29 Comments
O hai Charlie
Breaking news if you’re into this kind of thing:
New York’s 27th congressional district will likely find earmarks a lot harder to come by soon, as a House investigative committee has found that longtime congressman and lord of Harlem Charles Rangel “violated a range of ethics rules.”
The eighteen-month-long investigation was investigating whether the former Ways and Means chairman “improperly rented four rent-stabilized apartments in Harlem at a price well below market value” and “improperly used his office to provide legislative favors for an oil-drilling company that pledged a $1 million donation for an academic center named for Mr. Rangel and improperly failed to report taxable income received from a villa he owns in the Dominican Republic.”
And if precedent’s any guide, Rangel won’t have a happy ending: the last congressman to face equivalent violations was expelled from the House. On the sort-of-bright-side, Rangel still looks better than his predecessor, Adam Clayton Powell, who not only had his own corruption scandal, but was also a homophobe. A step up!
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29 Comments
@Anonymous When he’s not busy stealing my money, he’s busy stealing our valuable freedom.
Sponsored by Rangel and flying under the news radar because of his scandal. Sound like a reality for everyone, absolutely not.
HR 5741
http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h5741/show
@Anonymous Rangel’s going down, down to chinatown
LAURIE KELLMAN (AP) – 1 hour ago
WASHINGTON — House Democratic leaders who promised to “drain the swamp” of corrupt Washington are doing a delicate rhetorical dance around one of their own, 20-term Rep. Charlie Rangel, as he faces a public trial on ethical misdeeds during a high-stakes midterm election.
They can’t pressure the former Ways and Means chairman to strike a deal or resign without running afoul of the powerful Congressional Black Caucus. So by Tuesday, as behind-the-scenes talks more or less continued, Democratic leaders went public with the only thing they all could agree on.
“Everybody would like to have it go away,” said House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md.
@chinatown in city of China
@After the Reggie Bush Thing When I read the headline I thought you were talking about Ray Rangel!
http://www.gocolumbialions.com/ViewArticle.dbml?DB_OEM_ID=9600&ATCLID=511952
@Anonymous Rising sophomore here.
So move in is officially on the 4th this year. Classes start on the 7th. Does Columbia always give us such little time to move in an have fun? I thought current students moved in on the 30th last year.
@Anonymous Incoming freshmen move in on the 30th, to prepare for a week long freshmen-only orientation.
@Alum New York City charter:
http://www.nyc.gov/html/charter/downloads/pdf/citycharter2004.pdf
@Anonymous hey bwog, and bwog readers
article on the NYT site this morning about students in NYC … they briefly mention Columbia’s expansion, but I think the point about getting culture and the city in exchange for the classic “college campus” experience is an apt one. None of my friends at other schools can quite understand what it’s like to go to school at columbia
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/education/edlife/25urban-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp
@Anonymous The article is more about schools which are less like Columbia in that they do not have a centralized, traditional campus-like environment (NYU, New School, etc). There are some mentions of Columbia, but I think the article is more concerned with a type of student life that doesn’t really apply here.
@... have you ever noticed that entities that end with “city” in the official names (nyc is technically new york, new york city is a colloquialism) are actually little shitholes that are trying to make themselves sound like more than they really are? here are some examples:
jersey city
daly city
union city
ocean city
ventnor city
foster city
king city
redwood city
yuba city
what two traits do all of these municipalities have in common?
a) they have the word “city” in their official name. thus attempting to call out or declare something they are decidedly not.
b) they’re all tiny shitholes with fuck all going on.
now, what is the official name of columbia?
columbia university in the city of new york
following the same pattern:
a) it has “in the city of new york” in its full name, thus attempting call out something it most certainly is not (sorry kids, a manufactured neighborhood complete with guard towers where storefront tenants are handpicked by committees of university administrators does not a new york city make).
b) it’s a tiny shithole with fuck all going on.
@Anonymous I don’t agree with your “logic” at all. What about Mexico City (Ciudad de México), the largest metro area in the Americas? Surely there’s “shit going on” there. As for Columbia, while it is true that it is not in Lower Manhattan and it has a more traditional campus than many other NYC schools, it is hardly a “manufactured neighborhood complete with guard towers.” In conclusion, you sound like a troll from some other NYC school.
