Monday’s Headlines: War to End All War Edition

Today is Veterans Day, which commemorates the end of World War I (once known as The World War until they went and had another one). Take a moment today to honor those who sacrificed — and then take another moment to do something — anything — to end war.

OK, getting off the soapbox, here’s today’s news:

  • We’ve been covering a rash of pedestrian deaths in Queens, but the Daily News covered yet another killing, this time on Continental Ave. in Forest Hills, when a driver ran over a 29-year-old man on Sunday afternoon and kept on going.
  • On Tuesday, the Board of Elections will start counting roughly 1,400 absentee ballots in the State Senate race between Election Night winner Andrew Gounardes and incumbent Marty Golden, who is down by 1,100-plus votes. In advance of the final talley, NY1’s Jeanine Ramirez filed a bizarre report that basically asked for the election to be held again so residents of State Senate District 22 could come to their senses and re-elect Golden like they were supposed to in the first place. Sheesh.
  • Roughly 75 percent of women have been harassed or robbed on transit, compared to 47 percent of men. (Rudin Center)
  • This whole Amazon thing is just corporate welfare. (Bloomberg)
  • Bergen Street in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, is either the worst spot for illegal parking — or just where people complain to 311 about it. (Brooklyn Reader)
  • Larry Littlefield

    “My parents came from Ireland. Eight kids, 10 years, we grew up very close, very tight. One TV, one bathroom, it wasn’t easy,” Golden said. “But I got to tell you: We were very tightknit and we knew how to give back.”

    Good for your parents and their generation, Golden. We wish they were still here.

    But do the math society wide, and you’ll see that whereas Golden’s parents generation left his generation much better off, Golden’s generation ended up the first U.S. generation to leave ALL those to follow less well off than you had been at the same point in life, on average.

    He’s been there long enough at the state and local government level that some of those debts, deteriorating infrastructure, retroactively increased and underfunded pensions followed by tax increases, service cuts, and lower pay and benefits for new public employees are his responsibility.

    Even as the federal government goes broke, with later-born generations facing ill health and poverty in old age, after more of them had faced diminished childhoods due to the worse family life many in Golden’s generation provided. And diminished economic opportunity due to the pillaging of American business at the same time.

    All these folks need to go, before there is nothing left.

  • bolwerk

    Heh, well, if you expand that argument out of economics to the environment, Golden’s generation might well have left us climate apocalypse.

  • Larry Littlefield

    That’s what a guy who used to comment here said — why worry about all of that when there is the big one coming in addition?

  • Maggie

    Late comment on a story from last week. It’s odd that the NYT writeup on Dorothe Bruns’ suicide described her as having a clean driving record before she killed those children. I thought she actually had been implicated in an earlier hit and run with a pedestrian in Queens, plus of course a disturbing number of times speeding in school zones with kids in class. Very strange for the NYT to get that wrong.

  • Maggie

    NYT also has another good writeup on what Gov. Amazon Cuomo’s tax incentive giveaway to Jeff Bezos, the world’s wealthiest man, could mean for community residents of the Queensbridge Houses.

    It’s mind boggling to me that the governor who’s spent 8 years insisting we need to write billion-dollar checks to rebuild LGA, but that a LGA connection on the N train is infeasible because it would inconvenience Queens residents is now going full-speed ahead to bypass: Queens residents and jam through this hideous, unwanted giveaway.

  • bolwerk

    “The power of accurate observation….”

  • AnoNYC

    Maybe we could push for an N train extension now that Amazon is setting up shop in LIC.

  • Komanoff

    From the NYT Nov 7 story by Ali Winston:

    “Though Ms. Bruns had a clean driving record at the time of the accident, city records indicated that the Volvo she was driving had been caught by speed cameras driving at high speeds around schools on four different instances. Cameras also recorded the car running at least four red lights.”

  • Maggie

    Ah, thank you! So they did mention the camera offenses, if not her prior hit-and-run.

  • Maggie

    And now that I’ve slept on it…

    If a driver can have camera violations that a well-programmed bot uncovers (instead of NYPD) after she’s killed two kids, on top of a prior hit-and-run that NYPD buried without investigating, the takeaway isn’t that she had a clean driving record. It’s that NYPD and the de Blasio administration aren’t effectively using the enforcement leg of Vision Zero and a ‘clean driving record’ is meaningless.

    I get that this is unflattering to NYPD, and I get that there’s fatigue with BDB and a sense of just waiting for the next mayor, but the truth is that kids are dying because the administration keeps waiting for death before stepping up to show leadership.