Happy Friday gang! We made it through another week. My office is moving next Friday so there’s lots going on here. We’re moving into some swing space while they finish up our suite, which should be really nice. Hope you have a great weekend, any good plans?!?
Updates here:
Justice Alito ponders whether threat of prosecuting presidents would undermine ‘stable, democratic society’ – live
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2024/apr/25/supreme-court-trump-immunity-biden-latest-updates
Wow
A Ukraine-born congresswoman voted no on aid. Her hometown feels betrayed.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/04/25/victoria-spratz-ukrainian-congresswoman-aid-betrayed
Stonks! Love when they trot out Peter Tuchman!
Dow drops more than 400 points on inflation and growth concerns, Meta drags S&P 500 lower: Live updates
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/25/dow-drops-more-than-600-points-on-inflation-and-growth-concerns-live-updates.html
Sprots?
Damn I thought he already died
Harvey Weinstein Sex-Crimes Conviction Thrown Out by New York High Court
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/harvey-weinstein-sex-crimes-conviction-thrown-out-by-new-york-high-court-46d4a890?st=fcehs5wuhj63sv8&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
[I’m looking for a funny tweet to put here but I have to go to dinner so if I forget just fill in with your imagination]
Let me guess: the congresswoman is a Republican.
Right you are! Representing the great state of Indiana! And even though she’s 45, there’s a definite “Children of the Corn” (or maybe “Midsommar”) vibe that clings to her:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Spartz
So…Party before either Country. Right on brand.
OK, there’s your first problem right there.
Handsy Andy Cuomo, coming in hot! This is a paywall-avoiding link to a Handsy Andy WSJ op-ed that no one asked for but of course I had a great need to read.
You see, Handsy is rumored to be plotting a political comeback, possibly as Mayor of New York, the hometown that he despises so much and the city that he brought to its knees through his capricious and vindictive, science-denying COVID diktats. Still, he has a following. De Blasio and Adams are/were clowns but Handsy could actually wreak real havoc, especially if Kickback Kathy Hokum is still Governor. “Listen, Kickback, do you remember that time we went to that fundraiser in Cheektowaga, June, 2018? Because I do.” “What to you want?” “Oh, nothing specific. I’ll call you from my encrypted cellphone at Gracie Mansion.”
I chuckled this morning at that. But also if I lived there I’d be concerned; you people are all thumbs at picking mayors and Cuomo is the perfect Republican for the job.
It brought me no joy to write that. The odd thing is superficially Cuomo and Adams are very different people with different career trajectories but they share the same constituencies. A lot of folks who know people like Patch and Handsy who have “stumbled along the way” but Jesus tells them to love the sinner and hate the sin, as they board the buses to visit all the friends and relatives being held in upstate prisons. For now, anyway. Maybe when Bragg gets thrown out we’ll start prosecuting crime again—anyway, I don’t want to be distracted.
Patch Adams is probably the most corrupt Mayor we’ve had since Jimmy Walker (the original, Tammany Hall Democrat from the 1920s, not JJ from “Good Times” hawking reverse mortgages through the fog of his many strokes.) I would never connect Handsy with personal, financial corruption. He has bigger fish to fry, bigger favors to wheel and deal, and bigger breasts to grope.
Cuomo got to be governor by sticking a knife in the back of David Paterson with an assist from the NY Times and their editor overseeing NY state coverage, Carolyn Ryan.
Ryan returned the favor by saying Cuomo didn’t deserve much scrutiny as governor because he was too much of a “homebody” and somehow Times reporters under her watch never caught on to all of his abusive behavior. Funny how that worked.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Cuomo tries to run the same playbook, since Adams is so exposed, except it’s a lot harder when all of his own dirt is public and he doesn’t have the newspaper of record so easily able to run interference.
Have you noticed that for some reason David Paterson is everywhere nowadays? For a decade I thought he was dead, but now he’s everywhere. I don’t even really remember him being Governor, a huge plus for NYC residents. Just stay away. Take our money but just leave us alone. Kickback is pretty good about this. Cuomo…It’s going to take a generation just to get us back to where we were when we were sliding into recession pre-COVID.
Oh goodness, no, Cuomo is NOT above old fashioned corruption! How dare you, sir!
But not for personal, financial gain, I don’t think. Of course, the corruption and the venality were rampant. If Kickback ever really gets the COVID response inquiry off the ground (it would be like Brutus leading a Senate inquiry into Caesar’s death, so that’s not gonna happen) and Ghislaine DeRosa could be compelled to testify, that would be one small thing, but in a one-party state who wants to dig into the cesspool of Democratic politics. Howard Zucker, Handsy’s State Commissioner of Health and not-so-fondly known as the Butcher of Albany for consigning all those COVID-infected hospital patients to nursing homes, he slipped off to the CDC. Are you ever going to trust the CDC again after the COVID catastrophe? Trust, but verify, I suppose.
I know you’re a longtime hater, but I’m almost surprised you’re not rooting for Cuomo here because if anyone wouldn’t give the slightest shit about the party, it would be a guy who basically got booted from it. I have no doubt he’d love to go full John Wick on everyone, and it would be on sight with Albany from day one.
