December got its name from the Latin word decem (meaning ten) because it was originally the tenth month of the year in the calendar of Romulus c. 750 bc which began in March. The winter days following December were not included as part of any month. Later, the months of January and February were created out of the monthless period and added to the beginning of the calendar, but December retained its name.
Someone on Reddit linked to this Olympic speedskating video. I knew what was coming, but it still made me burst out laughing when it happened: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAADWfJO2qM
When I see offers like that I think "oh I could never live that far from a city," extrapolating from my mother-in-law's place in Maine, but the truth is that if I had decent broadband and a few restaurants within say 15 minutes reach, I'd be fine.
my guess the fixed will be competetive with regular broadband ($80 to 100/mo). When they get the mobile working for RVs, Offshore boats, etc. is when people will go nuts for it.
BREAKING: the huge telescope at the renowned Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico has collapsed. Last week, officials said it was in danger of collapse & would be closed.
I bought one of those coolant bleed funnels, and it was well worth the money. Parked the Miata on the sloped driveway and filled up the radiator and the funnel attached to the radiator and idled for about 25 min. After the car warmed up and the thermostat opened, I could see a little bit of bubbles in the funnel. Let the car go through a few cycles of the fans going on and off and then parked the car in the garage and kept the funnel on overnight to let it cool. This morning even more coolant went into the radiator so I'm hoping I got most of the air out of the system.
I bought a timing light so I may try to check the timing since I took the Cam Angle Sensor off to replace the o-ring. And the smoke didn't show up this time so I'm not sure why I was seeing it earlier.
I may try to change the TSX coolant next since I haven't changed it over the 85K and 7 years I've had the car.
After going for a drive now I'm smelling coolant. It's a different smell than when I saw the smoke. There isn't smoke but I smell some burnt coolant. I looked at each end of each of the hoses and I don't really see anything at all. Doesn't seem to be leaking. I'll take it to the place down the street and ask them to check out the smell and also check the timing while they have it.
I initially thought that but I don't think so. It was coming from under the exhaust shield so I took it off and I could see most of it it coming from the connector where the EGR tube connects to the Cylinder 3 exhaust header. Then some looked to be coming from below the header so maybe where the header connects to the CAT. It kinda smelled like a more intense burning oil smell not burning sweet coolant. And it happened the first 4 or 5 times I had the engine going during the flush. But since it didn't happen this last time when I had the engine going for almost 30 min whatever it was must have burned off? Dunno.
I may take it to a local place and have them check to see if there is still an oil leak. I may try to check the timing since that seems to be fairly easy or have them do it if it doesn't seem to work.
I still haven't really found a local place I trust yet. I'm going to try the place my mom takes her car. I've spoken with the guy there a couple of times so I may give them a chance. There are a couple of good Miata places down in the south bay but that's too far. One in Hayward used to be good but when the original owner sold and moved out of the country supposedly isn't great anymore. I'm looking for a place to do my timing belt/water pump as a precaution. The local guy said it should be fairly inexpensive, like 700+ probably since it's pretty easy on the Miata. That's not something I want to tackle myself right now.
The Bay Area one suggested a couple of places in the South Bay and on the Peninsula so those are probably too far to go and leave my car. PR Motor Sports I think is the one in Hayward that changed owners and isn't as good. Sakebomb in Fremont sounds like a rice rocket place so I'm not sure I want to go there.
I haven't joined the club yet. I may do it once the pandemic is over.
Oh, who wasn't good? Well, I'm not sure I'd say anyone was bad, but at times I found that Hugo Weaving wasn't quite able to escape the baggage of his previous roles to fully inhabit this one (it felt like Agent Smith from The Matrix was trying to advise Gandalf). Sometimes I also find John Noble a bit over the top as Denethor.
The head of the Food and Drug Administration was summoned to the White House Tuesday amid President Donald Trump's frustration that his agency hasn’t moved faster to authorize Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine for emergency use, officials familiar with the meeting told ABC News.
