Squadron Opens Mobile District Offices
When covering a district that includes two boroughs, it can be helpful to load up the staff, hop in a bus (we’re imagining) and meet with constituents. Instead of the bus route, State Sen. Daniel Squadron will open four mobile district offices this month in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn in an attempt to get closer to residents and speak directly with community members. The offices will be located around the 25th District, which he serves. Locations will be located in Tribeca, at Brooklyn Borough Hall, the Lower East Side and Chinatown. For more info on these mobile locations, visit the senator’s website at www.nysenate.gov/senator/daniel-l-squadron.

Federal Government Makes a Return to World Trade Center
The U.S. General Services Agency (GSA) signed a lease last week to rent space in One World Trade Center, the soon-to-be-tallest building in the Western Hemisphere.

The administration will occupy about 270,000 square feet of space on six floors starting in 2015; with the signing of this agreement, more than 55 percent of the building has been leased.

“This reaffirms the federal government’s commitment to the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site and to this project that demonstrates the undaunted resilience of the American people,” said GSA Acting Administrator Dan Tangherlini. “There will once again be a federal presence in the World Trade Center, as there was from its beginning. We worked closely with the Port Authority and the Durst Organization to negotiate a lease that will result in the best value for taxpayers, the federal government and the City of New York.”

Lower Manhattan M9 Bus Changes Route for the Better
Transportation headaches for those living in Battery Park City might soon be soothed as the MTA is set to restore M9 bus service in January 2013. A large section of this particular bus route was forgone two years ago in order to close a gap of nearly $900 million in the MTA’s budget, to the dismay of residents.

Once the full route is reinstated, it will include stops in the East Village, the Lower East Side, Chinatown and City Hall, saving residents from wasting time taking multiple buses. The route will also extend northward, providing stops at Bellevue Hospital Center and the NYU Medical Center.

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver applauded the news last Tuesday, saying the restored service will help rebuild the Lower Manhattan community.

“I recently approached MTA Chair Joseph Lhota to discuss the importance of restoring this service for the residents, workers and visitors to Battery Park City,” said Silver. “Enhancing important transportation links for residents, workers and students as well as visitors to my Lower Manhattan community is critical as we continue to grow and renew our neighborhoods.”

Senator Squadron Welcomes New Beer Production Tax Credit
It’s good news for breweries. Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently signed legislation to reinstate a beer production tax credit. New York breweries that produce less than 60 million gallons of beer will utilize the tax credit of 14 cents per gallon of beer sold in the state and 12 more cents per gallon of beer sold in the city for the first 200,000 barrels of beer.

This came after State Sens. Squadron and Lee Zeldin, U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer and Assemblyman Joe Lentol met with local brewers to announce a bipartisan plan to reinstate the credit and protect New York’s small brewers.

Such brewers include the local Brooklyn Brewery, which is in Squadron’s district, Kelso in Clinton Hill and about 90 others in parts of Long Island and New York.

“From the good jobs they create to the great beer they produce, New York’s brewers are key to New York’s economy,” said Squadron in a statement. “By reinstating the beer production credit, we’re serving New York’s brewers, consumers and economy alike, allowing our small businesses to keep growing while keeping their brews affordable,” he said.

Courtesy of Summer In The Square.

Attack of the Bubbles at Union Square
Kids and parents alike were bubbling over The Gazillion Bubble Show at Union Square last week. The performance, which has been popular at New World Stages since 2007, was part of the Union Square Partnership’s 2012 Summer in the Square series that holds events every Thursday from morning to evening. Bubbles of all shapes and sizes floated through the air at the bubble-making demonstration and performance, all to the delight of the young children in attendance.

Photo by Andrew Schwartz

After four years as editor in chief of The Onion, comedian Joe Randazzo is leaving the paper, and America’s self-proclaimed “finest news source” is relocating its offices from New York to Chicago. City & State editor Morgan Pehme talks with Randazzo about his tenure at the helm of the popular satiric publication and asks him if there’s anything funny about Andrew Cuomo.

City & State: What’s so funny about politics?

Joe Randazzo: You have a high concentration of egotistical people who oftentimes put their worst qualities forward to get noticed and to be recognized, and this lack of compassion, humanism and altruism often leads to success in politics. These are the worst qualities of humankind that people who are being put forth to represent all of humankind are embodying, so that inherently is a tragically hilarious juxtaposition.

CS: How seriously does The Onion take itself?

