On sight I had assumed it was for enabling intelligence activities around UN missions and expats (and suppressing demonstrations?) but enabling kleptocracies' real estate schemes is much more straightforward.
The amateurishness ("remember to delete these texts!" "always do!") and the fact that he was probably doing the same for years in Brooklyn politics makes me think: (1) man, cops assume they can get away with anything, and (2) how many more adept people must be in the shadows making graft in ways that are actually hard to figure out?
Checking to see if Turkish Airlines flies to Easter Island is just the funniest damn thing ever. I've been laughing about it all day.
I was laughing at the inefficiency of the JFK - IST - CDG routing until I remembered that I once flew SFO - IST - ZRH because I got a sweet deal on TK, which isn't much better.
I mean, they probably weren't personally bribing you.
2: there is a strong sense of impunity from these conversations - reminds me of covering financial crime trials.
Checking to see if Turkish Airlines flies to Easter Island is just the funniest damn thing ever.
Somewhere out there online is a nationalist Turk who not only thinks they ought to, but that it ought to be a domestic flight because it's historically part of Turkish lands.
4: It isn't much weirder than flying Europe-UAE-Singapore rather than just Europe-Singapore direct, which is faster even just in flight terms, never mind the layover.
I was curious to know LB's perspective.
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Also, OT, heebie, do you still have family in Florida? Are they affected by Helene? Anyone else here? Is this worth a separate thread. I just read a piece about Florida officials abandoning a jail with 3,000 people in it in harm's way. |>
I'm watching this, amused and/or agog from a distance, not having any personal stake in NYC.
But I find myself wondering: Did that building ever get an actual fire safety inspection?
I am delightedly eating popcorn. He drew an excellent judge, too: I worked with Dale Ho a little when he was at the ACLU, and he's smart and honest and competent. (Important mnemonic sighted on Twitter: "If your Judge Ho is Dale, justice can't fail. If your Judge Ho is Jim, the outlook is grim." )
When I say delighted, that's with a strong underpinning of despair. I love this city so much, and it always seems to be run by incompetent crooks. Sometimes a competent crook (Bloomberg) sometimes an honest incompetent (de Blasio), but it's been a long long time since anyone did a decent job.
Fewer indictments than Chicago, right?
Was Bloomberg a crook as mayor or do you just thin' that his industry was essentially crooked?
The former, with using "crook" expansively to include corruption that couldn't have been made stick in court. The story that I come back to is spending half a billion dollars with companies he was linked to on payroll software that was ultimately unusable: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/24/nyregion/bloombergs-computer-project-for-personnel-data-leads-to-waste.html
The story I linked to doesn't cover the whole thing, I'd have to do some work to put it together. But it was bad. Similar with spending school dollars on charter schools run by his cronies.
I would call it plutocratic -- a rich guy seizing control of public assets to direct them into the pockets of his cronies while maintaining deniability. Hard to prosecute, but a clear pattern.
On the other hand, he did nice things to parks and bike lanes: he wanted to rob the city blind but didn't actually hate everyone who lives here, so there was plenty of room for him to have been worse.
16: That's fascinating, because he supported snack taxes and congestion pricing. He's also given away a lot of money. The Boston Museum of Science got a lot, but he also gave to public health initiatives but very management consulting type ones.
Why is there any mention of Andrew Cuomo running if Adams resigns/is pushed out? Would anyone vote for that asshole? Is that just the NYT manufacturing buzz?
Argentina and Easter Island are stretches, but still not completely ridiculous to check whether Turkish Airlines could comp you - they could be codeshared, no?
7.last may or may not be the same person as the comparative linguist who's irrefutably shown that rongorongo encodes a Turkic language.
Also, OT, heebie, do you still have family in Florida? Are they affected by Helene? Anyone else here? Is this worth a separate thread. I just read a piece about Florida officials abandoning a jail with 3,000 people in it in harm's way.
Yeah, my parents said that Gainesville basically doesn't have power, but they're personally fine. (Also they invested in a back-up generator after a memorable hurricane season years ago.) Lots of downed trees.
I was about to post a different post, but I can throw both up. It's like old times!
On policy, my favorite Speaker of the House during my lifetime was Sal di Masi. We probably wouldn't have gotten MA Commonwealth Care (the ACA's predecessor) through without him. He also opposed casino gambling. But he was corrupt and went to prison for it.
Things I learned about New York governance thanks to this ongoing event:
1. One recourse for a corrupt or otherwise untenable mayor is for the governor to remove them directly, after showing them charges & some opportunity to respond. The constitutional basis seems to be XIII.5: "Provision shall be made by law for the removal for misconduct or malversation in office of all officers,
except judicial," and then it's a state law that makes the governor's action that provision, echoed by NYC Charter. It's an old system, the last time it was used it was by FDR in 1932 against a Tammany mayor, but the Constitution was rewritten in 1938 and that provision stayed in; NYC Charter around the same time.
2. There is also an "inability committee" that can declare a mayor unable to hold office, and grounds do not seem to be just physical/mental inability. There's a dance mirroring the 25th Amendment's where if the Mayor disputes the declaration it goes to Council which needs to vote 2/3 to remove him. But the Council for that purpose takes on the role of "inability panel" and is described as such in the Charter.
2a. One member of the "inability committee" is the longest-serving current borough president, adding up all tenure including nonconsecutive prior tenure. That is the Brooklyn BP (2020-); fortunate it's him because after him it's a precise 4-way tie between every other BP (1/1/2022-). If there were a tie they would have to draw lots!
he supported snack taxes and congestion pricing
A hard chocolate shell of public-minded technocracy around the plutocratic banana. (He also contributed significantly to soda tax campaigns far away!)