Also you have a better chance of getting that sort of center-right guy rather than Guiliani II, not sure that dog’s gonna hunt in NYC at this point.
I watch a YT creator called Cash Jordan. He used to make real estate type videos (TINIEST APARTMENT IN MANHATTAN GOES FOR HOW MUCH?! type stuff). But in the past year he’s transitioned to more current events topics for NYC. Migrant crisis, crime on the subway, lack of available housing. He stays pretty apolitical, mostly, and my lib-antenna is usually up for all the buzzwords. But the picture he paints of living in NYC is fucking BLEAK. It reminds me of what things looked like in the 80s, but more expensive. Just wondering if it is as bad as he portrays.
It’s really not. I mean, I exaggerate, and it is incredibly expensive to find a place to live, but that’s always been the case. I’ve heard from people who moved here in the 1970s and even earlier about how expensive apartments were and difficult to get.
It’s a very different city than the one I moved to, but really it’s more that I’m the different one. I’m calcifying into the grumpy senior citizen I was always meant to be, and not the 30-year-old spending hours at a très français restaurant on New Year’s Eve with blaring Europop and leading the crowd in the bunny hop at the stroke of midnight. Sigh.
But you can always make your own fun. All those college Hamas protesters you’re seeing? Not all of them are going back to their comfy suburbs. They’ll squeeze in, get roommates, parental handouts (a benefit denied to me and Better Half), starter jobs, careers, and before you know it people are doing incredibly middle-American things, like having bébés and buying apartments and maybe a car, the better to get to the vacation house and all the relatives who want visits from the bébés.
Thank you for your response! He’d said at one point the average studio in Manhattan was going for $3600. Which is 3x what I pay for a 2 bed, 2 bath condo. Plus the new congestion fees for driving a car, laws about trash, etc. It seems like they are just making it hard to exist there unless you make $300k a year.
No, everything about New York is that there’s always an angle. The over-regulation, the micro-managing, the incompetence and corruption among the rule setters and enforcers…
For example, and this is kind of a very minor example, no resident of New York has paid for a legal, fully taxed pack of tobacco cigarettes in this century. They’re too expensive. So you might walk by a bodega and they’ll be a sign about how, by law, they can only sell a pack for $20 or whatever the notional price is, and then you walk in and if the proprietor likes you he’ll open a drawer and sell you an untaxed pack of Marlboros from North Carolina for $7.
The problem is, and the nation should have learned its lesson during Prohibition, when you criminalize a wildly popular pastime and people ignore it, as they rightly should, you create a citizenry of petty criminals hostile to other laws that might make sense and to be for the public benefit.
I don’t drive but I can’t wait to see how Congestion Pricing plays out. This is a city that can’t arse themselves to open legally sanctioned pot shops while letting 2500 illegal ones thrive. Cheaper, better product, better hours, better locales. Stay in your lane, State of New York. No one asked for this.
“Apolitical” doesn’t mean “no agenda,” something I used to say to friends who liked Joe Rogan in his earlier days before he slid over to full reactionary shithead.
If NYC was like that I’d be a lot more worried about my friends and family who live there, but they’re not concerned and what they tell me often is at odds with what the internet tells me. Plus there’s just a lot of missing murder; the number in 2023 was down 83% from 1990. Unless there are some giant mass graves the cops can’t find, I have to conclude that Cash Jordan might not be telling the whole story here. Which, good for him, fear sells! But maybe bad for everyone else.
No, you’re right. He definitely has some sort of agenda. Not sure what it is, aside from generating views. Why would a real estate agent put out so much content seemingly designed to get people to say “well I’ll never move THERE”? And he has a wife and two little ones. He’s not moving either. I just mean he manages to talk about hot button topics without saying anything inflammatory or obviously geared towards one side or the other (95% of the time). I don’t think he likes the mayor, but I think that’s bipartisan at this point 😀
SPROTS UPDATE — NFL DRAFT: Chicago Bears draft possibly good QB for first time in 104 years (no exaggeration, this team actually invented the QB position but have never had a star in the position) ; my own New York Giants do not screw up draft (huzzah); Atlanta Falcons make one of the most hilarious picks in draft history at No. 8 by picking QB weeks after paying another player $160M to play QB; and so on and so forth. Take all with grain of salt; nobody knows anything when it comes to drafting.
Fellow Giants fan, how did I miss that? My cousin texted our group that they drafted JJ McCarthy and gave me a minor stroke, had me looking like Joel “cheap shot to the junk, not once, not twice, but thrice,” Embiid for about a minute until I figured out he was just messing with me. Here’s to a long prolific career for Malik Nabers.
I was **terrified** they were going to take McCarthy. (Or worse! Never forget that they took Daniel Jones 6 even though nobody else in the league seemed even remotely interested in him.)
Let Dimes play out the string and they can figure out QB next year after they finish 4-13 again.
Kirk Cousins will always let you down. Penix is an amazing QB with a huge arm & heart. Giants fans will be screaming for him to start by week 3!
We got Malik Nabers out of LSU, the wide receiver, and I’m happy with him, think he’s gonna be great.
