Gov. Kathy Hochul will not remove embattled New York City Mayor Eric Adams from office, saying his fate should be left to the voters to decide at the ballot box.
[…]Instead of removal, the governor said she will unveil new state and city bills that would increase oversight of the mayor’s office.
That includes creating a new state deputy inspector general with broad authority to watch over the city’s dealings, as well as giving other city officials more authority to sue the Trump administration over government actions without the approval of the mayor’s office. Hochul said she also wants to increase funding for the deputy state comptroller with oversight of New York City’s finances.
Those measures, if approved by the state Legislature and City Council, would apply through the end of this year and be “subject to renewal,” Hochul said.
What a stupid way to do this. This is a non-answer to the real problem: Trump is holding Adams hostage. It’s doing nothing in the guise of doing something, and any reasonable person sees right through it.
BTW, everyone who listens to Lawrence O’Donnell needs to realize that he told a bald-faced lie on his program a couple of nights ago.
According to Lawrence O’Donnell, Hochul can’t just remove Adams by fiat. Says she could kick off an as-yet-undefined court procedure that would involve witnesses with her as prosecutor, judge, & jury, requiring her presence for the duration, likely involving endless appeals. Not as easy as suggested
— Andrew Werth (@andrewwerth.com) February 20, 2025 at 1:07 PM
That is absolutely false. I know he said it because some people repeated it in the comments — I just assumed they misheard him. As I posted yesterday, and will post again today, this is the entirety of the removal clause in the City Charter:
The mayor may be removed from office by the governor upon charges and after service upon him of a copy of the charges and an opportunity to be heard in his defense. Pending the preparation and disposition of charges, the governor may suspend the mayor for a period not exceeding thirty days.
I’m just some blogger who has access to Google, but I didn’t lie to you, and I brought receipts when I made a claim about Hochul’s powers. Keep that in mind next time O’Donnell makes some claim that sounds like he read the law.
So, yes, I’m disgusted with a Democrat, and frankly, with most Democrats to date. Am I just some outlier? Nope — here’s the latest Q Poll [pdf]. It shows that 97% of Democrats polled disapprove of Elon Musks role in government, and overall it’s 54/42 disapproval. But look at this:
49% of Dems disapprove of the way Democrats in Congress are handling their job. Perhaps that’s based on unrealistic expectations, but I also think it’s a reflection of the lack of fight in party leaders and the lack of a response commensurate to the coup that’s taking place. It looks like our party, our team, our guys, our “I will fight for you” warriors got rolled, and they even admit it:
Don’t get me wrong, good for him for admitting that mistake, now do Rubio.
And, yes, I will mention Democrats who do well (I re-tweet them all the time on BlueSky), and yes, it’s mostly Republicans’ fault, but we need a functioning opposition party to fix this mess, and if we ever get some power, the cleanup is going to require swift, decisive use of that power.
trollhattan
Profiles in discourage.
Bon voyage, New Yorkers.
Lee
Regarding Blumenthal, I just…I mean, WTF man? Oh, he broke a promise made to you? Trump’s nominee broke a promise? Trump, the most lying, felonious, bankrupt (both morally and monetarily) person ever to occupy the office, nominated someone who broke a promise? Shocked! Shocked I tell you!
Kay
I think Democrats are unhappy with leadership of the Party. I don’t really want to hear about why that’s unfair – no one promised these very powerful people “fairness”. I dont even know what that means in this context.
My local Democrats are rural and center Right and they’re even mad, so I also don’t want to hear about how its somehow the fault of Bernie Sanders and disloyal progressives on Bluesky. Our Democrats get their news from radio and tv. They want to SEE and HEAR advocacy on their behalf. This is not complicated.
TONYG
Goddamn Hochul. And the depressing thing about her is that the only reason she’s governor is that Andrews Cuomo is a sex offender. My state, New Jersey, is full of other “Democratic Party” politicians who are almost as bad as Hochul. I don’t agree with people who just hate politics and ignore it. But I can understand why they act that way.
trollhattan
Even if the FTFNYT are feckless cowards, we still have the Post, who Trump they do not like even a little.
https://x.com/ChristopherJM/status/1892896325726773476?mx=2
Bugboy
Did you actually “read” the law? Because there’s this in the last line you quote:
“…the governor may suspend the mayor for a period not exceeding thirty days.”
What the fuck is thirty days SUSPENSION going to accomplish? You think it’s practical for the Governor to suspend the mayor every 30 days? Do you think the Governor has nothing else to do?
We are all very frustrated, but pissing on our purported allies is not the way.
ExPatExDem
Fascists can’t be trusted? Seeking comity with them was a bad idea?
Wow. Who could have guessed?
I assume that Dem Senators are reasonably intelligent people. How is that they get played so consistently?
Kay
And you know ONCE AGAIN the rank and file are doing all of the fucking WORK calling Congress and protesting and going to town halls while Democratic politicians can’t be bothered to show up to support their base.
I’m sick of it and I’m sick of the excuses. The Democratic base works harder than our elected officials. They’re volunteers. Why are they doing all the advocacy work in this party?
Gin & Tonic
@trollhattan: Sorta OT, but Chris Miller, who tweeted that, and is the FT’s correspondent in Ukraine, is a great journalist and a good human. I recommend his book, The War Came To Us for good and sensitive background on the current state of affairs there.
Kay
Democratic electeds should be at every protest. I dont care – local, city, state federal – someone needs to SHOW UP. How is this even a question? I can’t imagine not going to back up my own goddamned base if I’m calling myself “leadership” of anything.
ExPatExDem
@Kay: When Jon Stewart asked Hakeem Jeffries who was working on the competing Dem platform for Project 2025, it was straight up deer in the headlights.
It was as though he’d never even considered the possibility before that exact moment.
trollhattan
KFC becoming TFC. Confess one reason I might live in Kentucky would be to not live in Texas, but maybe this doesn’t suck for EVERY one of those poor sods. The enshittification continues unabated.
https://qz.com/kfc-leaving-kentucky-moving-to-texas-yum-brands-1851765388
Nukular Biskits
Ref Sen. Blumenthal’s “apology”: Bullshit. You knew he was lying to you and, if you didn’t, you don’t possess the judgment necessary to be a US Senator.
Likewise, this from US Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS), who said this in response to Hegseth’s Ukraine remarks earlier last week:
Wicker knew full damn well who and what Hegseth was … Wicker supported the nomination, spoke on his behalf, and voted for his confirmation.
Fucking liars.
@mistermix.bsky.social
@Bugboy:
The section I quoted is “Removal” and the first sentence begins with “The mayor may be removed from office by the governor” so yes I read the law. This is how it works:
Governor sends charges
She may or may not suspend the mayor for 30 days in preparation for a hearing
After hearing, she can remove him.
That’s it. LOD lied to you.
trollhattan
@Gin & Tonic: Do you know if he has a Bluesky account? Used to follow Miller on Twitter before, well, you know.
Kay
@Lee:
I actually think this is a political tactic – a lot of them are doing it. The idea is “I’m so fair minded I voted for these lunatics and now look – they’re lunatics”. Its really a polite ” I told you so”
Its intended to appeal to moron swing voters, which means it won’t work.
Old Man Shadow
I mean, I’m wrong enough that you might take this with a grain of salt, but do everything Republicans did to Obama and Biden.
Hell, that includes creating your own smoke around them even if they are setting forest fires everywhere. More smoke only helps you. Voters don’t punish politicians for lying anymore.
ArchTeryx
I’m going to reget feeding the troll (and I refuse to use his name here) but Project 2025 was written by a think tank funded by unlimited fascist billionaire and tech broligarch money. We do not have that kind of money at our beck and call, nor do we all fall in lockstep the instant some think tank decides this is The Way.
