New York City’s congestion pricing began this past Sunday

The New Neo Posted on by

Somehow I’d missed this news until right before it was about to go into effect. I had noticed something similar in European cities the last time I visited Italy, which was six years ago – either fines or surcharges for driving within what once was the city’s heart. Well, now it’s come to New York.

Here’s how it works in New York:

The decision Friday evening by U.S. Senior Judge Leo Gordon clears the way for the MTA to begin charging the toll as scheduled on Sunday, the culmination of a years-long planning process for a program designed to decrease traffic in Midtown and Lower Manhattan while raising billions of dollars for the MTA. …

Passenger vehicles with E-ZPass will be charged the base $9 toll from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekdays and 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekends. Overnight, the toll is $2.25. The toll is higher for commercial vehicles like trucks and buses, and lower for motorcycles.

Uber and Lyft trips into the tolling district will be charged $1.50, while taxis and cabs face a charge of $0.75.

Trump is against it, and it required federal approval so that might matter.

Of course, Manhattan traffic has been awful for a long time. Then again, the NY subway has gotten more dangerous. Will people feel forced onto it?

And it’s not just going to affect Manhattan. Here’s what’s also predicted:

Commuters to the Big Apple will be turning neighborhoods across the city into their own personal parking lots beginning this week, ditching their rides to save their wallets because of the $9 congestion pricing plan, concerned residents told The Post.

The plan is expected to upend neighborhoods closest to the 60th Street tolling zone with nightmarish gridlock as a surge of drivers begin scouring for free parking spots. …

The Upper West Side and Harlem are also expected to get slammed — a problem when parking spaces are already a precious commodity. …

Communities such as Long Island City in Queens, the South Bronx, and ritzy Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill and Park Slope in Brooklyn are fearing their quality of life will be uprooted — not only by their own drivers but also those schlepping to the Big Apple from New Jersey, upstate New York, Long Island and Staten Island.

Here’s a caption to a photo at the linked article:

“My constituents who still have no real public transit connection to Manhattan are looking forward to treating the posh, transit-rich, gentrified, brownstone Brooklyn as their new park-and-ride,” quipped NYC Council Minority Leader Joe Borelli (R-Staten Island).

I’m not sure what Borelli means by “real.” Staten Islanders have the ferry, which is plenty real but drops them off at the southern tip of Manhattan. They also have various buses that journey across various bridges.

As I said, driving in Manhattan has been a nightmare for a long time. This is an attempt to discourage people from even trying it. But the law of unintended consequences may make things worse. Actually, that may be the goal – making it so bad that cars are banned altogether in Manhattan.

I hadn’t heard of any other city in the US adopting this method, and in fact New York is the only one. So far:

Cold enough for you?

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s been very cold in New England for the last few days. Having returned recently from visiting family who live in climes with less chilly winter weather, I found it a shock to get to the Boston airport very late at night and wait outside for transportation. Somehow, I’d forgotten to bring my gloves and scarf along, too, although I had meant to.

Brrrr.

To top it all off, I’d caught a cold from my grandkids. I love my grandkids very much, but they’re at that age where colds are common and expected. And when I get a cold, it doesn’t last just a few days. It segues into sinus congestion and a cough that usually endures, all told, for about a month. I’m not usually very sick, fortunately, but I wonder why my colds linger that way and have done so since I was a teenager.

I’ve tried those zinc lozenges and all they seem to do is delay the amount of time I feel as though I’m getting a cold but haven’t really gotten it yet. I take Vitamin C. I inhale steam. Decongestants make me sicker so I avoid them. None of it seems to matter.

And yet I like the weather in New England. I enjoy four dramatic seasons – as long as the ice storms are kept to a minimum. So here I stay – so far.

Another F-you from the departing Biden administration

The New Neo Posted on by

It worked so very well for Obama:

When President Barack Obama released five Taliban commanders from the Guantanamo Bay prison in exchange for an American deserter in 2014, he assured a wary public that the dangerous enemy combatants would be transferred to Qatar and kept from causing any trouble in Afghanistan.

In fact, they were left free to engineer Sunday’s sacking of Kabul [written in August 2021].

