National Titan, Local Supplicant
Coming out of the train on the way to City Hall this morning, I spotted two guys on a bench behind the building, chatting away casually.
The guys, it turns out, were Michael Bloomberg and NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams. With the mayor's green initiatives, it's no surprise he's getting national attention.
But it's unclear if any of it will actually help with getting his congestion pricing plan approved in Albany. As long as a certain stunningly opaque official can single-handedly stop it, the national news appearances amount to a nice bit of personal publicity but little else.
Obama Vs. McCain Polling Data
- Poll
- Obama (D)
- McCain(R)
- Spread
- RCP Average
- 46.6
- 44.2
- Obama +2.4
Favorable Ratings
- Candidate
- Favorable
- Unfavorable
- Spread
- Obama
- 55.8
- 35.8
- +20.0
- McCain
- 54.8
- 36.6
- +18.2
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What is opaque, Azi, is the degree of clarity of the Mayor's proposal, and what is practically non-existent is the trouble which he has taken to even bother try explaining it to us ordinary mortals. He apparently wants to charge middle-class Manhattanites below 86th Street, who can't possibly afford private parking garages, for the princely privilege of alternate side parking, $8 four times a week, or more than $128 a month in other words. To add insult to injury, his very sketchy plan seems to propose charging us, and everybody else, for residential parking permits, to boot. Trash Shelly all you want, armchair editorialists and oh-so-purer-than-thou good governmnent-types -- he's the only thing standing between us and a permanent stratification of Manhattan into the chauffeur-driven on one divide, and everybody else on the other. The devil is in the details, and the Mayor's details are what are devilishly opaque.