NEW YORK (AP) — The Justice Department on Monday ordered federal prosecutors to drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, arguing in a remarkable departure from long-standing norms that the case was interfering with the mayor’s ability to aid the president’s crackdown on illegal immigration.
In a two-page memo obtained by The Associated Press, acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove told prosecutors in New York that they were “directed to dismiss” the bribery charges against Adams immediately.
Bove said the order was not based on the strength of evidence in the case, but rather because it had been brought too close to Adams reelection campaign and was distracting from the mayor’s efforts to assist in the Trump administration’s law-and-order priorities.
Here’s the original memo [pdf].
As Josh Marshall pointed out on Bluesky, the memo instructs the SDNY to review the case after New York’s mayoral election in November, so Adams is at the beck and call of Trump, as if it weren’t obvious already.
Governor Kathy Hochul has the power to fire Adams. The last NY Governor to attempt to exercise this power was FDR. Mayor Jimmy Walker resigned before FDR could fire him, but not before a NY judge ruled that the Governor has essentially unlimited power to remove the Mayor. FDR’s action was based on a special prosecutor’s report. Adams has been indicted, so it’s worse than Walker. Hochul has consistently refrained from criticizing Adams, and since it’s a feat for someone from upstate to remain governor in a state where all the political power is concentrated in the New York City area, she’ll be reluctant to do it. If you live in New York City and want to give her a piece of her mind, here’s the contact form with a phone number at the bottom.
If you want to know how a Republican would use that power, George Pataki used it to remove a Bronx DA from a murder case because that DA opposed the death penalty. But, obviously, Democrats must be better than that, because norms and “permission structures“.
In other New York News, King Elon decreed that no FEMA money could be spent to house migrants in New York even though it was appropriated by Congress, and his minions in government made it so.
Steve LaBonne
WTF would Hochul be worried about? Is there anybody left in the city who doesn’t hate Adams?
Belafon
She should have cover in this case. My son, who lives in Brooklyn, says almost everybody hates Adams, and this will make them actually hate him more.
@mistermix.bsky.social
@Belafon: I think her move will be to say that the voters will be able to speak on this soon (the primary) and that she doesn’t want to short-circuit the will of the voters, etc. There is some truth to it
Polling shows that he’s terribly unpopular, I agree with your son.
brendancalling
Emailed Hochul.
On a semi-related note (contacting reps and officials) anyone else get a call from their congressman about an emergency telephone town hall tonight at 7:30 or so EST? I believe it’s about strategy for the budget/debt ceiling. I plan on calling in, but called my rep just in case, and told him to let the GOP clean up their own mess. It’s not Democrats’ job to save the GOP from itself.
They (and we) gotta learn not to FAFO.
RepubAnon
As Trump reserved the right to reopen prosecution if Adams doesn’t follow orders, this should be cause for firing.
Lobo
Your Apocalypse Talking points to your House Rep. from TPM:
For the Senate:
-Deny Quorum
-Block Unanimous Consent
-Max Out Debate Time
-Blanket Opposition to all nominees.
For you: Imagine a better world. Peace.
Dan
@Steve LaBonne: She’s rightly worried about what comes next.
Sure, she can get rid of Adams and probably get some good press about it.
One hour later, Andrew Cuomo will announce his run for Mayor of NYC. Polling already has him as the leading candidate. he can win.
Neither Hochul nor a lot of the rest of us want to see Andrew cuomo in any office again, much less NYC mayor.
Melancholy Jaques
@Belafon:
After Adams loses the election, Trump will appoint him to some sinecure from which he will spend all day attacking Democrats.
Kay
Every pundit who celebrated Adams as a rebuke to the Left and the future of the Democratic Party should be confronted on it. The red flags were all there. He lied about his address. They could not pin him down on where he lives.
There’s your future of the Democratic Party, pundits. This fucking crook. But I guess punching the Left is always the go-to.
Kay
It was also NY media’s nutty crime panic. They’re at fault too.
Ninnies.
Ohio Mom
I don’t know what it is about my birthplace but NYC has had more awful mayors than good ones. Some of the awful ones weren’t bad, just ineffectual but others, like Adams!
Kay
@Ohio Mom:
I liked the sanitation manager who ran. Elect her. If she can run that she can run anything.
@mistermix.bsky.social
@Dan: One thing to factor into your analysis is that the NY Mayoral Democratic Primary has ranked choice voting. Where, normally, a bunch of candidates would split the vote and let Cuomo prevail, the Cuomo hating Dems in the primary can just not rank Cuomo.
Josie
Just saw this on Political Wire. How will our deeply Christian new administration (//) wiggle out of this one?
ETA: Yay for Episcopalians!
matt
‘we need this crook to help fill our deportation camps’
K-Mo
This feels like a straightforward plot line from a middling mob serial .
Kay
As always, I would like to remind everyone that obeying laws operates 99% on consent. When we celebrate these lawbreakers we do damage to the whole systems credibility and encourage lawlessness from people who may have been complying only out of fear of consequences. Adams will ripple. We’re creating an environment where this kind of corruption is not only accepted by celebrated. Countries collapse when they do this.
wolf parade
It’s not the NY voters Hochul is worried about it’s open war with Trump for defying his will on Adams.
matt
@Kay: Trump just pardoned Blagojevich too.
Kay
@wolf parade:
I’m sympathetic to governors with that fear. Less so to members of Congress. He can really screw individual states.
Belafon
@Josie: Any Church of Christ or Baptist churches in the group?
A Ghost to Most
Send Elmo back to Apartheid Street.
Kay
@matt:
Reap the whirlwind. I think many more people were not paying taxes in the 20 or so years where Republicans gutted enforcement. I saw it iin the law practice. They knew they’d get away with it. That’s what happens. We can’t actually police 350 million people. We need a culture that expects people to follow laws. We’re losing that.
@mistermix.bsky.social
@wolf parade:
This is the only way to beat Musk/Trump, though — to exercise any and all legitimate power against them, to show that they aren’t all powerful, and also to turn the population against them when they retaliate.
Firing Adams would be a completely legitimate use of a power that was designed for exactly this kind of circumstance.
Kelly
Settling in for my first cup of covefefe here on the upper left coast. I see Sec Def Hegseth has renamed Fort Liberty to Fort Bragg but with a twist it’s not Confederate General Braxton Bragg it’s WW2 paratrooper Roland Bragg. Seems a lot like the using the OK hand sign for white power.
Josie
@Belafon:
Not according to this list. I’ll watch for a more detailed report in days to come.
Belafon
@Kay: She should be one of the most powerful governors in the country given the economic power in the state. Newsom doesn’t seem to be worried and he could really use some FEMA money.
Melancholy Jaques
@Kay:
This mindset is deeply engrained in American political culture, not just the media. You would think that we liberals were trying to hurt people rather than mitigate the harsher features of our consumer capitalist economy.
Belafon
@Kelly: He can’t in the sense that the law that created the commission gave them the power to name the bases (hey, that’s what the Supreme Court said the legislature had to do, spell out the duties).
kindness
I left NY in ’77, so I’m somewhat removed from NY politics. What I can say is from what I see in California about the Democratic party in NY is that it might as well be the Vichy Democratic party.
Josie
@Belafon: Ok, dug further into AP article:
“The plaintiffs in the new lawsuit represent a vastly larger swath of American worshippers — including more than 1 million followers of Reform Judaism, the estimated 1.5 million Episcopalians in 6,700 congregations nationwide, nearly 1.1 million members of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), and the estimated 1.5 million active members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church — the country’s oldest predominantly Black denomination.
Among the other plaintiffs are the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), with more than 3,000 congregations; the Church of the Brethren, with more than 780 congregations; the Convención Bautista Hispana de Texas, encompassing about 1,100 Hispanic Baptist churches; the Friends General Conference, an association of regional Quaker organizations; the Mennonite Church USA, with about 50,000 members; the Unitarian Universalist Association, with more than 1,000 congregations; the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, with more than 500 U.S. congregations; and regional branches of the United Methodist Church and the United Church of Christ.”
catclub
Wait, then he should lose an election, right?