@... apparently the “shitty cities contain city in their name” theory falls apart outside of the us. find a counterexample inside our borders.
and if you want to find the guard towers, take a stroll down morningside drive. or better yet, take a stroll through morningside park and look up.
sounds like you’d be surprised to learn how many buildings in morningside are owned by columbia and how many of those commercial spaces are rented out by dear ol’ alma.
i mean, come on. there are private security guards walking the neighborhood. just like a theme park.
@Is/Is Not Surprised http://neighbors.columbia.edu/pages/manplanning/images/gallery/development_sites.jpg
A sea of blue.
@Anonymous Not as bad as this:
BARNARD (Who?)
THE LIBERAL ARTS COLLEGE (Oh, okay. It’s a college.)
FOR WOMEN (Giggity!)
IN NEW YORK CITY (Carrie! Samantha! And the rest!)
@Not Exactly The legal name of the city is the “City of New York,” (go to NYC.gov and see what they call it) not “New York” and certainly not “New York City.” I’d agree with you if Columbia was named “Columbia University in New York City”; that would be begging for recognition by using a colloquialism in an official name. But “Columbia University in the City of New York” uses the official legal name of the city, so I don’t see the problem.
@Alum Bwog staff really should not lower themselves to bickering with or trying to justify or explain themselves to opinionated anonymous commentators who whinge and let the world know about it every time something “rubbed them the wrong way”.
@Irony, definition “who whinge and let the world know about it every time something ‘rubbed them the wrong way'”
It does however seem entirely Bwog-esque to have commenters at each others throat, especially when saccharinely nostalgic, concern-troll Alums post.
I believe we’ve reached Bwog-Aum, Bwogirvana…
@Bwog is exposing their ignorance Sure, ACP jr. threatened to slander MLK jr. (by publicly announcing that he was having a homosexual relationship to Bayard Rustin) to keep him from marching at the 1956 Convention nominating Eisenhower. That was homophobic. However, remember, until at latest 1964, the Republicans were the party of civil rights. That’s why Powell and other prominent black celebrities such as Jackie Robinson supported Eisenhower and the Republicans—Democrats were deeply split due to the Dixiecrats (white southern racists).
Arguably, this may or may not have been a tactical error. But, to sum up the career of NYC’s first black councilman as a homophobic crook is unfair. He was the most powerful black politician until the mid-60s, helping create landmark programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Head Start — and even contributing to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
@Eliza We certainly didn’t intend to sum up ACP Jr’s career by calling him a “homophobic crook”- and I, as a lifelong Morningside Heights-er, understand the enormous positive impact he’s had on the community and city politics in general while still making mistakes.
We were drawing an imperfect comparison, and certainly a reductive one, to give a sense of history about what Rangel could be facing based on legal precedent. We certainly don’t mean to make our Bwoggy reductions offensive, and I apologize if that was the outcome, but do know that we were trying to make a point only about precedent for this kind of case, not ACP Jr’s legacy.
@ehhh... I still think that’s a shoddy cop-out: as the majority of Bwog readers are not life-long residents of New York’s 15th Congressional District, most would take such flippant pot-shots at Adam Clayton Powell Jr. at face-value, rather than a good-hearted chuckle between natives, who love to make jokes about politicians for the sake of making jokes about politicians.
But, this whole thing is not that big of a deal—the penultimate sentence just rubbed me the wrong way. Kudos on having the gumption to respond.
@you know if we’re ‘into this kind of thing,’ this is the last thing from breaking.
@Eliza That’s an incredibly good point.
@Anonymous i dont get it
@as in if you were interested in congressional politics/scandals, you would have already known about rangel’s “eighteen-month-long investigation”. thus, it wouldn’t be “breaking news”.
what i don’t get is who would ever be interested in that.
@Eliza I mean, the breaking news part of it (its on the front page of the Times, Daily News, Post) is that after this zillion-year investigation they’ve finally confirmed that he did in fact violate a bunch of rules.
@true true I didn’t mean to diss or question Bwog’s choice of wording.
@Anonymous See ya, wouldn’t want to be ya. Damn crook politicians always stealing my money, Rengel you suck and I hope you get prison time you f***ing SOB
@Anonymous Not gonna go to jail. The only thing Congress can do is censure or expel. And it’ll get cancelled out due to the fact that he’s gonna win re-election.
@go! ACPV!