We’re a herd of cats. And sadly, a herd of cats doesn’t do all that well against a pack of well-fed attack dogs with a singular goal in mind: Our destruction.
Peale
@trollhattan: But there already is a Texas Fried Chicken chain. (ADBA Church’s Fried Chicken in the USA. They needed to change the name from Church’s overseas because they couldn’t convince the locals that they were actually non-denominational and would accept Buddhists and Muslims eating their food as long as they paid.)
ExPatExDem
@Nukular Biskits: SecDef is now a learn on the job position in the hands of an alcoholic National Guard Major.
Having someone in that role that no one abroad takes seriously, friend or foe, is going to cost lives. It’s just a matter of when.
Kay
@ExPatExDem:
I loathe Jon Stewart. I think his too-clever bullshit is part of how we got here. But I take your point.
All I’m asking is for them to look up “advocate” in the dictionary and then act like one. They don’t need anything additional to do this. Go stand with your base. Be on their side.
When they’re out of power is when advocacy becomes one of the few tools they have. Use it.
Ruckus
@Lee:
I’m not sure he’s the worst ever. Worst in the lifetime of any one alive today – sure, absolutely. But given humanity, given communications over the history of this country? They could have been worse and we wouldn’t likely know. Just because this one is so openly far worse than just plainly useless…….
Leto
Just because the fire hose is the fire hose, was this mentioned yesterday?
Elon Musk’s private security detail gets deputized by US Marshals Service
I wonder what color their shirts are…
Peale
@Nukular Biskits: Project 2025 and interviewers by the admin made it very clear that they plan to shrink the military and turn it into a domestic police force loyal to trump, similar to the republican guard in Iran. That part he liked, which is why he voted for him.
Gin & Tonic
@trollhattan: Sorry, I don’t know the answer. I find I still need to use the other place to get information.
Kay
@ArchTeryx:
Is there some reason they can’t show up where the Democratic base is? Get up, travel to where they are and stand with them. March. Hold a sign. Do they need a billion dollars to do that? Why? The Democratic base have full time jobs and they’re doing it.
No One of Consequence
Amen.
Truth and Reconciliation. The Full Measure of it. With full and vigorous defense of the indicted, but I (and the American People) want and deserve the full adjudication of crimes that have been committed, but whose cases have been wound down with no result. Once those cases have ran their full course, and we have the evidentiary record, the acquitted may resume their lives, but the convicted… Oh the convicted deserve the full measure of justice with interest.
A boy can dream, right?
-NOoC
kindness
Hochul sucks but didn’t a group of NY black leaders tell her yesterday she shouldn’t remove Adams (who certainly should be removed)? I read it was 8 or 9 influential people. The really screwed up part about it was those leaders primary concern was to block Cuomo or Jumaane Williams from the job. NY politics is such crap and it really shouldn’t be. Seems as if the Republicans divide and conquer always works there.
ArchTeryx
@Kay: It was about why we don’t have a Project 2025 of our own. Nothing, of course, is stopping our Congresspeople and Senators from doing this, other than that a defensive crouch is all most of these people know how to do. Other than attack the few that have the courage to stick their head up and fire back.
And a media that loves to report them some D-on-D action, but blacks out any attempt to attack the other side.
Chris
@Kay:
Remember when “well, they voted for the Iraq War because they trusted George W. Bush: it’s not their fault that he totally unforeseeably turned out to be a lying liar!” was actually being used as a defense of pro-Iraq-War Democrats?
It didn’t make them look “moderate” and “reasonable.” It made them look like dumbasses, and opened them up to accusations of flip-flopping once the thing they voted for turned out to be something they had to speak up against.
Meanwhile, the Democrat who cleaned up at the end of that decade was the one who was able to say that he was against the war from the start.
@mistermix.bsky.social
@ArchTeryx:
I don’t know who’s trolling, but we do billion dollar campaigns in this party, and we, the donors who fund the party, can absolutely ask why a few thousand dollars wasn’t used to fund a response document.
We can push and prod them to do it now, too, because they have millions of dollars in the DNC, DCCC and DSC.
Agree that we don’t have the right wing noise machine, but we have money.
sab
@Kay:I keep saying that. I love our congresswoman but I only met her when I was campaigning at the board of elections. We were perhaps five people. What about the other 700,000 potential voters. Where is she? I get texts all the time but my guess is I am part of a select few.
Kay
DSA is salting Reddit with all kinds of remote organizing events because people are desperate for some kind of direction, they figure they’ll peel off some Democrats. And they will. Because they’re filling a gaping hole.
So don’t complain. Someone or something is going to jump into this void and we may not like it.
Sister Golden Bear
@Leto: Gray shirts. In honor of the techbro billionaire who wants to ethnically cleanse SF. to create a plutocratic technostate. I’m not joking about the latter.
sab
@Kay: John Stewart is pretending that we won’t notice he is OLD. I am significamtly older and even I noticed. My kids laugh when I mention him.He’s OLD.
Kay
@sab:
I’ve been calling her. I know someone in her office and I know he now thinks I’m a pain in the ass but I dont care. I want them outside, standing with their base.
Eolirin
So that’s what the clause says, but what’s the legal interpretation of what it means?
That clause has never actually been used to my knowledge. So this is not a matter of settled precedent; the courts absolutely will have to weigh in on what a hearing is defined as and what it needs to look like to be considered legitimate and every step of that process will involve appeals. This is not an immediate, okay Adams is out now process no matter how you look at it. She can suspend him for 30 days in a more immediate fashion, but he stays mayor and it’s unclear to me what that suspension looks like in a practical sense, because that language says it’s only while the charges are being prepared. So does he become mayor again while the process of bringing them drags out through legal appeals? I’m not sure anyone actually knows.
She also does not have the consent of the NYC political establishment, and realistically she needs it. You can bemoan that such consent should be present, but it isn’t. So what you’re really engaging in here is a desire to see the governor circumvent black political leaders in the heart of the state’s political power, and her being smart enough not to fucking do that.
Starfish (she/her)
@Bugboy: How much effort do you think it takes to suspend a mayor for 30 days? Do you think the mayor has to come into her office and do Saturday school or detention?
Peale
@Kay: Yep. Trump and Musk may be slipping in the polls, but Trump needs to be 15 points under water before he’s at the same level as “Congress” has been the last 20 years.
I think the Dems are going to need to convince their own voters that if they ever do get any power back, they aren’t going to go “oh, let’s let bygones be bygones. Let’s pretend that the FBI is “non-partisan” and let Kash Patel keep his job. Oh and all those 100% appointees to the “independent agencies” that Trump has taken over can just keep their positions until their term is up, even if that means that NBC and PBS have been turned over to OANN because they “had woke policies that Trump declared illegal.”
@mistermix.bsky.social
Jesus Christ. Hakeem Jeffries is on a book tour for the children’s ABC book he wrote. That’s what he’s doing with his recess time. One of our “leaders”.
https://bsky.app/profile/cingraham.bsky.social/post/3lipa6haubs2j
Kay
@sab:
I like him for supporting public schools but I have just come to hate his “savvy cleverness” type of politics. It feels dated and largely irrelevant. We can’t go back to 2015. Road closed.
Ten Bears
Day late and a dollar short, G’da would have muttered something under his breath about barn-doors, horses and grateful beggars. His non-apology is no different than Hochul …
Doug R
TBF if 49.8% of voters voted against your side even after you warned them, wouldn’t you be discouraged?
It’s shaken my confidence in Americans, that’s for sure.
Ruckus
@Kay:
Why are they doing all the advocacy work in this party?
