Category: Linked

A mea culpa would help (don’t hold your breath).

Image: Kevin Drum

The image above shows the relative size of Federal bailouts (adjusted for inflation) since the 1970s, starting with Penn Central at the far left, and ending with the Wall Street bailout (estimated) on the far right.
A few things to note: that largish green dot towards the left represents the NYC bailout (yeah, Ford told us to drop dead, but eventually he signed off on a bailout to the tune of $2.3 billion ($9.4 billion today)). Above and to the right of that is a blue dot representing the Chrysler bailout ($1.5 billion then, $3.9 billion now). In all, those two rather iconic bailouts are relatively small potatoes.
And that huge magenta circle? The S&L bailout of 1989 (almost $300 billion today). Until the Wall Street bailout, it was the largest on record, exceeding Fannie/Freddie, Bear Stearns and AIG (and almost equal to the three of them combined).
You wouldn’t know it from reading the papers, but one of the presidential candidates was at the center of the S&L bailout, and not in a good way. In fact, he was reprimanded by the Senate for his role in that fiasco. Here’s a hint – it wasn’t Barack Obama (he was too busy being a community organizer at that time). Here’s another hint.
That’s fiscal experience we can believe in.
[via Kevin Drum]

Jelly NYC is promoting a petition to include performance space as part of the plans for Bushwick Inlet park. 417 signatures and counting.
Of course the first step is for the City to actually acquire the land. Until that happens, nothing else happens.

Bob would normally be all over this (actually, he has been all over this, for ages now – welcome to the party, Eagle).
9 projects are currently under development on the triangle between Union, Grand and the BQE. For the record, that’s two Scaranos, two Fischers, one Bricolage, one Melzer/Mandl, on Gilman, on e S3 and one Kutnicki Bernstein.

NAG is working with North Brooklyn Development to protect the tenants of the Greenpoint Home for the Aged. (A fantastic building, by the way, part of the Greenpoint Historic District.)
[via Brownstoner]

Still no GL, so as a public service, here is some of the local news from the internets. First off, Metropolitan Cinema swears they’ll be open by the Spring of ’09. I’ll believe it when I see it – this is the second slowest project in the area (the slowest is 80 Metropolitan, which despite having a small army working six days a week, every week, is moving verrry sloooowly).
[via Curbed]

Gentrification and, more importantly, Poland’s entry into the European Union are changing Greenpoint.

Meditation Garden.
Photo: Gothamist.

Among other things, today is Park(ing) Day, that annual event where people reclaim parking spaces for public (uh, non-parking) use. Above is the “Meditation Garden” at North 6th and Bedford. Other local attractions are the “Manhattan Avenue Park” at Driggs and Manhattan; the “Buckminster Fuller Park” at North 10th and Bedford; and the “Extended Chill Space Garden” at North 5th and Bedford.

No word on whether or not there are any pirate-themed park(ing) spaces.

More at Gothamist, Brownstoner and Curbed.

The Brooklyn Paper takes a thoughtful and fairly comprehensive look at the conflicts between cars, bikes and pedestrians. Hyperbole aside, the addition of bike lanes does complicate traffic – where do trucks making local deliveries stop? Where do cars park during alternate side cleaning times? These are all solvable problems, but the solution is clearly not as simple as painting bike lanes on the street (nor is it as simple as erasing those same lines).

It was probably a simple misunderstanding, but McCain’s campaign is hell bent on turning it into an international incident.
John McCain would rather destroy a relationship with a NATO ally than lose the election.