Ferrets IN Groundhogs OUT
December 31, 2014 9:14 AM   Subscribe

 
I'm a big fan of the mayor. I know that a lot of people aren't, but to read things like this from the Editorial Board in today's Times really makes me feel good about our city government and the direction we are going in. (Although, I personally wouldn't mind if NYPD stopped these low-level crime arrests all together. Broken windows policing sucks.)
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:18 AM on December 31, 2014 [7 favorites]


Not only does it suck, it has no actual empirical support. One of my wish list items is for The Atlantic to pull a Lancet and repudiate the original piece they published on it.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:28 AM on December 31, 2014 [3 favorites]


Hot damn, De Blasio has INCREASED hiring of teachers in the public schools?

I didn't even know that was a thing he was gonna do. Awesome!
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:28 AM on December 31, 2014 [1 favorite]


I don't know, this excessive concern with little weasels is a sickness.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 9:38 AM on December 31, 2014 [8 favorites]


"Mayor de Blasio made his radio debut in January on the hip-hop station Hot 97, and answered a question about when New Yorkers would be able to "go to the bodega and get some herb" (answer: "I don’t think that’s happening anytime soon")."

It seriously should happen sometime soon. NYC (aka New Amsterdam) smells more like weed than Amsterdam proper itself!
posted by I-baLL at 9:53 AM on December 31, 2014 [1 favorite]


I don't know about #1. The mayor has as much to do with public approval of the NYPD as Obama has to do with Congress. There's more than one chain of command at work.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 10:02 AM on December 31, 2014


Besides the police (and other people who blamed de Blasio for the recent police killings), are there other people who dislike him? Why?
posted by likeatoaster at 10:07 AM on December 31, 2014 [1 favorite]


The groundhog lobby isn't too impressed with him.
posted by arcticseal at 10:20 AM on December 31, 2014 [3 favorites]


Besides the police (and other people who blamed de Blasio for the recent police killings), are there other people who dislike him? Why?

IANANY but I'd guess that his close association with Al Sharpton probably puts quite a few people off. I'm sure there are more than a few New Yorkers who haven't forgotten Tawana Brawley, Freddie's Fashion Mart or the Crown Heights riots (the latter two giving rise to a belief that Sharpton is a antisemitic).
posted by MikeMc at 10:25 AM on December 31, 2014


Hot damn, De Blasio has INCREASED hiring of teachers in the public schools?

One hand washes the other.

(And the opposite.)

are there other people who dislike him? Why?

Horse carriage enthusiasts
and their allies. Charter school enthusiasts.
posted by IndigoJones at 10:25 AM on December 31, 2014


He increases teachers, but is he known as De Blasio the education mayor?

He increases housing for the homeless, but is he known as De Blasio the sheltering mayor?

You kill one groundhog.
posted by maxsparber at 10:29 AM on December 31, 2014 [20 favorites]


More homeless shelters and less police in NYC might see the return of white flight.

Fingers crossed!
posted by cazoo at 10:40 AM on December 31, 2014 [1 favorite]


Fingers crossed!

That's an odd thing to say. Would you care to expound?
posted by IndigoJones at 10:52 AM on December 31, 2014 [1 favorite]


I think the NYPD's image problems have less to do with DeBlasio and more to do with the NYPD being a bunch of whiny-ass babies who think they deserve to be above the law. Specifically, that they've basically stopped trying to hide that they're a bunch of whiny-ass babies who think they deserve to be above the law and are now on their backs in the middle of the supermarket, kicking and trashing and biting and screaming about how everybody else needs to give them everything they want forever.
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:54 AM on December 31, 2014 [28 favorites]


Would you care to expound?

here you go

posted by poffin boffin at 10:56 AM on December 31, 2014 [3 favorites]


here you go

The inference being that the Disneyfied Indian chief would feel kinship with every other shade of 21st century New Yorker? Mine was a serious question.
posted by IndigoJones at 11:05 AM on December 31, 2014


That's an odd thing to say. Would you care to expound?

Rents and other housing prices would go down.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:09 AM on December 31, 2014


I recently got some current events education courtesy of the Fox & Friends show playing at the diner. Apparently the only things happening in the world were some domestic tragedy shock videos, the importance of DiBlasio's immediate resignation if he intends to retain any public dignity (their words, not mine), and your miserable future under Obamacare.

So I'm guessing that it's ultimately a local event that the Republican-affiliated media have decided to make national for party politics: exploiting the cop killing to make a populist play that minimizes the racist aspects of the preceding weeks of tension between the police, the boroughs, and the Democratic mayor.
posted by ardgedee at 11:25 AM on December 31, 2014


Outside of this police thing, I'd been hard pressed to name anything he had done. This list is most helpful.
posted by fungible at 11:28 AM on December 31, 2014


I pretty much voted entirely on universal pre-k* ( seriously it's one of the best ROI you can do, early childhood socialization is critical ) and it looks like that's happening!