Soon after gaining their freedom, some of the notorious Taliban Five pledged to return to fight Americans in Afghanistan and made contacts with active Taliban militants there. But the Obama-Biden administration turned a blind eye to the disturbing intelligence reports, and it wasn’t long before the freed detainees used Qatar as a base to form a regime in exile…

Earlier this year, one of them, Khairullah Khairkhwa, actually sat across the table from President Biden’s envoy to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, in Moscow, where Khairkhwa was part of the official Taliban delegation that negotiated the final terms of the US withdrawal. The retreat cleared a path for the Taliban to retake power after 20 years.

We have two weeks to go till Trump is inaugurated, and the outgoing Biden & company – many of whom are probably the same people from the Obama years – have plenty of time to do more damage and remind us once again of some of the reasons Trump was elected to a second term. For example, this:

In the most dramatic step in years to reduce the population at the U.S. military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the Biden administration has transferred 11 Yemeni detainees to Oman, which has agreed to help resettle them and provide security monitoring.

All of the men, who were captured in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, had been held for more than two decades without being charged or put on trial. All of them were approved for transfer by national security officials more than two years ago and sometimes long before that — one had been cleared for transfer since 2010 — yet had remained behind bars due to political and diplomatic factors.

Their release leaves just 15 prisoners at Guantánamo, cutting the number of inmates nearly in half.

The article goes on to say that their release had been planned by the Biden administration for October of 2023 but oops! October 7 happened, and the plans were delayed “due to concerns in Congress about instability in the Middle East.” And now those concerns are gone? Hardly. Now it’s not the left or the Biden group that has to worry about what happens on their watch – they can bequeath the extra problems to the Trump administration.

Buh-Bye, Trudeau

The New Neo Posted on by

A sort-of goodbye, anyway. Trudeau is retiring as head of the party and then once the party figures out who his replacement might be he will resign as PM as well.

Or something like that:

From [a] Canadian friend: He’s effectively shut down government until March and then will slow rollout a leadership race that will push the election out as long as possible.

That means the election likely won’t happen until October.

—–

Trudeau told reporters he decided to step down now because it’s become clear that he would not be leader due to internal party conflicts that he cannot be the one to carry the liberal standard into the next election.

And of course it’s all-important to the left that conservatives must be stopped! The consensus is that conservatives under Pierre Poilievre are poised to win the next election.

If it seems to you that Trudeau has been in power forever, that might be because he’s actually been PM for ten years. And if you wonder how long a Canadian PM can serve, the answer is that there are no term limits in Canada. Trudeau has served long enough to have thoroughly worn out his welcome, but he’s not even close to beating the previous Canadian record:

Under this system, William Lyon Mackenzie King was Canada’s longest-serving prime minister, holding office for a total of 21 years and 154 days over three non-consecutive terms.

When I read that, I immediately suspected that (the aptly-named) King may have served at roughly the same time as our FDR, during the Depression and WWII. That turns out to have been the case, and he had other similarities to FDR as well:

William Lyon Mackenzie King OM CMG PC (December 17, 1874 – July 22, 1950) was a Canadian statesman and politician who was the tenth prime minister of Canada for three non-consecutive terms from 1921 to 1926, 1926 to 1930, and 1935 to 1948. A Liberal, he was the dominant politician in Canada from the early 1920s to the late 1940s.[a] King is best known for his leadership of Canada throughout the Great Depression and the Second World War. In August 1944, he ordered the displacement of Japanese Canadians out of the British Columbia Interior, mandating that they either resettle east of the Rocky Mountains or face deportation to Japan after the war. He played a major role in laying the foundations of the Canadian welfare state …

There are parallels and trends among Western countries. FDR and King, Reagan and Thatcher, and now – hopefully – Trump and Poilievre.

Today is the four year anniversary of J6

The New Neo Posted on by

And Trump has been certified as the next president, to be inaugurated on January 20.

What a difference four years makes, and what a long strange trip it’s been – and hardly over yet. The left tried everything – and I mean almost literally everything – to stop him, and yet he was re-elected and has managed to stay upright and sentient, at least so far.

Much is being made in some circles of the fact that Kamala Harris presided over the session. Also, of the fact that the Democrats aren’t really contesting these results. That doesn’t mean they didn’t contest results in the past; they certainly did, and we have the video compilations to prove it. But more importantly, one reason this election wasn’t contested is that the voting rules were mostly tightened up, and the percentage of mail-in ballots – although still too high IMHO – went down significantly. What’s more, because Republican voters are not concentrated in urban areas controlled by Republicans, the mechanisms for significant fraud are less available to the GOP.

