Good Monday morning.
Some days I’m really reaching when it comes to content for this morning missive. Other days, I have to choose between multiple (what I consider) worthy topics, and then later wonder if I made the right decision. (Not sure why this is something I fixate on, considering this whole thing is free and I don’t hear anyone complaining).
Today is one of those “embarrassment of riches” days, because it honors two things I hold dear – dogs and women’s right to vote (note necessarily in that order…OK, maybe in that order).
Officially speaking, it’s Women’s Equality Day, which commemorates the 1920 certification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which granted women the right to vote.
Congress designated this day at the behest of Rep. Bella Abzug, a New York Democrat (AKA “Battling Bella,” “Hurricane Bella,” and/or “Mother Courage”), prominent activist and women’s rights leader who co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus.
As an aside, the 19th Amendment was ratified on Aug. 18, 1920, but it wasn’t until two days later that U.S. Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby signed a proclamation certifying the amendment and making it official. He did so with zero fanfare, behind closed doors at 8 a.m. in his Washington, D.C. residence.
Anyway, back to Bella, In 1971 – and again in 1973 – she introduced a proclamation that would officially designate today as Women’s Equality Day.
The first official recognition of Women’s Equality Day was designated by President Richard Nixon in 1972, and Congress approved the resolution a year later. Henceforth, every president has been both authorized and requested to issue their own proclamation commemorating the day, and every president has done so. (To wit: Here’s the latest one from President Joe Biden).
Abzug was pushing for recognition of Women’s Equality Day as national battles over the Equal Rights Amendment were raging across the nation – AND THEY STILL ARE, amazingly. For the record, the ERA, which would codify gender equality in the Constitution, was introduced in every session of Congress since 1923 until it finally passed in 1972, though it has never been ratified.
New York voters will be asked this Election Day to decide whether the state should amend its own constitution to add an equal rights amendment. Not surprisingly, given the history, that has sparked a big fight – most recently about the wording of what will appear on the ballot, vis-a-vis abortion rights.
This post is rapidly becoming unintentionally long in the tooth, which doesn’t leave much room for waxing poetic about dogs and how great they are.
Maybe that just goes without saying?
Perhaps it’s enough for me to admit that yes, some days I prefer dogs to people. And they only bad thing about dogs – my dogs anyway – in my opinion, is that that don’t stick around on the planet nearly long enough for us to fully appreciate and adore them.
Also “dog” spelled backward is “God”…I have to think that happened for a reason. Happy National Dog Day, everyone.
Even I, who almost always can find something to complain about when it comes to the weather, cannot think of a single bad thing to say about the past two days we were blessed with. Today we will see partly cloudy skies and the potential for a thunderstorm and/or showers. Temperatures will be in the low 80s.
In the headlines…
Vice President Kama Harris holds a 7-point edge over former President Donald Trump nationally in a new poll, marking the latest gain for the Democratic presidential candidate as the general election approaches.
A survey from Fairleigh Dickinson University, released last Friday, found Harris leading Trump with 50 percent support to 43 percent nationally, while 7 percent of respondents said they will vote for someone else.
Trump raised questions about his participation in next month’s debate with Harris hosted by ABC News.
The Harris campaign is casting a drastically wider net in recruiting House Democrats to stump for the presidential ticket than President Joe Biden did, gauging the interest of almost every member.
Harris’s presidential campaign said it raised $82 million during the DNC last week, the latest spurt of donor enthusiasm around a presidential bid that, according to the campaign, has now raised $540 million in the last month.
Trump is sharpening his attacks on Harris, trying to blunt the momentum that presidential candidates typically harness coming out of their party’s convention.
In the months since Biden imposed sweeping restrictions on asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border, the policy appears to be working exactly as he hoped and his critics feared.
In suspending his presidential campaign Friday afternoon, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. endorsed Trump for a second term, drawing criticism from his storied political family and other Democrats.
“Our brother Bobby’s decision to endorse Trump today is a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear,” Kennedy’s siblings, Kathleen, Courtney, Kerry, Chris, and Rory Kennedy wrote in a statement. “It is a sad ending to a sad story.”
Kerry Kennedy, the sister of the former presidential candidate, blasted him for his endorsement of Trump, saying that it is an “inexplicable effort” to tarnish their father’s memory.
