California's Employment Development Department Was Completed Unprepared for the Flood of New Claims During the Pandemic, And It's a Scandal of Lessons Not Learned During Earlier Crises, Such as the 'Great Recession'

Boy, is it ever a scandal. 

While New York is no doubt the worst state in its handling of the coronavirus pandemic and lockdown, the once-Golden State is so bad that Governor Newsom is nipping at Governor Cuomo's heels.

At LAT, "EDD’s lack of planning deprived jobless Californians of needed benefits amid pandemic, audit finds":

SACRAMENTO — Poor planning and ineffective management left California’s unemployment agency unprepared to help workers left jobless by the COVID-19 pandemic, and it failed to address problems in its system that were known for nearly a decade, according to an emergency state audit released Tuesday.

The report by State Auditor Elaine Howle was ordered by a bipartisan group of 40 state lawmakers who had criticized the state Employment Development Department for large backlogs of significantly delayed claims and its failure to prevent widespread fraud since the pandemic forced many businesses to close, putting millions of Californians out of work.

“Although it would be unreasonable to have expected a flawless response to such an historic event, EDD’s inefficient processes and lack of advanced planning led to significant delays in its payment of [unemployment insurance] claims,” Howle wrote to the governor and Legislature on Tuesday.

Howle said the agency was unable to automatically process nearly half of the claims submitted online between March and September 2020, and was forced to instead have the claims manually processed by staff.

“As a result, hundreds of thousands of claimants waited longer than 21 days — EDD’s measure of how quickly it should process a claim — to receive their first benefit payments,” Howle said. “EDD has begun to modify its practices and processes to increase the rate at which it automatically processes online claims, but the automation it has gained during the pandemic is not fully sustainable.”

The audit recommends the agency develop plans for times of high unemployment and address problems including call centers unable to handle large numbers of phone calls.

“EDD has at times been unable to help virtually any of the claimants that contact its call center and has not answered all web correspondence that claimants submit,” the audit said.

State lawmakers who requested the audit, including Assemblyman David Chiu (D-San Francisco), said Tuesday the report confirmed their worst fears about the agency’s preparedness and operations.

“This audit confirms that EDD has known it has been failing Californians for over a decade but hasn’t taken anywhere near the necessary steps to fix its situation,” Chiu said.

EDD director Rita Saenz, who took over the agency from outgoing director Sharon Hilliard on Jan. 1, told reporters Monday that she was working to address the problems in the state’s unemployment system, which has paid out an unprecedented $114 billion in benefits since the pandemic began in March 2020.

“We know that too many Californians are waiting on their payments, and we are working quickly to validate their claims and get their benefits to them,” Saenz said during a conference call.

In a written response to the audit released Tuesday, Saenz acknowledged that there were issues that needed to be addressed but said steps were being taken to improve the department.

“While there are additional improvements that EDD must make,” she said, “the department has taken steps to increase efficiencies, expedite payment processes and prevent fraud.”

The audit said the EDD knew of problems going back to the Great Recession of a decade ago but that in March 2020 the agency “had no comprehensive plan for how it would respond if California experienced a recession” and jobless claims surged.

“The 2020 claim surge was unprecedented and would have presented significant challenges no matter how prepared EDD was, but it failed to act comprehensively to prepare for downturns and to address known deficiencies,” the audit said.

Howle also said that EDD responded to the claim surge by suspending its determination of eligibility for most claimants, “thereby compromising the integrity of the UI program.”

State officials on Monday said they had confirmed that some $11.4 billion in benefits paid out by California involved fraud, and they are investigating suspicious claims involving another $19.3 billion in benefits.

Efforts to block fraud are hindering EDD’s work to get claims paid quickly, Saenz said.

“Security is stopping fraud and unfortunately creates longer waiting times,” she said. “Of course people are frustrated and angry.”

The lawmakers asked the state auditor to evaluate the performance of EDD call centers, the effects of the agency’s outdated technology, and the reasons for a backlog of delayed claims that last week totaled 941,000.

The EDD has made improvements in response to a strike team report by government experts in September, including hiring a contractor who put in place an identity verification system that allows more claims to be approved online, reducing the delays that accompany manual processing...

 

'This Is How Civil Society Disintegrates' (VIDEO)

Great video, c/o AoSHQ, "New York State Considering Bill Giving Mass-Murdering Governor Power to Imprison People Suspected of Being Sick and Forcibly Medicate Them."

Andrew Cuomo's last forcible-patient-relocation program consisted of stuffing covid-infected nursing home residents back into their nursing homes, guaranteeing that the entire home would be infected.

How many will he murder with his new power to forcibly cram people suspected of being sick with people who actually are sick?

Remember when we heard the Chinese were welding people inside their apartments and we thought, "Well, at least we're not an authoritarian communist state"?

We're now an authoritarian communist state...

Keep reading.

At the link: Canada's a "communist state" these days. That Gatineau raid is really frightening. 

