So, here’s the story. I’m no longer getting up every morning looking for a couple of items (I set six as a minimum awhile ago) for filler for the Gateway, so the real items don’t go stale before I get a piece up, and I’m no longer looking to have an on the record remark about every little thing.

But a few items I ran across along the way interested me enough to post on my personal Facebook page, and it is the end of the month, so I decided, “why not share them?”   

Maybe I’ll do it every month till I go back to serious blogging. Maybe every week. Maybe I won’t do it again for a while. Maybe not at all.

Saturday, Dybbuk and I celebrated shabbos by walking the Brooklyn Bridge. We then wasted the calories we burned by having mussels at Umberto’s while I tried to explain Joey Gallo to him.

“Dylan wrote a song about him being shot.”

“So he was like Medgar Evers?” [Well, actually Gallo was a pioneer in breaking the color barrier and expanding opportunity in the field of organized crime]  

We then walked to Film Forum to catch Harold Lloyd’s “Safety Last,” which is still playing (last show 7:20 tonight). Though Lloyd is no Keaton, this is a bucket list film (despite a couple of cringe worthy moments involving black and Jewish stereotypes).

Dybbuk was a bit traumatized by Lloyd hanging from the clock (it looks real, because he really is that high up over the City) and the fact that Harold nearly gets fired from his job, which would lose him the girl.

And yet “Jurassic Park” doesn’t bother him. Go figure.

Sunday we walked to Brooklyn Bridge Park. And I’ve stopped buying wine every night. I better stop writing before I relapse.  

Anyway, here now some old news:

Continue Reading on Room Gate.

It sometimes seems as if Mike Bloomberg is actually a conspiracy, put on earth as proof that the preposterous right wing fantasies about liberals wanting to create a mommy-state, which impairs all our personal freedoms, are really true.

Yes, legally, adulthood is less a bright-line than one would assume (you can be ordered to pay child support for a 20 year old), but none of the statistically provable public safety logic concerning a 21 year old drinking age applies to cigarette purchases.

Lord, I need a drink (think I'll have a supersized Red Bull).  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/23/nyregion/new-york-proposes-raising-minimum-age-for-cigarette-purchases.html?_r=1&

Quinn Spokesman: "It's sad that former Congressman Weiner is already pointing fingers..."

Gate: What would you prefer he point?  http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/politics/2013/04/8529393/weiner-offended-quinn-term-limits-says-he-was-sexting-couple-years

Weiner’s apparently intent on Anglicizing his name.  After, reading this I think it’s more appropriate to call him “Dick.”  http://politicker.com/2013/04/anthony-weiners-peculiar-press-strategy/

Of course Republicans support the use of drones; have you ever seen them staff an administration?  http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/ny_drone_rangers_4nAq16pAESCdE6jsFUsYoL

Barkan does a nice rundown on the race for Council Speaker.  http://barkanreport.com/post/48609765466/a-degenerate-political-junkies-guide-to-the-city

Liberal idiocy watch: Maureen Dowd on Obama on Guns.  http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/04/22/modo-on-obama/

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2013/04/barack_obama_s_gun_bill_failure_no_president_could_have_passed_gun_control.html

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/04/where-is-your-chart-president-obama.html

Point: CHAIT: "Last Thursday, the Post splashed a front-page photo of two olive-skinned males under the headline BAG MEN. This was, of course, a tabloid pun of sorts. A bagman is a mob figure who collects money from victims. The deeper insinuation of criminality lay in the menacingly large luggage strapped around their shoulders. Why else would Arab-looking men be carrying a bulky bag to a six-hour-long spectator event? A smaller text box beneath the headline noted, “There is no direct evidence linking them to the crime, but authorities want to identify them.”

 The “bag men” turned out to be a pair of innocent young men. One of them, Salah Eddin Barhoum, is a Moroccan-American teen who runs track and plays soccer for his high-school team and works at Subway. He and his friend had no connection to the bombing, as he established when he went to the police to clear his name.

Barhoum was not the first innocent person smeared as a potential terrorist. He was not even the first one so smeared in the Post. Three days earlier, it had breathlessly reported, “Investigators have a suspect—a Saudi-Arabian national.” The man’s suspicious behavior, other than skin, amounted to smelling of gunpowder and running away from the explosion, both of which also unfortunately tend happen to targets of bomb strikes.

The Post is hardly the only news organization rushing fragments of pseudo-fact into the public domain and then retracting them...But its recklessness displays an almost smarmy, legalistic disregard for its own swath of destruction. When the “Bag Men” scoop disintegrated, editor Col Allan replied, “We stand by our story. The image was e-mailed to law-enforcement agencies yesterday afternoon seeking information about these men, as our story reported. We did not identify them as suspects.”

Counterpoint: THE POST: "In a brazen show of hysterical hypocrisy, New York’s Jonathan Chait bends over backwards to argue that The Post “seems determined to revive the old xenophobic paranoia” in its coverage of the Boston bombings. Chait bemoans our utterly factual report that a Saudi national was an early suspect, and ignores the fact that numerous other liberal news outlets confirmed it. Likewise, he breathlessly accuses us of racism for our “Bag Men” cover, which once again was entirely factual."

