Two TV anchors have now brought up bringing metal detectors into the subways -- to which, I've have to ask, when was the last time they rode the subways?
Here’s the entire, unedited 13 minute exchange betweenester Holt and Pres. Donald Trump. What the president alleges in the tweet below didn’t happen. —
What’s going on at
@CNN
is happening, to different degrees, at other networks - with
@NBCNews
being the worst. The good news is that Andy Lack(y) is about to be fired(?) for incompetence, and much worse. When Lester Holt got caught fudging my tape on Russia, they were hurt badly!
Won't get over how the Port Authority hired the same contractor used by the MTA for OMNY to build a new fare system that's incompatible with OMNY.
Just top flight stuff.
Starting Tue, Dec. 5
@10am
, PATH is piloting TAPP, a new contactless fare payment system that works with your mobile device/card. Pilot begins with three turnstiles at JSQ & two at the 30th St entrance of 33 St station. Stay tuned as we keep testing & roll out to more stations!
New York is spending $6.9B on a 1.5 mile subway extension that is already partially built.
Meanwhile, Paris is spending ~$10B on a fully automated 47-mile subway line from scratch
this is why transit advocates must fight to reduce construction costs: lower costs = more transit
Trump speculates about why the Coast Guard made so many rescues in Texas during
#Harvey
: “People went out in their boats to watch the hurricane. That didn’t work out too well.”
"Smith responded to a group dinner invitation whose host said his home would be “judenfrei,” a German word used by the Nazis ... to describe territory that had been “cleansed” of Jews"
Smith replied: “They don’t call it Freitag for nothing.”
I'm just a simple country lawyer, but the plan to appeal to the suburbs who have twice rejected making Hunter Biden an issue is to go after the other son — the one who was a war vet and died of cancer?
Guys: I cannot emphasize this enough. Subscribe/buy your local paper in this crisis.
Your reporters/runners/rewrites/city editors/copy editors/page designers/graphics/photo/ea's are doing their damndest to bring you the best information they can.
Stay informed.
"City of New York is severing all contracts with the Trump Organization," says de Blasio, citing a clause on 'criminal activity.'
Says Trump siccing a mob on Capitol Hill qualifies.
Gotta have a car. To get a test. In Brooklyn. Where 72% of the population rides a train or a bus, walks or bikes to work. This seems like sound public policy.
This is not identical: But when NYC faced the threat of record heat just before the pandemic struck, BdB ordered power conservation, extended beach hours and more before it hit. And the city regularly closes down and preps before snow. We regularly react and plan for weather.
Mayor Adams tells press not to create a controversy where there isn't about admin's communications re air quality; says "there is no planning" & "no playbook" for something like this, "there were no late notifications" - he & admin reps seem v focused on shaping that narrative
👀👀👀👀👀 “Mr. Trump tried creative ways to persuade the Democrats that they should support his wall. At one point, he said Ms. Pelosi should back it because she was “a good Catholic” and Vatican City is surrounded by a wall”
Your annual reminder the only reason we have to go through the whole song-and-dance of filing tax returns is because TurboTax and HR Block spent millions on lobbying to block a bill that would automate the process for most taxpayers --
Not even letting a Democratic administration even attempt to pick its own cabinet secretaries is a pretty massive escalation of things -- even beyond judges.
🚨 🚨 scoop: McConnell, if he keeps the Senate majority, plans to prevent Joe Biden from stacking his Cabinet with liberals and force him to go with centrist options, like Lael Brainard 4 Treasury, Tony Blinken for State, sources tell
@mikeallen
Biden's popular vote lead is going to grow substantially in the next several days as NY *finally* begins to tally its absentee ballots.
1.5m uncounted ballots returned as of Friday -- 900k-plus from registered Dems.
*POPULAR VOTE UPDATE* + change since last night
Total vote: 148,502,630 (+342,739)
BIDEN: 75,215,986 (50.6%) (+205,527)
TRUMP: 70,812,803 (47.7) (+126,574)
MARGIN: 4,403,183 (+78,953)
What's left...