I’d say power. Either the mucky mucks are limited in what they are capable of or they are limited by the limits of their job – or they are limited by the concept that our higher elected officials get paid a not unreasonable salary so that they won’t accept bribes. This is not a poor country and MONEY buys everything in humanity, including humanity. Look at the supposedly world’s richest doofus and what he’s doing. Humans like power. It rather often goes to one’s head that money is great, and a lot of it is greater than anything else. What’s that old saying – “I can buy and sell you!”
We are just seeing this, laid out in public for all to see, in all its “glory.”
Peale
@Chris: Yep. If we are going to gel around a leader, it is probably going to have to be someone who is not currently in office. I don’t want another Senator to be a standard bearer.
Anyway
Jon. Watch out – jackals here get upset at pointing out people are OLD.
waspuppet
”Thus the only possible solution is to lecture people for their expectations, and to tell them to stop bothering us.”
PJ
The calculation is that it’s better to have Adams for another ten months (or Public Advocate Jumaane Williams if Hochul removes Cuomo after March 26) than to have Cuomo as Mayor for another 5 years.
If Hochul dismisses Adams now, there would be a special election in March, which Andrew Cuomo would win: https://emersoncollegepolling.com/new-york-city-mayoral-poll-cuomo-leads-primary-adams-faces-low-support-amid-high-unfavorability/. If Cuomo gets in on a special election, he would almost certainly win the primary in June and be elected to a full term in November. If he governs the city the same way he did as Governor, he will position himself as a “centrist” eager to work with Trump – functionally, not that different than Adams, except that he will be Mayor for five more years, at a minimum. Adams, on the other hand, is almost certain not to win the primary, and will probably lose the general election if he runs as a Republican.
Without a special election, Cuomo would still be the front runner for the primary in June just based on name recognition, but the extra four months would give other Democrats more of a chance at beating him.
CaseyL
Re the Democratic Party response to the coup: I will never get over how the 2024 campaign centered on the threat a Trump win would be to everything the US claims to stand for, and how completely unprepared the Party was for its own warning to be borne out.
The warnings were just campaign rhetoric, right? No one (except Walz) really believed any of it, right? Trump wins, we go back to Business As Usual, right?
That’s the part that angers me the most, I think. The Democratic Party is shocked, shocked! that the stuff they warned us about – campaigned on, fundraised on – is actually happening. And from November to January had drawn up no plans, no strategy, no nothing, to fight it.
As I said in a communication to one of my Senators, I spent many years trying to convince people more radical than I am that the Democratic Party was worth supporting, fighting for, and voting for. Many years contributing time, energy, and money to campaigns. And now I can’t justify that to myself anymore, much less to anyone else.
Peale
@@mistermix.bsky.social: Yep. Now imagine that somehow, which I don’t think is possible now because I’m a doomer, people actually do get fed up and we end up with Obama 2008 sized majorities in Congress. And whomever we manage to get elected wants to undo this mess as quickly as possible and restore the proper checks and balances the way they were. LOL. Congress will say “great. I don’t have to pay attention to you. We need to be on recess 2 weeks of every month so I can make money on my side gig.”
I do think we need to have some members of congress punched in the face a few times to understand that they may be a separate branch and their own club, but we’re tired of them treating it like a day spa.
JCJ
@Peale: Aha! I have seen Texas Fried Chicken in Thailand, I never knew they were related to Church’s Fried Chicken. I don’t think it is there any more. If I ever get fried chicken over there I just but a piece from a street vendor. It is quite tasty!
Ruckus
@Doug R:
It’s shaken my confidence in Americans, that’s for sure.
Americans are human beings, in all their possible glory and in all their possible crap. Money is very much a necessity in modern life and greed is very much a common trait of humans. Add those two things together and what do you get? It most often isn’t good, because humans are human and greed, power, money are common linch pins of life. We all like money, it is the one thing we have in common. It’s just that some are satisfied by the concept of enough, and some are not satisfied in the concept of ALL.
JML
@ExPatExDem: here’s the thing about Project 2025 that Stewart forgets when he’s doing his “I’m smarter than any silly little politician” schtick: It’s WILDLY unpopular. It was incredibly unpopular during the election, which is why the Current occupant disavowed it and lied about it all the time. It was toxic AF.
Putting together a Democratic version of Project 2025 isn’t going to help fix things now, and isn’t going to improve our standing with voters, or do fuck and all to stop anything going on right now. Stewart seems to have completely missed the fundamental problem that Project 2025 is awful, everyone hates it, and he and his pals in the media let the Current Occupant get away with LYING about it (and everything else) to win the election, because it was more important to them that Joe Biden was old and the Democratics didn’t give them a pie-fight open convention. but that would get in the way of washed up Jon Stewart getting to scold everyone. can’t have that!
Eolirin
@Kay: We’re supposed to be doing that, not our elected officials. Democracy is not about electing officials and then fucking off to let them take care of everything, it’s about direct, active, continual, engagement. You get people elected who will be amenable to the pressure your groups can bring to bear and less amenable to the pressures the other groups will bring to bear. And then you bring pressure, constantly, until you get what you’re after.
They’re not meant to be the leaders, the public is supposed to lead. It’s been this way with every major advance we’ve made politically, labor rights, civil rights, gay rights. All of them were ground up. That’s how we get to anything meaningful. Elected officials are sensitive to changes in the culture but the culture needs to build movements to give them cover to operate in. They’re ultimately beholden to public opinion, not the outcomes of their actions directly, and so if you want them to do things you need to make them need to do things.
This is working as intended.
This is how it is on the right too, they’re just better at it than we are, because they haven’t forgotten that they lead. Abortion rights and white supremacy and Christian nationalism are all driven by motivated members of the base to a far larger extent than elected officials. This is even true of Trump; no one elected Musk and Musk is driving things far further than any of the elected officials are.
robtrim
@trollhattan: Kentucky is not 100 percent awful. Louisville and Lexington (University of KY) are nice places. Governor Beshear is a very good Governor who has political upward mobility. Even Mitch McConnell is seeing the light as his being waits for the darkness.
trollhattan
@Gin & Tonic: It’s okay, we’re in a lengthy transition away from Twitter to various landing spots.
I can’t read it anymore inside browsers because they intentionally broke chron order, except for gold check accounts whatever the hell those are. e.g., Miller’s first post for me is from 2022, weeks into the war.
Ugh.
Chris
@Kay:
His “savvy cleverness” bullshit was already out of date in 2009 or 2010, when he tried to hold some “rally for sanity” and the theme was just that both sides suck.
He was great in the George W. Bush years, and that’s how long it’s been since he was great.
Chris
@CaseyL:
Honestly, I was the same way in 2021 when the whole theme out of Washington DC was “return to normalcy” instead of the 24/7 hair-on-fire alarm that the 1/6 coup should have warranted.
Nihilists have been saying for decades that Democrats don’t even believe any of the stuff they say about Republicans being a threat to the constitution and our lives, they just say it to raise money when there’s an election on, but it’s become clear this decade that there are plenty of Democratic electeds who do in fact believe the exact same thing, and act accordingly.
Old School
@JML:
Plus Project 2025 was about destroying the government. A Democratic version would not be able to be accomplished by executive orders. (See: Biden’s orders being constantly challenged/limited.)
tam1MI
Joe Biden understood the threat.
They forced him out.
Ruckus
@ExPatExDem:
That’s because project 2025 is a takeover project, not a how to properly lead project. The conservative side of the political aisle is/has lost a lot of control over the last 100 years, because it seemingly only wants to go backasswards, to a time when conservatism was far more in charge. If we take a close political look at this country we would see that money has always been a part of it because money has always been a part of humanity. We just eons ago measured it differently. This country has laws that allow all of us, not just the wealthiest to have a reasonable life. Higher taxes on higher money for example. But for many humans money is their drug of choice, and MORE MONEY is a much nicer, bigger high. And it affects every single aspect of the lives of almost all of us. Do we have enough, how do we get more, what is enough and Oh Boy I enjoy being rich. It isn’t just the US, it’s much of humanity.
