The headline in Friday’s Boston Globe would not have been out of place in the Post or Daily News: MBTA plans for drastic cuts in bus, rail service. Hmmm. And it gets even more familiar once you start reading the front-page article.
The MBTA would halt all evening and weekend commuter rail service, eliminate six Green Line stops, discontinue lightly used bus routes, and lay off 805 employees if the agency does not get legislative help with its $160 million deficit, according to a state document.
The agency has delayed making the …

For what it’s worth here are a few of my random thoughts and favorite stories on this chilly Monday:
It’s almost doomsday! With the MTA being forced to vote on it’s doomsday budget loaded with big fare hikes and bigger service cuts the responsibility for this rests squarely on the shoulders of Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith who has perfected the art (long-practiced in Albany) of fiddling while Rome burns. He has had an astonishingly inept three months leading the Senate.
While Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Governor David Paterson long ago …

The latest Get Real video is a history lesson that Albany’s Democrats seem never to have learned. Turns out their self-destructive behavior now is eerily similar to what happened in 1913 — the last year (other than one year during the Depression) that the party controlled all three levers of power in state government. Could they be sowing the seeds of their own destruction again?

Get Real: Dem History Forgotten from Jay DeDapper on Vimeo.

 
It’s no mystery what Mike Bloomberg is going to run on in his bid for a third term — safe streets and good management. But what exactly would his Democratic opponent try and do to sour New Yorkers on their popular mayor?
 
If Anthony Weiner was to really run (which seems very doubtful at this point) he has already spent months sketching out an outer-borough populist case that paints Bloomberg as an elitist who was lucky enough to be mayor during one of the biggest economic booms in the city’s history. …

Even with the Feds potentially spending about $15 billion on mass transit in the next 18 months, the MTA’s proposed big fare hikes and service cuts would still have to happen according to MTA insiders.
That’s because while the amount of money in the stimulus bill for mass transit seems to grow every day, the money is for capital programs — building stuff — not operating systems already up and running.
Last week transit money in the stimulus jumped from $9 billion to $12 billion just before the House passed it’s version. …