Good morning, it’s Monday. There are 28 days remaining until the Autumnal Equinox, but just 8 days until Labor Day, which serves as the unofficial end of the summer vacation season.
People all over are rushing to cram in some final days of beaching and relaxing before the back-to-school rush is officially upon us. I A good half of those people – at least – were on the road to Maine this past weekend. How do I know? Because I was stuck in traffic with them.
Sadly, my quickie trip to the Pine Tree State was not for a vacation, but rather a memorial service, which was actually lovely. But it was not a relaxing experience. Still, I was reminded of my fondness for Maine, which I have visited a number of times during my life to date – including a half ironman in Augusta last year and a summer spent as a counselor at Camp Modin – the oldest Jewish camp in New England.
One of my favorite Maine locations is Acadia National Park, which is a must-visit if you happen to be in the Bar Harbor area. It’s about 50,000 acres, which makes it one of the smallest of the 63 national parks. But what it lacks in stature, it more than makes up for in amazing views and incredible opportunities for enjoying them.
I have been lucky enough to visit a number of the national parks, including Arches, Zion, Bryce Canyon, Theodore Roosevelt, the Badlands, Redwood, the Hawaii Volcanoes, Glacier, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon. All of them have been amazing in their own, unique ways. And today, all of them are in some way or another endangered.
Before we get into that, an aside: The National Parks are a subset of the National Park System, which is a broader collection of more than 400 designated areas – including historic sites, campgrounds, monuments, etc. – across some 85 million acres that are administered by the National Park Service with the intention of protecting the country’s natural and cultural heritage.
New York, for example, has no designated National Parks, but a number of sites that fall under the National Park System, including Ellis Island in the New York City harbor, Eleanor Roosevelt’s house in Hyde Park, Fort Stanwix in Rome, Martin Van Buren’s home in Kinderhook, the Saratoga Battlefield, and more.
California has the most National Parks (9), followed by Alaska (8), Utah (5), and Colorado (4).
These are good days and bad days for the National Park System.
First the good – summer is peak park visiting season, and last year, they were patronized by a record 331 million people. This past May, Yellowstone alone experienced a record-breaking May, with 566,363 visits – up 20 percent from May 2021 – so it’s s safe bet that the entire system is again going to put up some eye-popping numbers when the season is over.
Big crowds have big benefits – millions in park revenue, for example, and the support and/or creation of hundreds of thousands of jobs. But there are downsides, park rangers have been warning for decades now that we are quite literally loving the parks to death, and a variety of crowd management techniques have been deployed with mixed results.
On the not-so-good side, there was the out-of-control fire that occurred at the Grand Canyon, which burned more than 140,000 acres and has since been determined to potentially have been mismanaged by the Park Service. There’s also the long-term stress that the system is under as a result of cuts and policies implemented by the Trump administration, which is not a friend to public lands – unless you consider opening up protected spaces for drilling a good thing, or returning Alcatraz to a prison.
Today is National Park Service Founders Day, which celebrates the Aug. 25, 1916 signing by then-President Woodrow Wilson of the National Park Service Organic Act, which created the agency to “preserve unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values of the National Park System for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations.”
Today would be a great day to visit a park – national or otherwise – as we will be seeing partly cloudy skies and temperatures in the low 80s .There’s a slight chance of a rain shower, so if you do head out there, remember to pack accordingly.
In the headlines…
National Guard troops on duty in President Donald Trump’s D.C. crackdown began carrying weapons last night, according to a spokesman for the National Guard task force.
Trump sought to ramp up pressure on Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, over his defense of the “blue slip” practice that allows home-state senators to veto nominees to district courts and U.S. attorneys’ offices.
Trump yesterday threatened to investigate former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey over a 2013 political scandal, days after the F.B.I. raided the home and office of another former Trump official turned critic, John R. Bolton.
Trump went on a late-night attack against NBC and ABC News yesterday, deriding them for what, in his view, was “biased” coverage and said he would be in favor of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) revoking their licenses.
A top Russian official told NBC News that there was no meeting planned between the leaders of Russia and Ukraine, dealing a blow to Trump’s efforts to mediate an end to the war between the two countries.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries opened the door to more Democratic redistricting efforts across the country, as he pledged to respond “appropriately” to any similar actions undertaken by Republicans.
Democratic Maryland Gov. Wes Moore said in an interview yesterday that he is actively looking into redistricting options in his state, as the partisan effort expands across the country.
Gov. Kathy Hochul has condemned Trump for sending troops into the streets of Washington, D.C., but she’s in no rush to withdraw hundreds of National Guard soldiers posted in New York City’s subway system on her orders.
Senate bill S6360, which would permit the use of crossbows for taking big game in any area longbows and compound bows are allowed, was delivered to Hochul on Friday, Aug. 22.
The New York Grieving Families Act has been delivered to Hochul for review, marking the fourth time in recent years that legislators have advanced the measure to the executive office.
