Local/State Politics: Engage Now Or Die!

[Bammer]

I got an email from a state senator that I hate and ran my response by a couple of colleagues, so it hasn’t been sent back to her yet.

[Bammer]

On another note I saw a pic of a different local politician wearing a PJ facemask. He leans conservative. Not your garden variety woke socialist. Interesting.

[B]

[Bammer]

I was a little concerned about his same race heterosexual nuclear family with all cis children, but he’s in Arkansas so it’ll probably be ok.

[Bammer]

I got an email from a state senator that I hate and ran my response by a couple of colleagues, so it hasn’t been sent back to her yet.

I wrote back and offered to buy lunch

[Bammer]

Can someone tell me what in the ever loving fuck is the point of state law if smaller jurisdictions like counties and cities can just go and make their own different laws about the exact same topic (on just a couple weeks’ notice at that)?

[Biff Pocoroba]

Our governor officially kicks off his re-election campaign today. Kemp is your typical red state governor. The interesting part is that he appealed to the Trump crowd and was their darling but then we know what happened in Georgia with the presidential and senate elections and fell out of favor with the deposed Trump. There has been talk of Kemp being primaried but so far no one has emerged to challenge him. It could interesting if that happens though.

[Bammer]

Did you see my post about they released a guy next day who attacked an elderly person and killed their dog?

i did not

We have a lot of similar things going on in Seattle what with not charging people for lots of various crimes. The latest one that made headlines last week was a 29 year crazy homeless guy attacked a 67 year old (I have to assume based on location) low income guy walking his dog. Attacker was mugging the old guy to steal his jacket. Attacker kicked old guy’s dog, killing the dog. Attacker was arrested and judge released him the following day. (My point about low income being old guy gave an interview saying the dog was all he had “I don’t have much and I’m not going to complain about that, but the dog was all I had.”)

I love the idea of withholding property taxes in protest to shit like this but unfortunately it would backfire on you.

That said if you’re willing to pay several years’ worth of penalties and you save the money, you could pay like 5 years’ worth of back taxes and clear the lien/foreclosure pretty quickly. How would the city do if people stopped paying property taxes en masse? Wouldn’t that be something.

Withholding property taxes in protest may be a fine form of public resistance, but what would you actually want to do from within the legislature to address homelessness, or mental illness, or crime/jail facilities/recidivism?

We’ll have to hook up for a beer some day and talk this all out.

"Vote Bammer 2024: He'll make a sober guy drink."

We’ll have to hook up for an iced coffee at the LAX starbucks in the Delta terminal some day and talk this all out.

[tragabigzanda]

FUCK ICE

[Bi_3]

There is still hope....

Eric Adams Is Going to Save New York
July 20, 2021
By Bret Stephens


Eric Adams arrives for lunch alone, no entourage or media handler. He shows me his new earring — “the first thing,” he says, that Joe Biden “asked to see” when the two met recently to discuss gun violence. He orders a tomato salad with oil on the side, the abstemious diet of the all-but-crowned king of New York.

For some progressives, the prospect of Adams as mayor (he still has to defeat Republican opponent Curtis Sliwa in November) is a nightmare. He’s been a thorn in the side of every institution he’s ever been part of.

He’s a former cop who crusaded against police brutality, a leading Democrat who was once a registered Republican, a machine politician who casts himself as a foe of city bureaucracy, a self-described progressive who’s friendly to charter schools and real estate developers and, most recently, a champion of law-and-order who refutes the idea that a Black leader must also be on the left.

For the rest of big-city America, not to mention the Democratic Party that usually runs it, he’s a godsend.

That’s because Democrats are again becoming the party of urban misrule, just as they were in the 1970s. In Portland and Seattle, progressive mayors have ceded the public square to anarchists and rioters. In San Francisco and Los Angeles, to homeless encampments and addicts. In Chicago and Baltimore, to street gangs and gun violence.

And, in New York, the city that in the 1990s and 2000s led the way in the historic and nationwide reductions in crime, 981 people were shot this year as of Sunday. That includes two women and a 4-year-old girl hit by stray bullets in May in Times Square, in broad daylight.

“This stuff can unravel so quickly,” Adams says, referring to social order. His mission is not to let New York go the way of Portland or San Francisco.

The key is the police. In 2019, multiple videos went viral of police officers offering no response after being doused by hecklers with buckets of water. “When I saw that I said we’re going to lose the city,” he recalls. “When you attack that officer, you didn’t attack that individual. You attacked the symbol of safety.”

Adams graduated from the police academy in 1984, another era of diminished faith in law enforcement, not least among cops themselves. The prevailing attitude, he says, was, “You hold on for 20 years, you get promoted, get your pension, nothing you’re going to do about crime.” He rejected that attitude and made his name in the 1990s as a dissident officer fighting police brutality and racial profiling.