JR: I think it’s understood that there’s this bedrock responsibility to speak truth to power, to call out bullsh-t when The Onion sees it or hears it, and to always try to fall on the right side of issues, to never be against the victim—and not to try to maintain objectivity but to keep any target open, so Democrats are just as open to ridicule as Republicans. But in order to get to the good jokes that make The Onion successful, all the writers have to do is make each other laugh. I think a responsibility to the broader social conversation is genetically encoded in The Onion as an institution and that rubs off on the writers, but on a daily basis Onion writers aren’t thinking about their responsibility or taking themselves very seriously. It just needs to be funny jokes.

CS: At The Onion, are you a journalist first or a comedian?

JR: I come from a little bit of a journalism background. I majored in journalism at Emerson and I worked for NPR, but I’m definitely a comedian first.

CS: Earlier this year, Rep. John Fleming of Louisiana mistakenly thought a story in The Onion about a planned “AbortionPlex” was genuine. On other occasions The New York Times and Fox News have reported on your articles as fact. How blurry is the line between real news and fake news in the current media environment?

JR: That one was really wonderful, because the whole point of the AbortionPlex story itself was to try to give as much credence to what we imagined every right-wing nut job’s worst nightmare of Planned Parenthood could be and to explore that and give it The Onion treatment, which is to present it in a very dry, authoritative way. That’s our formula; that’s the lens through which we observe the world—that’s where 90% of our comedy comes from—so when we do it really well, sometimes people who aren’t familiar with us take it seriously. I think it does to a degree speak to—especially during the Bush Administration and the rise of FOX News, not that Rupert Murdoch is an evil person, per se—this sort of reinventing news as entertainment that that has really taken hold in American culture.

I think in [Rep. Fleming’s] case, he’s a pandering guy who’s not that intelligent, who thought that something obscenely ridiculous like the AbortionPlex could ever possibly be real. But actually, one of the things that lent it some credence was that somebody went and created an actual Yelp site for the AbortionPlex—we didn’t solicit this, they just did this of their own accord, organically—and hundreds of people who were in on the joke started giving it thumbs up or thumbs down and writing reviews like “It was great! My husband and I are going to go there every year for our anniversary” and stuff like that, which sort of gave texture to this world we created that we never could have done on our own. I think that story, paired with that kind of real-world response to it, painted this picture that for some people made it much easier to believe that it was real, even though the story itself was ridiculous. I mean, it’s a $7 billion AbortionPlex or something like that, where they’re killing, like, 1500 babies a minute. There’s waterslides, and you can have a martini while you wait. It’s like there’s no way that would ever be real, even from Planned Parenthood. It’s delightful when people take that stuff seriously.

CS: Does constantly mocking hypocrisy and ineptitude in government make you hopelessly cynical about the state of our country?

JR: I think a lot of comedians are cynical. I’m generalizing, but comedians tend to be fairly sensitive people who have to kind of harden their souls to the fact that they’re going to get hurt, and that everybody’s going to get hurt, and that people are imperfect and that, you know, ultimately we’re all going to die. I think that’s actually the background of every comedian’s mind. So, I think there’s a side to that sensitivity that hopes for good, that wants to be optimistic, that wants to be idealistic, but that’s a vulnerable place to be, and rather than going out and trying to collect names for Children’s International, comedians write nasty jokes about Rush Limbaugh. Personally, I wouldn’t say that I’m cynical, but I’m not an activist.

I think that our country, if we continue on this path which is consumed with the endless obsession with consumption—that’s physically unsustainable, spiritually unsustainable, and culturally unsustainable. Politics is just a reflection of that, trying to keep order out of all these different types and groups of people, who are all basically just trying to get by in a material world—I think Madonna said that at some point. So I don’t actual think I’m cynical, but I’m not holding out a lot of hope for, like, big change. For one thing, we’ll probably have to wipe out, like, three quarters of the population maybe before anything good can happen, and that’s okay, I’m comfortable with that. I’m just enjoying my life while I can before the big purge comes.

CS: As a comedic journalist, when scandals like the ones that brought down Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer hit the papers, do you just think to yourself, Thank you!?

JR: Something like Eliot Spitzer or Anthony Weiner is a little more in the purview, from The Onion point of view, of late-night talk shows, like one-liners and zingers. The Onion tends not to really comment on those types of little blips, and when we do it tends to be more of a comment on the media’s take on something. We try to write stories that can be evergreen, that you can read in 10 years and they would still make some sense. We try to look at it with more than a 24-hour news cycle mentality. When Anthony Weiners come up I think we actually say, “Sh-t!” because we have to either figure out a joke that nobody else has done, or we won’t be able to cover it at all.

