#daniel halloran

[runbrownstonerun-blog]

End of Day Blitz: Links, Plus the Smith Scandal, As Told Through TV Show Comparisons

Most of today's news focused on the unraveling Smith scandal, but here are the links to which my eyeballs stuck and briefly considered exploring:

A Vermont rice farmer is raising money through Kickstarter to build a boat and ship his produce down the Hudson River. (Inhabitat)

Community theater is bringing Henrik Ibsen to the oozing banks of the Gowanus. (Brooklyn Paper)

Oh, almost forgot to mention the superFUNd canoe race. (DNAinfo)

The city has $1.77 billion to spend as part of a Community Development Block Grant in Hurricane Sandy aid and rebuilding. You have until Thursday to insert your two cents on how it should be allocated. (Staten Island Advance)

New York City and Verizon will start "microtrenching" fiber optics cables in the sidewalk. (Businessweek)

And I would have been remiss if I didn't make more of these:

"Sometimes politics is just an episode of 'The Sopranos.'" - Rachel Maddow

"This is something that belongs in ‘House of Cards,’ not an election to decide who will run our city or any part of our government. Regardless of the outcome of the criminal charges filed against Senator Smith, he has lost the public trust — and he should resign.” - State Sen. Daniel Squadron

“You have all those people circling around -- and then of course you have `Malcolm in the Middle.'” - U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara

[tahoemojo-blog]

The Conservative Class War, Continued

NEXT PHASE: Public Unions

Amplify’d from www.thenation.com

The Conservative Class War, Continued

It was a terrible tabloid tale. While New York City was buried under a blizzard, widows and orphans freezing and starving in their apartments, union fat cats swigged brewskis and chuckled to themselves as sanitation workers conspired to stage a slowdown to gain leverage in their contract negotiations. “The selfish Sanitation bosses who sabotaged the blizzard cleanup to fire a salvo at City Hall targeted politically connected and well-heeled neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn to get their twisted message across loud and clear,” screamed Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post. From there, the story ricocheted across the media, to Investor’s Business Daily to Fox News (naturally), and even to Saturday Night Live. The Washington Times ran an op-ed that began, “Cross us and people will die.”

Alas, it never happened. The source of all this hysteria was a sketchy story told by Daniel Halloran, a rookie councilman and Tea Party Republican—who is also an adherent of the neo-pagan religion Theodicism. A New York Times investigation weeks later found no evidence to support the allegation, and it turns out that Halloran isn’t so sure about what he thought he heard after all. But the damage is done. (Murdoch properties are not exactly famous for correcting their errors; though, to be fair, if they did, there would hardly be time or space for anything else.)

Can it be mere coincidence that the right-wing media promoted this phony-baloney story at a moment when, as Charles Loveless, legislative director of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, points out, conservatives are “readying a massive assault” on the pensions and benefits of these same employees?

Led by Newt Gingrich, conservatives are floating the notion that states should be allowed to declare bankruptcy to escape their pension obligations to firefighters, cops, teachers and, yes, sanitation workers. Gingrich called on House Republicans “to move a bill in the first month or so of their tenure to create a venue for state bankruptcy.” This was followed by a plea in The Weekly Standard by University of Pennsylvania law professor David Skeel titled “Give States a Way to Go Bankrupt.” Skeel later told a reporter that he had “never had anything I’ve written get as much attention as that piece.” He said he had been contacted by lawmakers from all over.

Read more at www.thenation.com

 See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/aosxf

[sarahlee310-blog]

...most of you have surely read about NYC's Boxing Day Blizzard "scandal" in which the city's evil union overlords ordered a slowdown in snow removal in order to embarrass the mayor. The story made national news as yet another example of out-of-control wildly overpaid union workers. Slight problem. It never happened.

It turns out at that the single source of the story, Tea Party-backed NYC Councilman Daniel Halloran (R), has long-running disputes with city workers on a broad range of mostly bizarre issues, and now he's refusing to name the supposed sanitation workers who tipped him to the scheme. In fact, Halloran now allows that the "slowdown" might have been just a few lazy "bad apples" and not, in fact, a union plot. But you can bet that this revelation doesn't make all the wingnut blogs who've spent the last month screaming about how unions are destroying America.