Or is ‘a lot’ a minority of voters in NYC?
brendancalling
@Kay: George “Please Don’t Remember My Role in the Minca Lewinsky Imbroglio” Conway had this to say recently on Blue Sky (too lazy to look for the link, but I copied the text in a text to my dad):
“A couple of (actually serious) thought-experiment question on where we are, and where we’re going: If a bunch of sociopaths are destroying the federal givernment from within, why should we pay federal taxes? And if they succeed, who’s going to make us pay those taxes?”
Kelly
@Belafon: I didn’t know that. He probably didn’t know and when informed didn’t care or got a bit of a thrill from coloring outside the lines.
Baud
@Kelly:
I wonder why he felt the need to distance himself from the Confederacy.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@@mistermix.bsky.social:
I network online on a couple of policy issues with a lot of NYC residents, plus I have a core of longtime professional musician friends there.
The Adams hate is deep and widespread although it would be great if we had any commenters actually living there to provide some internal-BJ perspective on the mayor.
Everybody who promotes rank-choice or jungle-primary or whatever they think might be better, Adams is a cautionary tale of “beware of what you wish for”.
https://www.thecity.nyc/2021/07/19/did-ranked-choice-voting-work-in-nyc-eric-adams/
That’s just one piece but others discuss similar issues and still more others heap nothing but praise on the process. One thing is clear, NYC voters next time will have a much better understanding of how to game the system. Now, will it produce a “better” mayor?
We have a (technically) non-partisan, jungle primary system here in Denver and all it does is cough up shitty mayoral candidates every four years.
Baud
@catclub:
A lot = all the people I hang out with.
Baud
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
No system prevents voters from electing a douchebag.
New Deal democrat
Just repeating that I’ve told anyone who has asked me before January 20, that it will get very bad, very fast. T—-p has picked up where he left off in January 2021.
The dismissal of charges against Adams, which *explicitly* were not due to a lack of evidence, sends a very loud signal with loyalty will be rewarded with impunity. Since part of the rationale is that the prosecution would interfere with Adams’ re-election campaign, I wonder what will happen if the voters of NYC reject his re-election bid? It is not far-fetched at all at this point to believe that the T—-p Administration will install him anyway, under the “Who’s gonna stop us?” Doctrine.
Plus, we are already seeing quiet defiance of District Court orders. It will likely be open, explicit defiance within a week. And then the only potential guardrail left potentially restraining a T—-p autocracy will be the GOP 6 at the Supreme Court.
If this happens – and I think it is a near certainty at this point – we can no longer consider the current Constitution anything more than a piece of paper. And Merrick Garland’s beloved “upholding the norms” speech was only three weeks ago.
As a result, I have crossed the legal Rubicon myself. Should Democrats regain national power, it is too late to try to “restore” the norms. That was Biden’s shtick, and obviously it failed. In particular, that means equal defiance of T—-py judge’s orders (see, e.g. Cannon, Kasmyrczk), under the theory that the Judiciary may issue opinions as to what the law is, but cannot order a separate and equal branch of government what to do. And if Congress wants to restrain a progressive Executive’s spending plans, well, there’s the Impeachment power. Good luck with that. I just don’t see any other plausible way forward.
Geminid
@Dan: If Andrew Cuomo wants to run for Mayor, he’ll run whether or not Hochul fires Adams. And from what I’ve seen, I expect Cuomo to win the Democratic primary and win again in November.
Old School
@Belafon:
What I read is that the commission was to rename bases named for Confederates. Since this Bragg isn’t a Confederate, it’s a way around the law.
Baud
@Old School:
Thanks. That explains it.
tobie
@Kay: Her name is Kathryn Garcia. According to Wikipedia she has a post in state govt now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathryn_Garcia
Another Scott
Politics is slow. I assume that justice will catch up with Adams eventually.
Meanwhile, ExistentialComics.com – The Once and Future King.
Hmm…
Best wishes,
Scott.
TBone
On topic mood music
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zGO8HN1QQdI
Belafon
@Josie: Thanks.
