[New York] This thread is technically a bodega

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > [New York] This thread is technically a bodega

GalacticAcid: Apr 8, 2013; NEW YORK VALUES

Jabari got over 1,000 votes on the "Socialist" line. Was that SPUSA's line, or just like, a non-party thing along the lines of "Dump the Mayor"?

# ? Nov 8, 2017 19:04

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? Apr 27, 2024 05:30

unbutthurtable: Dec 2, 2016; Total. Tox. Rereg.; College Slice

GalacticAcid posted:

Jabari got over 1,000 votes on the "Socialist" line. Was that SPUSA's line, or just like, a non-party thing along the lines of "Dump the Mayor"?

The latter

# ? Nov 8, 2017 19:05

E-Money: Nov 12, 2005; Got Out.

unbutthurtable posted:

The latter

I didn't see another ballot line other than Green with his name on it. Did i just miss it? My wife didn't see it either.

# ? Nov 8, 2017 19:39

Ogmius815: Aug 25, 2005; centrism is a hell of a drug

Sheen Sheen posted:

According to the Buffalo News the Dems took the Erie County Legislature

Wait...we have county legislatures?

# ? Nov 9, 2017 20:33

Absurd Alhazred: Mar 27, 2010; by Athanatos

Ogmius815 posted:

Wait...we have county legislatures?

You didn't know this? Counties have legislatures and execs.

# ? Nov 10, 2017 01:39

GalacticAcid: Apr 8, 2013; NEW YORK VALUES

Absurd Alhazred posted:

You didn't know this? Counties have legislatures and execs.

Not every county. For instance, New York, Queens, Kings, Bronx, and Richmond do not have county legislatures.

In fact from some quick googling I think only 16 New York counties do?

# ? Nov 10, 2017 03:42

Absurd Alhazred: Mar 27, 2010; by Athanatos

GalacticAcid posted:

Not every county. For instance, New York, Queens, Kings, Bronx, and Richmond do not have county legislatures.

In fact from some quick googling I think only 16 New York counties do?

Isn't that because they're coterminous with NYC burroughs, which would make them redundant? What's another non-NYC county that hasn't got a legislature?

# ? Nov 10, 2017 03:46

GalacticAcid: Apr 8, 2013; NEW YORK VALUES

Absurd Alhazred posted:

Isn't that because they're coterminous with NYC burroughs, which would make them redundant? What's another non-NYC county that hasn't got a legislature?

Here's a table with New York counties and their administrative structures. It's a .pdf.

# ? Nov 10, 2017 04:04

Absurd Alhazred: Mar 27, 2010; by Athanatos

GalacticAcid posted:

Here's a table with New York counties and their administrative structures. It's a .pdf.

Thanks! That's very interesting. If I'm reading this correctly, unless there are counties outside of these and those that are coterminous with the Five Burroughs, these all have legislative bodies, where the difference between a Legislature and a Board of Supervisors is something to do with how and whether voting is weighted.

# ? Nov 10, 2017 04:12

GalacticAcid: Apr 8, 2013; NEW YORK VALUES

Absurd Alhazred posted:

Thanks! That's very interesting. If I'm reading this correctly, unless there are counties outside of these and those that are coterminous with the Five Burroughs, these all have legislative bodies, where the difference between a Legislature and a Board of Supervisors is something to do with how and whether voting is weighted.

I believe that's correct - check out the "County" section in this Wikipedia article too, seems to be an okay summary.

# ? Nov 10, 2017 04:17

Absurd Alhazred: Mar 27, 2010; by Athanatos

GalacticAcid posted:

I believe that's correct - check out the "County" section in this Wikipedia article too, seems to be an okay summary.

Thanks for this as well! I kept looking for a table of counties or something on wikipedia, guess I missed this.

Edit: Hey, a tiny bit of good news from up here: Democrats regain control of Troy City Council. The mayor is also a Democrat, so no more excuses.