Still, many on the left would like us to remember J6 of 2020 as a day that will live forever in infamy. By electing Trump, the majority of voters rejected that idea. But there’s no question that the left got much use out of it, and managed to pervert the legal system to harshly punish even those uninvolved in any violence that day.

Honoring George Soros and Hillary Clinton

The New Neo Posted on by

Someone at the White House has a sense of humor – Biden gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to George Soros and Hillary Clinton, among others:

Soros, 94, was among the 19 people chosen to receive the nation’s highest civilian honor at the White House, a group that included U2 frontman Bono, actor Denzel Washington and former senator Hillary Clinton — who also was panned as a recipient.

“George Soros spent millions electing soft-on-crime politicians that let criminals wreak havoc in our major cities,” Montana Senator Tim Sheehy told The Post. “Hillary Clinton abandoned our Navy SEALs in Libya.”

To the left those things are features, not bugs. And still another feature is outraging the right.

Judge Merchan schedules Trump sentencing hearing for January 10

The New Neo Posted on by

And yet he also seems to be signaling that the case will be discharged without jail or probation. If that’s true, why do this at all?

Simple, says Jonathan Turley:

The sentence will finalize the case and allow for an appeal. However, it would also label the President-elect a convicted felon just before he is sworn into office. It is the final cathartic act for lawfare warriors…

For many months, Democrats have repeated over and over that Trump is a convicted felon, as though that has any meaning. It’s lack of meaning isn’t just because until the sentencing hearing it’s not technically true – it’s because he was convicted by a kangaroo court and anyone studying the case objectively realizes that the conviction only condemns the Democrats rather than Trump.

However, this is also true as far as it goes, although dismissing the case would have been far better:

Merchan said that “while Trump could have faced up to four years behind bars on each of the counts, ‘a sentence of an unconditional discharge appears to be the most viable solution to ensure finality’ and [indicated he will] allow Trump to pursue his appeal options,” according to the Post.

The case has been a travesty from the start.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) The Las Vegas truck bomber was not a terrorist, but rather a veteran intent on suicide who wanted to publicize his views and get attention:

A highly decorated Army soldier who fatally shot himself in a Tesla Cybertruck just before it blew up outside the Trump hotel in Las Vegas left notes saying the New Year’s Day explosion was a stunt to serve as a “wake up call” for the country’s ills, investigators said Friday.

Matthew Livelsberger, a 37-year-old Green Beret from Colorado Springs, Colorado, also wrote in notes he left on his cellphone that he needed to “cleanse” his mind “of the brothers I’ve lost and relieve myself of the burden of the lives I took.” Livelsberger served in the Army since 2006 and deployed twice to Afghanistan.

“This was not a terrorist attack, it was a wake up call. Americans only pay attention to spectacles and violence. What better way to get my point across than a stunt with fireworks and explosives,” Livelsberger wrote in one letter found by authorities and released Friday.

(2) I noticed nearly twenty years ago that the free speech protections in the US are more robust than in Europe, including the UK. It’s only gotten worse there – recently, much worse.

(3) How Israel penetrated Hezbollah:

(4) Revisiting the UK’s child abuse coverup. The scale was huge; thousands of innocent children were sacrificed on the PC altar. The details are ghastly, and who was the prosecutor who failed to bring charges? Why, the current PM of Britain, Keir Starmer.

(5) Mapping the bedbug genome might help us fight the nasty little critters.

Johnson is elected Speaker

The New Neo Posted on by

There was really no other possibility, and all the objections were merely theater. Trump had – wisely, I think – endorsed Johnson. With the GOP’s razor-thin majority, unity was necessary and no other candidate was viable.

Here’s the story:

Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana was re-elected speaker of the House of Representatives on Friday on the first ballot after two of the three fellow Republicans who initially voted for other caucus members switched to him.

Reps. Ralph Norman of South Carolina and Texas’ Keith Self flipped their votes to Johnson after huddling with him near the House floor as the chamber’s clerk kept the ballot open for more than an hour.

Only one Republican, Rep. Tom Massie of Kentucky, voted for someone else — Rep. Tom Emmer — in the final tally, which gave Johnson the minimum 218 votes he needed to win.

In other news, Matt Gaetz – who spearheaded the previous rebellion and resigned from Congress a while back – has a new gig on One America News Network.