18: He's still got connections, and he'd love to restart his career. I think it's hopeless, but I'm not surprised he's still got enough juice to get the Times to talk him up.
I kind of hope he makes a real shot at it and gets slapped down hard enough to hurt his feelings. I hate him so much.
19 good point! (They don't codeshare as far as I know - LATAM is in Oneworld and Turkish Airlines is in Star Alliance - but it's plausible they might)
25 last: be careful what you wish for/be careful to phrase your wish very clearly. I'm so used to insane election outcomes now that the first half of your wish is scary (on behalf of NYers. I don't live there).
Another very funny part is where the campaign staffer tells the shady Turkish guy that they'll check with Adams but they're pretty sure he doesn't want to do crimes, then they do and he very much does want to do crimes.
You have to imagine that was a "what am I doing with my life?" moment for the staffer.
28: Yes, that was great.
I wonder if this unnamed staffer whose texts feature so prominently in the indictment was saving them as future leverage, or if he was just careless.
I always felt Bloomberg's soda tax was deeply unjust for its inclusion of diet soda. Going after sugary drinks is one thing, but that's no reason to target harmless aspartame.
25: I know somebody who worked for him between stints on Wall Street and for a company doing investment advice on endowments. He seemed to like his middle-of-the road Dem values on policy while disapproving of his behavior. I still just didlike Cuomo. Was his father better? That was my impression, but I don't know. I think I would have preferred a Mario Cuomo presidency to a Bill Clinton one.
8. Probably a hangover from the 60s when flights from Europe (UK) to South and South East Asia stopped over in UAE to refuel.
31: Are you sure about that? Where did you see it?
In NYC it wasn't a tax, it was a portion cap, since struck down, but the drinks subject were defined as non-alcoholic, sweetened by the manufacturer or establishment with sugar or another caloric sweetener, has greater than 25 calories per 8 fluid ounces, and not more than 50 percent of milk or milk substitute by volume as an ingredient.
The Oakland tax he bankrolled (one of many), still around, has a similar definition, more exemptions like medical food but still having a threshold of 25 calories per 12 fl oz.
Where did you see it?
It was my memory of living in New York at the time. It may well have ended up a less-offensive rule, but it started out including all the things.
I wouldn't be surprised if that was grocers applying a broad brush. A search of nytimes.com for '"diet soda" bloomberg' suggests they were exempted back to the beginning, but they're in the same cases.
31 and 33:I adore Diet Coke and Cherry Coke Zero, which is harder to find, but I'm not completely sure that aspartame and sucralose are harmless. I think they can lead to weight gain because you wind up consuming more food and/or extracting more calories from other foods, because your brain believes that a certain number of calories must be present based on the sweetness.
38: If they aren't taxed it would not have been an assertion that artificials were harmless, rather an assertion that sugary drinks have a specific documented harm they want to target disincentivizing.
21: Apparently, my uncle didn't lose power or lost it and got it back quickly.
Also, I just got back from West Virginia, where I drove past Catamount Place.
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Tell me that isn't Erebor.
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For Höbelt the result on Sunday is, despite all the noise, unlikely to amount to any great ruction.See, I don't find that comforting. It means people are voting for Nazi-curiosity and nothing else.
[...]
Topics such as Covid and Ukraine, Höbelt noted, had no actionable policy dimension, as they were simply about stoking emotions. On other issues, such as migration, mainstream parties had already tacked right, adopting the FPÖ's ideas. The far-right party meanwhile had tried to present a more mainstream set of economic policies on issues such as tax and spending. "There's very little discussion of actual policy issues at all, and very little in the FPÖ programme of substance that separates it from the People's party."
42: If I go there now, can I just hang out in Greenwood the Great until whenever?
32 a company doing investment advice on endowments:
Laydeez.
Is that one of Maggie Smith's roles?
42: On a good day it's visible from Mount Doom.
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In Nashua canvassing. Thinking of Spike
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Awww. I'll be waving a sign in downtown Keene later today.
"Downtown Keene" would be a good pseud.
The sign holding thing was some folks up from one of the border towns in Mass, and us local folks had to put up a respectable showing for our guests. That group will be stopping at a couple other places in the county today as well, down in some of the redder towns.
Its always interesting at these things to see who yells shitty things at you. In this case it was a guy on a motorcycle cranking his stereo and not wearing a helmet, a teenage lacrosse boy out of the backseat window of a car his friend was driving, and an old dude in an expensive yellow convertible who looked like he was on his way to go play some golf.
Plus the usual comments from the giant pickup truck set, although they mostly didn't engage, and we even got a couple positive honks out of them. We got a lot of positive honks from Subarus.
Hanging out the passenger side of his best friend's ride.
51: I met the candidate for Executive Council. She seemed pretty great.
I went to a pretty down and out neighborhood where few wanted to talk. We spoke to one elderly Spanish-speaking woman, who was not the voter. I think her kids were. Somebody Spanish speaking is going to go back.
Do you guys need folks in your area? I'd love to meet up and have better talking points than I had today.
I met the candidate for Executive Council.
Melanie Levesque? She actually is pretty great. The first Black person to serve in the NH Senate.
I'm not on top of all the canvassing stuff going on (I hate canvassing. I like to focus on everything that's _not_ canvassing.) but I know there is a lot going on to support some of the state rep races. Hannah Bissex is the one everyone is hopeful for - a great candidate for a purple seat we would love to flip. I know they canvas a lot - you could get notification about it through the Cheshire Dems.
And there will be a visibility on Central Square in Keene every Saturday from 12-1, except October 26 which is the Pumpkin Festival. I won't be in town for next week's, but it would be fun to have you come up for one of those.
49: In the Fourth Age, Barad-Dûr has gone corporate and relocated to Nashville.