ArchTeryx
@@mistermix.bsky.social: ExPatDem, about why Jeffries was caught like a deer in the headlights when asked about “our” Project 2025. We don’t do things that way and we don’t have the unlimited resources they do, nor the media to black out such a plan so it can fly under the public’s radar. We’re not without resources, but the question was more trolling than it was anything constructive. Which is Jon Stewart to a T. He has a nasty habit of kicking down and has forever.
Matt McIrvin
@Peale: The military won’t be very effective at invading Panama, Greenland or Canada if they do that.
MazeDancer
Hochul is a terrible governor. She and Sean Patrick Maloney lost us the House because they were wretched campaigners.
Will never get over not being able to get a yard sign from her. Instead of, yes, thanks, where would you like it, the response was pay 25 bucks and you can have it in 3 weeks. The election was 2 weeks away.
The sad news is that whoever primaries her will be worse. She made Delgado Lt. Gov so he couldn’t run against her.
The miserable part is she is so impossibly bad she is giving repulsive Mike Lawler a chance.
I recall vividly having to go kicking and screaming and nose-holding to vote for Andrew Cuomo, because being online too much had me convinced Cynthia Nixon was closing on him.
Despite her naïveté and complete lack of experience at anything, there are moments where I wonder if I did the right thing.
Eolirin
@CaseyL: Like there’s any way to actually stop anything that’s happening beyond what’s already being done right?
Like you can tell what a strategy looks like until after it’s been fully implemented and succeeds or fails?
There’s no way to respond to any of this that’s going to actually work in the short term. ‘Why aren’t Dems doing anything’ is mostly about optics, and subject to intense availability bias. And it’s the wrong fucking question; Dems have almost no power right now. “Why are republicans doing this and how do we stop them” leads to a very different set of fairly obvious responses, half of which cannot be talked about openly, but all of which are far less pleasant to contemplate than “why aren’t dems yelling louder?”.
Honestly, at this point the Democrats and the minorities that make up the bulk of their voters should just fucking abandon the country, even though it’ll kill a lot of us (and that’s why they won’t, but they should). White people caused this, white people can stop it, they need to stop relying on us to bail them out when their preferred choices start doing crazy shit and break everything. All they have to do is not vote for Republicans.
sab
@Chris: Well at least Ohio has cleared itself of those deluded Democrats. All we have are Republicans and some women.
Shontel Brown (Cleveland area) is joining the protesters. Emilia Sykes (Akron and Medina) is keeping her head down. They each know their own district and are acting appropriately.
I don’t know what Kaptur is doing on the other side of the state.
bystander
“…after service upon him of a copy of the charges and an opportunity to be heard in his defense. “
The “opportunity to be heard” is probably where all the procedural issues arise. Adams’ successor is highly problematic, which may also dampen the enthusiasm.
Eolirin
@Chris: Yeah, I mean, it’s not like there weren’t attempts to hold Trump accountable that got stalled out by a corrupt judiciary, and we didn’t have Jan 6th hearings that went into extreme detail on what happened.
A political calculation was made that getting legislation passed was more important than going after sitting members of congress, and that may have been a mistake, but it’s an understandable one.
ArchTeryx
@MazeDancer: I have a different perspective, albeit a narrow one. I work for the state government of New York (Department of Health, Office of Health Insurance Programs, to be specific).
Cuomo was horrible to state workers. He was little better than a Republican and dreamed of breaking our unions. Hochul actually treats us decently and our union contract negotiations with her and the lege aren’t fights to the death like they were with Cuomo.
As bad as Hochul is on… just about everything else, I fully expect the next Republican governor we get will do exactly what Musk is doing with the feds – just march in and fire everybody, contracts be damned. And frankly, I am not sure our unions are nearly as activist as they’d need to be to combat that.
Jackie
I call BS. Adams has been sucking FFOTUS’s ass since the election – knowing full well FFOTUS admires and condones Adams’ taking bribes from foreign countries.
Steve LaBonne
@sab: Sykes’s district does not include any part of Medina County.
Geminid
@Bugboy: I am interested in the legal and administrative tools Governor Hochul has to constrain Adams. City and State reporter Rebecca Lewis (rebeccaclewis.bsky.social) listed these:
Westchester Democrat Tom Watson* reposted Lewis with the comment: “Unpopular opinion: the right move.”
New York City’s other elected officials also have some powers here, as do the City Council and Manhattan County prosecutor Alvin Bragg.
* Tom Watson posts on Blue Sky as guitarwatson.bsky.social. He also posts longer-form pieces at theliberaltomwatson.substack.com.
Watdon seems to be a shrewd and knowledgeable analyst of New York politics. His commentary on the LaSalle nomination was very informative. He opposed the nomination and reported on the various party elements working (successfully) to get it withdrawn, but he did not use this affair as an opportunity to tear Hochul down.
MazeDancer
@ArchTeryx:
That’s good to hear. Will make my having to vote for her slightly less painful.
Ruckus
@Chris:
This is not a republican or democrat problem, this is a problem of humanity. The concept of money, no matter what we call the currency has always been in humanity. Even when we did not define money as a common currency. Gold/silver was powerful even when it was not used for anything but a means of acquiring too much stuff or even just having some of it. The Gold Rush?
Money is nice to have, but what is enough and what is too much? Is too much the ability to purchase too much food and far too expensive wine? Or to own a lot of property, far more than anyone can use? Or to be the world’s richest asshole? We all like money, it’s what makes humanity go round – while it is also one of the strongest drugs in this same world. Some never have much or any at all and some always have way too much. We have a governmental system that collects and pays us money to live when we get too old to reasonably work – Social Security. The concept of money makes the world go round, even if it actually rotates on its own.
Eolirin
@ArchTeryx: I honestly don’t think Hochul is doing a particularly bad job in terms of any kind of meaningful outcomes for the state, and we have actual democratic majorities in the legislature now, so they’re going to set most of the agenda. I don’t think people in NY have a strong impression unless they’re very online.
Her being a woman is a drag in certain parts of the state, but whether she’s able to win reelection will come down mostly to the political environment the election is held in.
And I think that was true of the 2022 elections as well; Tish James is widely viewed as a good AG, she had exactly the same margin as Hochul did. Schumer underperformed by ten points, but had the exact same margin as every other male elected running for statewide office, which was 3 points higher than the women. That tells me the campaigning wasn’t really that much of a factor, Dems were turned out that election period. I’m not sold that you can actually fix that through campaign efforts when much of what motivates people to engage isn’t about the campaigns but the underlying circumstances in their lives, unless you’re dealing with once in a generation political talents.
Better campaigning might have flipped a handful of the closest contents in 2022 because some of them were close enough that even a marginal difference would have been determinative, but the break of the orthodox Jewish community to Republicans on the back of Pandemic era restrictions was the real story of that election. I suspect outrage against Trump will be the story going into the next election cycle, and will swamp any other consideration, but we’ll see.
CaseyL
@Eolirin:
The GOP was in the minority in the Senate last term, and they managed to the bring the Senate to a halt using just one Senator objecting to military promotions. How’d they do that?
Layer8Problem
@Chris: My recollection of Stewart’s schtick was some funny stuff, more than enough of Stewart’s reaction shots stuffing himself with popcorn, good correspondents and writers, and a safe space for Republicans and conservatives when he interviewed them. He lost me with the “Rally for Sanity” (what a transgressive nut, huh?) and his abject John Yoo interview. Maybe asking about the usefulness of the hypothetical torture of a terrorist’s child as an interrogation tactic might be a, you know, worthy line of inquiry.
