NY Times wants a mayor who can enforce the law
and teach the kids!
The tectonic plates of American politics are twitching more than usual these days. Realizing that anti-Trump didn’t work last November, Democrats and their political party are absorbing, however reluctantly, dribs and drab of common sense.
The national party recently defenestrated the insufferable David Hogg — America’s version of that Swedish scold, Greta Thunberg. Now, two old government labor union feather bedders have been squeezed out of national party leadership as well. They would be Randi Weingarten, leader of the 1.8 million-member American Federation of Teachers, and Lee Saunders, the president of the 1.4 million-member American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. Both, it should be noted, supported Wisconsin’s Ben Wikler for national chairman.
The teachers union shut down schools during the Covid-19 scare, despite evidence that kids didn’t get sick. Also presided over the free fall in test scores. Both were inimical to the real workers — the truck drivers, waitresses, and farmers that have gone over to the party of Trump.
Today, The New York Times forcefully rejected progressivism:
You forgot Los Angeles!
Subway trips can have a chaotic or even menacing quality. … The number of felony assaults has jumped more than 40 percent over the past decade. The city’s fourth graders … have fallen back in math and reading. Housing has become even less affordable, and homelessness has risen.
Crucial to that understanding is an acknowledgment that a certain version of progressive city management has failed, in New York and elsewhere. This liberalism was skeptical of if not hostile to law enforcement. It argued that schools needed more money and less evaluation. It blamed greedy landlords for high rents, instead of emphasizing the crucial role of housing supply.
As lousy mayors, the NY Times editorial calls out former mayor Bill de Blasio, Brandon Johnson in Chicago, and the mayors in San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland. How about Karen Bass in L.A., who can’t field enough police or working fire hydrants!
The party primary is 06-24-25. Of the 11 candidates seeking the Democrat(ic) nomination (incumbent Eric Adams running as an independent) the NY Times reserves its most severe blistering for the choice of A.O.C., Bernie Sanders, John Nichols, and The Nation:
Zohran Mamdani is running on an agenda uniquely unsuited to the city’s challenges. He is a democratic socialist who too often ignores the unavoidable trade-offs of governance. He favors rent freezes that could restrict housing supply and make it harder for younger New Yorkers and new arrivals to afford housing. He wants the government to operate grocery stores, as if customer service and retail sales were strengths of the public sector. He minimizes the importance of policing. Most worrisome, he shows little concern about the disorder of the past decade, even though its costs have fallen hardest on the city’s working-class and poor residents.
→ “We don’t need this working-class hero crap”
Blaska’s Bottom Line: Mamdani also disparages Israel in a city Jesse Jackson once called “H …” — well, you know the thing. NYC had a mayor who reduced crime but the pecksniffs at the NY Times despised him — Rudy Giuliani, before he got TDS.
8 responses to “‘Progressive city management has failed’”
Sorry sir. I don’t and won’t subscribe to the NY Slime to read garbage. Real Men don’t.
“The teachers union shut down schools during the Covid-19 scare, despite evidence that kids didn’t get sick.”!!! Really??? Kids do get quite sick from COVID, more so than from flu, especially at the beginning of the pandemic and it was quite appropriate to shut down schools for a brand new virus and disease that spread rapidly and for which we had NO treatment or vaccine. We only had the old standbys: isolation and quarantine, which worked us well in the past. Sure kids did not get as sick as older people but as of 2022, at least 1,800 children have died of COVID in the United States (that is the equivalent of six jumbo jet crashes). In other words, about 600 kids died each year from COVID, while the flu death rate in children only ranged from 39-199 per year since 2004. Thus COVID is much more lethal than influenza in children. Beyond these fully preventable COVID deaths, many more kids required hospitalization, including intensive care. In 2023, one million kids, or about 1.4% of children, came down with long COVID, the chronic problem that bedevils many COVID sufferers well after contracting the disease. In kids, long COVID problems include headache, fatigue, loss of IQ points, a variety of GI issues, and memory and other neurological problems. Neuroscience research has shown that young people who have recovered from COVID often show distinct changes in their brain activity as measured by scans while performing cognitive tasks.
Furthermore, kids can also develop a nasty multi-organ pathology known as Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome, or MIS. MIS occurs post-infection and can lead to organ failure and other long-term health problems. The condition is reminiscent of toxic shock syndrome where different organs, including the heart, brain, lungs, kidneys, skin, eyes and GI system can become inflamed and/or fail. More than half of COVID MIS cases are under nine years old.
All together, these facts provide sobering reminders that this disease is not benign in pediatric populations. Vaccination now protects kids against serious COVID disease and death as well as against these complications of long COVID and MIS. before vaccines, isolation protected kids.
Despite these substantial problems kids can face from COVID, I keep encountering people who totally dismiss the disease in children simply because its effects are more devastating in older people. But, it really is a very poor reason to brush aside the effect of the disease in children simply because another demographic fares worse.
Contagious diseases typically are spread by children and focused in schools, which are high contact environment. A couple of decades ago, Japan mandated flu vaccines for school kids (even though flu is has less of an impact on kids than on adults), and the major result was that the flu mortality in adults plummeted. The vaccine was akin to school closings since it preventing the kids from getting sick. Sure, once we had a significant number of adults and kids vaccinated for COVID, we should have opened the schools. We were too slow doing that, but again, this was a wholly new disease. We were learning about it on the fly. For a brand new disease, it is necessary to err on the side of caution. The fact that hind sight is 20:20 is irrelevant to the past. Sweden stayed open and did poorly compared to its neighboring Scandinavian countries who closed their societies. Sick people also do not go out and buy things. Read about that here: https://stevensclark.typepad.com/coronavirus_news_and_view/2023/12/what-we-learned-from-swedens-response-to-covid-.html
Masison parochial schools did not shut down during Covid.
Zero deaths.
You not only did NOT learn about it on the fly you lied about it repeatedly. Tell us now where it came from. Deny that the NIH funded Wuhan lab which spawned this man made pandemic.
We damn well know why Fauci had to have an auto pen pardon.
Hind sight is 20/20… so were the Nuremburg Trials.
1800 deaths in a K-12 population of 50 million is absolutely not a reason to close public schools. Especially not when the educational effects on the rest are going to be felt for years.
Thought experiment: Complete the following: “If David Hogg and Greta Thunberg had a baby …” Oh, wait. They probably believe that human beings should refrain from procreating. Not only would it exacerbate climate change, it reinforces the heteronormative patriarchy.
It struck me that with the exception of mayhem on the subway, what the NYT said about the disasters of progressivism–schoolkids losing ground academically, lack of affordable housing, increase in homelessness–applies perfectly to good ol’ Madison. Not that anyone will notice.
Give it time and there will be mayhem on the BRT and at its stops. That degeneration is accelerating on the light rail in the Twin Cities, where open air drug use is common. I’ll never ride that again without steeltoe boots out of fear of stepping on a needle.
I’ve noticed the number of panhandlers on Madison street corners has markedly increased in the last four years. Not that progressives care.
“Panhandlers” are a convenient way for Madisonians to get their goody two shoe points. I have more respect for the ones who stand at the intersections in all kinds of weather vs the DEI grifters in their comfy offices.
What you subsidize you get more of.