Absurd Alhazred has issued a correction as of 04:59 on Nov 10, 2017

# ? Nov 10, 2017 04:25

get that OUT of my face: Feb 10, 2007

i didn't give new york enough credit post-election day. a town in erie county elected a democratic socialist to town council, and the nassau county GOP finally collapsed under the weight of its own corruption. while a democrat as nassau county executive isn't new, Hempstead elected the first democrat as town supervisor in 100 years

county governments are varied. some have the traditional american separation of powers structure, others are run by an elected board, and still others combine the government of its largest city with the county government (i.e. Miami-Dade and Davidson County in tennessee)

Scrub-Niggurath posted:

Cuomo is a spineless shill who can, if nothing else, smell which way the wind blows. I guarantee that if legalization would boost his numbers he'd sign off.

i disagree. cuomo is a dyed-in-the-wool third way democrat who has hardly any ideological flexibility. his push for same-sex marriage in the legislature only happened because he used it to curry favor with republicans in return, and he doesn't give the left flank of his own party the same treatment. he says he thinks medicare for all is a good idea, but i highly doubt he'd back his talk up with action

he's also a suck-up to law and order, as evidenced by his veto of undoing the hilariously outdated gravity knife laws

# ? Nov 10, 2017 06:35

Absurd Alhazred: Mar 27, 2010; by Athanatos

https://twitter.com/JonCampbellGAN/status/930425441416032257

Good! Not like there's a state to run here or anything.

# ? Nov 14, 2017 14:26

get that OUT of my face: Feb 10, 2007

i sincerely hope that cuomo's disregard for actually governing bites him in the rear end like it did chris christie, but new jersey is more enlightened than new york. even their wall street shills are better than ours. i now see the allure of moving across the hudson to raise a family

different subject, same guy: i'm absolutely floored at how horribly cuomo is choosing to attack the elimination of state and local tax deductions. right now he's using the republican standby of "higher taxes means rich people will leave" as justification. here's a very simple, straightforward, no bullshit way of tackling the issue that will get people on your side:

SAY THAT REPUBLICANS ARE LOWERING TAXES ON THE WEALTHIEST AND RAISING TAXES ON EVERYONE ELSE!!!

if you don't wanna spook the donors, leave out the part about lowering taxes on the wealthy! it's so simple a schmuck like me could do it!

# ? Nov 15, 2017 05:52

Absurd Alhazred: Mar 27, 2010; by Athanatos

https://twitter.com/GannettAlbany/status/931159284423028736

# ? Nov 16, 2017 15:05

unbutthurtable: Dec 2, 2016; Total. Tox. Rereg.; College Slice

I think we mentioned it in the LAN thread already, but I thought this thread might want this too: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-subway-system-failure-delays.html?referer=

# ? Nov 20, 2017 14:38

Real hurthling!: Sep 11, 2001

good read. loving cuomo.

# ? Nov 20, 2017 16:13

BENGHAZI 2: Oct 13, 2007; by Cyrano4747

get that OUT of my face posted:

looks like syracuse is gonna be amazon's east coast headquarters now

i really wish san francisco would stop sending their minions to spread their gospel of tech bullshit across america. i'd rather be ruled by goldman sachs... at least one of them proved to have winning ideas today

Syracuse should be purged in nuclear fire but only if they take out Fulton first so I can enjoy it

# ? Nov 20, 2017 16:49

unbutthurtable: Dec 2, 2016; Total. Tox. Rereg.; College Slice

From the NYC LAN thread:

grah posted:

incoming.

I don't think that the SUBWAY ACTION PLAN is going to adequately address the problems the system is facing. I mostly only know the Signal side of it, but it is dumb and bad and I'll try to explain why.

So on June 29 Andrew Cuomo signed Executive Order # 168 declaring a state of emergency in response to a glut of MTA delays, not only on the NYCT Subway but also the Penn Station debacle, and Metro North and LIRR problems.