At the video, "Is Canada becoming a police state? Gatineau (Quebec) police break up "unlawful" New Year's gathering. Of 6 people. The level of police force being deployed for Covid "restrictions" is getting obscene. ":

Staten Island Pub Declares Itself an 'Autonomous Zone' After Cuomo and De Blasio Impose NEW New York Restaurant Lockdown Order

From Ed Driscoll, at Instapundit, "IT’S THE WINTER OF LOVE ON STATEN ISLAND: NYC Pub Borrows a Page From Leftists in Lockdown Dispute."

A Weekend of Coincidences

Following-up, "Bomb and Knife Attacks Rattle the U.S."

Here's Robert Spencer, at FrontPage Magazine, "Incidents in NYC, New Jersey and Minnesota look an awful lot like jihad, but the denial is as thick as ever":

It was a weekend of coincidences: acts declared not to be terrorism that just happened to look a great deal like…terrorism.

After a bomb went off at 23rd Street and 6th Avenue in Manhattan and another bomb was found four blocks away, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said: In a press conference in the aftermath, New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio said, “This was an intentional act.” However, he added that he didn’t think it was terrorism, and refused to agree with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who said that the bombing was “obviously an act of terrorism.”

De Blasio’s position was entirely incoherent: what is an intentional bombing if it isn’t terrorism? Cuomo made a bit more sense as he explained that while it was obviously terrorism, “it’s not linked to international terrorism. In other words, we’ve found no ISIS connection.”

Very well. So he was leaving the door open to it being “right-wing extremists.” But was it an act of jihad? Both de Blasio and Cuomo were committed to denying that there is any jihad that has anything to do with terrorism in the first place, so they would never answer (or, given the state of the mainstream media, be asked) that question, but just to assert that the bombing was not terrorism, or international terrorism, did not entirely rule out that it may have been an act of Islamic jihadis. Yet De Blasio remained mystified: “We know it was a very serious incident, but we have a lot more work to do to be able to say what kind of motivation was behind this. Was it a political motivation? Was it a personal motivation? We do not know that yet.”

More.

America's First Major Socialist Party Debuts in Philadelphia

Heh.

At Instapundit, "FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: America’s First Major Socialist Party Debuts in Philadelphia."

And from Daniel Greenfield, at FrontPage Magazine, "Welcome to the Communist Party, U.S.A.":

Wearing a white pantsuit, Hillary Clinton plodded out on stage to accept the nomination that she had schemed, plotted, lied, cheated, rigged and eventually fixed a series of elections to obtain.

Then she claimed that she was accepting the nomination of a race she had rigged with “humility”.

Humility is not the first word that comes to mind when thinking of Hillary Clinton. It is not even the last word. It is not in the Hillary dictionary at all. But this convention was a desperate effort to humanize Hillary. Everyone, including her philandering husband and dilettante daughter, down to assorted people she had met at one point, were brought up on stage to testify that she really is a very nice person.

This wasn’t a convention. It was a series of character witnesses for a woman with no character. It was an extensive apology for the Left’s radical agenda cloaked in fake patriotism and celebrity adulation.

Sinclair Lewis famously said, "When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross". More accurately, when Communism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross. That’s what the Democratic National Convention was.

This night presented Hillary Clinton as all things to all people. She was a passionate fighter who found plenty of time to spend with her family. She is for cops and for cop-killers. She likes the Founding Fathers and political correctness. She wants Democrats to be the party of working people and of elitist government technocrats. And, most especially, she cares about people like you.

The convention, like everything about Hillary, was awkward and insincere.

There was Bernie glaring into the camera just as Hillary was thanking him for rallying a bunch of young voters whom she hoped to exploit. There was Chelsea Clinton reminding everyone that the Clintons are a dynasty and that everyone in it gets a job because of their last name, right before introducing her mother whose only real qualification for her belated entry into politics was her last name. And there was Jennifer Granholm who got an opportunity to have an incoherent public meltdown at the convention.

There’s the mandatory video explaining how Hillary Clinton personally hunted down Osama bin Laden while sitting in a chair. “She’s carrying the hope and the rage of an entire nation,” Morgan Freeman intones. Coming in November 2016. And Hillary Clinton will be played by Meryl Streep. Donald Trump is compared to Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It’s rather obvious even to the handful of Hillary supporters that their candidate fits the Ratched role much better than Trump does.

The audience was told incessantly that Hillary Clinton loves small children. Once would have been enough. Twice would have been enough. By the millionth repetition, it seems more like Hillary is the witch trying to lure children into her gingerbread house.

Helping out with that task were a continuing parade of young female celebrities. If you thought that Elizabeth Banks and Lena Dunham were awkward, just wait for Katy Perry and Chloe Moretz urging their cohort to go out there and vote for Hillary right after a bunch of ex-military people claim that the woman who helped ISIS take over two countries and the Muslim Brotherhood even more countries than that will be good for national security.