Pac-12 announces cancellation policy for basketball. Testing is the same as we have seen for football. Minimum requirement is 7 scholarship players available; below that and the game can be cancelled.
And of course this is a Pac-12 tiein. With the Holiday & Red Box bowls already cancelled, as well as the Hawaii Bowl, the prospects for Pac-12 teams (and the bowl payouts) are getting slim.
Oh absolutely, El Paso is the Shreveport, LA of the western half of the United States...positively brutal. The Chitwood family truckster has driven through it a few times now...yuck.
That said, for some inexplicable reason, I've always wanted the Bears to get an invite to the Sun Bowl...maybe it's because we never hit it during the Tedford/Dykes years, and it was always cool to watch the CBS crew call P12 games BECAUSE they never did...alas, it'll have to wait until next year.
The Kevin Riley move is actually more common than you would probably like to see from a college quarterback...that happens every weekend. What the 'Cuse QB did tho was a double down on signal caller ineptitude, unfortunately for him. That's ALSO positively Holmoe-nian
I remember being at the hotel on election night in 1993 where Mayor David Dinkins and his supporters had gathered to celebrate what they hoped would be his re-election. I was a reporter for The Village Voice, and the polls had been close.
But it was not to be. At a certain point in the evening, the local cable news network NY1 (just about a year old at the time) called the race for Rudy Giuliani. Shortly after, some members of the mayor’s entourage thundered past me.
In the mayhem, I managed to make eye contact with Lee Jones, the mayor’s press secretary, whom I had known since he worked for Mayor Ed Koch (Mr. Dinkins kept him on). I could see he was distraught. “Well,” he said, “by and large, the coalition held. The coalition held.”
That may sound like spin, but it wasn’t. We knew each other quite well. I took it that he was just trying to think of something hopeful to say — and in retrospect, he wasn’t wrong.
As I’ve thought back on those years in the wake of Mr. Dinkins’s passing last week, I’m floored at the extent to which the politics of New York City foreshadowed the national politics of today. If the American polity consists of two warring camps right now, we might say that the New York of that time helped blaze that unhappy trail.
The 1993 race was a rematch of their 1989 contest, when Mr. Dinkins beat Mr. Giuliani by less than 50,000 votes out of nearly two million cast. In the rematch, Mr. Giuliani won by about 53,000.
Both men’s coalitions were remarkably sturdy. Even with a series of tumultuous situations — like the AIDS, heroin and crack cocaine epidemics, and dark economic times that forced Mr. Dinkins to enact severe budget cuts — two relatively marginal factors seemed to tip the election. First, Mr. Dinkins lost a few thousand mostly white voters over his too-tentative handling of a riot in the Brooklyn neighborhood Crown Heights and the boycott of two Korean-owned grocery stores by Black residents. Second, Mr. Giuliani benefited from a Staten Island secession referendum that Republicans had led the way to getting on the ballot. It goosed turnout in that borough, which benefited Mr. Giuliani (Republicans knew how to put a finger on the electoral scale even then).
Mr. Dinkins’s coalition was liberal, multiracial and multiethnic. It arose and came together over the course of the 1970s and 1980s. For decades before him, New York City politics had been dominated by “the three I’s”: Italy, Ireland and Israel. For three citywide offices — mayor, comptroller and City Council president — it was often the case that one would go to an Italian, one to an Irishman (or by the 1970s, Irishwoman) and one to a Jew.
In that arrangement, Black people and Latinos were junior partners, and they could not win the mayoralty because they could never coalesce around a single candidate. Meanwhile, the 1980s were happening: raging inequality and the AIDS crisis; a wave of crime and homelessness; the decade of the rise of the hedge-fund titans and Manhattan real estate celebrities (including you-know-who). In addition, Mr. Koch played increasingly to white racial backlash as the years went on. The Dinkins coalition — Black people, Latinos, gays, liberal Jews, immigrants, assorted others — was an emerging New York that was mostly not invited to the conspicuous prosperity of the ’80s enjoyed by Wall Street financiers and real estate developers. Mr. Dinkins’s most historically significant accomplishment was arguably not anything he did as mayor; it was to have assembled this coalition and, with his widely admired strategist Bill Lynch, proved to the world that it could win.
