A Few Notes on the NYC Mayoral Race, and then all the Boring Facts

"Why doesn't Anthony Weiner drop out?" is one of the latest internet questions being bandied about...also that the Daily News asked all the candidates to tell their "best jokes" and Weiner was the only one who refused ( the jokes themselves? Most observers said in a determinedly polite way,
"NYC politicians are not a particularly funny bunch."

The strange void forming because of long time Mayor Mike Bloomberg's looming absence reveals just how complicated politics in this city are and how everything is pretty much still up for grabs, despite some early polling indications that there are some favorites for all the political parties involved ( including the minor parties such as the Conservatives, the Liberals and others).

I have decided to go the boring-but-factual route here for this posting and just run what Wikipedia has on the election so far ( granted, people sometimes question whether you can always trust everything on Wikipedia when it is a hotly contested issue).

In future postings I suppose I shall have to deal with what is happening because of the mayoral race...

The only issue I have noticed so far where the candidates have adopted generally a weird stance is about this huge garbage facility they want to build up near a park on the Upper East Side (Asphalt Green) and  a dispute over how much damage to the health of children especially in that area and how much pollution would be caused by the facility..

The people who live there are dead set against it of course,--you can just dismiss this as "NIMBY" (Not in My Backyard) --they argue the garbage that would be processed and put on tug barges in the East River would be of calamitous proportions...and since they are currently trucking this stuff to New Jersey, the present system is better.

Now we get back to "the politics of race"--because the area around Asphalt Green is affluent and mostly white, and people say the City's garbage facilities so far are located disproportionately in poor, minority areas. (Which I believe is true).

But it remains debatable whether the huge new facility is an already outmoded scheme and worth the damage it will inevitably cause...

Well, there are other issues as well that are very contentious, but that is the only one I care to comment about at the moment.

So--on with the dreary factual analysis and statistics of the Wikipedia article ( if you are not a New Yorker, this is going to be of minimal importance to you, most likely,--take a peek and decide for yourself...

Uh-oh, the system is telling me I have a technical problem here, so the Wikipedia article will have to be listed separately...