General John Allen, formerly of the Marine Corps, currently employed by Qatar’s pet Brookings think tank, insisted that only Hillary Clinton could defeat ISIS. That’s like saying that only Mrs. O’Leary’s cow could put out the Great Chicago Fire which she started. Furthermore Qatar played a major role in the expansion of Islamic terrorism that helped culminate in the current crisis.

There were treasonous Republicans, confused celebrities and a weirdly lifelike Nancy Pelosi. There was yet another New York politician likely to be indicted, Andy Cuomo, trying much too hard. But topping them all was Hillary Clinton who was in her manic mode, trying too hard to be human, and failing.

Eyes wide, looking suspiciously from side to side, shrilly barking lines into the microphone that stripped them of their emotional context, Hillary delivered both sides of her personality in one speech.

And both sides of her agenda.

The radical agenda of the Left was clumsily cloaked in references to the Founding Fathers. The same group of people whose names the Left want to see ground into the dirt. Hillary’s call for collectivism, the insistence that none of us can do anything as individuals, was dressed up in E Pluribus Unum and the Founding Fathers.

Sinclair Lewis was almost right. When Communism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag...

Keep reading.

At 48, Tony Hawk Lands the 900, 17 Years After He First Pulled It Off (VIDEO)

I'm 54, so back in the day, when I was skating the SoCal skatepark circuit at around 17, Tony Hawk would have been 11-years-old. He was already great then. No one had any idea, however, that he'd one day become the world's most successful (and famous) skateboarder.

The bonus here is how utterly clueless are Chris Cuomo and Alisyn Camerota. Such fake enthusiasm for something about which they know nothing and for which they literally couldn't care less.

Watch:

East Coast Region Reported Snowfalls Not Seen in Generations (VIDEO)

At the New York Times, "After East Coast Blizzard, the Cleanup and the Workweek Begin":

While New York City emerged from the season’s first blizzard with relatively little damage, the toll along the Eastern Seaboard as a whole was more sobering: 29 deaths related to the storm, thousands of homes without power and serious flooding in coastal areas.

The great dig-out began with officials in New York lifting a travel ban, and airlines and commuter railroads slowly resumed service.

In separate appearances on CNN on Monday morning, Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York said that most mass transportation services were operating normally for the morning commute, with the exception of some parts of the Long Island Rail Road, where workers were still struggling to remove snow and ice.

But in other places along the East Coast, the tone was less upbeat.

In Baltimore, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said on Sunday that she could not give a timeline for clearing the streets. In Washington, the leadership of the House of Representatives — scheduled to convene on Monday for a pro forma session — said no votes would be held this week. Federal offices will be closed on Monday, as will state offices in Maryland and Virginia.

“This was a major event,” Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia said during a news conference. “I caution everybody, this is going to take a long time to clean up this snow.” He said that crews from as far away as Connecticut were on the way to help.

For officials, Sunday was a day to transition from blizzard mode to cleanup. For those with no official role to play, it was a day for sledding, snowboarding or snowshoeing — or lobbing snowballs and building snowmen. The bleak gray of Saturday — and the piercing wind that drove the snow — gave way to bright colors on Sunday, with a warm orange sun climbing across a brilliant azure sky.

Officials prepared for Monday and the start of the workweek, when a challenge would be moving commuters over rail lines stiff from the weekend’s assault of snow and punishing temperatures. New York City, where schools will be open,faced another challenge — picking up busloads of schoolchildren in streets with snowdrifts on every corner.

On Monday morning, yellow school buses struggled and hordes of parents with small children staggered, but school started on schedule in Corona, Queens, after students arrived through streets still caked in snow.

“The mayor made his decision yesterday; school is open, so I don’t want him to miss a day,” said Luis Molina, 56, a cleaner, after he hugged and kissed his son, Jason Molina, 10, who is in fourth grade at Public School 19.

The storm swirled out to sea after brushing Massachusetts, leaving behind what the National Weather Service called “copious” accumulations from Virginia to New York: 29.2 inches at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, a record; 22.4 inches at Philadelphia International Airport; and 28.1 inches at Newark Liberty International Airport. In Washington, the National Zoo reported 22.4 inches for the weekend, and other places reported totals not seen in years if not generations: 28.2 inches in Roselle Park, N.J.; 33.5 inches in Frederick, Md.; 39 inches in Philomont, Va.; and 42 inches in Glengary, W.Va.

The Weather Service recorded 26.8 inches in Central Park, missing a record by one-tenth of an inch. But Saturday’s total of 26.6 inches was a record for a single day (the other 0.2 inches fell on Friday). The one-day record beat 24.1 inches, set during a two-day storm in 2006. That storm retained its place as the city’s snowiest.

Mayor Bill de Blasio said that major roads had been cleared by Sunday afternoon, putting much of the city in a position to ease back into weekday commuting routines on Monday. Tunnels and bridges into the city, all of which had been closed during the storm, reopened on Sunday, according to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

Service had been suspended during the storm on the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North Railroad, as well as the aboveground routes of the subway and on the Staten Island Railway. All started rolling again on Sunday, though some remained on reduced schedules. Buses in the city also returned to the streets...