The vice president has virtually erased Berkeley, Calif., her hometown, from her campaign biography. The residents of “the People’s Republic” say they get it.
The border crisis that exploded during the Biden-Harris administration is the Achilles heel that could cost Harris the White House, ex-Gov. David Paterson warned.
In his 30s, Sen. J.D. Vance, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, read works on theology, mysticism, and political and moral philosophy. And he discovered his faith.
Vance denied in an interview with NBC News yesterday that tariffs had caused higher costs for Americans, as economists have documented, and said he believed Trump would veto a federal abortion ban.
Anthony Fauci was hospitalized this month after contracting West Nile virus. Fauci, 83, the country’s former COVID-19 czar, as hospitalized for six days and is now home where he is recuperating from the mosquito-borne disease.
“A full recovery is expected,” a spokeswoman, Jenn Kuzmuk, said in a statement yesterday on behalf of Dr. Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
The federal government is once again offering free COVID-19 tests by mail for those who sign-up as infections from new coronavirus variants increase across the U.S.
At the end of September, each household will be able to order up to four rapid tests through COVIDtests.gov. The tests, which will detect newer COVID-19 variants, will be good for use until the end of the year.
The mailed tests are returning after the Food and Drug Administration last week approved two updated COVID-19 vaccines to provide protection against current strains of the virus.
New York Democratic Rep. Pat Ryan, whose purple district in the Hudson Valley elected him with less than a 2 percent margin in 2022, said Harris’s rise after Biden’s withdrawal has “without question” made it easier for him to win this year’s race.
Speaking on the sidelines of the DNC Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi appeared to blame Gov. Kathy Hochul’s 2022 reelection campaign for dragging down New York House candidates and thus in part costing the party their majority in Washington.
Hochul pushed back against Pelosi’s suggestion, saying: “I’ll tell you this, no governor in the history of the state of New York has worked harder to elect members of Congress than I have.” She predicted New York would win House races “on the ground.”
A group representing home care go-betweens spent more than $600,000 on ads in June seeking to thwart Hochul’s plan to move administration of a $9 billion Medicaid-funded home care program under the control of a single entity.
Hochul signed an executive order on Friday, declaring a Disaster Emergency for Suffolk County. The major storm event resulted in severe flooding to homes, businesses and institutions, damaged roads and caused the breach of two local dams.
President Biden has approved a federal emergency declaration in Suffolk County following last week’s devastating flooding, Hochul announced.
Nicole Gelinas: “Hochul’s latest congestion-pricing punt reveals New York’s real motive in pushing the program. It has nothing to do with cutting congestion, and everything to do with “pricing” — raising more money for the state.”
A quartet of current and former state legislators waded into the lawsuit against Hochul’s congestion pricing pause – telling the judge overseeing the case that the Legislature never gave her or any governor the power to do away with the toll.
The push for congestion pricing has failed to garner public support because savvy New Yorkers know it’s just a money-grabbing con — and not about reducing traffic jams, Staten Island Borough President Vito Fossella says.
A group of 31 state senators asked the federal government to consider rejecting New York’s plan to restrict a Medicaid program that allows residents to be paid for the home care for their loved ones.
The transformation of cycling access in Paris over the past few years may have lessons for New York and its car-clogged streets.
The state’s cannabis regulator has made exactly zero progress to increase its staffing levels months after Hochul began tearing the agency apart.
The state Thruway Authority has sued the consortium that built the Gov. Mario M. Cuomo Bridge over the durability of some of the pipes connecting the bridge’s cables to its main structure.
A Republican candidate for state senate is launching a campaign to bar biological males who identify as transgender from competing against females in athletics — and other GOP hopefuls are expected to jump on the bandwagon, too.
New York’s long-running fare evasion problem, among the worst of any major city, has intensified recently; before the pandemic, only about one in five bus riders skipped the fare. Yet public officials have done little to collect the lost revenue from bus riders.
A failure of cooperation between New York City and federal authorities allowed Daniel Davon-Bonilla, a 24-year-old from Nicaragua, to slip out of the grasp of law enforcement, enabling him to allegedly raped a homeless woman under the Coney Island boardwalk.
University officials nationwide are grasping for new approaches as they brace for renewed protests over the Israel-Hamas war, along with a bitterly contested presidential election. So far, they are signaling little overt interest in negotiations with students.
