Oct 24
2022
Monday Morning Read
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WeeklyPost recaps Investigative Post’s reporting of the previous week, along with recommended reading of other news accounts. It’s free and delivered Sunday mornings to subscribers via email. Subscribe here.
Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz is throwing oodles of money at the Erie County Sheriff’s Department to hire a slew of new employees. Let’s hope John Garcia does a better job screening job candidates than Tim Howard did, as evidenced by this fine reporting job by Charlie Specht. Long story short, Howard hired a bad apple from the Buffalo police force, who later underscored his unfitness for the job by confronting Black Lives Matter protestors in 2020 with a baseball bat.
The News, which moved its offices last week from Main and Scott streets to Larkinville, had a couple of noteworthy stories related to the Bills stadium. First, community groups complained about being shut out of negotiations to incorporate a community benefits agreement into the stadium deal. They have a legitimate beef. Then came word that Terry Pegula’s net worth in the past year jumped nearly 20 percent to $6.7 billion. That makes his demand that taxpayers and season ticket holders foot most of the bill to construct a new stadium all the more galling.
Speaking of corporate welfare, the current edition of Subsidy Sheet, published by Reinvent Albany, is loaded with good reading. Read it, top to bottom.
The knife attack in Salman Rushdie this summer at the Chautauqua Institution has cost him vision in one eye and the use of one hand, the Guardian reports.
The right would have us believe that progressive prosecutors are contributing to an increase in crime. The Atlantic reports that’s false, based on a new study:
“Countering conventional wisdom, the study found that homicides over recent years increased less rapidly in cities with progressive prosecutors than in those with more traditional district attorneys. It also found no meaningful differences between cities with progressive or traditional DAs in the trends for larceny and robbery.”
The Marshall Project surveyed sheriffs across the country. What it learned:
“We found that sheriffs — the vast majority of whom are White and male, according to a previous study — are also far more conservative than Americans as a whole, and largely approve of Trump’s performance as president.”
The Intercept is about the last place I’d expect to read that the have-nots of our economy are doing better of late, so let me quote the story:
“The last several years have not been an economic disaster at all for the bottom 50 percent of U.S. households. Indeed, they’ve arguably been the best time during the past 30 years. That’s not to say that America’s poorer people are living in clover — they’re not. But in this way it is a clear improvement on the past: The net worth of the poorer 50 percent has doubled since the first quarter of 2020 and is now far higher than it’s ever been in U.S. history.”
The New York Times profiled Congressman Tim Ryan, the blue-collar Democrat with a fighting chance of capturing the Ohio Senate seat being vacated by Republican Rob Portman. Ryan strikes me as a Buffalo kind of guy.
On the lighter side, here’s John Lennon, rather than Ringo, singing an early version of Yellow Submarine. The final version, including a nifty cartoon, is here.
