October 20, 2024

The Ongoing Erosion Of Welfare Reform In New York

October 20, 2024/ Francis Menton

When I started this blog back in 2012, we were just coming to the end of 20 years of Republican, or quasi-Republican, New York City mayors (Giuliani and Bloomberg), who also had support from a newly-Republican Congress elected in 1994.
One of the great triumphs of that era was welfare reform. The new Republican Congress made reform of welfare a priority, and after their first efforts were vetoed by President Clinton, in August 1996 he signed a compromise bill called the Personal Responsibility and Work Reconciliation Act. Among the reforms contained in that Act were time limits and work requirements for welfare recipients.
It’s now nearly 11 years since Bloomberg left office, and the goal of minimizing welfare dependency is long gone and forgotten.

October 18, 2024

The DEFR Follies -- Cost Of Hydrogen Storage

October 18, 2024/ Francis Menton

Here in New York we have our own unique and special acronym for how we think we are going to make our future emissions-free electrical grid work with predominantly wind and solar generation. The acronym is DEFR — the “Dispatchable Emissions-Free Resource.”
When the sun goes down and the wind stops blowing in the dead of winter, we will crank up the DEFR to keep us all warm and cozy. There will of course be zero carbon emissions, because by definition the DEFR is “emissions-free.”
Unfortunately nobody is quite sure what this DEFR might be.
There are only a few options. Nuclear could work, but in New York it is completely blocked by regulatory obstruction and the certainty of decades of litigation. Batteries are wildly too expensive and physically not up to the job.
That leaves many green energy advocates grasping at hydrogen as the last remaining option. Granted, we don’t yet have any meaningful production of hydrogen from carbon-free sources. But it seems so simple: just use wind and solar generators to run electrolyzers to make hydrogen from water; then store the hydrogen in some big caverns, and burn it when you need it. No carbon is involved. Problem solved!

October 16, 2024

October 16, 2024/ Francis Menton

The American presidency has definitely had its ups and downs over the years, but at least the occupants of the office, and the contenders who have sought it, have taken the job of being President seriously.
Until now, uniformly, they have thought it important to outline some kind of a vision for the country, and to propose policies intended to achieve that vision. Even if in some instances you might disagree entirely with the candidates’ vision, at least they had it. Or, if they really didn’t have a vision, or much of one, then they pretended to.
In this sense, has there ever been a more fundamentally unserious candidate for President than Kamala Harris?

October 12, 2024

October 12, 2024/ Francis Menton

A couple of weeks ago I posed the question of whether the recently-initiated federal prosecution of New York Mayor Eric Adams is legitimate, or whether it is yet another instance of abject corruption by our Department of Justice and FBI, in this instance pay-back by the prosecutors for Adams’s criticism of the regime’s immigration policies.
To help you as you ponder that question, it might be useful to look at a few other things that the DOJ and FBI are recently up to.
As Item Number 1, Justice “Special Counsel” Jack Smith chose the date of October 2 — 34 days before the upcoming election — to file his brief laying out his reasons why ex-President Trump does not qualify for immunity from prosecution under the Supreme Court’s July 1 ruling in Trump v. United States. . . .

October 10, 2024

October 10, 2024/ Francis Menton

Have you seen any economic news coming out of Cuba recently? With barely a couple of exceptions, if you read the U.S. Corporate Media, likely you have not.
Searching for the most recent articles on Cuba’s economy from mainstream sources just now, I find nothing in the Washington Post about Cuba’s economy since May 2022; nothing from the New York Times since a piece in April rehashing the usual litany of Cuba’s long-known economic failures; silence at CBS since a piece in April quoting a Cuban official as “blam[ing] the U.S. for exodus of migrants, economic issues”; nothing from CNN since a March article discussing “power cuts and food shortages.” And so forth. OK, Cuba’s economy has performed poorly for decades, ever since Castro’s revolution 65 years ago. We already knew that. But are there any important new developments we should know about?
I last wrote about the economic situation in Cuba about a month ago. The news I could find then already made the World Bank “data” appear ridiculous.
Since then, more facts have dribbled out to make Cuba look like a full-on disaster.

October 07, 2024

October 07, 2024/ Francis Menton

Today is the first anniversary of the massacre perpetrated by Hamas on Israel. One year ago today, about 1200 hundred people were killed in the surprise attack, and about 250 taken hostage. Almost all of those killed or taken hostage were civilians, and the large majority were either women, children, or the elderly. About 100 remain as hostages today.
This sad occasion gets me to thinking about the term “Islamophobia.” I don’t even remember this term existing in my youth. This piece in The New Republic in 2011 traces the origin of the term to the 1970s. But from those relatively recent origins, the term “Islamophobia” has risen fast in the ranks of the epithets generally used to condemn non-conformists to the progressive project as evil people. Other such terms include racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and trans-phobia.
Why is the term “Islamophobia”?