Belafon
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Dallas ran into the same issue: Black male Democrat is obviously better than the Republican. Then the elected Democrat switched to the Republican party after the election.
Geminid
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Adams won about 32% of first rankings. Under New York’s former system, he would have had to win a runoff against the runner-up because he did not clear 40%.
I think Kathy Garcia would have won a head-to-head matchup with Adams, but we’ll never know. Generally speaking though, I prefer runoffs to Ranked-choice voting, the so-called “instant runoff.”
Something that struck me about the 2021 Democratic in New York City: it was considered a low turnout affair. One of the rationales for Ranked-choice voting was that the prospect of having so many choices would bring more people to the polls. It didn’t work that way the first time.
TBone
@Josie: hip hip hooray!
Mr. Bemused Senior
Not just obedience to laws. The whole operation of society is based on trust. We trust the food we buy at the market won’t poison us. In contracts it’s the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing.
Without trust we get the law of the jungle. I think most people don’t want that.
Starfish (she/her)
@Belafon: My sister in Queens says the same.
Baud
@Josie:
I really hope decent religious people start getting loud.
tobie
@Geminid: @Dan: If Andrew Cuomo is in the lead in the Dem primary for NYC mayor, then I think we are dealing with a much more conservative electorate in a blue city than I expected. Things will only get worse as blue cities and states are starved for funds and Dems continue to blame each other for losses. Gawd, it would be nice if we could all pull on the same rope once in a while.
Citizen Dave
Can Weiner stand up for NYC Mayor?
Baud
@tobie:
NYC almost always elects a conservative mayor. Consistently Republican until diBlasio.
Dan
@catclub: Yes, “a lot” is less than 50%. ;)
cmorenc
@brendancalling:
Actually, that is precisely Donald Trump’s greedy wet dream – to eliminate income taxes – a substantial part of why Trump is so enamored with tariffs is his notion that they (and maybe other indirect or user-fee taxes ultimately born by consumers) can replace income taxes. Of course, the other motivation for tariffs is that they align with Trump’s M.O. of the swaggering bully approach to international relations.
Dan Almont
Eric Adams is deeply unpopular in New York City. Firing Adams would be to Hochul’s political benefit in New York City.
Dan Almont
She won’t do it, though. She continues to dissapoint.
Kelly
@Baud: Yeah the Trumpists have been mostly blatant. Finding a different Bragg has to be a wink and nod to the Confederacy. Reading about Roland Bragg, paratrooper with a Silver Star. A brave soldier with a Silver Star but kinda obscure.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Geminid:
Yup, that’s Denver’s system, Top 2 go to a subsequent runoff with a new voting date.
Anybody interested in how Instant Runoff Voting works:
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/waymakermath4libarts/chapter/instant-runoff-voting/
I honestly don’t have any real preference cuz as Baud says above, any system can result in a douchebag being elected. What I push back against is the argument that some kind of alternative to what’s mostly done around the US is somehow “better”. It’s simply different. Worth trying? Sure but none are a panacea.
And anytime somebody says a voting method will massively increase turnout, at least in the USofA, I snort. Okay, that’s not entirely accurate. As we’ve shown in CO where we make it insanely easy for *everybody* to vote, it does juice numbers but except for The Plague Times, it doesn’t juice the numbers into a territory (let’s say around 80%) that allows one to honestly say “the people have spoken”.
And that’s only for federal elections. Our mayoral race had a 33% turnout for the initial round, 31% for the run off.
Baud
I personally don’t know if removing Adams would help him in the primary, running against interference from Albany. Voters sometimes respond stuff like that.
Baud
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
My big thing is people winning primaries or elections with less than 50%, sometimes much less. I don’t care much about how the system gets to 50%.
Also, agree about turnout. California does everything possible to make voting easy, but I don’t even think they’re the highest turnout state.
Kelly
@Old School: I didn’t know that either. Also using the names of respectable people will keep the names from changing back. The search is on for a respectable soldiers named Hood, Lee, Benning etc
dc
@Dan: Why can’t NY elect a normal Democratic mayor?