The Giuliani coalition was the traditional and aging New York of wealthy Manhattan elites and white ethnic populations in other boroughs — the police and firefighters, the owners of the hardware and liquor stores in Howard Beach and Bensonhurst (the “red” parts of New York City), the pressmen at the Daily News plant, the sons and daughters of the men and women who had worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during the war.
They were white. As such, they were privileged, even if it often didn’t feel that way to them. By and large they did not like the changes, like letting Black and Latino people into their unions and neighborhoods, that the emerging New York was seeking to impose on them. In Mr. Giuliani, they found their avenger.
Fundamentally, those two coalitions in our largest city are now our two coalitions in the United States. And just as those two mayoral elections were close, hard-fought referendums on which New York would have power, our recent national elections have followed exactly the same pattern. Emerging America won in 2008 and 2012. Backlash prevailed narrowly in 2016. Then, a few thousand votes switched, and multiracial America won again.
In some ways, I feel like I’ve been watching the same movie for 30 years. It even has some of the same stars, saying some of the same kinds of things. Of that 1989 election, Mr. Giuliani once told the journalist Jack Newfield: “They stole that election from me. They stole votes in the Black parts of Brooklyn, and in Washington Heights.”
Mr. Dinkins, though a good and decent man, in the end didn’t have the political vision and will to transcend the divisions. Mr. Giuliani, like his friend President Trump, didn’t have them, either (in his case, more by choice).
But these days I wonder who can transcend them. I know Joe Biden wants to, but I sure don’t get the feeling the other side wants to play along. Lee Jones was righter than he knew, not just about 1993 but also about what’s unfolded ever since: The two coalitions have not only held; they’ve metastasized. I may be watching this movie the rest of my life.
Bears beat Nicholls State in mens' BB, 60-49. Not a bad win as their opponent finished 21-10 last season. Unfortunately Monty Bowser was injured and taken to the hospital.
Ya, it was a grind. Despite the inexplicable waiver denial for Hyder, Cal's nonetheless put together an interesting squad. If the Lars/Kuany/DJ Thorpe entity can give them ANYTHING consistently down low along with AK, this team could be competitive more often than I dared to hope. With some early season signs of a shift in Fox's game plan to shoot more 3's, which makes sense with Bradley, Grant, Makale and Betley, it's probably safe to say we could cause some problems to teams when 3 of those 4 are hot on the same night....that has yet to happen, so we shall see. But they'll be battling.
Sorry to hear that on Monty...hope it's only precautionary.
Decimation was a form of Roman military discipline in which every tenth man in a group was executed by members of his cohort.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(Roman_army)
Are we not doing basketball write ups anymore?
Columbus OH
https://www.reddit.com/r/AnimalsBeingBros/comments/k31eni/at_osu_in_columbus_oh/
F#^% OHIO STATE
Columbus is really really excited for Christmas this year
https://twitter.com/ScribbledCoffee/status/1333147701517672448
stopped for a night in Columbus on my way from NY to Muncie.
i had the BEST cortado in a while at Brioso.
it was so good that i went back for a 2nd one before driving off.
Did you go take a leak on the Horseshoe? Next time....
Someone on Reddit linked to this Olympic speedskating video. I knew what was coming, but it still made me burst out laughing when it happened: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAADWfJO2qM
I vaguely remember that from the time. This is why I like traditional speedskating - none of that excitement at all.