But I don’t watch him these days and perhaps these parlous times have sharpened his edge. Has he turned up the heat now the MAGA crowd are getting their fondest wishes fulfilled?
Eolirin
@CaseyL: The procedural method that was used for that only really works for blocking military promotions, because not batching them via a suspension of the normal procedures would have taken up too much of the senate calendar. And it hardly brought the senate to a halt, it just broke that one specific thing.
John S.
Is it really so hard to stop making excuses for Democrats?
If we hold their feet to the fire, they will get in line. After all, way too many of them were happily voting for Trump appointees just a couple weeks ago, and now not even Fetterman is voting for them.
The only Democratic vote in favor of a Trump nominee since last week (when 19 of them voted for Brooke Rollins at AG) was Jacky Rosen in favor of Kelly Loefler for SBA.
sab
I overslept today. I meant to stay home and do my own taxes. Instead I am reading BJ and getting pissed off.
We have a relatively inexpensive and highly experienced Federal government work force. In one month Trump and Congress blew that up for at least one generation, possibly two.
The government offered lower pay and job security while working within established rules.
In one month they switched it to same or lower pay for a job at the whim of multiple managers demanding illegal actions.
Well that certainly entices me towards government work. ///
ArchTeryx
@Layer8Problem: That ridiculous rally – which I attended, living in Maryland at the time – I am convinced played a part in why 2010 was such a disaster for downballot democrats.
Eolirin
@John S.: None of which is accomplishing anything; every single nominee is getting confirmed.
Which is why focusing so much on this is an entirely pointless waste of time.
Yes, we should be expressing how pissed off we are about Musk and everything, because it’s important that the cultural center of the country is very clearly outrage, but our elected officials cannot stop any of the nominations from going through no matter how they vote.
This isn’t a tactic that’s going to even minimize damage, it’s purely about messaging, and if people can’t get if you vote for Republicans you’re voting for Death through their heads simply based on what Trump and Musk are doing, and need to see Democrats yelling really loudly and voting against all of the nominees to get that, we’ve already lost.
Steve LaBonne
@Eolirin: Polls and contentious town halls show that Trump, Musk, and Republicans are rapidly bleeding support, and that’s likely to accelerate. What everyone should really try to focus on is how to make sure there are real elections in 2026 and 2028. I am confident that they will be voted out- if they can be.
Geminid
@CaseyL: That’s not hard to look up. My recollection is that Tuberville exploited a Senate rule that would not work in the cases of nominations and legislation.
I remember how Republicans tried to delay Biden’s last few judicial nominations during last year’s lame duck session. Schumer put the Senate into all-night sessions and the Democrats powered through Republican Minority’s oppostion.
zhena gogolia
Is it really so hard to support the only group of elected officials who represent us? They were not given control of Congress by the voters. Maybe because we didn’t hang together.
John S.
@Eolirin:
The Orthodox community always leaned Republican, but now it is overwhelmingly Republican.
Link
That shift may have accelerated after COVID, but it also began with Trump because of his stance on letting Israel do whatever they want.
John S.
@Eolirin:
That is entirely your opinion. Not a fact.
rikyrah
Still fascinated that a Governor can just get rid of a Mayor,
Bypassing the electorate of that city.
RaflW
February 20, 2025
American Oversight Files Bar Complaint Against Deputy AG Bove for Corrupt Actions in Dismissal of Eric Adams Charges
Yesterday, nonpartisan watchdog American Oversight filed a disciplinary complaint asking New York authorities to investigate potential professional misconduct by acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, the Justice Department official who oversaw and directed the corrupt dismissal of criminal charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams.
The complaint, sent to the Attorney Grievance Committee in New York, where Bove is a member of the state bar, outlines how Bove’s pursuit of the dismissal — reportedly based solely on his understanding that Adams would provide political favors in return, and achieved by threatening to fire subordinate attorneys, and by claiming the dismissal was appropriate in light of Adams’ political cooperation with the Trump administration — appears to have violated several sections of New York’s rules governing attorney ethics and professional conduct.
“Letting an elected official off the hook for serious, evidence-based criminal charges in exchange for venal political support is textbook corruption and could be grounds for suspension of an attorney’s law license,” said American Oversight interim Executive Director Chioma Chukwu. “As a member of the New York bar, Mr. Bove is required to meet minimum standards of professional conduct, but the overwhelming weight of evidence suggests he has failed to do so. The rule of law isn’t a political trading card; it must be applied equally and uniformly, and we urge the New York Attorney Grievance Committee to investigate and address Mr. Bove’s actions before they become the norm at the U.S. Justice Department.”
—
As with other Trump & Co. malfeasance, using state venues is likely to be more fertile and effective. I’m still delighted that Rudy got disbarred for his shite. Hoping many of this maladministration’s lawyers eventually meet that fate.
Eolirin
@Steve LaBonne: The biggest risk, to my mind, is the incarceration of key Democratic candidates for insurrection and having them pulled off ballots as a consequence. And this happening late enough in the process to prevent another candidate from being able to run. I’m not sure this can be prevented if they do it right. And if they’re surgical about it, it might not be enough to get people out in the streets in numbers sufficient enough to be unmanageable.
Short of them just declaring that Congress is to be dissolved anyway, but that’s even harder to pull off without an uprising.
RaflW
@Kay: The role of money in politics post Citizens United is more seriously toxic on the GOP side, but the effects of donor capture of high ranking Democrats isn’t nil.
We in the grassroots have to work this hard in part because we have to overcome a greasy consultant-driven mess that laps up a lot of money and dispenses conventional wisdom tilted heavily towards more consulting and a ton of pro-business malarkey.
Old School
New York Update:
The Yankees are going to allow players to have beards.
What is this madness?
kwAwk
My thought for today is that for a guy that says he wants to go to Mars, Elon is doing his best to kill American manned space exploration. I could see Democrats rising back to power next year and killing the Artemis program just to spite Musk. He’s even starting to get NASA to hate him.
And I certainly at this point wouldn’t support government funding for a manned mission to Mars until Musk had been dead for 10 years, just so his name wouldn’t be attached to the effort. But maybe his end game is killing NASA because he thinks we’ll pay him to go to Mars instead. Maybe he thinks he’ll be able to convince Rand Paul to vote for it.
Darkrose
@JML: I can’t stand Stewart, but he’s not entirely wrong here. Democrats need a platform with a brandable name that lets people know what we stand for. “Republicans are using Project 2025 to destroy democracy. We propose [Catchy Name Here] to restore American democracy to the people, not unelected billionaires.”
Then blast that message. Lead with that in every media appearance and SHOW UP. Dem electeds should be at the protests with the message of maximum obstruction. Let us know that they willing to fight with us.
Baud
@Old School:
Doesn’t the governor have the power to make them shave?
Eolirin
@John S.: It’s really not. They’re increasingly voting no, okay. The candidates are still confirmed. What did the no votes accomplish in terms of tangible outcomes? Certainly there are zero with respect to the nominees. That isn’t actually something you can dispute; they all got confirmed.
So it’s a messaging play. That’s all it does, because that’s all it can do. It’s signaling opposition, sure, but it’s also signaling weakness, out of necessity. Dems can’t stop any of this. They don’t have any actual power to restrain the Trump administration beyond what Republicans, especially those on the Supreme Court, allow.
But what Trump and Musk are doing is going to swamp any attempts at Democratic messaging, and our Democratic politicians, despite the sniping, aren’t stupid. They’ll get on the right side of that anger. Because they’re still going to be trying to win elections. And maybe those elections will give them enough power to make an actual difference, though I think we’re well past the point where the legislature and the judiciary can restrain the executive; once they go lawless there’s really nothing but the decisions of the members of the executive branch to get in the way.