Scuffletuffle
I would be interested in a discussion of what happens to the economy now that fElon is turning off the money spigot, especially to federal employees and related agencies. Seems like there’s gonna be one heck of a downturn at some point…
Geminid
@tobie: I don’t think a Cuomo win would reflect a more “conservative” electorate in New York City. I think New Yorkers will have made their decisions on pragmatic grounds: that he would make a better Mayor than the others; a practical choice, not an ideological one.
This primary interests me because New York City is a very political place. I don’t think New Yorkers are neccesarily more civic-minded than Virginians, but they seem more politically minded. It’s very media-intensive as well.
So I think there will be a lot of debate on basic issues; it will be in the context of New York City’s problems, but many of their challenges are present in much of the nation. I’m interested in seeing what New Yorkers think about them.
Citizen Alan
@Kay: I actually could have voted in that election and would have voted for the woman who finished second. I had just moved to Queens for my LLM in August and did not become aware of the deadline to register in time.
Captain C
@@mistermix.bsky.social: Brooklyn resident here and I can confirm. Pretty much everyone hates him and considers him a corrupt, incompetent joke from Jersey.
tobie
@Geminid: If New Yorkers believe that Andrew Cuomo would be a more effective mayor, and they vote on pragmatic grounds, they are saying that some positions and proposals are ineffective and impractical. That is a political statement which indicates what New Yorkers think Democratic governance in their city should be. I will not be taking sides in the primary but I will be listening to the statement NYers make with their vote. That statement involves ideology.
Ruckus
I served in the US military at a time of war. Did I want to go where I might have been sent to kill humans halfway around the world? NO. Did I want to represent the government of the time to be the world wide determinate of if a government of a foreign country was legitimate and up to our “standards”? I don’t believe I did. But that didn’t matter to our government.
What actually does matter to OUR government? The cost of food? The freedom of our citizens? The size of their bank accounts? Equality? The Constitution? Power?
And what does the current government give two shits about? The power of one man? The equality of our citizens? The size of their bank accounts? That our elected people should allow the world’s richest man to run it though not elected nor with any legitimate basis and run it?
I suspect that this is a somewhat new, never imagined bit of politics that is as bad as any of us might have imagined.
Citizen Alan
@Kay: I think a lot of it in NYC was equating the Left with de Blasio who had his own problems.
Also, as a practical matter, I don’t think it’s possible anymore to get a NYC mayor willing to even try to rein in the NYPD because the NYPD reacts to even the slightest criticism with what amount to threats to step back and let the city fall into anarchy. I think a sizeable portion of the NYC voters genuinely think that police reform is a Leftwing position (which it is) and therefore voting Left means provoking the anger of an organized and well-armed street gang 35,000+ strong that has the de facto legal authority to kill at will.
Kay
@Citizen Alan:
I’m sick to death of corrupt pols. As if we don’t have enough problems.
Captain C
@Kay: There was a tweet not long after Adams assumed office which said something like: “When Adams was elected all the media was like ‘Ha! Now you leftists will see what a real normie Dem looks like and then every day when he talks to the press he says something like ‘Leprechauns are real and I’m gonna cook one for dinner tonight!'”
Geminid
@tobie: I think ideology is an overrated concept when it comes to Democrats in New York City and elsewhere. Questions of ideology are a bigger deal among the chattering class which is well represented here, but I don’t think most rank-and-file Democrats care that much about them. They look at policies through a pragmatic lens.
Kay
@Citizen Alan:
That was underexplored in the crime panic – how police got mad and simply did no work at all for two years, to punish us.
Adams has been very, very good to them. The overtime costs are incredible. I feel bad for anyone who comes after – good luck reining them in now that they’re all making 200k a year.
Citizen Alan
@tobie: It also signifies that being a gross sex pest is not a deal-breaker for the majority of Democrats. Which is another norm that Trump and the Rape-The-Public Party has destroyed.