NY 79%
WA 85%
CA 86% reporting (up from 66%)
TX 98% (up from 85%)
Blistering new assessment of how the MTA builds transit projects reveals agency spent nearly twice as much on consultants on the Second Avenue Subway as it did boring the actual tunnel from 63rd to 96th —
Two mayors, two govs, two MTA chairs and god knows how many budgets — proud of the stories on billion dollar stations, unequal COVID and mpox vaccine access, kids left in lead-tainted apartments, and unsafe shelters. It’s been a good run. Got laid off. Will be at the bar.
If you’re keeping track at home, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has, amid a new awful COVID outbreak:
- Banned cities from imposing mask mandates
- Or vaccine mandates
- Or imposing capacity restrictions if hospitals become overwhelmed
- And now won’t even send nurses.
Some late Friday breaking news from
@JFreports
& me: Unlike in past
#covid19
surges, the state isn’t planning to send nurses to help hospitals keep up w/ rising demand.
It’s now telling cities & counties to use their own stimulus $ to hire reinforcements:
George Santos remains a pariah in Congress after his biography unraveled. But rather than shrinking from attention, he's stepping more toward the spotlight, as he seems to be testing whether his notoriety will translate into celebrity, if not acceptance.
Crazy idea: Amtrak should let you switch onto a same-day train that’s earlier or later in the same class of service if there’s space available for free.
A coach ticket should equal a coach ticket.
I cannot say this loudly enough -- if you think 'the media' isn't covering Andrew Cuomo aggressively, please turn off cable news and subscribe to a newspaper.
If Biden is a “legislative terrorist” for not agreeing to “discuss meaningful action”, what does that make the guys holding the government’s full faith and credit hostage to score political concessions they can’t win at the ballot box?
“If President
@JoeBiden
decides he wants to be a legislative terrorist ... who refuses to discuss meaningful action on a $32 trillion debt, then he has the power to hurt America. There’s no question about that.”
@RepDustyJohnson
@thedispatch
City Hall's response so far (in sum/substance):
- We were on top of it, we just didn't tell you
- If you didn't know, it's your fault
- Lincoln Restler is a meanie
- Drones
Slashing service:
- MTA would have to cut up to 40%
- as much as 8-minute gap between trains
- as much as 15-minute gap between buses
- up to 7,200 positions cut
EXCLU: The MTA shelved a through-running/signals program that could have boosted Penn Station’s capacity by 20-45%. Officials say they shelved it because it missed capacity targets. The $13B terminal they’ve proposed instead misses those targets, too.
The problem here is 'give me literally everything I ask for' is not a serious bargaining position; but McCarthy's whip operation is questionable and he can't afford to lose a single vote so literally every demand stays in.
I really do not know how this ends. It is very hard for me to see how the White House accepts the kinds of cuts to programs - like education, rental aid, nutrition for poor families - that the GOP seems to have made their redline. But they seem very, very determined to get a deal
Why does the Postal Service matter? Because UPS wants $12 to send one average-sized book from a warehouse in Brooklyn to an apartment in Brooklyn and that is nuts.
Mayor Adams is rolling out a giant set of tweaks to the zoning code. It's not ditching the code, but it's a substantial set of changes:
- Allows for widespread construction of ADU in more suburban portions of the city
- Largely ditches parking minimums
- More studios/1bd
De Blasio has fiercely resisted closing playgrounds, and Cuomo just made the decision for him. It's a replay of the schools shutdown all over again. Just remarkable. --
POST INVESTIGATION: The MTA’s has a backwards system for designing mega-projects that puts consultants in driver’s seat, leads to excessive engineering and design choices. The Post found $2.3b in excess in three projects the MTA is scoping —
Keep this in mind as we talk about congestion pricing: Cars accounted for *just* 250k of the 2 million trips in and out of Manhattan's Central Business District pre-pandemic.
