What's there to complain about regarding the fare increase? How selfish can you be. Don't you realize that not only is your money going towards the job stimulus program for the construction unions but it also is paying for the votes that people like Senator Menedez and Senator Lautenberg bought for themselves when pushing for the Port Authority spending projects. I mean come on, a 2 for 1 deal. You are not supposed to complain about that!

I've worked minimum wage jobs before. I've worked at McDonald's flipping burgers (and I recommend that everyone do this at least for a short time in their lives), I've worked as a minimum wage messenger in Manhattan and I've worked as a minimum wage bus boy at a caterer. It was the lack of benefits at these jobs that contributed to my motivation to improve my skills so that I can get a better job.

If you know your employer doesn't offer sick days how about making sure you save enough money so that you can easily afford to take an unpaid sick day from time to time?

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Exactly right. So now not only are business owners penalized if their employees get sick but they are also penalized if their employees' family members get sick.
This is just another politician using somebody else's money to purchase votes. And it's a discouraging sign to see Fulop taking a step that I would expect from your typical "I'm happy to spend other people's money" politician.
If you decide to have a child you should make sure you are working for an employer that offers paid sick days (if that is a concern to you). The government shouldn't have to make sure of that for you.
If forcing employers to give out paid sick days is such a good idea then why stop at just 5 days? Why not make it 10 or 20 sick days? Apparently the more paid sick days granted is without a doubt a good thing. So why not just do it?

BEST OF THE WEB TODAY

August 28, 2013
The Harms Race Hate-crime hoaxes and "counter-Trayvonism."

By JAMES TARANTO

Four "hateful text messages" appeared on the phone of a 16-year-old black student who was running for Student Council president at St. Peter's Preparatory School in Jersey City, N.J. "We have NEVER and will NEVER have an (n-word) to lead our school," read one of the messages, according to a report in the Jersey Journal:

The message went on to call President Obama by his middle name Hussein and used a racial slur in referring to Obama, a police report said. "We will never make that mistake again. Drop out right now . . ." it continued, a police report said.
Can you guess where this is going? The Journal reports that the unnamed student "sent the texts to himself, a school official confirmed last week." (He lost the campaign for president, was elected vice president instead, and eventually complied with his own demand: "A source said he no longer attends the school.")

This isn't the only fake "hate crime" to come to light in the past week. Last March, as The Daily Caller's Chuck Ross notes, administrators at Ohio's Oberlin College shut classes for a day and held "campus-wide teach-ins focusing on racism and homophobia" after "virulently racist, anti-Jewish and anti-gay messages" appeared around campus and "a person wearing a hood and robe resembling a KKK outfit" was spotted "near the Afrikan Heritage House."

The perpetrators in the Oberlin case, Ross reports, turn out to be "privileged Obama-supporting white kids." One of them, Dylan Bleier, conducted a voter registration drive for the 2008 Obama campaign and belonged to a group called Ithaca White Allies Against Structural Racism (apparently he was from the upstate New York town where Cornell University is located).

Hate-crime hoaxes are of course nothing new; the practice goes back at least to 1987 and Tawana Brawley's fraudulent rape claim. We'd like to draw a connection to a phenomenon that is new: what blogress Ann Althouse has dubbed "counter-Trayvonism."

Althouse links disapprovingly to a Twitchy.com item about a candlelight vigil for Delbert "Shorty" Belton. He was an 88-year-old World War II veteran, wounded at Okinawa, who was beaten to death in North Spokane, Wash. The suspects were described as black males between 16 and 19.

Counter-Trayvonism, according to Althouse, refers to efforts "to rebalance public opinion after the distortions that surrounded the George Zimmerman case" by "looking for incidents in where the killers are black and the victims are white . . . to undo the distortions."

