"Wisconsin GOP Advances Bills Controlling How People On Welfare Eat And Pee."

Headline at The Huffington Post.

I know. I should punish The Huffington Post for distorting things to such an absurd degree, but it is so absurd that it's self-undermining � the "pee" part is just about requiring drug tests � and, besides, HuffPo also has this headline: "Florence Henderson Describes How Former NYC Mayor John Lindsay Gave Her Crabs."

Look how handsome John Lindsay was:



If you're going to get crabs from a New York City mayor, he's the one. There have been 109 NYC mayors, going all the way back to Thomas Willett in 1665. I can't say I know what they all looked like � and did they have crabs? � but here's DeWitt Clinton, who's not that cute, but I love the painting:



DeWitt Clinton (March 2, 1769 � February 11, 1828) was also a U.S. Senator and, most notably, a governor of New York. His great achievement was the Erie Canal:

Many thought the project was impracticable, and opponents mocked it as "DeWitt's Ditch." But in 1817, he got the legislature to appropriate $7,000,000 for construction.... The cost of freight between Buffalo and Albany fell from $100 to $10 per ton, and the state was able to quickly recoup the funds it spent on the project through tolls along the canal... [T]he New Hampshire Sentinel [wrote:] "His exertions in favor of the great Canal have identified his name with that noble enterprise, and he will be remembered while its benefits are experienced... Yield credit to Clinton, and hail him by name."

Hail, Clinton!

By the way, "crabs" are pubic lice, pthirus pubis. From Amy Stewart's "Wicked Bugs: The Louse That Conquered Napoleon's Army & Other Diabolical Insects":

Body lice evolved from head lice about 107,000 years ago, around the time humans started wearing clothing. Pubic lice, however, are more closely related to gorilla lice� and were transferred to humans through some sort of intimate physical contact with gorillas, the precise details of which remain a mystery....

Pubic lice... lock their claws around a strand of hair and almost never let go. Their habit of feeding in one place for most of their life means that their feces accumulate around them, making for a truly unpleasant situation. They inhabit all parts of the body covered in coarse hair, including eyebrows, chest hair, mustaches, armpits, and, of course, pubic hair.... Because pubic lice can only survive a few hours off the host... [s]exual contact is really the most efficient means of transmission, which is why the French call pubic lice papillons d�amour, or butterflies of love.

Now, here's Florence, singing about the butterfly of love:

"A rogue group of subway vandals calling them the �Subway Conquestors� is allegedly on a mission to attack the rail system."

In NYC, "the acts are getting more extreme as the vandals try to one up each other. They have been accused of changing destination signs to confuse passengers, surfing train cars, and stealing MTA equipment and gear. 'It�s extremely dangerous. The tools and keys they have give them full control over subway trains just like any other employee of the MTA � which is incredibly scary, because this is 16, 17-year-old kids.'"

"It�s hard to pinpoint the moment when New York and also technology started to feel like such a chore."

"Maybe it was when I urinated in a slim-fit adult diaper while waiting in line for the iPhone 4 for ninety-three hours and pronounced the experience 'worth it,' or when I found myself testing out tweets on my wife during foreplay, or when a rat scurried across my face and into my mouth while I was checking Facebook and waiting for a C train that never arrived. But a few weeks ago, on a gray April day, as I ambled by the Duane Reade where my favorite dive bar McHurlihan�s once stood, while joylessly scrolling through my Twitter feed in between reading a saved Instapaper article about how to live in the moment, I realized I had to leave New York and stop using the Internet for a while."

The first paragraph of an essay by Benjamin Hart titled "Leaving New York and Also Technology/Why I left New York and also technology." And I love love love the implicit mocking of the requirement that articles have subtitles. I <hart> Benjamin Hart.

"The city�s birthrate is steadily declining, but not among the affluent, and that rise is changing the feel of the city."