And FWIW, am not a draft expert or tape eater or even watcher of college football, but I liked Penix more than I think the draft experts did, though his list of injuries is really nasty. That said, taking him that early after spending all that money on Cousins is INSANE, that’s how you end up in 3 years having negative salary cap space and having to cut guys just to field a roster.
I watched every game Penix played at UW, he only had a few clunkers & won almost all the big games we didn’t expect them to win. He looked like he was injured in the only games he lost but wouldn’t let on. He has actually been super durable at UW. His letter he published is amazing:
https://www.theplayerstribune.com/posts/michael-penix-jr-nfl-draft-ncaa-football-university-of-washington
It really is nuts to draft Penix after signing Cousins. If Cousins didn’t work, there would be another chance to draft a QB next year. And odds are Cousins will deliver pretty much the reasonably OK performance they expected when they signed him. This really comes across as Matt Millen level stuff.
Dave Gettleman would like a word….
Politico rolled out an account of the “feud” between the Biden Administration and the New York Times, and hilariously it’s a bothsides account which has struck a nerve with Times leadership because, of course, bothsides is NOT supposed to be done to them.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/04/25/new-york-times-biden-white-house-00154219
Politico notes that publisher AG Sulzberger is clearly angry that the Times hasn’t been given an exclusive interview with Biden – and Sulzberger brings the issue up repeatedly. Going beyond that, Politico quotes two sources saying Sulzberger thinks only an interview with the Times would be evidence that Biden isn’t too old to be president.
The Times angrily denies AG Sulzberger has an explicit linkage in mind, but Politico clearly agrees that the Times has been hung up on the issue. Which of course suggests that the Biden team is on to something regardless – giving the Times more access will do nothing about their bias.
And Politico captures example after example of exactly the things that not only Biden complains about but press critics – including the Times’ own public editors – have noted, such as petty crusades, refusal to make corrections, and serious blindspots.
Politico spends plenty of time dinging Biden, but the way they refuse to rationalize the imperial attitude of the Times is worthwhile. The harder the Times insists that they are the only judge of what is fair and balanced, the harder it is to take them seriously.
Current political editor Elisabeth Bumiler ominously repeats language that they don’t see anything wrong in their coverage that is a close parallel to what former political editor Carolyn Ryan said in 2016. They haven’t learned anything in eight years, and it’s clear that publisher AG Sulzberger wants to be sure they don’t.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a48443/new-york-times-2016-election-coverage/
What a petty ass, Sully is.
AG needs his own Girl Friday. I can’t remember if AG is divorced. His Dad, Pinch, certainly is. And crack native-Canadian reporter David Brooks famously left his wife of many years to marry his decades-younger “research assistant.” Imagine being able to expense your inter-office affairs. The “Mad Men” era lives on in the Times Tower!
That was a fascinating story, and deeply unsurprising. The one tough beat here is that Politico doing it is probably the wrong outlet, as they have a very similar schizophrenia when it comes to “are we setting the agenda or reporting the news here?”
And I rarely credit Biden and his team, but good on them for telling the Times to pound sand given that they very obviously have an agenda, and one that would not be good for him! (Hell, I’d even go further and publicly say “Is this a media company or a protection racket? We don’t negotiate with terrorists.”)
I think it’s totally fair to criticize Biden’s approach to the press, and he probably would benefit from a few more well chosen interviews.
But it’s pretty telling that when Trump was grossly and deliberately breaking Covid protocols for press briefings the Times didn’t raise a fraction of the fuss compared to their demands now for an interview. They’d benefit a lot from not resisting all criticism, but under AG Sulzberger they’ve cracked down even harder.
I thought it was funny that Politico got leakers too, in light of Sulzberger’s inquisition over the Times blowing a front page Gaza story. His crackdown didn’t stop reporters from being reporters.
As for Harvey… only his soul is dead.
Yeah I’d be okay with him spending time in Epstein’s jail cell.
https://www.thebeaverton.com/2024/04/american-18-year-olds-stoked-to-vote-in-last-presidential-election/
Meanwhile, old white Trump voter votes twice & then once for his dead wife & crickets…
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/25/crystal-mason-black-woman-voting-error-acquittal
I’m sure this would end well…
https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-federal-reserve
and all Raffi albums banned from the library in 3, 2, 1…
https://www.motherjones.com/media/2024/04/raffi-guide-to-fighting-fascism-baby-beluga-penny-penguin/
Bye Bye MaraLardo!
Military official: “Sir, the mission was a success, the target has been eliminated. No survivors at Mar-A-Lago.”
Biden: [smiles, takes lick of ice cream cone]
Ok Cruella!
https://www.rawstory.com/noem-dog/
The Heritage Foundation presents Kristi Noem starring in “Young Yeller”
Couldn’t happen to nicer guys
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/mckinsey-faces-us-criminal-probe-over-opioids-work-sources-say-2024-04-24/
Unfortunately, these things largely get settled with some deal that is friendly to the corporation, but I’m guessing that this is being leaked because the feds have hit an impasse and want to rattle McKinsey’s cage.
Holy shit! Another Biden win!