Aren't you in the tank for the Netherlands?
maaaaaaaybe
Porto's + Sofia Vegara + Kiva = cake https://store.portosbakery.com/pages/sofia?_ke=eyJrbF9lbWFpbCI6ICJjaW5keWxlZS50d3VzQGdtYWlsLmNvbSIsICJrbF9jb21wYW55X2lkIjogIlB3UUR1QyJ9&utm_campaign=Sofia%2C%20CHLA%20%28XMmWGN%29&utm_medium=email&utm_source=DBNY%20-%20Weekly%20Newsletter%20List%20%5BTEST%5D
Yay Cake!
Houses for sale in Italy: EUR1
https://us.cnn.com/travel/article/italy-one-euro-homes-castropignano-molise/index.html
When I see offers like that I think "oh I could never live that far from a city," extrapolating from my mother-in-law's place in Maine, but the truth is that if I had decent broadband and a few restaurants within say 15 minutes reach, I'd be fine.
Starlink is going to be a global game-changer. Imma sign up as soon as it is available next year.
Beta testers are reporting 130-150 mbps downstream.
https://www.starlink.com/
The satellites they are launching are filling up near-earth space, frustrating astronomers...
do you have any inkling of how much it will cost?
Rumors of $99/month but hardware is $600.
Monkey Brains is $35
the move to Oakland is kind of a high point of entry though ;)
Is it only in the Bay Area? - probably won't make it to suburban areas - relies on repeater antennas on tall buildings (like mine).
my guess the fixed will be competetive with regular broadband ($80 to 100/mo). When they get the mobile working for RVs, Offshore boats, etc. is when people will go nuts for it.
I get 400+ from Monkey Brains, and it's very stable.
HGTV show. https://www.hgtv.com/shows/my-big-italian-adventure
Villa DBD
Science
BREAKING: the huge telescope at the renowned Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico has collapsed. Last week, officials said it was in danger of collapse & would be closed.
https://twitter.com/DavidBegnaud/status/1333746725354426370
Too bad. I recall it being featured in the movie "Contact" with Jodie Foster.
John Hurt as the VC character S.R. Haddon also was good.
Contact is a great movie.
i forget who, but wasnt someone on DBD saying Contact was one of the worst movies ever?
[raises hand] it's not my favorite 😂
And Goldeneye with Sean Bean
once again 2020 remains a little too on the nose for symbolic events about the state of the US
CARTOON
Can someone explain to me the cartoon in the header?
It's Legolas remembering the past, before resuming his stint as shopping center elf.
ah, a Lord of the Rings reference. That explains why I was bamboozled.
DBD Auto Work
Just an update, @becuase I know everyone cares@.
I bought one of those coolant bleed funnels, and it was well worth the money. Parked the Miata on the sloped driveway and filled up the radiator and the funnel attached to the radiator and idled for about 25 min. After the car warmed up and the thermostat opened, I could see a little bit of bubbles in the funnel. Let the car go through a few cycles of the fans going on and off and then parked the car in the garage and kept the funnel on overnight to let it cool. This morning even more coolant went into the radiator so I'm hoping I got most of the air out of the system.
I bought a timing light so I may try to check the timing since I took the Cam Angle Sensor off to replace the o-ring. And the smoke didn't show up this time so I'm not sure why I was seeing it earlier.
I may try to change the TSX coolant next since I haven't changed it over the 85K and 7 years I've had the car.
Was the smoke from some coolant (or some other fluid) that inadvertently made its way near the exhaust manifold and burned away?
After going for a drive now I'm smelling coolant. It's a different smell than when I saw the smoke. There isn't smoke but I smell some burnt coolant. I looked at each end of each of the hoses and I don't really see anything at all. Doesn't seem to be leaking. I'll take it to the place down the street and ask them to check out the smell and also check the timing while they have it.
I initially thought that but I don't think so. It was coming from under the exhaust shield so I took it off and I could see most of it it coming from the connector where the EGR tube connects to the Cylinder 3 exhaust header. Then some looked to be coming from below the header so maybe where the header connects to the CAT. It kinda smelled like a more intense burning oil smell not burning sweet coolant. And it happened the first 4 or 5 times I had the engine going during the flush. But since it didn't happen this last time when I had the engine going for almost 30 min whatever it was must have burned off? Dunno.
