The Blog Party

an article in the mercury news details harriet miers longtime affiliation with a fundamentalist christian church. it is going to be bad.

What was Virginia Fields thinking? Some staffer photoshopped four pictures together to make it look like she had a diverse constituency. Read the article in the NY Daily News. Funny.

Just got home and was watching NY1. Very good interview with Brian Ellner. Check him out. He’s got good ideas.

Bloomberg’s polls are up and even Gifford Miller was playing nice when they announced the city’s budget. Bloomber g said:

“The speaker and I may be vying for the same office; that is politics,” he said. “But when it comes to government, Gifford Miller has been a great speaker of the City Council, and together each year, after all the pushing and shoving, we always come together, have a handshake and try to do what is right for this city.”

Which is all well and good - but a $400 property tax rebate and a reduction in the sales tax on clothing is small potatoes when it comes to significant reform. The current surplus will not last and these short-term initiatives don’t help stabilize the already precarious middle class. There are a few solid programs that were re-instated at the behest of the City Council:

“The deal, which requires the formality of a full Council vote tomorrow, would also add about $230 million to the budget that Mayor Bloomberg proposed in May, mostly for education, cultural and social service programs sought by the Council. The figure includes about $20 million for a jobs program aimed at poor minority neighborhoods; about $9 million for literacy and legal services for immigrants, and $6 million to combat domestic violence, the Council speaker, Gifford Miller, said last night.”

But we’ve still go a long way to go…

The City Council passed legislation yesterday intended to help poor New Yorkers on several fronts, including making it easier to apply for food stamps and offering low-income tenants a chance to buy their buildings should the landlord decide to withdraw from rent subsidy programs.

Read more in NY Times.

It faces a veto from the Mayor’s office because food stamp law might conflict with federal and state laws.

The Mayor just won the waste transfer battle, it’ll be interesting to see how this one goes.

Personally, I want to know why they are only trying to help low-income tenants! Low-income is important, but what about middle-class tenants? What about the millions of New Yorkers that are a vital part of the NYC economy who are moderate income? The people who don’t need public resources and subsidies but are always struggling to make ends meet? We need to give those people access to housing, we need to help the most productive people to feel invested in the city by having the opportunity to own a home or collectively buy a building.

What about NYC’s vanishing middle class??

So here’s some more interesting stuff.

Bloomber and Co. have put up a site to track campaign donors and lobbyists as well as vendors. It is at nyc.gov/bizsearch

City Council put up a site to let you see how the budget cuts affect you.
Check out www.myneighborhoodcuts.com. This is on the city council site, but its pretty obviously a plug for Gifford Miller.

And so the battle continues… and its politics as usual.
Millionaire vs. Billionaire. Still, the information is useful.
See which real estate interests bought off who.

an interesting NY Times article about the race for the office of Public Advocate:

What is clear is that these candidates have decidedly different views on how the office should be used.

“I think this office has the most potential of any office on the New York City landscape,” Mr. Rasiej said. “If only the imagination of the person in office could be expanded.”

As I mentioned earlier on this site, and on my personal site, I’m bulking up the platform. Obviously, its thin. As I read through all the other candidates’ sites last night and early into the morning, it became eminently clear that everyone is saying basically the same things. I’m sure -at least I hope - that there are substantive differences underneath the rhetoric and slogans, but it is hard to tell. And the fact of the matter is, the deeper I dig into it, the more it becomes evident that campaigning has nothing to do with substance, its all image.

I’m your basic, fickle voter. I look at a candidate and think, “Dork” or “Loser” or “Bossy” or “Too Rich” and tune out. And the media doesn’t help because it is easier to devolve into name-calling and high-volume snark than it is to really try and convey meaningful information about the choices available to us.

On that note, I’m glad to see The Politicker is completely unexcited by my campaign and that it has generated more Monday morning quarterbacking in the comments section. Christopher, I agree with you that the media doesn’t cover the candidates substantively. I think your idea for a simple Voter Guide Magazine is a great one. You’ve got a lot of great ideas - and I’m sorry that you feel blacklisted by the media. Not sure how to counteract that.

To the guy who called me a hipster - I’m not. I’m too old to be a hipster. I’m one of the countless people in the city who lives and works in NYC making very, very little money at a non-profit organization. I used to work in the private sector but left to pursue a career I felt was meaningful. I’m not a barista as you so condescendingly assume. The idea of the “creative class” is not some stupid, hipster notion. Its a very real thing. And even C. Virginia Fields, in the paper on Affordable Housing she released as Borough President in 2000, discusses the issues of moderate income New Yorkers trying to afford their rent in the city. Creative Class, Knowledge Workers, Wage Slaves - whatever you want to call it. Moderate Income White Collar Workers are the new Factory Workers in an urban environment. We are the people Observer readers hire to run their businesses - or administer their foundations - while they catch the jitney to the Hamptons.

If you want to condescend and call us all hipsters, that’s fine. But it is uninformed and reductive.