But he also believes that effective policing is the basis for justice, not an enemy of it. Well-intentioned liberals, he says, “have piggybacked off of the appealing, attractive conversation. You know, ‘Black Lives Matter.’ Well, if they matter, damn it, then we should be talking about a 13-year-old kid being assassinated in the Bronx.”

He argues for reversing the state bail reforms that treated some robberies as nonviolent offenses, for bringing back the plainclothes police squad disbanded last year by Bill de Blasio and for using stop-and-frisk (or, as he reminds me, “stop-QUESTION-frisk”) as an essential policing tool, so long as it isn’t being unconstitutionally abused to fill a weekly police quota or harass civilians.

As for abolishing the police: “When I get out of that subway station, I want to see that cop at the top of the stairs.”

After rebuking certain progressives for their views on New York’s finest, he turns to their views on New York’s richest. “Sixty-five thousand families pay 51 percent of our income taxes,” he says. “Those income taxes are going to the police, the teachers, Department of Sanitation. We have people who say, ‘Who cares whether the rich leave?’ You’d better connect the dots. I care!”

Adams doesn’t fear the rich leaving town because of sky-high taxes (though he should). But he knows that they’ll flee to safety if they have to fear that their children “can’t walk the streets.”

He also recognizes the harm the city does itself with its results-unfriendly bureaucracy.

“How do you have a Small Business Services that’s trying to get restaurants open, but you have the Department of Buildings that takes a year and half to give someone their C-of-O to get inside?” he asks, referring to a certificate of occupancy. “Try opening a hotel: If you can get their sprinkler system inspected in two years, you’re a miracle maker.”

He plans to do for city agencies what the CompStat program did in the 1990s when it took police units out of their respective silos to make them see the larger picture. It helped bring crime down from historic highs to historic lows, until liberal guilt got the better of pragmatic good sense. At one point he quotes the Chinese aphorism that it doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white, “you still have to catch the mouse.” It happened to have been a favorite of Deng Xiaoping.

Listening to Adams hold forth like this for an hour is an enjoyable, even delightful experience, because it’s so refreshingly free of ideological cant. If Adams can govern as he campaigned, he’ll be remembered as the mayor who saved New York from walking itself off a ledge. It probably won’t be the last, much less the highest, office he’ll hold.

[simple schoolboy]

Its pretty well established that the continental divide is problematic, and that the great lakes and missippi have water privilege. Seems like a straight forward climate justice solution.

Previous climate justice proposals (not from this guy) included bringing in fresh water from the Pacific Northwest. Can you believe that some places just dump fresh water into the ocean? Not even to reduce brackishness in the estuary, but just out of habit. These people need to share their ill gotten gains.

[Green Habit]

Keep your hands off our water California kthx.

[Bi_3]

Keep your hands off our water California kthx.

[simple schoolboy]

Keep your hands off our water California kthx.

You give us water or we give you President Newsom. Thats the deal.

[Green Habit]

Keep your hands off our water California kthx.

You give us water or we give you President Newsom. Thats the deal.

Is he gonna survive the recall election?

[simple schoolboy]

Keep your hands off our water California kthx.

You give us water or we give you President Newsom. Thats the deal.

Is he gonna survive the recall election?

Kinda depends on how flexible you all are on the water question.

[simple schoolboy]

Weird that it takes a recall to pretend to deal with homelessness. CA legislature proposes a monetary incentive for drug addicts to stay sober.

Maybe thats almost something. I suppose its an admission that a significant number of the homeless have housing affordibility well down the list of their biggest problems.

We also gave up on housing affordability a while ago. We'll just keep screaming about greedy developers while doing nothing to decrease the insane timelines to get housing approved.

[Bammer]

Weird that it takes a recall to pretend to deal with homelessness. CA legislature proposes a monetary incentive for drug addicts to stay sober.

Maybe thats almost something. I suppose its an admission that a significant number of the homeless have housing affordibility well down the list of their biggest problems.

We also gave up on housing affordability a while ago. We'll just keep screaming about greedy developers while doing nothing to decrease the insane timelines to get housing approved.

We really do have our own nice little brand of lunacy along the weat coast, don’t we? Sounds just like WA.

[tragabigzanda]

FUCK ICE

[simple schoolboy]

What do mental health resources look like for the poor in CA? Serious question, just asking as I view it as an frequent extension of sobriety.

No idea. There's a money spigot that goes to city outreach workers and NGOs. How much of that ends up being useful services who knows. Someone's getting paid though.

If you enjoy fentanyl or meth and don't want to get hassled by the cops, it would seem that word gets around that Portland, San Francisco, and LA are the places to be.