Keep reading.

PREVIOUSLY: "Digging Out in Queens and the Bronx (VIDEO)."

Carly Fiorina's Not 'Snarling' at CNN's Chris Cuomo (VIDEO)

Here's Tom Boggioni --- the leftist idiot 'TBogg' --- at Raw Story (via Memeorandum), "WATCH: Carly Fiorina snarls at CNN host after he confronts her over Planned Parenthood smears."

She's not "snarling."

Watch for yourself, "Fiorina gets heated over Planned Parenthood."

REPORT: Syed Farook's Mother Active in 'Pro-Caliphate' Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA)

Following-up from previously, "Tashfeen Malik Was Driving Force in Terror Couple's Embrace of Jihad — #SanBernardino."

The Daily Caller has the report, via Memeorandum, "Shooter’s Mother Active In U.S. Branch of Pro-Caliphate Islamic Group."

And see Pamela Geller, "SB Jihadi’s Mother Active In U.S. Branch of Pro-Caliphate Islamic Group":

The family knows. They know everything.  As I explain here, it was obvious  when Chris Cuomo interviewed the Bernardino shooters’ family attorneys. Cuomo gave them a free pass and the family was  hostile, unrepentant. The family blamed the victims. They were a very tight family and they didn’t see a bomb making factory in the house? The neighbors were suspicious but the family wasn’t?

They go on to say the wife had no role in the murder or in the planning. This is morbidly comical, because according to numerous news reports, she is alleged to have “radicalized” her husband.

Attorney Muhammad said Tashfeen took care of the mother in the house. Are we expected to believe that the mother never saw anything?

“Shooter’s Mother Active In U.S. Branch of Pro-Caliphate Islamic Group,” Daily Caller, December 6, 2015

Rafia Farook, the mother of San Bernardino terrorist Syed Rizwan Farook, is an active member of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), a Muslim organization that promotes the establishment of a caliphate and has ties to a radical Pakistani political group called Jamaat-e-Islami.

Farook’s affiliation with ICNA was revealed on Friday when MSNBC and other new outlets scoured the Farooks’ apartment in Redlands, Cal. An MSNBC reporter found a certificate of appreciation presented to Safia Farook last summer by ICNA’s sisters’ wing.

On Wednesday, Syed Farook and his wife, Tashfeed Malik, killed 14 people during a holiday party being held for San Bernardino County workers in what the FBI considers a terrorist attack...

More.

Also at Red State, "Was Syed Farook’s Mother the Linchpin in the #SanBernardinoShooting."

New York to Crack Down on Times Square's Topless Women

I heard about this on O'Reilly. He was talking to Kennedy and Katie Pavlich, who obviously didn't approve.

But see CBS News, "Topless women in Times Square breaking the law, NY governor says."

And watch, at CBS News 2 New York, "Topless In Times Square."

Still more at the Wall Street Journal, "N.Y. Gov. Andrew Cuomo Joins Criticism of Times Square’s Topless Women."

Mayor Bill de Blasio Is Unpopular With White Voters

Heh.

The Democrat-left, still dividing the country along racial lines and pissing off voters. Good job progs!

At WSH, "New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio Is Unpopular With White Voters: Stark racial divide keeps widening over policing and income inequality; administration is ‘mindful’ of gap":

They are worried about crime. They don’t want to pay any more taxes. And they really, really miss Michael Bloomberg.
But to understand why many white voters are so down on New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, consider that some of them said they believed the feeling was mutual.

“He’s so down on me,” said Gene Reilly, a 71-year-old Democrat from Manhattan’s Cooper Square neighborhood who is white. “He’s looking out for the poor.”

Mr. de Blasio, also a Democrat, rode into office on a landslide in 2013, taking 73% of the vote. But the racial divide was there from the beginning. While winning 85% of Hispanic voters and 96% of black voters, he captured just 54% of the white vote.

A year and a half later, the mayor’s approval rating among whites is at 32%, according to a Wall Street Journal-NBC 4-Marist Poll in May. That compares with a 49% approval rating among Hispanics and 59% among blacks.

The heart of the mayor’s political support, in his campaign and in his administration, has been New Yorkers of color and liberals. They responded to his calls to address income inequality and de-emphasize long-standing policies that had a disproportionate impact on the poor and minorities, including the street-policing tactic known as stop-and-frisk.

Yet in interviews, many white voters said they were increasingly concerned about crime, and they faulted the mayor for how he had handled policing issues.

And many said the mayor’s loyalty to his base and his liberal agenda had left them uneasy.

Some cited his decision to continue a losing battle last year to raise taxes on the wealthy to pay for his prekindergarten program even after New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo had made state funding available.

“He thinks it’s all the fault of the rich,” said Aida Gurwicz, a 69-year-old retiree on the Upper East Side.

Some said they felt overlooked or even abandoned by the mayor.