I think our fate will ultimately come down to whether or not enough members of the military and federal law enforcement are willing to fire indiscriminately on peaceful protesters when ordered to do so.
kwAwk
@Darkrose: I think give Democrats another month for Trump’s unapproval rating to really tank. Then hit hard.
Eolirin
@RaflW: This is vitally important even, because the only way we’re going to have even a glimmer of a chance of maintaining rule of law is if there’s still consequences to breaking it and this is one of the few measures left.
Lily
Baud
@Lily:
Interesting. Paul Clement is an excellent attorney but pretty right wing. But I think Ho is too.
I think Ho should make the government dismiss with prejudice so that can’t extort Adams. But interesting to see what Clement says.
RevRick
@Kay: When have Representatives or Senators ever been the voice of the opposition? I can only think of Newt Gingrich and his voice was that of a bomb thrower.
Out parties seldom have someone who is the voice of the party. Legislators are seldom, if ever, chosen for their ability to articulate a grand vision, at least not since the early 19th century when political speech was a form of entertainment.
I just don’t get the expectation that workhorses will suddenly transform into show horses.
Eolirin
@John S.: It started with anti-vaxxing, not Israel. Which is why the pandemic massively accelerated things.
Juju
@Eolirin: Thank you. This is not a situation where it’s either zero or one. Interpretations may vary.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@@mistermix.bsky.social:
You omit that the mayor has the right to defend himself.
That defense would include a hearing. That hearing can be appealed. The appeal can be appealed to New York’s highest court, the New York Court of Appeal. Do not rule out that the U.S. Supreme Court would intervene as well. The USSC has no business here; nonetheless, when has that stopped this group?
So, Governor Hochul can suspend the mayor for thirty days and let the litigation begin. I think New York’s higher courts would expedite the mayor’s appeals. Yet, even with expedition, the blackmailed mayor is still in office for a lot longer than you want to claim.
Before anybody recommends kicking due process to the curb, recall due process stands between all of us and these nihilistic men.
Grover Gardner
I think it would have been a terrible mistake to remove Adams from office. Leave him to New Yorkers, they’ll deal with him. Hochul can’t complain about Trump meddling with NY state then turn around and get her hands dirty with city politics.
Baud
@Grover Gardner:
That’s a good point I hadn’t considered.
Lily
@Baud
Could be another crushing disappointment for sure.
Almost Retired
@Baud: I am sort of “Ho adjacent” (that sounds wrong) insofar as his brother Daniel is a colleague. Judge Ho is not right wing to my knowledge. He headed up the election protection project at the ACLU and was somewhat red-baited at his confirmation hearing. But perhaps he’s been a disappointment on the bench- I don’t know because I haven’t followed it.
Baud
@Almost Retired:
My memory is probably wrong.
Clement is definitely right wing, but not a hack. He’ll do a good job, but I wonder if he’ll talk about the impropriety like another attorney might have.
Juju
@Doug R: It’s no so much that we warned them, as much as it’s that they were there for the daily shit show and death parade that his first term was that has shaken me. What do you have to do to be considered unqualified to be president? Be a convicted felon? Be impeached twice? Not being able to speak in complete sentences? Lie about everything? What does it take?
Baud
@Juju:
Comment on Balloon Juice, apparently.
Eolirin
@Grover Gardner: It would probably be fine if the NYC political leaders were all behind the move and actively pushing for it. She’d have the cover of being asked to intervene with a broad consensus behind it. It’d draw distinction from Trump’s interference and seem less like meddling.
But they’re not, and honestly in that situation the pressure on Adams to resign would be immense, which would make this whole thing moot. So that’s kind of the beginning and end of the whole thing.
John S.
@Eolirin:
Look, I shared an article which outlined that Orthodox Jews:
1. Were already majority Republican well before the pandemic.
2. Largely moved further right as a result of Trump’s stance on Israel.
This analysis was based on polling data. Now if you want to dispute those findings and provide some evidence to the contrary, I’m all for it. But please stop making assertions of fact that are based on nothing more than your opinion.
I’m a liberal Jew with many Orthodox family members, so I can assure you that I have plenty of opinions, too.
@mistermix.bsky.social
@HopefullyNotcassandra: This power has been upheld in judicial review in NY since FDR as gov days. I did not ignore that but instead cited an article that reviewed it in previous posts.
geg6
I’m with you, mm. I’m so sick of the wimps we seem to be saddled with as our so-called “leaders.” We have a handful of people speaking clearly, forcefully and righteously about what’s going on (Frost, Raskin, AOC, Crockett, Murphy, Warren) while the rest sit on their hands and do nothing, less than nothing or simply vote whatever way the Republicans do. Fuck them. They suck and totally deserve to be shit on as much as possible. Buncha Vichy cowards.
Sister Golden Bear
I’m sure the Muskrats would never use all the data they’re stealing to do anything like this, especially not to trans people. /s
Kremlin Creates Database Of LGBTQ Russians
Suzanne
@RevRick:
Bigger frustration for me is that we don’t develop our own show horses. That doesn’t have to be most of our elected officials — it probably can’t be — but we have a few who show inclination. But there’s a whole ecosystem around them. Groups like the DNC could do more of this than they do, opinion writers like the Krugmans of the world and the Bulwark people, even celebrities and comedians.
Instead, the attitude has been, “Whelp, we don’t control the media and they hate us”, and alternately, “Theatrics are dumb”. Both of those things are true, and yet they matter. We donate millions of dollars to these campaigns and the media landscape is shifting every year. If we didn’t have contempt for the entire idea…. perhaps we could hire smart people to get ahead of this? The traditional media degrades in importance every day. Americans clearly respond to some amount of theatrics. If all is not lost…. the world may tilt in our favor, and we’d be wise to get ahead of it.
hrprogressive
“Let the voters decide” is such a horseshit cop out.
Voters are ill-informed, propagandized, and in many cases, disenfranchised from even casting their vote.
Fuck this shit.
Start *doing* or abdicate your offices, Democrats.
Geminid
@rikyrah: New York has a very singular set of laws. I don’t know how many (if any) states allow their Governor to remove a sitting Mayor. And I think New York is the only state that has a “Fusion” voting system, whereby candidates running on two different party lines pool their votes from both.
And their Democratic intra-party fights are intense and bitter! I’ve seen people refer to decades-old disputes as if they happened yesterday.
I am used to less contentious party politics. Virginia’s Democratic Party resembles an ecumenical coalition of moderate Episcopalians, Unitarian Universalists Reform and Conservative Jews, and Black Baptists. Sometimes the New York Party seems more like the Hatfields and the McCoys, with some Wobblies thrown in.
When New York Democrats underperformed in 2022, there was a torrent of blamecasting and scalp hunting. I learned that 700% of the blame attached to 7 different politicians and factions. When Democrats underperformed in Virginia the previous year and allowed Foungkin’ Youngkin to get past, we were more like, “Let us not speak of this again.”
I’m not arguing one state party is better or worse, just observing that they are very different.
geg6
@ArchTeryx:
I have always despised Jon Stewart and was on to him even before his stupid rally made his own grift obvious. But it’s a question that deserves an answer. Jeffries is not prepared and has none. For anything, as far as I can tell. Not even an explanation like yours. Don’t defend Mr. Children’s Book Tour. He can’t be bothered with our concerns. At all. Fuck him.
geg6
@John S.:
Seriously.
geg6
@Eolirin:
You seem to think messaging doesn’t matter at all and it’s ridiculous to even try. This is exactly the problem. You should run for Congress. You’d fit right in.
Opposition needs leadership. It needs voices with microphones. It needs people who have power, even if diminished, to speak up and lead. Without that, we will find leaders outside of party power who can provide the message we need to stand up. And you may not be happy with who emerges.