The order came with a sizeable amount of money to address those problems, and suspended a number of regulatory laws, primarily dealing with the hiring of contractors. There were also some suspensions to State Finance Law, and a suspension of the law requiring environmental impact statements for major projects. Notable highlights include removing Comptroller oversight of contracts, removing the non-collusion provision between the MTA and Contractors authoring bids, weakening/removal of MTA board oversight of the chairman's contract awards, suspension of some of the rules governing the bid process, and suspension of the legal obligation for prompt payment of contracts by the MTA. It is a really bad executive order that has gone largely under the radar. It's been extended every 30 days since its inception and is still in effect now.

Besides giving Joe Lhota basically free reign to hire whatever contractors and execute whatever projects he likes, the MTA has also claimed that the presence of an emergency gives them broad authority to force overtime, cancel days off, and reassign personnel. Which they sort of have, the collective bargaining agreement does make a lot of allowances for emergencies. But these are largely powers meant to be used in response to a disaster--when Sandy hit and the MTA ordered most of its workforce to stay on the job for days at a time, that was the sort of thing the emergency powers in the contract are meant for. The MTA exercising those powers on a continuous basis over several months is really lovely to the workforce, and is ultimately what drove me to resign.

New York City Transit is, and since at least 2008 has been understaffed by about 150 - 200 Signal Maintainers. There are a lot of reasons for this but probably the biggest is that Signal is seen as a very undesirable department to work in. Signal Maintainers frequently take civil service exams to go elsewhere, and Transit Electrical Helpers assigned to Signal frequently seek reassignment to other, better departments. In terms of hourly compensation, Signal Maintainers are about middle of the road for similar maintenance titles. But they respond to trouble the most frequently (often requiring unplanned overtime at the end of a tour), have among the highest number of undesirable tours, and have notoriously bad management, and aside from Track Department, they spend far and away the most time on the trackway. New employees in Signal are routinely told to get out if they can, and many do--to Car Equipment or Lighting or Telephones or anywhere else.

At the same time, there were some high profile incidents on the Subway, in particular a power loss on the D/F line over the summer that created massive delays on multiple lines, and had passengers stuck in un-air conditioned cars in the tunnels with no power for way too long. The MTA blamed ConEd (because their feeds died on us!) and ConEd blamed the MTA (cause we plug their feeds into a bunch of 80 year old transformers that are maybe not the best). So Cuomo ordered ConEdison to hire contractors to inspect every piece of electrical equipment we have, including Signal equipment. He had ConEd hire them instead of the MTA as a little end-around of our Collective Bargaining Agreement, which requires bids like this to go through a farming out committee that includes union people, to determine if the work could be better done in-house.

Typically outside contractors work under General Orders. That is, we shut down the track for them--only MTA people are qualified to work on in-service track. General Orders have to be secured by Signal Maintainers, because only we are qualified to verify that all switches leading to the work area are secured in such a way that no train can physically enter it. But since we're already understaffed, ~quadrupling the number of general orders we have to secure exacerbates that problem. In addition, when contractors do need flagging it is typically provided by Rapid Transit Operations personnel (conductors by title who chose a flagging job, basically). But they also don't have sufficient personnel to support the sudden massive increase in contractors on the property, so for the Signal work, Signal department is providing flagging personnel. Additionally, we have to provide them personnel to access our rooms, and to make sure they don't break our equipment or damage service (which they keep doing, a lot, but we'll get to that). So you have an understaffed department that was sort of limping along making its maintenance goals by using a lot of overtime, and now their workload is massively increased.

The response to this has been to bring in still more contractors in order to keep up the maintenance--even though the contractors are not qualified signalmen, their performance of maintenance is in violation of the collective bargaining agreement, and they aren't actually able to legally certify that the equipment tests sufficiently. But they can do the work to, theoretically, minimize breakdowns due to lack of maintenance. This pulls even more Signal people away from their normal work and into supporting contractors.

