Upstate’s declining population of increasingly elderly and poor remaining residents are no longer consistent conservatives. While Pataki, like Cuomo, has overseen this decline, he’s also clinging to the back of the demographic leviathan.

Place matters: its eradication can neither be reversed nor the sin atoned. No book, no film can ever restore what dies inside us when the wrecking crews descend.

The new arrivals look upon them with confusion, disdain and just a touch of pride—Look how real it still is here!

“The rest of the country gets her ass,” says Frank, a long-time Red Hook resident. “Red Hook is the only place you can see her face.” We’re on the recently renovated Pier 39, now a fantastic pocket park, staring directly into the green eyes of the Statue of Liberty. It’s true: except for some technicalities—like the north shore of Staten Island, which doesn’t really count—Red Hook has, by virtue of its location, a singular view of Lady Liberty. But then, for Red Hook, location has always meant everything.

New York’s transit strike may be Bloomberg’s problem. But the excessive power wielded by public-employee unions is a natioanl problem for Democrats, who control most big city halls, who are tied most intimately to the public-sector unions and who will lose out most when the cities they run no longer work.

Any candidate so humble as to admit that he needs a degree in public administration after 22 years in elected office has the stooped shoulders needed to bear the weight of begging funds from Washington, apologizing for his helplessness in the face of national trends and other ceremonial duties of the mayor’s office, circa 1990.

 

 

Prior to 311, most non-emergency calls were taken by Mayor’s Action Center, headed by Fletcher Vredenburgh, best known for his online screed declaring that he was sick of “griping, often whining, often stupid New Yorkers … dumb fucks from the public to dumber fucks that work for the city… So I take painkillers, sleep a lot, and think about killing every citizen and employee of New York City every minute I’m awake.”

 

 

 
The destruction of 9/11 has placed the city’s already aging and inadequate infrastructure back on center stage for the first time since the fall of Robert Moses 35 years ago. Here is our chance to again plan for the whole city, not merely consider whatever groups yell the loudest.

 
Given a choice between hearing Freddy Ferrer explain that parks are essential, or reading comments like “Giff is so feisty! Grrr!” I’d have to go with the hecklers who were taken out by security, chanting “No Police State!” At least they knew this was theater.

"The phrase 'the city that never sleeps' doesn’t refer to nightclubs and bars, but to work and labor. At all hours is the city building, selling, changing, working; that is what it means to live in the city that never sleeps."

 
In a city where Democrats outnumber barbarians by more than five-to-one, we’re on the cusp of an unprecedented 16 straight years of Elephants in Gracie Mansion. What happened?
 

Why should anyone want to leave the Council, with its six figure salary, including lulus, the lack of any restriction on outside work or income, the ample staffs, the mailing privileges at public expense for self-serving illustrated brochures, and all the privileges and emoluments which come with good pay and light work, which basically consists of intoning 'Aye' upon hearing your surname mentioned on a roll call?

Consider the politicians who keep the New York State election laws so rigid and baffling that they stand as artificial, expensive barriers to public participation in free elections.