was and what a public menace the guy must’ve been and what a message it sends to The Criminal Element.
sdhays
@BR: JFC. Banning masks?
burritoboy
The reality is that any major city will have very entrenched economic interests ( indeed, this is more or less a necessity when we say “major city” in modernity), and these interests will simply have outsized power. Â That’s one of the ways the New England town meeting circa 1770 leads us down the wrong path: Â most of the (adult, male, reasonably economically active, Puritan believing, etc.) Puritans in the New England town of 1770 will either have their own farms, or have their own independent artisanal shops. Â (To some extent, the New England town of 1770 was intentionally socially engineered to achieve that outcome.) The Puritans were not workers nearly entirely dependent on large enterprises and who will simply starve if those large enterprises even falter. Â That means some things must be very different between the two, and we tend to intentionally try to avoid realizing the consequences of that. Â In New York, this is the power of being the money center of the world; in other major cities, the particular industries and the consequences of those will have differing impacts. Â But one can’t simply hand wave the problem(s) away. Â It’s not truly accurate to hand wave at the problem as simply being the fault of misguided conservative-Dems, but the problems are massively much deeper and more problematic.
Chris
@sdhays:
True, but on the bright side, having such a huge and overfunded police department did manage to cut violent crime in New York to a fraction of its London equivalent.
… oh, balls.
raven
@trollhattan: The AK 47 and SKS use the same ammo.
trollhattan
Okay, that’s twelve or so PA votes in Kamala’s pocket.
Suzanne
I need an open thread. I just watched That Clip of Rich Lowry with Megyn Kelly and my mouth is hanging open,
BR
I’m hoping the Harris/Walz campaign is going to do a bunch of events and fun interviews and whatever soon, because I’m tired of hearing all the noise we’ve been hearing for going on 5 days now.
TBone
PSA:Â Hillary Clinton on with Rachel Maddow tonight.
Also, a bunch of former Reagan Admin. employees issued a letter of endorsement of VP Harris today.
TBone
@trollhattan: our đ€Ź PA Supreme Court just also shot in the foot the lower court’s ruling that misdated ballots could be counted as normal ballots. So BE CAREFUL when filling out your ballot AND the outer envelope, PA peeps!
Old School
@Suzanne: Wasn’t sure what you were referring to, so I tracked it down.
Wow. I’d say an n-bomb would end Lowry’s tenure at the National Review, but it’s the National Review.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@TBone:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/15/former-ronald-reagan-staffers-endorse-kamala-harris
FYI to anyone who remembers, this is different than the letter a slew of former various (R) administration officials released (that’s linked to in the Guardian article).
TBone
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: đ thanks!
trollhattan
@Old School:
Just doubled his Christmas bonus.
NB Not “holiday” bonus, suck it hippies!
Geminid
@cain: This is promising, but I keep in mind that the office of Supreme Leader Khameini calls the shots on major foreign policy decisions, and the IRGC is not controlled by President Pezeshkian.
Next month IAEC Secretary Rafael Grossi will visit Tehran to hash out some problems regarding inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilties. This could be a key test of the new government intentions.
Last time Grossi visited Tehran (in 2022 I think), he pressed for a meeting with Khameini because he wanted to speak to the man in charge.
Fun Pezeshkian fact: like Khameini, President Pezeshkian is an Azeri. That is the second largest ethnic group in Iran, after Persian. There are more Azeris in Iran than there are in Azerbaijan.
Jackie
@TBone: I really donât see the reason mail in ballots need to be dated. The only meaningful date should be the post office stamped date proving it was postmarked by Nov 5.
TBone
A great reminder collection of insanity – Loomer isn’t the sole problem (we still have Gen. Flynn, the “National Security Advisor and many more):
https://digbysblog.net/2024/09/16/trump-conspiracy-theories/
I, however, am still an assassination truther. Unabashedly. It’s all just too hinky. I think that fucking guy is capable of doing anything to advance his personal interest in regaining power and continuing to grift. Who in the fuck money begs for an assassination attempt? Oops, I mean two attempts! đ
TBone
@Jackie: I’m with you on that. It’s an unnecessary hurdle put in place and solely designed to trip people up!
Jackie
Heh! TCFGâs I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT ! post on social media yesterday misfired đ
Maybe heâll post his TS hatred daily!
cain
@Geminid:
Yes, let’s hope that we have a good result.
Suzanne
@Old School: OMG. I would say “the mask slipped”, but I think it’s more like “they’re flinging the masks out the window and off the balcony to crash on the street below”.
burritoboy
Having the extremely large metropolis that is the necessary capital hub for the large extended commercial republic (which is what the US is) necessitates in turn to some extent a large internal security force (whether the NYPD or any of the huge number of others). Â That this large internal security force will eventually come to recognize its own inherent institutional power and own needs for development and expansion is not something new in the history of republics. Â In fact, it’s an extremely old cycle, and why there was a great deal of opposition to the new imperial policing methods being introduced by Peel back from the colonies into London in the mid nineteenth century.
SteverinoCT
Cops randomly shooting is not a new problem: When Will Rogers read that police gunfire hit an innocent bystander, he was full of praise for the cops. âHard enough to FIND an innocent man in New York City, much less hit him!â
JAFD
@Sister Golden Bear: That’s the way it works on New Jersey Transit’s light rail lines, the Hudson- Bergen Light Rail, Newark City Subway and the Trenton-Camden River Line. Buy ticket, get time-stamp at machine on platform, show it to officer if asked.
I’ve ridden all three, system seems to work well. Occasionally made round-trip on one fare, once rode without paying (arrived at station as train did, didn’t want to wait for next train, was lucky)
Geminid
@Geminid: Correction: Rafael Grossi leads the IAEA— International Atomic Energy Agency— not the IAEC.
Matt
Fun update: the NYPD now “can’t find” the knife!
Paul in KY
@Old School: Ha! Well played, Old School!
Paul in KY
@Baud: If the guy really did say to a cop “Stop following me or I’ll kill you”, that’s like just daring the cop to continue following, etc. etc.
Why they then started blasting in a subway car…