In addition, the current class of Maintainer Trainees who are supposed to be in Signal School right now had their training suspended, so they could all be sent to go and flag for contractors. So the manpower problem is only getting worse.

In response, Transit lifted the overtime cap (previously if you made more than $149,000 in the previous rolling 12 month period, you'd be banned from working non-emergency overtime until that was no longer true), and lifted the ban on back to back doubles. That is, the ban on working 16 hour shifts on consecutive days. That ban was in place as a safety issue, because accident rates skyrocket when you work 32 out of 40 hours of your life. When that proved insufficient they also began a program of mandatory overtime. I had been working ~10 hour days doing work extremely unrelated to my actual job on a daily basis. A great number of other maintainers were having one of their 2 days off per week cancelled, being made to work 12 hours on their regular day off. Transit also put out a voluntary job bid for people to switch to a standard 10 hour day, working 10pm - 8am. They had 51 maintainer jobs of this nature (well some were 7am - 5pm), and got very few bids. Therefore they assigned those jobs. They assigned me, and at that point I resigned.

Strain on the workers aside, there are 2 serious problems with what's happening here.

Firstly, the signal work is fairly specialized. There are only but so many signal contractors in the city who do this sort of work, and they only have so many qualified personnel. To meet this sudden demand, they're bringing in anyone they can, and they don't have Transit's training requirements or standards. Even though a lot of their workforce is Local 3, the work an electrician does and the work a signalman does are pretty different. And even basic electrical work-wise, their personnel seem to be lacking. At least once that we've documented they simply failed to properly crimp a wire into a connector. That's like, super basic stuff--you crimp a wire on and then you tug real good on that wire to make sure it's solid. So a track lead fell out of its connector near Vernon Jackson Avenue and delayed, officially, 127 trains during the AM rush hour last week. I've heard from other maintainers that this has happened other times but was caught and rectified with less dramatic delays, but the one at Vernon Jackson is the only one I have actual photographic evidence for. On a different day, I actually responded to a trouble where, to test a generator hook-up they'd installed, the contractors turned off all the power in the middle of the day, delaying several 4 trains around 3 in the afternoon and requiring us to respond to an apparent signal trouble. Basically a lot of these guys don't know what they're doing, they actively avoid oversight by Signal personnel, and they're installing equipment that either doesn't work as well as some of our older equipment or is irrelevant to the causes of delays. Certainly some of the work they're doing is useful and they have some talented signalmen, but by and large this isn't the case.

And that's my second problem--the work they're doing is mostly irrelevant to the causes of signal delays. Within Signal at least, their work falls into 3 major categories. They're installing generator quick-connects, they're changing our bootleg pins to a new style, and they're doing the maintenance that we're supposed to be doing.

Generator quick connects are nice. Currently, if we need to hook up a generator in most locations, we have to figure out a way to run between 2 and 5 2/0 wires (2/0 is about a third of an inch in diameter, excluding the insulation, so fairly heavy) anywhere between 50 and ~300 feet, sometimes down hatchways or stairwells, or up structure columns to elevated rooms, sometimes along the trackway, and then into the rooms to connect them to the panels. So the idea is that at each location where we ever might need a generator, to install a panel in an accessible place on the street that is permanently connected through a switch to our reserve power supply. Then we can just drive a generator up to that box, hook it up in like a minute, and turn everything on. This is cool and good! But it's not going to have a huge impact on train delays, because losing power only very rarely causes train delays. And when it does, most of the response time is towing a generator to location through traffic. This is because we always operate with 2 sources of power, a Normal and a Reserve. And it's actually quite rare that we lose both at the same time. So if we lose the Normal, say, a switch automatically puts on the Reserve and the riding public will never even notice. There is absolutely zero impact to service. We just get an indication of a power failure, and we go and hook up a generator so that we have a backup in case we lose the Reserve, and we investigate the power loss and fix it. It's a good system. Yes, it failed when ConEd lost multiple feeders over the summer, and when that happens it is pretty bad. But that is a rarity--it's a big delay but it's not a common one. So most of this work (and we're talking about 100s of signal power panels, if not thousands), will almost never affect anything. Even with the hookups, that delay still would have happened, and been only marginally shorter. The majority of that delay was confusion about which feeds were out and where the generator(s) were most needed, and then actually getting them to the location.