“I think he has good intentions…yes, I’m glad you’re giving something to the lower class. But what about the middle class? He has to deliver something for us,” said Ellen Warmstein, 62, of Rockaway Beach.

And many white voters said they struggled to identify with Mr. de Blasio, who followed two mayors with deep reserves of white support— Rudolph Giuliani among the working class and Mr. Bloomberg among the well-to-do business set.

“He’s almost a social-communist,” Rochelle Weinberg, a Democrat from the Queens neighborhood of Forest Hills, said of the mayor. “He’s out of town all the time. He’s disrespectful and shows up late. I can’t stand him. Everything he does makes me angry.”

"Almost" a social-communist? Actually, De Blasio is a social-communist.

But keep reading.

The New Nationwide Crime Wave

From Heather Mac Donald, at WSJ, "The consequences of the ‘Ferguson effect’ are already appearing. The main victims of growing violence will be the inner-city poor":

@SykesCharlie @WSJ Libs don't care. This was never about Black lives mattering. It is about energizing the Black base for 2016 election.

— David A. Clarke, Jr. (@SheriffClarke) May 30, 2015

The nation’s two-decades-long crime decline may be over. Gun violence in particular is spiraling upward in cities across America. In Baltimore, the most pressing question every morning is how many people were shot the previous night. Gun violence is up more than 60% compared with this time last year, according to Baltimore police, with 32 shootings over Memorial Day weekend. May has been the most violent month the city has seen in 15 years.

In Milwaukee, homicides were up 180% by May 17 over the same period the previous year. Through April, shootings in St. Louis were up 39%, robberies 43%, and homicides 25%. “Crime is the worst I’ve ever seen it,” said St. Louis Alderman Joe Vacarro at a May 7 City Hall hearing.

Murders in Atlanta were up 32% as of mid-May. Shootings in Chicago had increased 24% and homicides 17%. Shootings and other violent felonies in Los Angeles had spiked by 25%; in New York, murder was up nearly 13%, and gun violence 7%.

Those citywide statistics from law-enforcement officials mask even more startling neighborhood-level increases. Shooting incidents are up 500% in an East Harlem precinct compared with last year; in a South Central Los Angeles police division, shooting victims are up 100%.

By contrast, the first six months of 2014 continued a 20-year pattern of growing public safety. Violent crime in the first half of last year dropped 4.6% nationally and property crime was down 7.5%. Though comparable national figures for the first half of 2015 won’t be available for another year, the January through June 2014 crime decline is unlikely to be repeated.

The most plausible explanation of the current surge in lawlessness is the intense agitation against American police departments over the past nine months.

Since last summer, the airwaves have been dominated by suggestions that the police are the biggest threat facing young black males today. A handful of highly publicized deaths of unarmed black men, often following a resisted arrest—including Eric Garner in Staten Island, N.Y., in July 2014, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in August 2014 and Freddie Gray in Baltimore last month—have led to riots, violent protests and attacks on the police. Murders of officers jumped 89% in 2014, to 51 from 27.

President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, before he stepped down last month, embraced the conceit that law enforcement in black communities is infected by bias. The news media pump out a seemingly constant stream of stories about alleged police mistreatment of blacks, with the reports often buttressed by cellphone videos that rarely capture the behavior that caused an officer to use force.

Almost any police shooting of a black person, no matter how threatening the behavior that provoked the shooting, now provokes angry protests, like those that followed the death of Vonderrit Myers in St. Louis last October. The 18-year-old Myers, awaiting trial on gun and resisting-arrest charges, had fired three shots at an officer at close range. Arrests in black communities are even more fraught than usual, with hostile, jeering crowds pressing in on officers and spreading lies about the encounter.

Acquittals of police officers for the use of deadly force against black suspects are now automatically presented as a miscarriage of justice. Proposals aimed at producing more cop convictions abound, but New York state seems especially enthusiastic about the idea.

The state’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, wants to create a special state prosecutor dedicated solely to prosecuting cops who use lethal force. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo would appoint an independent monitor whenever a grand jury fails to indict an officer for homicide and there are “doubts” about the fairness of the proceeding (read: in every instance of a non-indictment); the governor could then turn over the case to a special prosecutor for a second grand jury proceeding.

This incessant drumbeat against the police has resulted in what St. Louis police chief Sam Dotson last November called the “Ferguson effect.” Cops are disengaging from discretionary enforcement activity and the “criminal element is feeling empowered,” Mr. Dotson reported. Arrests in St. Louis city and county by that point had dropped a third since the shooting of Michael Brown in August. Not surprisingly, homicides in the city surged 47% by early November and robberies in the county were up 82%.

Similar “Ferguson effects” are happening across the country as officers scale back on proactive policing under the onslaught of anti-cop rhetoric. Arrests in Baltimore were down 56% in May compared with 2014...

Keep reading.

And at Twitchy, "‘The New National Crime Wave’ explores the consequences of the ‘Ferguson effect’."

New York Officials Defend Decision to Shut Down New York City

Hmm...

The storm wasn't as bad as folks has expected, although I don't take the "worst blizzard in history" prognostications too seriously. Someone's got an invested interest in climate hysteria.

At NYT, "Leaders in New York and New Jersey Defend Shutdown for a Blizzard That Wasn’t":

It was an unprecedented step for what became, in New York City, a common storm: For the first time in its 110-year history, the subway system was shut down because of snow.

Transit workers, caught off guard by the shutdown that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced on Monday, scrambled to grind the network to a halt within hours.

Residents moved quickly to find places to stay, if they were expected at work the next day, or hustle home before service was curtailed and roads were closed.

And Mayor Bill de Blasio, whose residents rely upon the transit system by the millions, heard the news at roughly the time the public did.

“We found out,” Mr. de Blasio said on Tuesday, “just as it was being announced.”

The storm largely spared the city, instead battering eastern Long Island and much of New England, where Nantucket lost power and Scituate, Mass., flooded.

And on Tuesday, local and state officials were left to defend one of the most consequential decisions elected leaders can make: effectively closing a city, in light of an uncertain forecast.

With travel bans instituted across the region, residents had little choice but to heed the warnings to stay put. Even as roads reopened and trains creaked back to life early Tuesday, there would be no normal business day, even though most parts of the city received less than 10 inches of snow, not the two to three feet that had been predicted.

The weather laid bare the civic and political high-wire act of the modern snowstorm — pocked with doomsayer proclamations and sporadic lapses in communication.

At the episode’s heart is the sort of damned-if-you-do decision that has bedeviled politicians for decades: Play it safe with closings, all but guaranteeing sweeping economic losses, or try to ride out the storm?

“I would much rather be in a situation where we say we got lucky than one where we didn’t get lucky and somebody died,” Mr. Cuomo said.

Briefings and interviews with officials suggest that recent challenges — including Hurricane Sandy, a snowstorm in Buffalo and public spats between top local leaders and forecasters — have left decision-makers even more risk-averse.

As the storm approached, a sort of one-upmanship theater had visited the local political stage: Mr. Cuomo’s announcement about the subway shutdown came hours after the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority suggested a full shutdown was unlikely. New Jersey Transit riders were told on Monday afternoon not to expect rail service until Thursday...

More.

Mario Cuomo Dies at 82

Cuomo spoke at Fresno State back in 1992. Definitely an icon of traditional Democratic Party liberalism. No one could articulate the vision of liberal activist government as he could. He was an interesting man.

Here's the outstanding obituary, at the New York Times, "Mario Cuomo, Governor, Governor’s Father and an Eloquent Liberal Beacon, Dies at 82":

In an era when liberal thought was increasingly discredited, Mr. Cuomo, a man of large intellect and often unrestrained personality, celebrated it, challenging Ronald Reagan at the height of his presidency with an expansive and affirmative view of government and a message of compassion, tinged by the Roman Catholicism that was central to Mr. Cuomo’s identity.

A man of contradictions who enjoyed Socratic arguments with himself, Mr. Cuomo seemed to disdain politics even as he embraced it. “What an ugly business this is,” he liked to say. Yet he reveled in it, proving himself an uncommonly skilled politician and sometimes a ruthless one.

He was a tenacious debater and a spellbinding speaker at a time when political oratory seemed to be shrinking to the size of the television set. Delivering the keynote address at the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, he eclipsed his party’s nominee, former Vice President Walter F. Mondale, seizing on Reagan’s description of America as “a shining city on a hill” to portray the president as unaware of impoverished Americans. “Mr. President,” he said, “you ought to know that this nation is more a ‘tale of two cities’ than it is just a ‘shining city on a hill.’ ”

The speech was the high-water mark of his national political career, making him in many ways a more admired figure outside his state than in it.

RTWT. (Via Memeorandum.)

No Deep Bench: Democrat Party Hollowed Out — No, Eviscerated! — After 6 Years of Epic Obama Failure

Basically, at the national level after Obama, the Democrats are the party of old white people. Obama's eviscerated the party — left it without a deep bench of talent — and the political greed of Hillary Clinton guarantees to keep it that way.

Oh poor progs! It wasn't supposed to be like this.

The old hag Debbie Wasserman Schultz is even packing her bags, lol!

Amazing piece from the far-left correspondent Dan Balz, at the Washington Post, "Two midterm elections have hollowed out the Democratic Party":

When President Obama was elected in 2008, his victory signaled a generational change and the prospect of renewal for the Democratic Party. Instead, the opposite has occurred. Over the past six years, the party has been hollowed out.

The past two midterm elections have been cruel to Democrats, costing them control of the House and now the Senate, and producing a cumulative wipeout in the states. The 2010 and 2014 elections saw the defeat of younger politicians — some in office, others seeking it — who might have become national leaders.

As the post-Obama era nears, the Democrats’ best-known leaders in Washington are almost entirely from an older generation, from the vice presidency to most of the major leadership offices in the House and Senate. The generation-in-waiting will have to wait longer.

