In the news business, a big heist pulled off “in broad daylight” commands attention. The extra nerve required of thieves brazen enough to do their dirty work without waiting for darkness makes their caper all the more sensational.
That’s why a certain select group of New Yorkers should be paying special attention to City Hall’s sudden and strange plan to cap Uber and other growing e-hail car services. Consumers, including tourists, love the convenience, and thousands of jobs are at stake, all of which lends a fishy smell to government efforts to stop progress.
Doubly strange are the details of the pols’ effort and the explanation for it.
First, some City Council members said they wanted to study the congestion impact of the rapid growth of livery cars. That sounded ominous, given that so much congestion is a result of city policies, from bike lanes to delayed green lights to pedestrian plazas, and the council never cared before.
Then the other shoe dropped. The council said it wanted to “freeze” the number of app-hailed cars for a year while the study played out, and the mayor’s office instantly shouted amen.
No previous traffic study ever required a freeze of emerging technology, a fact nobody attempted to defend. Instead, trying to add a sheen of class warfare, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s taxi boss, Meera Joshi, assailed Uber and Lyft as options that offer “instant gratification” for the “privileged.”
Stop right there — the fish clearly stinks from the head.
There’s something rotten at City Hall, and those certain select New Yorkers I have in mind are prosecutors. One or more of them ought to start digging. If my instincts and sources are right, a major scam is taking place in broad daylight — under the pretext of improving transportation.
The suspicions are not cut from whole cloth. Taxi moguls, meaning big owners of yellow medallions, have long been hefty donors to de Blasio, and gave over $500,000 to his mayoral campaign.
Similarly, council members pushing the legislation have been cozy with the owners, and one, Ydanis Rodriguez, head of the Transportation Committee, even suggested a bailout for owners because competition is lowering the value of the city-issued medallions.
The leader of the anti-Uber movement is Gene Freidman, the so-called taxi king because he owns over 900 medallions. He’s in a dispute with Citi over loans backed by medallions, and there have been reports that he’s a tax scofflaw who owes millions to the city and the state. He was a fundraising bundler for de Blasio’s campaign and has donated to the nonprofit mayor’s fund, according to Capital New York.
The pattern and the connections, along with the extraordinary attempt to protect a wealthy monopoly, raise suspicions that demand answers.
Who coordinated the push for the legislation? Who first suggested a cap for the non-medallion cars? Who suggested freezing the current numbers during the congestion study? What promises, if any, were made?
As one insider who knows the issues said to me, “There has to be a dirty deal here. The whole thing makes no sense otherwise.”
That argument is the only thing that does make sense. Consider that federal prosecutor Preet Bharara’s indictments of former Republican Senate leader Dean Skelos and former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a Democrat, hang on the charge they sold official actions for private gain.
The details are different, but the pattern here appears to be virtually identical. Perhaps there are reasonable explanations and innocent answers to the questions, but the facts in the public domain overwhelmingly suggest something’s not kosher.
Let the investigations begin.
Gretchen kvetchin’? No way!
Gretchen Carlson has done a remarkable thing. She’s written a memoir without trying to settle scores. Nor does the Fox News anchor complain about deprivation, disease or the unfairness of life itself.
Instead, she celebrates generations of her big, loving family. She is grateful for excellent teachers and generous mentors, and is happily devoted to her career, her family and her faith.
There aren’t many books like hers, called “Getting Real,” because publishers crave hardship porn. You know the type — life was rotten, I nearly died, but now I’m famous.
For sure, Carlson hit obstacles, but she never pretends that life was stacked against her. She just plowed ahead through pluck and determination.
She was chubby when she started in the beauty-pageant business, but trained hard and lost weight. She was too short, she feared, to be Miss America, but won the crown with a killer performance on her violin, on which she had attained concert-level skills through years of grueling practice. She graduated from Stanford, so don’t even start with the dumb-blonde jokes.
Carlson’s life is a success story, and she is proud and grateful. But don’t tell anybody. Let readers discover for themselves that happy lives also make good books.
Longevity tip: Fry, fry again
The world’s oldest living person is Susannah Mushatt Jones, who turned 116 Monday. She lives in Brooklyn and attributes her longevity to not smoking or drinking and getting “lots of sleep.”
Or maybe it’s the bacon. The London Telegraph reports that she starts each day with several strips, along with scrambled eggs and ground corn, and has a sign near her door saying, “Bacon makes everything better.”
There it is — the secret of life.
Smite makes right vs. ISIS
Although it’s too late to hope President Obama will change his approach to Islamic terrorism, there was an expectation he would say something new after Monday’s Pentagon briefing. Otherwise, why bother going public with a routine update?
Why, indeed? After the president finished, I found myself channeling Peggy Lee by asking, “Is that all there is?”
The president is his least inspiring when he’s talking about combating terrorism, and Monday was Exhibit A. His tone and body language never conveyed resolve.
Even worse was what he said. “Ideologies are not defeated with guns, they are defeated by better ideas and more attractive and more compelling vision,” he declared.
That’s ridiculous. Islamic State is not following a rational script drawn up by a debating society. It’s an army of bloodthirsty jihadists with no compunction about killing anyone and destroying anything that stands in their way.
Better ideas will come into play when their army has been defeated, just as Nazism, fascism and communism had to be defeated militarily before their ideas could be swept into the dustbin of history.
The second bit of presidential preening was Obama’s continuing refusal to utter the phrase “Islamic terrorism.” Usurping a job better left to Muslim clergy, he insisted, “We are fighting terrorists who distort Islam, and its victims are mostly Muslims.”
Whatever. In fact, those innocent Muslim victims are dying for lack of a better military force. But under Obama, America mostly quit the fight, and our allies lack the leadership to win.
Yes, that’s all there is. A catastrophe — bloody, horrible and unnecessary.