Bootleg pins are what we call the metal pin bonds that we use to electrically connect signal energy onto the rails. We drill a hole in the web of the rail (the narrow part in the middle, between the base and the ball), and we insert a tapered metal pin made out of softer steel than the rail. Then we smack that pin with a hammer so that the soft metal pin is forced to deform slightly, making a very firm connection to the rail. These pins work very well. But if you read through trouble reports, you'll frequently see the phrase "changed bootleg pin, track circuit working as designed." And if you don't know very much about how Signal Maintainers in NYCT work or speak, you would think that there is a big problem with bootleg pins, and that we'd better get a different solution! And that's what they're doing. Except in better than 9 out of 10 troubles written up that way, the pin wasn't the problem. The problem is almost always the wire connection into the pin. People step on the wires, the wires corrode or break down over time, green mold gets on the wires and causes high resistance, track fires melt the wires, all kinds of stuff happens out there. So we cut off the old pin, cut back the damaged portion of the wire, attach a new pin, and the track circuit works again. And almost every maintainer in the system will put that in his report as "changed bootleg pin, working as designed" because that's what they did. So now we have this massive useless contract to change all our bootleg pins to a threaded connector held on by a nut, which at best will have no noticeable effect on service reliability at all. In fact, the new connectors seem to be less reliable, whether because of their design or because they're being installed incorrectly, and we have not been issued the tools to replace them, so trouble response now requires an additional layer of improvisation to get the drat thing working again.

Lastly we now have contractors doing a lot of maintenance. This means two things:

Firstly--they've basically never done maintenance before, so they're learning on the job, with all the problems you'd expect that to cause. In particular, since they're doing the maintenance and not us, and since the push is to get as many numbers through as possible, nothing is being winterized. That is, with outdoor equipment, usually in October or so, we take extra care to get any built up water of the equipment. We put fresh oil in things, and in some places put alcohol or antifreeze into machines to prevent them freezing. We also survey and repair any heaters meant to prevent cold related troubles. Winterizing equipment is always a challenge, because we're short staffed and it takes a lot of time, but typically when you have a crew that knows their section, they can prioritize the stuff that freezes most often and we can head off a lot of delays. But these are brand new people from outside, who don't even know they're supposed to be winterizing the equipment. Last I knew uptown, virtually nothing is being winterized. This could make for real trouble if they don't manage to catch up by the time we start getting a lot of freezing days and precipitation, should it be a harsh winter.

Secondly, these contracting companies (LK Comstock in particular, but they're not the only ones) want their people to get this experience because they want to bid on the maintenance on a regular basis. It's something that has real potential for union busting and a lot of people are fearing for their jobs over the next couple of years. Because there's a lot of money to be made in maintenance, and a lot of hay made in the media about how New York City has the highest per-mile maintenance costs of any subway in the world. Largely that's down to how drat much maintenance the antiquated system requires, the inclusion of trouble response standby in maintenance costs, the fact of a 24 hour railroad biting into productivity, and the high cost of living in New York City necessitating higher wages. But it's sort of a wedge that can be used to try to break the union's exclusive hold on maintenance. Especially since a lot of those factors don't apply to contractors--they're not paid for standby, the cost of having us assist them is still held against the unionized work force in labor cost calculations, and we shut down tracks for them so of course they can be more productive (not having to set up flagging, and not having to stop what you're doing every 4 - 15 minutes to let a train go by will obviously impact productivity). So it's easy to make an exaggerated case for the savings available by ditching TWU and contracting out this Signal Maintenance, even though those savings are largely illusory.