* and you know the competition was like an evil dimension version of Louie C.K
posted by The Whelk at 11:34 AM on December 31, 2014 [2 favorites]


I think the NYC DOH was the lead on the ferret thing, not the mayor's office (can't say I'm wild about ferrets, but whatever, everybody's got the right to be happy). And speaking of a little more credit for them, another win this year: New York's Transgender Residents Will Now Be Able To Change Birth Certificate Sex Designation Without Surgery.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 11:37 AM on December 31, 2014 [3 favorites]


Remember the subway kittens, where Lhota was the only candidate to say he wouldn't have stopped the train to rescue the kittens?

Leave aside whether or not he's right and you can't have a massive disruption in city transit over a handful of kittens. That's irrelevant. What's relevant is that being so fucking stupid to say that out loud during a campaign shows not that Joe Lhota is a hard-nosed realist but that he's too fucking stupid and bad at politics to know that when somebody asks you if we should run kittens over with trains, the only correct answer is no.
posted by Pope Guilty at 11:41 AM on December 31, 2014 [21 favorites]


I recently got some current events education courtesy of the Fox & Friends show playing at the diner.

Don't forget about the War on Christianity. Never forget. About the war. On Christianity.
posted by mintcake! at 12:14 PM on December 31, 2014


I think what mintcake! is saying is that we need more lions. More lions.
posted by el io at 12:16 PM on December 31, 2014 [6 favorites]


So I'm guessing that it's ultimately a local event that the Republican-affiliated media have decided to make national for party politics...

New York City is the most populous city in the nation and the center of its financial empire. The mayor of NYC is always a national figure.
posted by Etrigan at 12:16 PM on December 31, 2014 [4 favorites]


But are they subway lions?
posted by poffin boffin at 12:26 PM on December 31, 2014


TIL subway dancing.
posted by Splunge at 1:28 PM on December 31, 2014


Etrigan: New York City is the most populous city in the nation and the center of its financial empire. The mayor of NYC is always a national figure.
To expand... NYC is the largest financial center in the entire fucking world. Yes, NYC's mayor has some relevance outside of lower-New York-state.
posted by IAmBroom at 6:04 PM on December 31, 2014


NYC is the largest financial center in the entire fucking world.Yes, NYC's mayor has some relevance outside of lower-New York-state.

Eh, I can't see how the mayor of New York is relevant to anyone outside of New York. Wall St. is going to do what Wall St. is going to do no matter who the fucking mayor is. The Masters of the Universe are far, far above the petty squabbles of plebs like De Blasio.
posted by MikeMc at 6:15 PM on December 31, 2014


Eh, I can't see how the mayor of New York is relevant to anyone outside of New York.

How many New Yorkers do you think would click on "43 ways Milwaukee changed under Mayor Barrett"?
posted by Etrigan at 6:45 PM on December 31, 2014 [3 favorites]


How many New Yorkers do you think would click on "43 ways Milwaukee changed under Mayor Barrett"?

I don't think very many Milwaukeeans would click on that (Tom Barrett isn't exactly a charismatic guy). I guess my point being that the media tends to be very NYcentric and thus what is really local news becomes national news even if it has zero effect on anyone outside of the area. The De Blasio/NYPD/Pat Lynch/PBA clusterfuck? Replicate that story in Houston and see how much national coverage it gets (even though it would affect the 300,000,000+ Americans who don't live in either city just as much).
posted by MikeMc at 7:09 PM on December 31, 2014 [1 favorite]


I guess my point being that the media tends to be very NYcentric and thus what is really local news becomes national news even if it has zero effect on anyone outside of the area.

Well, yes. Because of the whole "most populous city in the nation and the center of its financial empire" thing I mentioned above. My point was that this isn't a story that was trumped up and made more important by Fox News to bring down Democrats, but that this is a story that was trumped up and made more important by it being in New York City, which has that effect on stories all the time.

Regardless of whether it's influence or simply notoriety, the mayor of New York City is relevant to people outside the five boroughs to a greater degree than any other mayor I can think of.
posted by Etrigan at 7:43 PM on December 31, 2014


Regardless of whether it's influence or simply notoriety, the mayor of New York City is relevant to people outside the five boroughs to a greater degree than any other mayor I can think of.

I get it. I was more referring to IAmBroom's comment about relevance. Whether it's Ed Koch in drag or Bloomberg's "War on Jumbo-Sized Soft Drinks" NYC mayors certainly do enjoy national fame/notoriety. I guess the "relevance" issue may be more of a semantic difference.
Also, I was a bit hard on Tom Barrett, there was that time he got the shit beat out of him by a guy wielding a pipe when he intervened in a domestic violence situation he stumbled across. How many mayors would do that? Of course if he had brought his security detail he probably could have been saved the ass whoopin'...
posted by MikeMc at 8:03 PM on December 31, 2014


Correction: Rudy Giuliani in drag.
posted by MikeMc at 8:42 PM on December 31, 2014




The ferret thing is partially a Giuliani thing. (Stop the video at 3:00 or you'll be subject to Ron Paul wank.)
posted by nathan_teske at 8:09 AM on January 1, 2015




« Older Next time I’ll be asking where your lap goes when...   |   The ten most popular installments of "Ask... Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments