Category: Urban issues

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Three More Years!

Here’s a 35-minute video of Charlie Rose’s interview with Robert Caro last April, at the end of which Mr. Caro mentions that the final volume of his LBJ biography won’t be published for another three years.

That should give you enough time to read The Power Broker, his phenomenal biography of Robert Moses, and the first three volumes of the Johnson bio! I think I’m going to start the LBJ books this winter.

Seriously: If you want to develop an understanding of how political power works in America, you really need to read Mr. Caro’s work.

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Chicanerism

I’d read how the NYPost and other papers in Our Fair City have policies of not crediting blogs for, um, reporting on stories that they can then publish in their papers, but this morning’s rip-off by Page 6 could at least have come up with an alternative to “chicanery.”

From the NYPost on Oct. 1:

Even the Democrats in Minnesota now realize their new US Sen. Al Franken was elected with the help of ACORN chicanery. The disgraced, pimp-friendly community organizing group claims it registered 43,000 new Minnesota voters. If just 1 percent were fraudulent but survived the recount process, that’s 430 votes, almost all cast for Franken, who won by just 312 votes. Asks Katherine Kersten in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, “Did ACORN folks pull some fast ones to help get their favorite son Franken elected — a win that handed Democrats the 60-vote, veto-proof majority that they needed to enact their liberal agenda?”

From Mickey Kaus’ kausfiles on Sept. 29:

Did ACORN chicanery elect Al Franken? That’s the import of this tactfully phrased Minneapolis Star Tribune column.** Franken won by 312 votes. ACORN claimed to have registered 48,000 new Minnesota voters. If just 1% were ineligible but cast ballots, or had ballots cast for them illegally, and survived the recount process … that’s 480 votes, almost certainly overwhelmingly cast for Franken. … Maybe in pristine Minnesota even ACORN is clean. If so, the state would apparently be an outlier. …

To the Post’s credit, they did fix Mickey’s typo of 48,000 voter registrations. The original column they cut-and-pasted from says it was 43,000.

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New To Me

I discovered a couple of sites this week, and figured I’d share ’em with you. Since they’re not around individual posts, they don’t make as much sense for Unrequired Reading:

  • NYC Grid – a photoblog that chronicles a different block of Manhattan each day (discovered via Subtraction)
  • Feinstein on the Brink – John Feinstein is blogging? Awesome!
  • Books, Inq. – literary ramblings, mainly links
  • James Surowiecki – I knew he was blogging for the New Yorker, but when I checked the blog out, there was no RSS feed set up, so I never followed it. (There’s a feed now.) It looks like he doesn’t update too often, but hey.
  • Richard Sala – the blog of a great cartoonist I once semi-trashed in a review at The Comics Journal. I later discovered that he took the review to heart. Even later, I discovered that the essence of my criticism was completely wrong.