Hochul will meet virtually with New York college presidents as officials try to prevent more campus chaos after spring anti-Israel protests descended into vandalism and violence.
New York University is revising its student conduct policy to prohibit discrimination or harassment against “Zionists,” saying that for many Jews Zionism is integral to their identity.
A company that makes magnetically locked cellphone pouches is ramping up its lobbying efforts in New York state as Hochul and New York City Mayor Eric Adams are looking to ban students’ use of cellphones in schools.
Adams’ high-profile lawyer Alex Spiro vowed not to settle the bombshell sexual assault case against the mayor, calling it “fictitious” – and setting off the accuser’s attorney during a combative court hearing.
Echoing concerns he expressed in court filings earlier this week, Adams’ lawyer Alex Spiro — a prolific celebrity lawyer who has represented Elon Musk and Aaron Hernandez — lamented the supposed vagueness of the sexual assault accusation.
Adams is shrinking the city’s office footprint to account for a smaller municipal workforce — a controversial “mayoral priority” that’s quietly underway, according to a review of internal communications and budget documents.
Adams’s decision to weaken — for a second time — a popular plan for a safety redesign of one of Brooklyn’s most-dangerous streets on behalf of powerful business interests once again casts into dramatic relief the mayor’s failure to put safety first.
After allegedly getting into a fight with security guards inside a migrant shelter last year, Tim Pearson, a top Adams advisor, was confronted by one of them outside the facility even as NYPD officers arrived to diffuse the situation, surveillance footage shows.
Democratic socialist City Council members have been bragging about big budget “wins” even though they voted against the spending plan — and now some sources are calling the misplaced bluster “hilarious hypocrisy.”
The NYPD recently promoted the department’s highest-ever-ranking Orthodox Jew — a 9/11 hero who wears a yarmulke on the job — as the city fights a wave of antisemitic hate crime.
A new group of South Asian immigrant hotel owners is fighting a proposed bill they say would “destroy” the Big Apple’s hospitality industry and stomp out their American Dreams.
WCBS 880 radio sent its final transmission over the weekend after 57 years of delivering breaking crime news, political happenings and subway delays to New Yorkers, many of whom now rely on apps.
A rule that bans shortened days and staggered schedules for tots starting 3-K and pre-K and forces them to be in school six hours a day is “cruel and abusive,” according to some parents and educators.
The city Department of Education would be required to install vape detectors in middle and high schools across the five boroughs under bipartisan legislation introduced last week by Councilwoman Joann Ariola (R-Queens).
City of Troy leaders are requesting that the state Legislature declare a public health emergency for the Collar City due to its lead water pipes — an action that would speed up the funding process for a broad replacement program.
A group of 16 Albany County legislators is urging the county Airport Authority’s board to renew CEO Phil Calderone’s contract.
A vigil and march Friday evening honored the life of Alice Green, the longtime civil rights activist and leader of the Center for Law and Justice who died suddenly last week at the age of 84.
Music, performances, food and additional forms of fun were on display at the 27th Annual Albany LatinFest in Washington Park this past weekend, which lucked out with some of the summer’s best weather.
Applied BioPhysics in North Greenbush received a two-year, $1.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to fund its continued research and cultivation of advanced biomedical instruments.
The owner of a Schenectady medical transportation firm and an employee have been arrested on allegations that they bilked the state’s Medicaid program by more than $700,000 and provided kickbacks to drug-addicted clients to further their scheme.
Two New York City women have pleaded guilty to their roles in a nationwide identity theft ring that targeted credit unions in upstate New York and across the country.
Two astronauts who have spent months aboard the International Space Station will have to stay there months longer after NASA decided they could not return on Boeing’s troubled Starliner space vehicle. They will return instead on a SpaceX capsule next year.
Fierceness lived up to his former two-year-old champion self by taking the 2024 Travers Stakes, but had to defend himself in the last furlong from a charge by the ever-game Thorpedo Anna, just the fifth filly to run in the Travers since 1960.
Fierceness, who earned back-to-back wins for the first time in his career after scoring in the Grade 2 Jim Dandy last time out on July 27 at Saratoga, put any doubts about his true ability to rest when displaying unmatched grit over a stacked field.
Photo credit: George Fazio.