Soprano2
@Kay: It applies even in small things. Since Covid happened there have been more and more people who don’t license their vehicles. I heard an interview with one of them who said it was cheaper to pay the $99 ticket than the license fees and sales taxes. What’s he going to do when he needs to sell the vehicle or trade it in? He doesn’t actually legally own it. Shit’s about to get real here, the police asked our City Council for the right to tow any vehicle they find parked with expired tags of any kind. That’s how bad it is. I heard an estimate that it’s cost the city $4 million in tax revenue for people to not license their vehicles.
Kay
@Captain C:
It isn’t his weirdness – its that he’s a crazy liar. That’s a red flag! Bad!
Lying all the time needs to be disqualifying again. Standards. We need to hoist them back up.
He is of poor character. Stop hiring bad people.
Kay
@Soprano2:
I want tags enforced again. I know they want to wear combat clothes and use flash bangs but I want traffic code enforcement.
Soprano2
@Melancholy Jaques: According to the people who are critical, we’re hurting them by helping people they don’t like, or by helping people the wrong way.
Kay
@New Deal democrat:
I’m with you. My measure was they stop obeying court orders and they’ve gone past that to immunizing their friends from any consequences. Lawless.
I think we’re past politics. As Adam says – thru the window and over the hill or whatever.
I just don’t know how to think about it yet.
Soprano2
@Belafon: I heard a report on the news today that stated the FFOTUS ordered them to stop making pennies, as if he had the power to do that. Most people probably think he does.
I heard part of an interview with Sarah Longwell this morning where she said that “the Democrats” need to call out all this stuff so the press will report on it. What about the idea that the press should be reporting it because that’s part of their job!!!!!!! Gggggrrrrr…….. Also, she said that the one thing FFOTUS is doing that’s polling well is the deportations. Who knew that publicizing a few raids by putting them on YouTube and parking big trucks with the letters “ICE” on them in prominent places would convince people that you’re doing something about immigration? *rolleyes* Unfortunately, this is the world we live in now – for people to think you’re doing something you have to create visuals for them. This is one thing that FFOTUS is a genius at doing in a way that manipulates public opinion. He’s not deporting that many more people, but they’re sure making it look like he is.
Kay
@Soprano2:
I think there’s basically two groups of Democrats – those who think we’re coming back from this by normal political means and those who don’t. I don’t, but I can see the other side and think its reasonable.
An election isn’t going to fix this, IMO. The fever isn’t going to break. They get worse every month and have since 2012.
Ruckus
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
Never forget that humanity takes ALL KINDS. We don’t have much of a choice of who is and isn’t running for office. Do you want to hold office? I thought about it once for less than a minute and almost choked – I was laughing so hard. What we can do is vote to not elect crappy humans. And often it actually is a crap shoot that we get someone who isn’t. Humanity takes all kinds – and has all kinds. And we as often as not have no real idea how good someone might be at any particular job. Over my lifetime I’ve hired a few humans to work for me, in technical work that took abilities and training. When I started doing that I thought there must be a way to do this right. Without spending a hell of a lot of time watching them work – there isn’t. We can test, we can have our impressions, we can demand experience, but at the end of the day it’s very often just a risk that they can and want to do the work. It was that way in the military, it’s been that way in 2 different types of business I’ve owned and it’s that way in politics – and in life. You make a choice and you hope it works out. If you are smart you work at making it work.
tobie
@Geminid:
I think you and I may have a different understanding of what ideology means. Deciding that you want or don’t want sweeping change, are happy or unhappy with the status quo apart from modest adjustments is ideological to me. Maybe NYers think Cuomo has the pugnacious personality to get stuff done. That could be construed as a non-ideological motivation, though in the age of Trump the desire for a strongman feels very political. We’ll see what happens. I don’t vote in NY so will just be an observer.
Soprano2
@Kay: It’s crazy, I saw a car the other day with a temp tag from 2021!!!
Soprano2
@Kay: I’m more on your side, they’ve gotten consistently worse since Obama’s election. I think it made some of them insane, and that insanity spread. If they defy court orders, I think that’s the ballgame, because who will stop them from whatever they want to do? Did you see that FEMA stopped payments to the hotels in NY City based on an Elon tweet? That’s money that was appropriated by Congress for that purpose. If Congress isn’t going to stand up for their prerogatives, and the court isn’t going to stand up for it’s prerogatives, who is going to fix this?