She thinks this is a terrible mistake:

Conservatives have rested on the principle of colorblindness for a long time, and they've taken abuse for it. Look at how left liberals abuse Chief Justice Roberts for writing, "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." They consider that kind of talk naive (at best). They push the perceived sophistication of what Justice Blackmun said back in the first affirmative action case: "In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way."
Those are the 2 well-defined and socially presentable opinions in this country, and decent, sincere Americans have argued from these positions for decades. Now, we're seeing some conservatives who seem frustrated by this taking account of race that's been done on the left. They seem to think it's a good time to spotlight violence committed by black people. This is not a good idea! It's fine to mourn Shorty, but these candlelight vigils are intended to stir hearts the way hearts were stirred at the Trayvon Martin demonstrations. . . .
To stir hearts counter-Trayvonistically is to nurture feelings that white people are oppressed by black people. This alternative to colorblindness is profoundly stupid. 1. It abandons the easy to express, principled position that many people perceive as the high ground. 2. It steps into the arena of taking account of race, where the left liberals would love to take you on. And 3. It gives air to the white supremacists among us. These people have been outcasts for a long time, but they exist, perhaps not quite yet recognizing what they are.
Our first reaction on reading this a few days ago was to agree enthusiastically, particularly with that first point. We are an exponent of the colorblind view and are no more comfortable with counter-Trayvonism than with Trayvonism.


Associated Press
A memorial for Delbert Belton

But on further reflection, we have some doubts about points 2 and 3. To begin at the end, we'd say worries about "white supremacists among us" are overblown. The impulse behind counter-Trayvonism seems quite the opposite of a supremacist one. It imagines whites to be in an inferior position to blacks--"that white people are oppressed by black people," as Althouse herself puts it.

In that regard, it is in fact the mirror image of the contemporary liberal view of race. The left does not advocate black supremacy. Instead it asserts that blacks continue to be victims of oppression and are owed special treatment as recompense. Hence the parallel between counter-Trayvonism and fake hate crimes: While the murder of Delbert Benton was real and the St. Peter's text message was fraudulent, both were presented as synecdoches of racial oppression. Trayvonism, counter-Trayvonism and fake hate crimes all arise out of the perverse aspiration for victim status.

We are also dubious of Althouse's assertion that counter-Trayvonism plays into the hands of the left. That seemed right to us at first, but then we saw some of the reactions from the left--particularly one from Josh Marshall, proprietor of TalkingPointsMemo.com.

Marshall complained last week that "the right-wing racial resentment-o-sphere has been aghast about the horrific murder of Chris Lane, 22, a young Australian." There are three suspects in that case, "two black, one either mixed race or white." Actually, Marshall seems aghast too: "The really sociopathic nature of the crime was brought home by the fact that one of the accused assailants allegedly told the police, 'We were bored and didn't have anything to do, so we decided to kill somebody.' "

What troubles Marshall, of course, is counter-Trayvonism--or, as he puts it, the "jagging about the 'double standard' when the same thing happens and the races are reversed." He observes accurately that the Martin and Lane cases are actually quite different: Whereas Zimmerman was interviewed and released after shooting Martin, the suspects in the Lane murder were promptly arrested and charged with murder. Marshall does not note the other obvious difference: that unlike Zimmerman, Lane's alleged killers do not appear to have any basis to claim self-defense.

Anyway, although Marshall makes some reasonable points, his tone is not a reasoned one; clearly he is agitated by the comparison. So is Brian Beutler, who wrote a similar piece the same day for Salon.com. We read this as evidence that the counter-Trayvonists have struck at a weakness, not a strength, of the left.

Most interesting, however, is Marshall's concluding paragraph:

This is the part where this kind of article falls back to say, well, race is complicated. It's not as simple as it was in the old days. But actually, it's still not that complicated. This whole episode amounts to little more than another plea from the subsection of aggrieved white Americans who still crave both social dominance and and [sic] the seat at the front of the racial victimization bus.
Saul Alinsky's fourth rule was: "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules." The counter-Trayvonists may ultimately be wrongheaded, but if they can provoke as conventional a liberal as Josh Marshall into disparaging "the racial victimization bus"--a colorblind sentiment if ever there was one--then perhaps they serve a dialectical purpose.

I spoke to Gill, the owner, this morning. I stopped in to verify that he is closing his business. He said he is in fact closing shop and that this will be his last week. I didn't want to be rude and ask why he his closing. I was hoping he would offer the reason but he didn't. I asked him if he had plans to open up a new dry cleaning store someplace else and he said no.
That was pretty much all the info I got.

It's good to see how often in recent times people are motivated to make up racism where it doesn't exist. This is just another piece of evidence that real racism against blacks is just getting harder and harder to find.