Does anyone think the Post won this exchange?

Remember Disco?

Push, push for the Busch! http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/politics/2013/04/8529380/gillibrand-makes-last-minute-push-colbert-busch

I end today with an announcement that I will be dialing it down more than a bit for a mental health break of some indeterminate period of time which I suspect will run somewhere between six weeks and five months. During that time, I will be posting sporadically, if at all.

There are a perfect storm of reasons. I haven’t gotten past page 200 of a great book I started last fall; I’d like to pay more attention to DP, Dybbuk and Cerberus; I’d like to re-start walking the Brooklyn Bridge, so I could lose some weight; after seven years, I think it might be time to rethink this thing of ours; I’d like some time to work on another project; I’d like people to stop hating me, at least for awhile.

It seems like as good as time as any. Local politics looks more and more like a discussion of matters under pending and impeding litigation. Recent national news may auger the same. Truth is, I’m a bit tired, and a bit stale, and don’t draw many links these days, and maybe it’s time to let people know that they might miss me if I were gone (or not; WTF really knows?).    

I really did not intend for the Levin/Pierson Council race to become a cause célèbre in this department. Though I like Stephen Levin personally, as recently as October, I criticized him in no uncertain terms for what I perceived as his reluctance to break his apron strings with Vito Lopez.

Continue reading on Room Gate.

Back in 2010, the Daily News published an article where Vito Lopez was accused of trying to close Roman Catholic Churches in his district where the priests were his political enemies.

The article noted Lopez’s response to the charges:

 Lopez spokeswoman Debra Feinberg said the Democratic boss was "saddened to learn" of the closures and mergers, adding that he's fought to keep churches economically viable.

At the time I wrote:

To me, the really distressing thing here is not the charge, but the admission.

Just hypothetically, let's take Lopez at his word: He did not try to use the power of government to get the Diocese of Brooklyn to close churches; he used the power of government to try to get the Diocese of Brooklyn to keep open churches they wanted to close.

While this may not be quite as great an evil as the allegation in this article, is it not just as great a violation of the Free Exercise clause for a politician to use the power of government to interfere with the internal decisions of a religious denomination?

Continue Reading on Room Gate.

Because even a stopped clock is right twice a day, Andrea Peyser's whine about left opposition to Quinn is not without an occasional salient point,  but to assert as Peyser does that "Quinn...once enjoyed the uniform support of the city’s vast left-wing cabal," is to indulge in Bizarro-world delusional revisionism. The "left cabal," to the extent it exists, opposed Quinn's election as Speaker, and has never since supported her with much, if any, enthusiasm.

Further, while Peyser is correct that Quinn is sometimes the victim of misogynistic and homophobic stereotyping, it is not "stereotyping" to quote Quinn threatening to cut off the genitalia of others--it is "stenography."

The truth is, what scares people, and not just people on the left, about Quinn isn't that "she acts like a man." It is that she acts like a particular man:

Rudy Giuliani.

Continue reading on Room Gate.

[Posted on Room Gate 4/18/13]

Politics and Poker, Politics and Poker
shuffle up the cards and find the joker
Neither game's for children
Either game is rough
Decisions, decisions, like:
who to pick
how to play
what to bet
when to call a bluff!

Councilman Stephen Levin makes it awful hard not to like him.  

He works hard. He caters to the whims of every civic type in his area, even when, as is often the case, they are being stupendously silly. The only time Levin can’t please the activists in a community is when they, as is sometimes the case, are at war with each other.

He goes the extra mile in bringing home resources to his constituents. And he takes a special interest in his poorest, least organized constituents. Representing one of the City’s most affluent districts, he champions the causes most dear to residents of its NYCHA projects. 

And it’s even harder not to like him on a personal level.

Though smart and politically savvy, Levin is basically a wide eyed sweet earnest goofball.

No wonder he attended Brown University (also, not coincidentally, the alma matter of Levin’s almost but not quite opponent Lincoln Restler—rumor is they were library rats together). 

He’s the sort of guy who is unaccountably attached to a ten year old Honda which appears to be held together by discarded chewing gum. The sort of guy who suffers a bad story because someone tweeted a picture of him dancing at a Hasidic wedding with a guy who was under indictment, and only suffered that bad story because he himself tweeted the picture, thinking it looked cool.

The sort of guy who spends nearly an entire evening at a political club Christmas party talking with a nine year old about American history trivia (Yes, it was Dybbuk, who thinks Levin is “awesome”).

Continue reading on Room Gate.

Don't believe the hype. If every Democrat voted for cloture on background checks, it still would have failed. Six Republicans who supported a similar bill in the past voted no today.

The shame here hangs heavily on the GOP. http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2013/04/17/blaming_manchin_and_the_democrats_for_the_gun_bill_s_failure.html

Continue reading on Room Gate.

Today, even in New York, we are all Red Sox.

Take a second pray for the dead, the wounded and their families, then continue reading on Room Gate.

Really folks, is Weiner's political fantasy life really anymore deluded that Malcolm Smith's? http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/magazine/anthony-weiner-and-huma-abedins-post-scandal-playbook.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&

Continue Reading on Room Gate.