Mr. Bemused Senior
When I became a manager the first hiring decision I made was a disaster. I had wrongly trusted a resume. I learned the hard way.
Years later I learned there are things you can do to make the hiring process better and more objective but they are not foolproof.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Soprano2:
Heh heh, just yesterday I was behind a car with temp tags that expired in Apr 2024. That’s one of the worst ones I’ve seen lately.
Cities statewide last Fall had a couple-of-week “crackdown” on cars driving with expired tags. The problem? They only checked cars driving on I-70 and I-25. Drive around the city on expired tags with impunity. And if you were caught on one of those roads, the fine is $95 whereas even if you’re driving a 5-10 year old car, the registration costs more.
One of the most consistent things I hear being on the board of two registered neighborhood orgs (and in public meetings with the 3 City Council people I semi-regularly interact with) is the complete lack of traffic code/law enforcement. It’s actually overtaken ‘property crime’ as the issue most residents bitch about the complete lack of response by the pohlice. Instead, the City tries to implement poorly thought out engineering solutions to solve the problem and the result has made things worse.
Ruckus
@Baud:
As a Californian I do have to report that I’d bet that a reasonable percentage of the humans over 18 living in CA may not be able to vote. We have a large percentage of humans from other countries living here. I imagine that some of them may not be here legally but most are. The languages I hear spoken are diverse. (I take public transit a fair bit, it’s quite good here now and far cheaper than gas, and it is often that my butt is a minority on the train/bus.)
Kay
@Soprano2:
I dont know. I think about it a lot – I need a new context. My thing is sort of “laws” and “politics” and both of those are rapidly becoming irrelevant. I was over tired last night, driving back from Detroit after a whirlwind trip, just exhausting, and the Adams news hit me quite hard – like “oh, THIS is what it will be like”.
I find the unreality the most frightening part – things like media replacing boos with cheers in a broadcast.
Geminid
@tobie: This is not a binary choice. There is continuum between “sweeping change” and modest policy adjustments to a status quo. And as a practical matter, there are several different and distinct areas to be addressed by this debate. There is also the question of prospective managerial capability.* That is in large part independent of policy prescriptions but very important in a city as large as New York.
So I disagree with the notion that New York City’s primary will be some sort of ideological test. I know many commentators and maybe some candidates will try to make it one, but I don’t think it will be.
* Ed. If the old rules had been in effect in 2021 and the race came down to a runoff between Eric Adams and Kathy Garcia, I think she could have won on the issue of manageral capability. As it was, she was down by only 8,000 votes when all ranked choices were tabulated
That was a strange primary. Andrew Yang was a distraction, I thought. Yang flamed out and I don’t think he ever had a chance to win. But Yang sucked up a lot of media coverage and I think that was to Adams’ benefit.
Ohio Mom
There’s a thin line between the libertarianism 1%ers like Koch promote, and anarchy. Not updating your car tags is a foretaste of a country without the rule of law.
I remember being a young teen and learning about anarchy. Sounded very appealing to my adolescent self, no rules to follow. Then I grew up.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Ohio Mom: if we get real anarchy in this country a lot of people will die. Personally, I’m opposed to the idea.
jowriter
@tobie: A bunch of my friends in NYC voted for Garcia. Competent, not a showboat. Hope she runs again.
Ruckus
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
Depending on where you live it is quite possible the population has increased but the number of cops has not, or at least not in the same percentage. When I was a kid, a bazillion years ago, it seemed that the number of cops/per citizen was a larger number. But think about it now, a lot more humans (of all types) makes more need for more cops. But. That is all public money that pays them and buys them the cars and equipment, which has gone upwards like the cost of every other thing and we seem to not want to spend money that way. And when I was a kid the concept of being a cop was not out of line for a lot of people. Is that still the case? I’m thinking not. I had a friend who became a CHP. He has to be retired now.