I see the classic republican/neo-liberal strategy of privatisation at work here. Understaff and underfund an agency until it fails, declare that the public agency is failing, and privatize as much of as you can. Even if this is a good faith effort by the MTA and the Governor to fix the subways and not just a political stunt with the added bonus of union busting (synergistically timed with the coming onslaught of Janus v AFSCME), it's being mismanaged because the people looking at the data don't know what that data really means, and because they have agendas of their own. In particular, they would very much like to go work for these contractors after they retire. And many, many senior supervisors and managers have unofficial guarantees of employment from the contractors while they're still on the job. Our Code of Ethics prohibits this, and in fact requires 2 years between leaving the MTA and working for anyone that the MTA pays for things, but I have never ever seen this enforced, and everyone knows it is not enforced.

So everything is hosed. I quit for a lot of reasons. I (and about 45 other maintainers) was told on Friday that beginning Sunday (so, Saturday night) I would be working 10pm - 8am (10 hour minimums! whoo!) instead of my picked tour, which was 8am - 4pm, and that additionally my new job would involve holiday coverage, whereas I was in a holidays off job. So less than a week before Thanksgiving I was being ordered to work overnight on Thanksgiving. And it's a dumb petty thing but I'd had enough.

The past few months before this nonsense started, I loved my job. I did good work with a great crew, and I genuinely enjoyed coming into work most days and I enjoyed going home sore and tired at the end of the day, because it felt like the work mattered. After years of putting up with crappy schedules, weekdays off and working every holiday, I felt like I had a schedule where I could start to put my life back together outside of Transit, and still go and do good work. And I just wasn't willing to give up all the other parts of my life that I was starting to enjoy for a company that didn't give a poo poo about its people, that fought my father tooth and nail to avoid taking any responsibility at all for literally poisoning him to death, and that is being run into the drat ground. And I certainly wasn't willing to give up my life to go and not do actual Signal work, but to spend every night helping contractors putter around doing stupid crap and potentially undermining my (erstwhile) union. So gently caress em, I quit.

# ? Nov 20, 2017 19:16

get that OUT of my face: Feb 10, 2007

i said this in the LAN thread and i'll say it again here: the problem we're facing isn't one of raising revenue, it's one of MTA control. currently cuomo and his lackeys control everything, and the amount of lackeys who have a say have been drastically reduced for the past few months. it doesn't matter whether a millionaire's tax or congestion pricing is implemented, they still control where the money goes, and it won't be towards proper repairs

if you think cuomo's gonna play nice once he gets his money and abandon everything laid out here, you're impossibly naive

get that OUT of my face has issued a correction as of 20:10 on Nov 20, 2017

# ? Nov 20, 2017 19:49

Real hurthling!: Sep 11, 2001

# ? Nov 20, 2017 19:53

get that OUT of my face: Feb 10, 2007

this is the first time in his entire time as city councilmember that i've seen reports of mathieu eugene out there being visible to his constituents. look at his fuckin death stare:

even if he weren't breaking electioneering laws, that glare says it all

# ? Nov 20, 2017 23:39

LegionAreI: Nov 14, 2006; Lurk

Schumer calls for IDC to actually vote with Democrats like they were elected to do

Not that it means jack poo poo, but hey, every little bit helps.

# ? Nov 21, 2017 08:30

Absurd Alhazred: Mar 27, 2010; by Athanatos

NY

https://twitter.com/klnynews/status/933186147584319488

# ? Nov 22, 2017 05:13

Rated PG-34: Jul 1, 2004

I guess that�s an efficient vetting process.