CS: The Onion hasn’t really run a satiric article featuring Andrew Cuomo since his days as HUD Secretary. Is there just nothing funny about Cuomo to write about?

JR: I don’t think there is. He’s boring, right? That’s his whole thing?

CS: In 2009 The Onion was awarded a Peabody, and last year you actively campaigned for a Pulitzer. Does The Onion really deserve journalism’s highest award or was that just a shameless publicity stunt?

JR: I think that we would all actually really like to win a Pulitzer—and now that I’m leaving in two days, I think I can say that The Onion absolutely does deserve a Pulitzer. In terms of commentary I don’t think there’s anyone who has consistently done a better job with sort of more integrity that The Onion has. The Onion also does lots of stupid, horrible jokes that have no business being published, but I think there isn’t any other organization that has for 20 years observed the American condition as consistently as The Onion has. It’s been amazing to be able to work for them for six years. The Pulitzer campaign was definitely tongue-in-cheek. It was meant to be sort of a comment on awarding prizes for journalism, which is kind of a weird thing. In many ways, even though you are talking about things that are supposed to be good for the community, it can get wrapped up in just as much vanity as the Academy Awards can. So we thought it would be funny, instead of pretending we don’t care about prizes like many news outlets do, just shamelessly going for one and saying we will actually just buy one from you, if you allow us to do it.

To read the full article at City & State click here.

From City & State’s Heard Around Town, May 22, 2012:

Add another very explosive element to the mix in the 2013 New York City mayoral race. Randy Credico, a political comedian and activist who is well-known in New York politics, will kick off his mayoral bid on June 7 at Rocky Sullivan’s, a bar in Red Hook, Credico confirmed in an interview last night. “All of the other candidates are hacks, and there will now be a candidate in the race that represents real progressives,” Credico said, citing what he described as less as impressive support for abolishing stop-and-frisk by the other contenders as the main issue he will be pushing. Credico, known for his frequent pranks, also said he would be producing and circulating videos mocking the other mayoral contenders, including one featuring former Republican New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani endorsing Council Speaker and mayoral front-runner Christine Quinn. A strident opponent of the now-abolished Rockefeller Drug Law, Credico ran an unsuccessful and uphill campaign in 2010 against Democratic U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer.

To read more from City & State click here.

Later, Chuck Schumer took on D’Amato and beat him, and now Schumer has won the Trifecta himself. He is thought to have gotten Kirsten Gillibrand selected by Gov. David Paterson to be U.S. Senator. Now it looks like Schumer got the President of the United States to call Rep. Steve Israel, who would have defeated Gillibrand in a primary, to ask him to stay out of the race. Finally, Chuck has just had his staff counsel named U.S. Attorney for the Southern District, probably the most powerful in the United States.

It would appear that Chuck Schumer may be the most powerful politician in the United States. After all, he is generally credited with having delivered the U.S. Senate to Democrats. The party owes him a lot, and the President owes him a lot.

So let’s see whether this is good for the people and for democracy. Primaries were invented to give people a choice. When the country passed a constitutional amendment providing for the direct election of senators and getting that choice out of the hands of the cigar-smoking backroom boys, it was a good thing for democracy. When a President makes a telephone call and tells a fine candidate to get out of the race, it is decidedly not a good thing, especially when it would appear that Israel was the leading candidate. One can only wonder if, with Chuck whispering his ear, Obama called the others whose names have been mentioned, like Carolyn Maloney and Carolyn McCarthy.

Chuck once called and asked if he could come to Albany to announce that he would vote for the war in Iraq. I was delighted to host him, even though I was certainly opposed to the war. It was a great thing for the public radio stations I run, but because I wanted to keep things from degenerating, I announced we would have audience members write their questions on cards and I would read the cards to the senator. When I came into the hall, an older man was yelling at a staff member that he “…didn’t care who I was and he was going to stand up and have it out with the $%^&^*”

I asked him to lower his voice and told him I expected him to play by the rules, at which point the guy standing next to him threw a cup of hot coffee at my head. Someone called the police, who asked if I wanted to press charges. I declined. But the best part came when Chuck walked into the hall and asked in a loud voice, “Where’s the peacenik who threw the hot coffee at Chartock?” That was Chuck at his funniest and his best. Now I think the situation may be becoming more serious.
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Alan S. Chartock is president and CEO of WAMC/Northeast Public Radio and an executive publisher at The Legislative Gazette.