I may take it to a local place and have them check to see if there is still an oil leak. I may try to check the timing since that seems to be fairly easy or have them do it if it doesn't seem to work.
I still haven't really found a local place I trust yet. I'm going to try the place my mom takes her car. I've spoken with the guy there a couple of times so I may give them a chance. There are a couple of good Miata places down in the south bay but that's too far. One in Hayward used to be good but when the original owner sold and moved out of the country supposedly isn't great anymore. I'm looking for a place to do my timing belt/water pump as a precaution. The local guy said it should be fairly inexpensive, like 700+ probably since it's pretty easy on the Miata. That's not something I want to tackle myself right now.
There's gotta be a local Miata club that would have advice on repair shops.
The Bay Area one suggested a couple of places in the South Bay and on the Peninsula so those are probably too far to go and leave my car. PR Motor Sports I think is the one in Hayward that changed owners and isn't as good. Sakebomb in Fremont sounds like a rice rocket place so I'm not sure I want to go there.
I haven't joined the club yet. I may do it once the pandemic is over.
I like the way that Sakebomb tackled these, certainly not a dumb-ass stance look / performance https://www.sakebombgarage.com/fpspec-long-stroke-nc/
When money, paranoia, and stupidity collide.
https://survivalcondo.com/
love to spend $1.5M on a condo I won't be able to reach in a time of crisis.
10
Bo Derek
cc, purveyors of what I think of as one of the most 70s songs ever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgJckGsR-T0
Love me some Dreadlock Holiday
That must after I checked out; but I do have affection for this song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wv8N6zSzL7k
Heh, that is very 70's, do why they called themselves 10cc?
I read once that it was because of the estimated typical amount of spunk that an adult male ejaculates
BRB
More that average, yes.
also heard that's how the Lovin' Spoonful got their name
So not heroin - interesting
December
genuinely surprised to learn that there is an official video for December 1963 (Oh What a Night) by Franki Valli and the Four Seasons
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTUhnIY3oRM
A beautiful song
What is a catch phrase or movie quote that you use at home?
Chu got da stuff?
We're gonna need a shit-load of dimes
heh, i always say "mongo like candy" when i treat myself to dessert at home
that's a bold move, Cotton
That's a bingo
That movie gets quoted often around here.
"How about you Utivich, would you make that deal?"
"I'd make that deal"
"I don't blame ya, damn good deal!"
Hasta la Vista
Baby
Besides Idris Elba, which celebrity would you rate as a 19 out of 19?
Oh now we're talking.
Denzel Washington
George Clooney
Brad Pitt
Alexander Skarsgård
Jimmy Garoppolo
On the female side:
Monica Bellucci
Margot Robbie
Samara Weaving
If that's the case, then consider:
Jaime Pressly
Margot Robbie
Jaime King
Emma Mackey
Chris Hemsworth
Candice Patton
Ana de Armas
Katherine Langford
In slightly less dirty old man territory:
Kelly MacDonald
Eva Green
Marion Cotillard
Nice bring with the Kelly MacDonald...quite underrated
Tessa Thompson
If you had a boat, what would you name it?
hmmm....
I like Sunk Costs.
Golden Bear
Free Sail
Sunk Costs
The Disco Volante
LOTR series: Which actor was perfect for the role?
Which actor wasn't!
That's what I was going to say!
Apparently, everyone involved with the movie got a cameo in it. Also, TIL that Stephen Colbert had a cameo.
https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Cameo_appearances_in_Peter_Jackson%27s_The_Lord_of_the_Rings_and_The_Hobbit_film_trilogies
McKellen
Alright wise guy, show your work, who would have been obviously better?
Wait, I thought we were supposed to say who was perfectly cast. That would mean there wasn't a better option.