Subways/railroads/buses? 1.65m
Hey
@harrysiegel
everyone has an opinion. It’s a shame
the Daily News chose to share yours — wild inaccuracies and all. It’s true we don’t track “defecation,” but we do track murder — and you managed to get that wrong. Rest assured, we will continue to enforce the law and make…
CUT/COPY: The night before controversial Harlem Councilwoman Kristin Richardson Jordan published a Twitter thread that blamed Ukraine and the West for Vladimir Putin’s invasion — another Twitter user posted a virtually identical thread:
It's also:
- 10x as much as Paris spends per mile,
- 5x as much as LA spends per mile,
- AND, 2x as much as the MTA spent per mile to build the *same* subway through the Upper East Side, perhaps the city's wealthiest neighborhood.
Couldnt tweet from underground but NEW Deets on
@MTA
Second Avenue Subway Phase 2. opening date is “6 to 8 years” from groundbreaking which is slated for next year. So 2028-2030 range. Cost is $6.3B. Which the chairman calls “a bargain” based on passenger numbers.
#NBC4NY
9:01pm: Cuomo’s office releases empty public schedule
10:01pm: City Hall schedules presser for 9:30am
10:30pm: Cuomo’s office releases updated schedule with an event set for 9am — ie, on top of Blas’s presser.
We’re really gonna do this in the middle of a pandemic, aren’t we.
JUST IN:
@TSA
officers screened 2,169,974 people at airport security checkpoints yesterday, Friday, Oct. 8. The last time checkpoint volume was this high was Aug. 1, when 2,238,462 people were screened. (Aug. 8 came close at 2,168,264) It's a fall holiday weekend folks.
It would really behoove the Board of Elections to provide some kind of update about what's going on. This is a democracy, not the College of Cardinals.
"We're going to get new vendors to take over," says Blas. (Rough transcript here): "These are sites we want to continue serving the public, but not with a criminal"
"And reminder, NY is constantly building tons of new housing of all types. Rents are not going down."
We're not. New York hasn't averaged more than 20k housing completions annually in about 40 years.
In the 2010s: We added 700k+ jobs, we built ~200k homes.
@erik_engquist
I support building more affordable housing.
And reminder, NY is constantly building tons of new housing of all types. Rents are not going down.
Good Cause Eviction is the best solution to combat rapidly increasing rental prices.
NEW: Sen. Manchin has told the White House the child tax credit must include a firm work requirement and family income cap in the $60k range, Axios has learned.
These demands would dramatically weaken one of Biden's signature programs.
It's crazy, as a kid growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area -- Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, Jerry Brown, Willie Brown were all kind of like the Sierras. Immovable, defacto features of life and had been for at least a generation or two prior. And it's all kind of over.
POST INVESTIGATES: The MTA is repeating design decisions that pushed the first phase of the Second Avenue Subway into the stratosphere with the East Harlem extension --
SCOOP: One of Mayor Eric Adams' closest aides — Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Phil Banks — founded one of the firms providing unarmed guards to the MTA as part of its crackdown on fare-beating. And he still lists himself as an employee on his resume:
This, from a source, is video of the from Canal St at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge, where a phalanx of cops is in a standoff with hundreds of protesters, blocking them from entering the city.
"I live in the regular world," says Bill de Blasio about his 12 mile, hour-long trips to a YMCA in another borough to ride a stationary bike while watching cable news.
The idea that politicians can't be indicted is so peculiar if you've ever written about politics in New York, Texas, Illinois, Florida, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Louisiana, Oregon, California, etc. Basically anywhere.
Since we're doing some NYC vs. LI housing on the Twitter today:
- NYC built 10x as much housing over the last decade than LI did;
- LI's averaging one new home/apt *per* square mile *per* year;
- Share of LI renters who are rent-burdened is actually higher than in NYC