# ? Nov 22, 2017 05:26

get that OUT of my face: Feb 10, 2007

LegionAreI posted:

Schumer calls for IDC to actually vote with Democrats like they were elected to do

Not that it means jack poo poo, but hey, every little bit helps.

his tactic to get them together is saying "it's the right thing to do?" he really is america's foremost jewish grandpa by trying to invoke feelings of guilt like that, but that won't work against a group of people who are incapable of feeling such an emotion

speaking of which, jessie hamilton's office won't stop sending me texts even though i've called them four times demanding that they take my number off, the last time while i was screaming at them. they got my number from this post-election forum he hosted, ostensibly to inform people of events he hosts. lately it's only been links to Kings County Politics (an openly pro-IDC website) and today i got two robotexts from "people" claiming he's helped them on thanksgiving. his office is closed until monday, so i'll wait until then to go there. i'm not leaving until i actually witness them taking my name off the list

# ? Nov 23, 2017 02:29

Kurtofan: Feb 16, 2011; hon hon hon

why do those guys caucus with the gop

# ? Nov 23, 2017 11:55

Chevy Slyme: May 2, 2004; We're Gonna Run.

We're Gonna Crawl.

Kick Down Every Wall.

Kurtofan posted:

why do those guys caucus with the gop

Money and power.

# ? Nov 23, 2017 16:02

get that OUT of my face: Feb 10, 2007

Kurtofan posted:

why do those guys caucus with the gop

it's pretty much entirely because of money. when i called hamilton's office last year for an explanation, i spoke to the guy i know who works there and he didn't even try to hide it. he wanted money for stuff in his district that the main caucus wasn't willing to give

peralta did it for a $25,000 raise while alcantara/Senator Buzzfeed got money directly donated to her campaign

get that OUT of my face has issued a correction as of 16:19 on Nov 23, 2017

# ? Nov 23, 2017 16:16

Grondoth: Feb 18, 2011

Kurtofan posted:

why do those guys caucus with the gop

So they can get into office on the backs of minorities and get donations from rich people

# ? Nov 23, 2017 18:58

Horseshoe theory: Mar 7, 2005

CaptainPsyko posted:

Money and power.

Without any consequence (see Bob McDonnell's conviction being vacated by the Supreme Court, which led to Silver, Skelos, etc. also having theirs vacated).

# ? Nov 23, 2017 19:01

Chevy Slyme: May 2, 2004; We're Gonna Run.

We're Gonna Crawl.

Kick Down Every Wall.

Horseshoe theory posted:

Without any consequence (see Bob McDonnell's conviction being vacated by the Supreme Court, which led to Silver, Skelos, etc. also having theirs vacated).

I�m not even talking about that kind of money and power.

Caucusing with the majority literally gets them a straight up salary raise.

# ? Nov 23, 2017 19:34

Absurd Alhazred: Mar 27, 2010; by Athanatos

https://twitter.com/JimmyVielkind/status/934978682007015430

# ? Nov 27, 2017 03:59

get that OUT of my face: Feb 10, 2007

get that OUT of my face posted:

speaking of which, jessie hamilton's office won't stop sending me texts even though i've called them four times demanding that they take my number off, the last time while i was screaming at them. they got my number from this post-election forum he hosted, ostensibly to inform people of events he hosts. lately it's only been links to Kings County Politics (an openly pro-IDC website) and today i got two robotexts from "people" claiming he's helped them on thanksgiving. his office is closed until monday, so i'll wait until then to go there. i'm not leaving until i actually witness them taking my name off the list

update: i was told that his constituent office isn't the one sending them, his campaign office is. their shamelessness truly knows no depths

at least i got the personal email of the guy who broke this news to me, so if i'm still getting this poo poo in a week i'll tell him to hurry up

# ? Nov 27, 2017 22:07

get that OUT of my face: Feb 10, 2007

poll results here

# ? Nov 28, 2017 00:06

ate shit on live tv: Feb 15, 2004; by Azathoth

get that OUT of my face posted:

poll results here

Why isn't property tax an option?

# ? Nov 28, 2017 01:55

Badger of Basra: Jul 26, 2007

get that OUT of my face posted:

poll results here

colorado got $200 million off theirs last year, i would be interested to see how much ny could get given it's bigger and also already a huge tourist destination, so you've got a lot of people there who would do it as a tourist attraction

# ? Nov 28, 2017 02:10