Yeah he was, but I really can't think of anyone who wasn't.
Oh, who wasn't good? Well, I'm not sure I'd say anyone was bad, but at times I found that Hugo Weaving wasn't quite able to escape the baggage of his previous roles to fully inhabit this one (it felt like Agent Smith from The Matrix was trying to advise Gandalf). Sometimes I also find John Noble a bit over the top as Denethor.
if anything he wasn't over the top enough, based on how I read the book.
OOoooOOOOooo I have to disagree about John Noble's performance.
Bold move, Cotton
F-in' A, Cotton
David Chang
Wins Who Wants to Be a Millionaire -- donates proceeds to charity
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/david-chang-donating-hospitality-workers-after-historic-who-wants-be-n1249430
ABC, 1985
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaL1Nh4vwFY
On the first day of Christmas, my Oski gave to me... a ___________
A reminder that optimism has no place in Cal football fandom
Yes, this.....the Sun Bowl in El Paso is my Graceland.
a shiny new special teams coach...
but but...he's great at recruiting 3 star players from Arizona!
Today in Covid
All the comfort of outdoor hospitals in Rhode Island in December
https://twitter.com/ShimonPro/status/1333491021292965893
could be worse, being close to the coast keeps temperatures and snowfall under control
Politico: Trump once again passes on responsibility, makes states organize vaccine distribution
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/30/trump-states-handle-vaccines-440798
37% of health care professionals hesitant to get Covid vaccine
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/12/01/940158684/some-health-care-workers-are-wary-of-getting-covid-19-vaccines
Dr. Fauci seems on board with these tests and I trust him, but I'm still on the fence if I'd get vaccinated.
Why?
Trump seems to have backed off on his interference in the whole process but it retains his stink.
He can't help himself.
The head of the Food and Drug Administration was summoned to the White House Tuesday amid President Donald Trump's frustration that his agency hasn’t moved faster to authorize Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine for emergency use, officials familiar with the meeting told ABC News.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/fda-chief-summoned-to-white-house-amid-pressure-to-authorize-vaccine-emergency-use/ar-BB1bx1fN?ocid=msedgntp
the pfizer vaccine has all kinds of logistical issues that i don't expect him to understand bc he's a fucking moron
I wouldn't take the British one, but that's a different story.
Are we going to have people showing off, "I flew all the way to Bhutan to get this certified cruelty-free vaccine. You settled for BioNTech? Ha!"
Elsewhere in college
Bob Stoops re-joins OU staff as Covid thins out available coaching staff
https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/30429527/lincoln-riley-calls-ex-oklahoma-coach-bob-stoop-help-sooners-practice
Pac-12 announces cancellation policy for basketball. Testing is the same as we have seen for football. Minimum requirement is 7 scholarship players available; below that and the game can be cancelled.
Sun Bowl cancelled (El Paso, TX)
https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/2020/11/30/college-football-coronavirus-updates/6468786002/
And of course this is a Pac-12 tiein. With the Holiday & Red Box bowls already cancelled, as well as the Hawaii Bowl, the prospects for Pac-12 teams (and the bowl payouts) are getting slim.
Good thing we don't have to worry about a bowl game this year.
UGH!! The Sun Bowl Watch unfortunately is delayed yet another year....New Years Eve in El Paso remains elusive.
considering the recent spike in Covid cases in El Paso, be thankful
Oh absolutely, El Paso is the Shreveport, LA of the western half of the United States...positively brutal. The Chitwood family truckster has driven through it a few times now...yuck.
That said, for some inexplicable reason, I've always wanted the Bears to get an invite to the Sun Bowl...maybe it's because we never hit it during the Tedford/Dykes years, and it was always cool to watch the CBS crew call P12 games BECAUSE they never did...alas, it'll have to wait until next year.
Isn't that where they called in the Natl Guard to help with the bodies?