Presidential campaigns and open nomination contests help bring new leaders to national prominence. That appears unlikely in 2016. For all her positive attributes, former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton is a suffocating presence when it comes to intraparty presidential competition. Her command of the Democratic machinery, from fundraising to grass-roots organizing, is so extensive that almost everyone else is understandably intimidated about even testing their talents against her.

Think of it this way: If Clinton were to win the presidency and serve two terms, the next opportunity for a new generation of Democrats to compete nationally would not come until 2024. The Democrats could go 16 years between competitive presidential nomination contests, wiping out opportunities for today’s younger generation to define or redefine the party apart from either the Obama or Clinton eras.

But don’t blame Clinton for these problems. The party’s national bench is so thin that Democrats count themselves lucky to have her available in 2016. If she were to decide not to run, the Democrats would have trouble identifying a field of candidates as extensive as Republicans are likely to put up in the coming presidential race.

The last competitive nomination campaign, in 2008, included — in addition to Obama and Clinton — an experienced field: then-senators Joe Biden, Christopher Dodd and John Edwards, and then-governor Bill Richardson. Clinton has been on the national stage for two decades. Biden, who might run if Clinton does not, was elected to the Senate four decades ago. Dodd and Richardson are out of office. Edwards is in disgrace. With the obvious exceptions, that field has disappeared.

Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley has been moving toward a presidential candidacy. But he suffered a significant setback in Tuesday’s midterms when his state turned to Republican Larry Hogan to replace him. Sen. Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.) has a populist message for Democrats, but he is not going to be the party’s future. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts is a favorite of progressives and capable of stirring passions, but she shows no serious signs of running as long as Clinton is in the race, and perhaps even if Clinton isn’t.

The more serious problem for Democrats is the drubbing they’ve taken in the states, the breeding ground for future national talent and for policy experimentation. Republicans have unified control — the governorship and the legislature — in 23 states, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Democrats control just seven. Democrats hold 18 governorships, but only a handful are in the most populous states.

In California, Gov. Jerry Brown won again at age 76, his fourth, non-consecutive term in the governor’s office. His victory means that younger Democrats will have to wait until 2018 to compete for one of the nation’s most high-profile political jobs. In New York, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo won a second term, but can’t get out of Clinton’s shadow. The only other state among the top 10 in population held by the Democrats is Pennsylvania, newly won by Tom Wolf.

Meanwhile, Republicans control governorships in Florida, Texas, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia and Massachusetts. Democrats were hoping to knock off Republicans Scott Walker in Wisconsin, Rick Scott in Florida and Rick Snyder in Michigan. All survived. In Ohio, John Kasich won by the second-largest margin in state history, thanks in part to the implosion of his Democratic opponent.

Ohio is an interesting case study of the fortunes of the two parties. It has been ground zero in presidential campaigns for years. Obama won it twice — but at the state level, Republicans are firmly in control. GOP candidates have won all the statewide elected offices there in five of the past six elections.

Without prominent statewide elected leaders, Democrats are in danger of seeing their state party structures atrophy. This has happened in Texas over the past two decades, ever since Republicans seized control of the politics of the state...

Ah, yes.

Texas, where some Democrat Party Einstein thought Abortion Barbie would turn the state blue. Wrong, she turned the state even more blood red.

But continue reading. But beware, it ain't pretty for this dirtbag party of epic losers.

IMAGE CREDIT: The People's Cube.

Obama Built That: Democrat 'Majority Coalition' Shrinks After Midterm Debacle

From Michael Barone, at IBD, "After Republican Wave, Obama Majority Has Shrunk":

Some observations on the election:

1) This was a wave, folks. It will be a benchmark for judging waves, for either party, for years.

2) In seriously contested races, Republican candidates were generally younger, more vigorous, more sunny and optimistic than Democrats. The contrast was sharpest in Colorado and Iowa, which voted twice for President Obama. Cory Gardner and Joni Ernst seemed to be looking forward to the future. Their opponents grimly championed the stale causes of feminists and trial lawyers of the past.

Democrats see themselves as the party of the future. But their policies are antique. The federal minimum wage dates to 1938, equal pay for women to 1963, access to contraceptives to 1965. Raising these issues now is campaign gimmickry, not serious policymaking.

Democratic leading lights have been around a long time. The party’s two congressional leaders are in their 70s. The governors of the two largest Democratic states are sons of former governors who won their first statewide elections in 1950 and 1978.

This has implications for 2016. Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee, worked in her first campaign in 1970. She has been a national figure since 1991. The Clintons’ theme song, “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow,” was released in 1977. That will be 39 years ago in 2016.

3) The combination of Obama’s low job approval and Harry Reid’s virtual shutdown of the Senate ensured a Republican Senate majority. Reid prevented amendments — Mark Begich of Alaska never got to introduce one — that could have helped them in campaigns.