A program that helps New Yorkers save money by paying for energy-efficiency upgrades is being drastically cut in the coming years.
Voter turnout, especially in New York, is expected to be a key factor in next year’s battle for the control of Congress. According to the Cook Political Report, four of New York’s congressional races are considered competitive, which is the second most of any state.
The pro-Andrew Cuomo super PAC Fix The City raised a whopping $1.26 million in the past week alone — the largest weekly haul for the mayoral candidate to a super PAC since the Dem primary, sources said.
Mayor Eric Adams’ own campaign got his age wrong — by 3 years — in an X post aimed at dunking on his election foe Zohran Mamdani for failing to bench-press alone even once at a public event. (Adams is 64 and will turn 65 on Sept. 1).
New York’s mayoral election isn’t the only heated race in the city. Sides are already being drawn over who the next City Council speaker will be — as outside interests push candidates they think will best stand up to Democratic mayoral nominee Mamdani.
Winnie Greco, the ex-adviser to Adams who handed a reporter a cash-stuffed potato chip bag, bizarrely claimed Friday that the controversial packet was her “birthday gift” and implied that the journalist she slipped the money to wanted to “hurt her.”
Adams defended his longtime advisers Ingrid Lewis-Martin and Jesse Hamilton on the heels of their corruption indictments, while his opponents in the mayoral election slammed their cases as indicative of deeper problems with Adams’ leadership.
At the same time, the mayor distanced himself from the allegations and used the occasion to renew attacks on his opponents in the November general election.
Mamdani got salty Saturday, trolling Adams’ leader-chip on social media. The state assemblyman announced a scavenger hunt for supporters with a nearly minute-long clip that begins with a trail of potato chips on a city sidewalk.
Around 2,000 Mamdani supporters took part in the madcap scavenger hunt through city streets yesterday in an attention-grabbing campaign stunt.
The event was so popular that it ran out of clue cards early on — but undaunted seekers pressed on anyway. Participants chronicled their multiborough adventures on X in real time as they went from Manhattan to Staten Island to the end in Queens.
Mamdani raised twice as much money as rival former Cuomo over the past five weeks — but the majority of the Democratic Socialist’s windfall came from outside the Big Apple, new city filings reveal.
In its most recent platform, the DSA blasts policing and detention as “instruments of class war” designed to “guarantee the domination of the working class” — and demands an end what it calls “the criminalization of working-class survival.”
Mario Cuomo’s failed 1977 New York City mayoral campaign was a training ground for his son Andrew, who has mounted his own bid decades later.
Andrew Cuomo’s successful quest to shut down the Indian Point nuclear plant spiked electricity costs and dirtied the energy grid of the city he’s now running to lead.
Frustration over the cost of child care in New York City has transformed what had long been a private family concern into one of the most pressing issues shaping local politics. Mamdani has promised to make it free for everyone – regardless of income.
Manhattan Councilmember Erik Bottcher, who has been championing legislation to ban horse-drawn carriages in the Big Apple, is being called out as a hypocrite for previously honoring fashion designer Dennis Basso, the “king of fur” and “furrier to the stars.”
Executive salaries are skyrocketing at the nonprofit that runs the 9/11 Memorial and Museum — even as it continues to hemorrhage money — infuriating families of the victims.
Mingus Reedus — the 25-year-old son of “Walking Dead” star Norman Reedus — was released by a Manhattan judge after being charged for a brutal attack in which he allegedly punched and tried to choke a 33-year-old woman in Chelsea.
Police have released the names of five people who died when a tour bus returning to New York City from Niagara Falls with 54 people aboard crashed and rolled on its side Friday on an interstate highway.
Xie Hongzhuo, 22, of Beijing, China; Zhang Xiaolan, 55, of Jersey City; Jian Mingli, 56, also of Jersey City; Pinki Changrani, 60, of East Brunswick, New Jersey; and Shankar Kumar Jha, 65, of Madhu Bani, India, were killed in the Friday incident, state police said.
Weeks before the Ulster County Legislature voted to earmark funds for his legal defense, Acting County Clerk Taylor Bruck retained private counsel in the abortion-rights case brought against him by Texas AG Ken Paxton, which lawmakers did not know about.
The Albany Common Council will soon consider an ordinance designed to keep young people off city streets on weekend evenings.
Over 100 guns were seized from Albany, Troy and Menands as part of a financial crimes investigation this week, officials announced Friday.
Ellis Medicine on Friday moved outpatient surgical procedures performed at Bellevue Woman’s Center in Niskayuna to its main Nott Street campus in Schenectady.
Multiple students were unknowingly admitted to Excelsior University and other schools in a decadelong financial aid scheme prosecutors say raked in over $200,000.
In 1984, Richard E. Jackson Jr. became the first elected Black mayor in New York, leading the Hudson Valley river city of Peekskill until 1991. Four years later, he went on to lead the state Department of Motor Vehicles. He died recently at the age of 80.
Photo credit: George Fazio.