ICYMI: Syracuse lost in a more painful way than Cal
https://twitter.com/SomeonesAnIdiot/status/1332790730352455691
Kevin Riley has entered the chat.
The Kevin Riley move is actually more common than you would probably like to see from a college quarterback...that happens every weekend. What the 'Cuse QB did tho was a double down on signal caller ineptitude, unfortunately for him. That's ALSO positively Holmoe-nian
OUR CRUMBLING DEMOCRACY
Barr appoints Special Counsel in order to saddle Biden with a Trump ally and entrench him in the DOJ well after the inauguration
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/01/william-barr-john-durham-special-counsel-russia-441872
I wonder how aggressive this investigation will be. Seems like they've been at it for more than a year and haven't really come up with much.
The toad disagrees with Trump:
William Barr says there is no evidence of widespread fraud in presidential election!!!!
https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/01/politics/william-barr-election-2020/index.html
Trumpistas are losing their minds about this
They have minds to lose?
Lizard brains
not much has changed for old Rudy
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/01/opinion/dinkins-giuliani-nyc-mayor.html
I don't have a subscription. What's it say? Is it related to this?
https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/528131-giuliani-has-discussed-possible-pardon-with-trump-report
I remember being at the hotel on election night in 1993 where Mayor David Dinkins and his supporters had gathered to celebrate what they hoped would be his re-election. I was a reporter for The Village Voice, and the polls had been close.
But it was not to be. At a certain point in the evening, the local cable news network NY1 (just about a year old at the time) called the race for Rudy Giuliani. Shortly after, some members of the mayor’s entourage thundered past me.
In the mayhem, I managed to make eye contact with Lee Jones, the mayor’s press secretary, whom I had known since he worked for Mayor Ed Koch (Mr. Dinkins kept him on). I could see he was distraught. “Well,” he said, “by and large, the coalition held. The coalition held.”
That may sound like spin, but it wasn’t. We knew each other quite well. I took it that he was just trying to think of something hopeful to say — and in retrospect, he wasn’t wrong.
As I’ve thought back on those years in the wake of Mr. Dinkins’s passing last week, I’m floored at the extent to which the politics of New York City foreshadowed the national politics of today. If the American polity consists of two warring camps right now, we might say that the New York of that time helped blaze that unhappy trail.
The 1993 race was a rematch of their 1989 contest, when Mr. Dinkins beat Mr. Giuliani by less than 50,000 votes out of nearly two million cast. In the rematch, Mr. Giuliani won by about 53,000.
Both men’s coalitions were remarkably sturdy. Even with a series of tumultuous situations — like the AIDS, heroin and crack cocaine epidemics, and dark economic times that forced Mr. Dinkins to enact severe budget cuts — two relatively marginal factors seemed to tip the election. First, Mr. Dinkins lost a few thousand mostly white voters over his too-tentative handling of a riot in the Brooklyn neighborhood Crown Heights and the boycott of two Korean-owned grocery stores by Black residents. Second, Mr. Giuliani benefited from a Staten Island secession referendum that Republicans had led the way to getting on the ballot. It goosed turnout in that borough, which benefited Mr. Giuliani (Republicans knew how to put a finger on the electoral scale even then).
Mr. Dinkins’s coalition was liberal, multiracial and multiethnic. It arose and came together over the course of the 1970s and 1980s. For decades before him, New York City politics had been dominated by “the three I’s”: Italy, Ireland and Israel. For three citywide offices — mayor, comptroller and City Council president — it was often the case that one would go to an Italian, one to an Irishman (or by the 1970s, Irishwoman) and one to a Jew.
