Daily Office:
Tuesday
Morning
¶ Bye, Bye, Bruno: New York State Senator Joseph L Bruno seems to have knocked all of Albany on its ear by announcing that he will not seek re-election.
Noon
¶ One Lump or Two?: First, the good news: U S Sugar will restore 187,000 acres of Florida land to the Everglades.
Night
¶ Sprawlwrong: Even more quickly than I’d expected, suburban sprawl not only looks like a bad idea but costs like one, according to Peter Goodman’s story from Denver. Between transport and heating, many Americans face a dismal, possibly dangerous winter. Suddenly, the way that I live (apartment footage in the three-digits squared; no car) looks like a far more viable template.
Oremus…
Morning, cont’d
§ Bruno. The Senate majority leader is one of the three men who run New York State — or, if you like, make sure that it doesn’t run. (The other two are the Governor and the Speaker of the Assembly.) In over thirty years in office, Mr Bruno has done his part to wear down procedural obstacles to autocracy, rendering the body that he leads an almost vestigial organ. It doesn’t have to be that way, and one hopes that his successor — perhaps not his immediate successor, but someone down the road — strips away the majority leader’s accreted powers.
New York’s senate, like the one in Washington, gives disproportionate representation to conservative, rural areas, and it is traditionally a Republican Party “stronghold.” The Assembly is just the opposite. How anything gets done… but of course nothing does get done.
Noon
§ Sugar. Now, the sad news: none of this is Fanjul land. The Fanjul brothers are holding on to their 400,o00 acres.
Night, cont’d
§ Spwrong. Schadenfreude, however, isn’t what I feel at all. Anger would be more like it. Even if what’s happening now could be postponed for fifty years, it’s obvious that our land-use and home-ownership policies are not the work of true leaders.