Medicare For All = a savings of $2 trillion over a 10-year period.
So says even a Koch-funded think thank.
But, as Ryan Cooper writes at The Week, “so far The Washington Post, The Associated Press, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and CNN have absolutely beclowned themselves trying to dispute the study’s clear finding.”
Once again, Sen. Collins finds a way to let herself hear what it is convenient for her to hear, regardless of how blatant is her snookering.
Of course, Brett Kavanaugh says abortion rights are settled law; what he will do on the Supreme Court is to whittle down access to abortion until it is so attenuated as to be virtually nonexistent.
Councilmember Rivera’s betrayal on Tech Hub is one of the most callous, cynical, and egregious put-up jobs I’ve seen in the forty-plus years I’ve been following NYC politics.
A friend called up and said that Rivera had been on WBAI touting the progressive issues she supports–this was after Rivera caved on Tech Hub. I said to my friend, Why would you believe a word this woman says?
Rivera’s defense of her action in a recent issue of Town and Village descends to Orwellian flim-flam; she deflects away from the facts presented by Andrew Berman, and says she objects to his “messaging.” As if that was what it was all about.
She obviously thinks that by the time she comes up for re-election, this whole mess will have been forgotten; but by that time the Tech Hub neighborhood will have been ravaged by developers, thereby making her sabotage of the neighborhood all the more graphic.
More about Rivera and similarly regressive Council Speaker Corey Johnson in a bit.
Like so many of the Republican office-holders boosting him, Kavanaugh is the perfect amalgam of prurient and self-righteous.
When it was Clinton in the hot seat, Kavanagh wanted access to every orifice.
When Trump is committing treason, Kavanaugh prefers that we all remain hands-off.
In the Grand Foyer of the Paris Opera?
I bet the Macrons would have made it a foursome.
And Beyonce and Jay Zee could have come, too.
Talk about stealing Trump’s thunder.
But classical culture has become an albatross to American politicians, since they have fallen lock, stock, and barrel for the “elitist” smear.
To give yet another example of the rot that has debilitated the Landmarks Preservation Commission:
Andrew Berman writes in his email that the LPC has made the peremtory announcement that it will only consider–consider, mind you–SEVEN of the nearly TWO HUNDRED buildings within the Tech Hub environs that Berman and the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation wanted included as part of their proposal for comprehensive protections for the area.
A proposal for a Tech Hub landmark district should be submitted: let the LPC implicate itself by rebuffing it. Let them expose themselves once again on the record. LPC is now an organization held captive by the Mayor, the City Council, and the real-estate developers. All of them are betraying the public interest of New York City.
Only two actual preservationists sit on the Landmarks Preservation Commission.
These and other fun facts on de Blasio’s reign of terror vs. the city’s architectural heritage are covered in a Daily News piece from last February.
Eric Uhlfelder opined that “One of [just resigned in disgrace LPC chair] Srinivasan’s first actions upon taking over LPC, according to sources inside the commission, was instructing her staff to take off their preservation hats. The agency has since seen a significant exodus of experienced staff and landmarked areas compromised.”
De Blasio and is deputy turned LPC into a travesty of a preservation organization.
One of De Blasio’s very first actions as Mayor in 2014 was to appoint Meenakshi Srinivasan as chair of the Landmarks Preservation Commission. She became, and was obviously tasked by the Mayor to become, the Scott Pruitt of LPC. She capriciously and ferociously resisted designating deserving individual buildings and districts, so much so that the law suits started piling up and she abruptly hightailed out of LPC last April.
New landmark designation has ground to a halt, as the Mayor intended.
Now, a multi-plaintiff lawsuit must be launched against the LPC for its dereliction of duty and betrayal of mandated civic responsibility. And, of course, the Mayor must also be named as a defendant.
The Geenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation issued this rebuttal to City Council member Rivera’s three-card monty feint on zoning “protections.”
“In response to Councilmember Carlina Rivera’s release of a letter requesting a ‘zoning protection’ plan for requiring special permits for new hotels in the area south of Union Square following the City Council approval of the Mayor’s 14th Street Tech Hub (click here), the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation issued the following statement:
“Councilmember Carlina Rivera’s plan released today is a pale shadow of the zoning protections she publicly promised would be necessary for her to approve the Tech Hub, and hardly qualifies as ‘zoning protections.’ The requirement of a special permit for hotels will have little to no effect on the development problems the Tech Hub will exacerbate. First, any hotel can still be built with the approval of the City Council. Second, this really only applies to a portion of the affected area, since the zoning for about half the area already prohibits or restricts hotels. Third, hotels are only one of many forms of bad development this area is experiencing which this measure will not address, such as office buildings and high-rise condos, as well as doing nothing about affordable housing which the community rezoning plan Rivera promised to hold out for would have. Finally, it will take months for this requirement to be adopted into law, while the added development pressure from the Tech Hub approval takes effect now. Thus it is like firing a starting gun to developers, letting them know if they want to build a hotel in this area without going through the special permit process, they just need to get underway over the next several months before this measure takes effect. Councilmember Rivera broke her promise to the community and voted for a commercial upzoning which will increase development pressure on these neighborhoods without providing anything like the protections they need or she promised. Trying to pass off flimsy measures with little effect as the protections this community fought for won’t change that.”
Do we realize how much invaluable national security expertise vanishes with Peter Strzok’s firing?