In that arrangement, Black people and Latinos were junior partners, and they could not win the mayoralty because they could never coalesce around a single candidate. Meanwhile, the 1980s were happening: raging inequality and the AIDS crisis; a wave of crime and homelessness; the decade of the rise of the hedge-fund titans and Manhattan real estate celebrities (including you-know-who). In addition, Mr. Koch played increasingly to white racial backlash as the years went on. The Dinkins coalition — Black people, Latinos, gays, liberal Jews, immigrants, assorted others — was an emerging New York that was mostly not invited to the conspicuous prosperity of the ’80s enjoyed by Wall Street financiers and real estate developers. Mr. Dinkins’s most historically significant accomplishment was arguably not anything he did as mayor; it was to have assembled this coalition and, with his widely admired strategist Bill Lynch, proved to the world that it could win.
The Giuliani coalition was the traditional and aging New York of wealthy Manhattan elites and white ethnic populations in other boroughs — the police and firefighters, the owners of the hardware and liquor stores in Howard Beach and Bensonhurst (the “red” parts of New York City), the pressmen at the Daily News plant, the sons and daughters of the men and women who had worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during the war.
They were white. As such, they were privileged, even if it often didn’t feel that way to them. By and large they did not like the changes, like letting Black and Latino people into their unions and neighborhoods, that the emerging New York was seeking to impose on them. In Mr. Giuliani, they found their avenger.
Fundamentally, those two coalitions in our largest city are now our two coalitions in the United States. And just as those two mayoral elections were close, hard-fought referendums on which New York would have power, our recent national elections have followed exactly the same pattern. Emerging America won in 2008 and 2012. Backlash prevailed narrowly in 2016. Then, a few thousand votes switched, and multiracial America won again.
In some ways, I feel like I’ve been watching the same movie for 30 years. It even has some of the same stars, saying some of the same kinds of things. Of that 1989 election, Mr. Giuliani once told the journalist Jack Newfield: “They stole that election from me. They stole votes in the Black parts of Brooklyn, and in Washington Heights.”
Mr. Dinkins, though a good and decent man, in the end didn’t have the political vision and will to transcend the divisions. Mr. Giuliani, like his friend President Trump, didn’t have them, either (in his case, more by choice).
But these days I wonder who can transcend them. I know Joe Biden wants to, but I sure don’t get the feeling the other side wants to play along. Lee Jones was righter than he knew, not just about 1993 but also about what’s unfolded ever since: The two coalitions have not only held; they’ve metastasized. I may be watching this movie the rest of my life.
It's interesting how they never say, "I don't need a pardon because I've done nothing wrong"...
Gov Stitt (R-OK) addresses the spread of Covid by encouraging people to go to church
https://kfor.com/news/local/gov-stitt-declares-day-of-prayer-and-fasting-for-those-impacted-by-covid-19/
Fasting as a way of supporting those with covid? That's even more useless than praying for them.
when you have a hammer...
Kelly Loeffler ad trying so hard to swing a fraction of minorities to vote for her because she's already locked up the racist & entitled vote
https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1333127337710399495
Scott Atlas resigns. Good f*&$%#@ riddance, but the damage is done.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/30/politics/scott-atlas-resigns-trump-administration-coronavirus-task-force/index.html
PRO
Lewis Hamilton has the 'rona
CAL
From the Front Page: RB DeShawn Collins (RS Jr) - who is not even on the roster - enters the transfer portal. Seven RBs still on roster.
https://writeforcalifornia.com/p/cal-running-back-deshawn-collins-transfer
Bears beat Nicholls State in mens' BB, 60-49. Not a bad win as their opponent finished 21-10 last season. Unfortunately Monty Bowser was injured and taken to the hospital.
Ya, it was a grind. Despite the inexplicable waiver denial for Hyder, Cal's nonetheless put together an interesting squad. If the Lars/Kuany/DJ Thorpe entity can give them ANYTHING consistently down low along with AK, this team could be competitive more often than I dared to hope. With some early season signs of a shift in Fox's game plan to shoot more 3's, which makes sense with Bradley, Grant, Makale and Betley, it's probably safe to say we could cause some problems to teams when 3 of those 4 are hot on the same night....that has yet to happen, so we shall see. But they'll be battling.
Sorry to hear that on Monty...hope it's only precautionary.