Surly Duff
You didn’t lie, but if you think reciting the text of the Charter proves O’Donnell lied, you’re obviously Not A Lawyer.
That is absolutely the correct interpretation of the Charter provision you quoted. She can suspend him for 30 days but removing him permanently would open Pandora’s Box of unintended consequences. (Not saying she shouldn’t do it anyway.)
No. We do not “need” a functioning opposition party to fix this mess. Even the most ruthless, efficient, savvy opposition party cannot stop a Trifecta in the American system. What has happened since November is not the Democrats’ fault in the slightest – period.
The only way to “fix this mess” is to win elections. And every time people rhetorically sh!t on Democrats because they “don’t know how to fight” or something, they are making that objective more difficult.
John S.
@Eolirin:
Votes matter. When a Democratic Senator votes for a nominee, they are giving their CONSENT. If they do not vote for a nominee, that means they do not consent to having an unqualified hack in charge of government.
And just because the outcome is predetermined doesn’t mean that their votes don’t matter. In fact, votes always matter because that action is one of the only real records that exists of how Senators do their jobs.
Voting is not a messaging problem.
RevRick
@Suzanne: The old joke is that a camel was a horse designed by a committee. Well, the DNC is a committee.
The reality is that in the Democratic Party it is the base that creates the movement and then uses a candidate to embody it. JFK resisted doing anything about Civil Rights until the pressure from below became inexorable. And then he became its martyred face. Polio sidelined FDR for most of the 1920s, and then he became the vehicle of 20+ years of policy wishes that had been percolating in the base when GOP economic policies crashed the country.
Surly Duff
@John S.:
That’s the definition of “votes don’t matter”!
Democrats in Washington have no power right now, and rhetorically sh!tting on them over and over is going to make regaining power that much less likely.
Surly Duff
@geg6:
Right now, Democrats’ messaging doesn’t matter at all. I’m sorry, that’s just the way it is with a Republican Trifecta and two years until the next election.
It’s not ridiculous to try out different messages, but it is ridiculous to rhetorically sh!t all over your ideological allies simply because you don’t like how they are exercising their non-power.
John S.
@Surly Duff:
Way to completely miss the point.
Holding people accountable for their ACTIONS is not equivalent to rhetorically shitting on them.
By your logic, Democrats should just vote like Republicans since the outcome is predetermined and they aren’t in power. As long as we don’t criticize them when they go along with awful shit.
Ruviana
@@mistermix.bsky.social: For what it’s worth, Jeffries is doing a bookstore meet and greet tonight, maybe in Chicago? People were lining up this morning to get seats with the Plan to turn it into an impromptu town hall. People were chanting in line. Note that it was just a story I came across but it all helps.
Surly Duff
@John S.:
No… by my logic (and yours!), it doesn’t matter how Democrats vote right now since the outcome is predetermined and they aren’t in power. Their vote has zero consequences in the real world.
And by my logic, criticizing them for a vote that doesn’t matter does not make sense if we are trying to get them elected.
Another Scott
@HopefullyNotcassandra: While IANAL, this is kinda where I am.
There is no One Weird Trick.
What happens after Adams is kicked to the curb? What happens to NYC politics? What happens to NYS politics?
Elected politics is all about personal relationships among the players. Hochul stomping all over NYC when elected people there say “NO” will not make things better.
We need to give elected people on our side the space to make difficult decisions, thinking a few moves ahead, without being underbused for not acting NOW NOW NOW.
Anything that Adams tries to do now will be under extreme scrutiny, with legal challenges likely. That, and the remaining threat that Hochul could change her mind, will help constrain any horrible actions he may contemplate.
Like it or not, the way out of this morass is elections. We have to vote the monsters, and their enablers, out. Trying to find One Weird Trick to go around that is overwhelmingly likely to end in tears (or worse).
My $0.02.
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
John S.
@Surly Duff:
Your logic is that votes don’t matter. I have explicitly stated the opposite.
And by that logic, Democrats can just vote for any shitty thing and it won’t matter because you have already decided they can’t be held accountable for their actions. Ever.
Matt McIrvin
@Ruckus:
While it’s hard to say, I think the best evidence is that money as we know it arose along with governments, as a way of managing payments and debts.
The origin myth we were taught on school, that money arose from barter systems as a way of streamlining the inconvenience of in-kind exchanges, seems not to be true: what moneyless societies seem to have, or have had, instead is a kind of gift economy with a complicated social sense of reciprocal obligation: you give me something and then I “owe you one” and will feel compelled to repay the favor sometime. Barter prevails mostly in low-trust situations where you’re exchanging with strange tribes.
But none of that can work beyond some level of organizational complexity, which comes along with things like agriculture, grain storage and water management.
Chris
@RevRick:
Completely tangential, but it’s always been such a stupid fucking joke.
A camel is ideally equipped for the conditions in which camels live. If you told a committee “design me a horse that’s optimally adapted to thrive in the Sahara Desert,” a camel is exactly what they’d come up with, and they’d be right.
Geminid
Hakeem Jeffries’s so-called children’s book tour is actually a series of appearances in front of adults, periodically for the last few months. An example from last November, at an Ohio State University bookstore:
Last December 2, at the Ebell in Los Angeles:
There was a discussion of themes from Jeffries’ book The ABCs of Democracy published last year.:
* Anyone interested in the substance of this so-called children’s book tour can check out this event on YouTube.
Grover Gardner
@Eolirin The voters of NYC may well vote him back into office. IMO it would *still* be a mistake for Hochul to summarily remove him.
@hrprogressive We have no choice but to “let the voters decide.” And when they elected Adams it wasn’t a bad choice, per se. It’s Adams who betrayed the voters. I think many New Yorkers see that, but if they don’t, they don’t.
I lived in DC for 25 years and for much of that time we had to endure Marion Barry. At the beginning there was every reason to see why most voters wanted him. Then he became a bad joke, and it was quite while before he hoisted himself on his own petard. But if someone other than the voters had stepped in to remove him (and god knows they tried) it wouldn’t have gone well, and in fact would have been a betrayal of why he was elected in the first place.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@robtrim:
Kentucky is also beautiful. I was not expecting that.
Matt McIrvin
@Juju: During Trump’s first term, until the COVID pandemic hit, if you didn’t pay attention to politics and you weren’t in the specific groups he targeted (mostly immigrants), you were basically OK. He didn’t actually do a lot to wreck the government or crash the economy–he was tyrannical toward immigrants, he was corrupt, but mostly he was personally embarrassing and low-engagement people could ignore that.
Then the COVID pandemic hit, and a wave of social unrest over police brutality and racism, and Trump’s inability to deal with any of that coherently actually got him booted from office, just barely. But again, if you were low-engagement, in hindsight you could frame all of that as not Trump’s fault. And when the COVID pandemic and its aftereffects dragged on under Biden, he ended up getting most of the blame and people got nostalgic for the first three years of Trump.
I think a lot of his marginal voters basically just wanted to get 2019 back. But there’s no way to get 2019 back.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@@mistermix.bsky.social:
I did not say the power to remove was not upheld. I asked that you recall due process and that everyone in this country, including Mayor Adams, is entitled to it.
Ergo, Governor Hochul can suspend Mayor Adams for thirty days. Everything else is up to the court schedule and the number of appeals Mayor Adams’ defense can conjure.
We just lived through delay tactics by a defendant, aided by our supreme court, that cost us a trial before the election. If not for that delay, Jack Smith and Judge Chutkan would have completed that trial before the GOP primary process was completed. Defense delay tactics are no lie.
WTFGhost
You stupid (expletives deleted), THE PEOPLE DESERVE TO SEE CRIMINALS PUNISHED. Not “losing the next election” but the crime should be punished, by the state, which misrepresents itself as “the people” because the *people* want him *gone* and facing charges – those that don’t are either corrupt as eff, or don’t know the stakes.