Votes were blocked on issues with clear Senate majorities — such as the Keystone XL pipeline, medical-device tax repeal, and the bipartisan patent-reform bill backed by Judiciary chairman Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.0.

That left Democrats running for reelection stuck with 95-plus percent Obama voting records. It left them with no independent votes or initiatives to point to. Reid kept Democratic candidates well stocked with money. But not with winning issues.

4) Democratic territory has been reduced to the bastions of two core groups — black voters and gentry liberals. Democrats win New York City and the San Francisco Bay area by overwhelming margins but are outvoted in almost all the territory in between — including, this year, Obama’s Illinois. Governor Jerry Brown ran well behind in California’s Central Valley, and Governor Andrew Cuomo lost most of upstate New York.

Democratic margins have shrunk among Hispanics and, almost to the vanishing point, among young voters. Liberal Democrats raised money to “turn Texas blue.” But it voted Republican by wider-than-usual margins this year.

Under Obama, the Democratic base has shrunk numerically and demographically. With superior organization, he was able to stitch together a 51 percent majority in 2012. But like other Democratic majority coalitions — Woodrow Wilson’s, Lyndon Johnson’s, even Franklin Roosevelt’s — it has proved to be fragile and subject to fragmentation.

5) In many states — including many carried twice by Obama — Republicans have been governing successfully, at least in the estimation of their voters. Governor Scott Walker has won his third victory in four years in Wisconsin against the frantic efforts of public-employee unions.

Governor John Kasich won a landslide victory against a flawed opponent in Ohio, and Governor Rick Snyder won solidly in Michigan after signing a right-to-work law hated by private-sector unions. In Florida, Governor Rick Scott’s second consecutive one-point victory means that Republicans will be in control for 20 years in what is now the nation’s third-largest state.

Democratic governance, in contrast, was rebuked by the voters in Massachusetts, in Maryland (with the nation’s fourth-highest black population in percentage terms), and in Obama’s home state of Illinois.

(6) The Obama Democrats labor under the illusion that a beleaguered people hunger for an ever-bigger government. The polls and the election results suggest, not so gently, otherwise.

The fiasco of HealthCare.gov, the misdeeds of the IRS, the improvisatory warnings of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — all undermine confidence in the capacity of big government. Looking back over the last half-century, we can see that the highest levels of trust in government came, interestingly, during the administration of Ronald Reagan.

7) This election was a repudiation of the big-government policies of the Obama Democrats. It was not so much an endorsement of Republicans as it was an invitation to them to come up with better alternative policies...

Scott Wiener, of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Takes Truvada to Prevent Contracting AIDS

From homosexual Josh Barro, at the New York Times, "San Francisco Official Says He Takes Truvada to Prevent H.I.V., and More Gay Men Should, Too":

Scott Wiener, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, made an unusual public announcement on Wednesday: He takes Truvada, a daily antiviral pill, to greatly reduce his risk of contracting H.I.V.

Taking the pills is a practice known as pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, and some researchers believe it may reduce the risk of infection by 99 percent if patients take their medication daily as prescribed. Approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2012, PrEP has increasingly been embraced by public health authorities and is one of three planks of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s plan in New York to sharply cut new H.I.V. infections.

But it carries a stigma in some parts of the gay population, and Mr. Wiener appears to be the first public official to disclose that he’s personally on it.

“A much larger segment of gay men should be taking a close look at PrEP,” Mr. Wiener, who represents the same Castro-based district once held by Harvey Milk, said in an interview on Wednesday. “I hope that my being public about my use of PrEP can help people take a second look at it.”

Oh, preventing HIV carries a "stigma" in the homosexual population, you know, among the bare-backing rim-station demographic, folks who Walter James Casper thinks are just swell.

It's not a healthy lifestyle. Indeed, young homosexual men of color are the most likely demographic cohort to contract and die from AIDS. But hey, wouldn't want to discourage that kind of bare-backing promiscuity, because bigotry!!!

More at the link.

Peter Lavelle, 'Russia Today' Propagandist, Blames Ukraine for #MH17 Downing

Wow, these Russia Today stooges are completely whacked.

At Mediaite, "CNN’s Cuomo to RT Anchor: Why Are You Carrying Water for Russia?

The full interview's at that link.

Excerpts here:

Sean Hannity to Leave New York After Gov. Andrew Cuomo Rant Attacking Conservatives

At Instapundit, "THE EXODUS IS HERE: Sean Hannity to Leave New York After Andrew Cuomo’s Anti-Conservative Rant."

He's not kidding. Listen at the Right Scoop, "Hannity to Cuomo: I’m leaving New York and I’m taking all my money with me…"

Cuomo's Version of Liberal Tolerance

From Jonathan Tobin, at Commentary.

Also at Blazing Cat Fur, "VIDEO: Governor Cuomo: Pro-Life People Have 'No Place in the State of New York'."

And to think, I used to respect Cuomo's father, Mario. But peel off a few layers and all leftists are ultimately totalitarians.