Something tells me if these guys couldn't get their hands on a gun then they would just carry knives and this incident would have been about people getting stabbed instead of being shot.

My point is that simply making it harder to attain a gun solves nothing.

Sounds like a perfectly reasonable response to being dissed in public. Pull out your gun and start shooting.
Who are these people? Idiots.

Noooo! I've been using them for 15 years. This sucks.

Or, on the other hand, maybe these properties have all along been artificially undervalued by the typical JC buyer and the Aussies are revealing the correct value.

The escalators being out of service at PATH stations are part of the Port Authority's job stimulus program for the escalator repairmen union.

The "cash only" business is also a classic way for businesses and their employees to avoid reporting the income they are making and hence not have to pay income taxes on it.

Thanks for calling. Did they give an estimate of how long the water pressure would be down?

The way to win is to buy a few shares in Goldman. Anybody can do it.

I'm at 10th and Erie. At exactly 8am this morning I was running the water in my kitchen sink. It suddenly slowed to a trickle then it stopped completely. Looks like united water is messing around with things again.

Just drove by 18th and Coles again. There is a united water truck on the scene any the water seems to have stopped coming out of the ground.

I went to get bottled water and happened to pass through the intersection of 18th street and Coles St. There is water percolating up through the seems where the asphalt meets the sidewalk and where new asphalt meets old asphalt. I called a united water representative to report it and they said they were looking for the spot where there is a problem. They thanked me and said they would respond right away.

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Me too.

Great news!

On a side note, while some people on JC List complain that the NY Times doesn't cover JC enough it is nice to see that a real paper like the WSJ does.

In terms of severity of political patronage this is about as small as it gets.

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Yes, I know they are not required to pay NYC sales tax rates at the same time they make the purchase in Newport Mall. However they are required to pay the difference between the cheaper NJ rate and the NY rate when they file their personal tax return. They are supposed to pay this calculated difference to NY since they live in NY. It's called Use Tax. Thousands of people are committing this form of tax evasion in NY costing the people of NY millions of dollars in tax revenue. But nobody cares because it's simply a form of the everyday tax fraud committed by everyday people instead of being isolated to the "rich". But it's still tax evasion.

http://www.tax.ny.gov/pubs_and_bulls/ ... e_tax_for_individuals.htm

It's a good thing we have the group Mayors Against Illegal Guns or else the group Mayors For Illegal Guns would be running around unfettered.

[quote]
Piert1025 wrote:
The mall generates thousands of dollars in tax revenue. Many ny'ers come here for the 3.5% tax rate.... [quote]

They really should end the discounted sale tax rate and bring it to the normal NJ state rate of 7.0%. No need for it anymore.

And how come the 99% aren't railing against all those New Yorkers engaging in tax evasion by shopping in NJ and not declaring their out-of-state purchases when they file their NY taxes. All of them are robbing NY of millions of dollars of taxes every year. Oh that's right. I forgot. It's only other, rich people that engage in tax evasion. Not ordinary, middle-class people. Not on an every-day basis. No way.

Let them go. Just rats fleeing the SS Healy. It will be the best money this city has ever spent. Consider it as paying somebody to fumigate bedbugs from a what is otherwise a nice place to live.

When my friends and I used to pull these types of hijinks back when we were young boys I remeber that the most effective way to get us to stop was for a victim or group of victims to come chasing after us. Usually they didn't. So when they did it really scared the crap out of us.

The seller was a motivated seller. The father had died and the heirs to the father's assets wanted to liquidate ASAP so that the assets could be divided up. Plus the Australians came with cash so no need to wait for a mortgage approval which may or may not have been approved if the buyer needed a mortgage.

This morning I heard the Australian investors were the ones who recently purchased the entire residential building that was for sale on the northeast corner of 8th & Erie as well as the one next to it.

Maybe Healy's position regarding gays is simply "evolving". It seems that if a politician has an "evolving" platform regarding gays it is perfectly acceptable. Or at least able to be swept under the rug by the politician's gay constituents.
I suppose that's why Obama endorsed Healy. Which is apparently a good thing to most people around here.

Harassment like this should be covered under anti-bullying laws. Bullying isn't limited to schools.