When politicians face different conduct rules than ordinary people, things are not good, nor stable, not in a democracy, where those politicians are our goddamned *servants*.
WTFGhost
@Matt McIrvin: Yes. Putin (I assume Putin) put delusions of grandeur in his head for territorial acquisition, and Project 2025 has had Republicans creaming their underwear for a vast expansion of Presidential power, just like the rise of a Fuhrer.
Last one that came to power, with visions of territorial expansion, yikes. And that was Germany, nowhere near an atom bomb, just, closing in on a nuclear reactor. Fewer glide bombs, fuel-air explosions weren’t a reliable *thing*, artillery advanced to obscene degrees…
I’ll be the first to say “don’t quiver in fear,” but I think Trump is now the object of enough hero worship, I think he might make even more stupid decisions this time around. And I’m not sure how much he can be stopped, if/when he tantrums, or thinks he really is the President who will expand America into Canada and Greenland.
Eolirin
@geg6: No, I think messaging has hard limits in it’s effectiveness, not that it’s pointless, and given that we have the direct experience of what the Republicans are actually doing drawing everyone’s attention, attempts at Democratic messaging really don’t matter that much right now; everyone is going to want to gut Musk given the state of affairs, and nomination votes that no one pays attention to except for the very online aren’t that important in the face of it. So we shouldn’t be focusing on nomination votes. I think it’s great if all the dems always vote no but I don’t think we should care if they vote yes here either, we should be focusing on how horrible the Republicans are being. That’s what people are going to care about. Earlier yes votes can be spun as betrayal. It’s not going to hurt us, not really, unless we start focusing on how much of a betrayal it was that Dems took those votes, instead of focusing on how horrible the Republicans are acting. We shouldn’t be doing that.
And more importantly I don’t confuse messaging for having a strategy to accomplish things. We can message and message and message exactly the way people on the sidelines want and just end up losing elections and having bad things happen and it won’t have achieved other than feeling good in the moment to see people say the things we want them to say. Messaging is a tool, one of many, not an end goal. Outcomes are the only thing that really matter in politics, everything else is just process.
I’d like to point out that Andrew Cuomo, for being a corrupt fuck with terrible messaging strategies, managed to completely bend NYS politics to his personal whim for over a decade and won all of his elections with huge margins. He got everything he wanted for a very long time, both in terms of what got done and what didn’t; that’s actually the core skill of a politician, beyond being able to win elections. It tends to go with people who have really shitty personalities, though not always, but it’s part of the asymmetric struggle we have to get to a better political reality.
@John S.: They should be held accountable for their actions when they hold power. When they don’t hold power we should be doing literally everything we can to get them back in power regardless of what they’re doing or not doing. Because the alternative is Musk, or worse.
Democrats in congress cannot stop anything without Republican consent is the beginning and end of the story right now. Applying power under those circumstances may mean doing things you think they shouldn’t because it gives them leverage they can use to actually accomplish something, or to help win an election with a divided electorate. Sometimes it’ll align with exactly what you want. In either case, it doesn’t matter until we win more elections, and we need to focus entirely on making sure that happens, if elections are even still possible.
Geminid
@Geminid: What I took away from these two event descriptions (and a couple others) is that Hakeem Jeffries’ book The ABC’s of Democracy is a reprise of his first floor speech as Democratic House Leader in January, 2023. with illustrations added.
Jeffries is a very effective speaker, in my opinion. His longer efforts often employ rhetorical devices found in Black Church sermons: alliteration, simple statements in groups of three, and in this case using the alphabet. I saw Jeffries do this in a floor speech at the conclusion of Kevin McCarthy’s prolonged election as Speaker. I expect that speech is the basis of The ABC’s of Democracy.
This kind of rhetoric does not fit an impressively “intellectual” template. But while it’s not “cerebral,” this rhetorical style is simple, direct and memorable, and it has all the more reach for those qualities.
I can see how that speech could be the basis of a good “children’s book.” It would be useful for older kids in terms of civic education. Their adult parents ccouldprobably benefit from the book also, and I bet they read it too. Or at least the Black adults; they tend to respect Jeffries, I think, and to not look down on him like some of their White counterparts do.
Eolirin
@WTFGhost: He can’t be tried because the charges are federal, and the federal government is refusing to prosecute.
If there are state level charges that could be brought, that might be worth pursuing, but that’s not the Governor’s office’s call.
Hochul has a binary choice; start proceedings to have him removed from office or don’t. Literally all that can be accomplished is that he stops being mayor. That’s all the Governor is empowered to do here. So, the same outcome if he loses the primary election, just a little faster, maybe, depending on how long appeals would have ended up taking.
So why are you focused on Hochul instead of the DoJ that’s dropping these charges so that Trump can extort the mayor of NY?
It’s Murc’s Law with everyone ffs.
Chris
@WTFGhost:
Yep.
It’s batshit insane. The mayor of my small suburb resigned a couple years ago, because if he hadn’t he’d have been forcibly removed, because he was charged with running a child pornography ring, and now, of course, he’s been convicted and is sitting in jail where he belongs. We were fine with this, because, y’know, that’s what you’re supposed to do with criminals, not leave them at large and completely unharmed for months. The fact that he was a criminal made it more urgent for him to be booted the fuck out of that office, not less, and the fact that a whole bunch of us, myself included, had voted for him a few years earlier doesn’t change that.
Geminid
@WTFGhost: These Democratic officials may be public servants, but that does not make them your property. They are responsible to the people who elected them, not to the amateur political strategists on some political blog.
prostratedragon
@Geminid: So … the tour discussions could concern the kinds of things that would lead people not to elect fascist and treasonous dictators?
Geminid
@prostratedragon: That seems to be the point. I haven’t watched the YouTube excert from the Los Angeles appearance with Bryan Tyler Cohen, but I’m guessing it’s not what people were meant to think by:
“Jesus Christ. Now Jeffries is on a book tour for the children’s ABC book he wrote. That’s how he’s using his recess time.”
The comment was intended to make people angry at Jeffries over one misrepresented appearance during the recess. This attempt at manipulation does does not surprise me. The commenter has had an axe to grind against Jeffries for as long as I can remember.
Kay
@RevRick:
You don’t get it. I’m not telling them to “message” or “turn into show horses”
i’m telling them to GO TO their district or state and attend a protest, meet with their base, hold a town hall
This isn’t hard. If your people are outside, go outside and stand with them.
This is not about swing voters or polling or any of that – it is about their base and them NOT continuing to treat their base like shit.
You cannot ask people for loyalty if you are not loyal to them. It’s outrageous to do so.
YY_Sima Qian
@Kay: The elected Dems did that for USAID. I am glad they did, & USAID deserve to be defended w/ all the might the elected Dems can muster. (As part of USG’s instrument for foreign policy, USAID is far from perfect, but IMO it is by far the best USG organ in the way it relates to the ROW.)
However, in so far as moving the needle w/ the general public, USAID is far too inside baseball.
MinuteMan
By accepting the deal with Felonius Punk, Adams has admitted his guilt of the charges and is effectively accepting a plea bargain that requires him to act in Mangolini’s (and his own) best interests rather than the interests of the citizens of New York City. Hochul sounds an awful lot like the weasels who twice rationalized voting against convicting Twitler; not a good luck, to say the least.
Gloria DryGarden
@trollhattan: yes he is on blue sky. Just checked. And followed.
Bulgakov
50 year registered Democrat here. Deregistered 3 weeks ago because of the utter lack of resistance from the leadership. Became an “Unaffiliated” voter. No more Democratic yard signs in my yard (my wife was never happy about that) and no more donations. Basta!