So says the teaser on the front page of the NYT that takes us to "Baby Boom Among New York�s Affluent," which is illustrated by this startling ad � anti-birth propaganda from the city:



"What happens to me?" = words the government puts in the mouth of the unborn child, who presumably has the opinion that she should not be born. And try to wade through the race-and-class politics of this:

Between 2004 and 2013, of all the racial groups that the city�s Health Department measures, birthrates increased only among whites. Beginning around 2010, as birthrates among whites started steadily to climb up, birthrates among blacks began to go down. In 2013, blacks had a birthrate of 12.7, the lowest of any group in the city, with the abortion rate four times as high among black women as among white women...

For decades there were factions on the right worried about poor minorities �overbreeding� and taxing the city�s resources. Historically, there has been far less panic about the affluent having a lot of children, and yet they change the feel of the city, driving family-size S.U.V.s and generating a more suburban sensibility. The main complaints have come from well-off people themselves, as they worry about overcrowding in affluent school districts and rising numbers of children attending private school, making admission even more impossible....

So the affluent white people end up sick even of themselves � or especially of themselves � and the NYT tries to amuse its affluent-white-female readership with this kicker:

Perhaps those ads could be recast and targeted at TriBeCa mothers with small children, warning them of the tough realities: �You may think you want a fourth child. But what if your husband never buys you that four-bedroom apartment and never says yes to the weekend nanny?�

ADDED: Two things:

1. Why pick on "factions on the right" who worried about "poor minorities" breeding when you've got an ad that plainly reveals that the city government � liberals � were actively fighting exactly that?

2. It's quite politically incorrect to portray a woman as looking to her husband to buy her a home and and a servant. Don't these upscale, affluent types have egalitarian marriages these days? I would have thought that TriBeCa mothers are equal partners in decisionmaking within their marriages. Why did that sexist stereotype suddenly appear? When does the NYT let its guard down?

"For a time in recent decades, it looked like the reform examples of New York under Messrs. Giuliani and Bloomberg and the growth of cities like Houston might lead to a broader urban revitalization."

"In some places it did. But of late the progressives have been making a comeback, led by Bill de Blasio in New York and the challenge to sometime reform Mayor Rahm Emanuel in Chicago. This week�s nightmare in Baltimore shows where this leads. It�s time for a new urban renewal, this time built on the ideas of private economic development, personal responsibility, 'broken windows' policing, and education choice."

A Wall Street Journal editorial titled "The Blue-City Model/Baltimore shows how progressivism has failed urban America." (Pay-wall protected, but if you Google some text, you can go in.)

Bus ads in NYC: "'Killing Jews is Worship that draws us close to Allah.' That�s His Jihad. What�s yours?"

"On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge John Koeltl ruled that New York�s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) cannot stop the controversial ad from running on scores of subway cars and buses."

The MTA has argued that the ad could incite violence against Jews, but Koeltl rejected that idea.

MTA officials �underestimate the tolerant quality of New Yorkers and overestimate the potential impact of these fleeting advertisements,� he ruled. �Moreover, there is no evidence that seeing one of these advertisements on the back of a bus would be sufficient to trigger a violent reaction. Therefore, these ads � offensive as they may be � are still entitled to First Amendment protection.�

The MTA's argument was premised on the idea that people would misunderstand the ad, which is intended to be pro-Israel. The ad comes from Pamela Geller's American Freedom Defense Initiative.

�What matters is not AFDI�s intent, but how the ad would be interpreted,� [said MTA Security Director Raymond Diaz]. The line �What is yours?� could be considered a �call to violence,� particularly because the CAIR posters it was mocking never appeared in New York....

"A teacher and debate coach at the prestigious Bronx High School of Science was arrested on Friday on charges that he persuaded teenage boys to send him nude or suggestive photographs via cellphones in exchange for gift cards."

"'Pictures just have a huge impact on me,' [Jon] Cruz wrote, according to the complaint."

The boys Cruz allegedly lured were not boys at the Bronx High School of Science, where the students are all presumably super-smart, having gained admission through a competitive NYC test.

ADDED: As a commenter points out, Cruz allegedly "also admitted to soliciting photographs from a Bronx Science student in exchange for a gift," though the charges relate to 3 boys in New Mexico and upstate New York.