There’s a mismatch here between the reality and the response. Judging exclusively by the plan, one might imagine that the subways have descended into a Hobbesian state of chaos and disorder, with New Yorkers being constantly shot and stabbed as they simply try to take a train. If you actually venture down into the system, you’ll largely see normal people going about their days, grumbling more about service outages than violent criminals.

Insofar as there are people disturbing the peace, they’re often homeless New Yorkers with mental health issues who’ve suffered from a dearth of psychological and psychiatric care options and who need help, not troops. The governor understands this, which is an increase in so-called SOS teams — made up of social workers, medical specialists, and others that help homeless people in subways find bed placements and services — and is a welcome part of the effort. This is the type of targeted intervention that gets results, not just headlines.

None of this is to minimize the impact of the crimes that do occur on trains and platforms, and the ripple effects they have. While crime may be generally down in the subways, felony assault was up slightly and burglary up significantly in the last year. The headline-grabbing severity of these assaults — with straphangers hit with metal objects or tossed to the tracks — creates shock that obscures the sheer unlikelihood that someone will be harmed on the trains.

Last year, the NYPD reported 570 assaults on the subways, every one of them terrible for the victim and society, but that represents something like two million rides for every assault, or an assault likelihood of around 0.00005% per ride.

Yet these assaults can and do make the public afraid of riding, and anything that keeps riders away is a self-reinforcing problem as fewer people pay fares and occupy the stations and trains at all hours. If we’re going to get serious about stopping the upward trend, the solution is not untrained soldiers to gum up the works, perform invasive searches and increase the likelihood of altercations with the public. More real transit cops on the platforms and the trains are helpful, but that is also quite expensive.

Instead, Adams and Hochul should scrap the showy but ineffective Guardsmen plan and focus on targeted interventions. Don’t make the subway system feel more like the airport with bag searches, but put more NYPD transit officers specifically in known problem areas, and have them be visible but relatively unobtrusive.

Also, expand having social services staff develop relationships with those suffering from substance abuse and mental illness by offering placements and supports. The subways cannot serve as campsites, which is degrading for people living there and unsettling to those using the trains for their intended transportation purpose.

This approach will work better, cost less and help more people in the long run.

That she didn’t endorse him is a thin hope that she will withhold her backing — and her voters and donors and supporters will do likewise. Or maybe she will soon enough fall in line as Mitch McConnell did, and pledge loyalty to Trump.

Haley’s departure is bad for her and it’s bad for the party and it’s bad for the country, as Trump cruises towards a third consecutive nomination. No one wants a repeat of the awful 2020 contest between Trump and Joe Biden, but that’s what we are getting.

Biden said a while back that he is running to stop Trump, the same reason he ran last time. However, if there was no Trump, with his not-secret threats to democracy and constitutional norms, then maybe Biden could retire.

But Trump pushes on, perhaps to erase his 2020 loss (which really happened, fair and square) and take revenge on those he perceived betrayed him, perhaps to try to raise money for his costly legal defense and staggeringly high civil court judgments, perhaps to try to win in order to self-pardon himself from his federal indictments or perhaps for all those reasons.

Also packing it in yesterday was Congressman Dean Phillips, who quit the Democratic race. He liked Biden’s policies and he liked Biden, but argued that Biden couldn’t beat Trump. Democrats didn’t take up the offer from Phillips. And we will see in November if Phillips’ dire prediction is correct.

What this also means is that the April 2 New York presidential primary has no value to anyone and is a $25 million waste of taxpayers’ money, including eight days of early voting starting on Saturday, March 23. It’s not the normal nine days of early voting because March 31 is Easter Sunday. But instead of keeping the polls closed just for one day, we should cancel the whole presidential primary.

The Republican ballot lists Trump, Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy and Chris Christie. They have all quit except for Trump. The Democratic ballot has Biden, Phillips and Marianne Williamson. The New Age guru/kook Williamson quit and then unquit. She may very well quit again. And on the part of the Democratic ballots that actually matters, delegates, only Biden offered a slate of delegates so Williamson isn’t competing for anything. (Republican ballots don’t list delegates in this state)

The two chairs of the Legislature’s election committees, Assemblymember Latrice Walker and state Sen. Zellnor Myrie, should quickly pass a bill that requires presidential primary candidates to recertify their intention of running. When the quitters don’t respond, the state Board of Elections can then cancel the primary, as New York never runs primaries with single candidates.

There are no other public offices or party positions on the April ballot. Any absentee ballots that were already mailed out can be thrown away.

With the top of the two tickets settled, it’s going to be very long eight months until November. New York taxpayers should at least save $25 million and avoid a useless exercise.

As beneficial as this has proved for our species, it has pitfalls, most significantly the fact that we don’t see the really bad things coming, or tend to ignore them. The last two decades have been a masterclass in the dangers of this cognitive quirk — our hubristic campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, the economic meltdown whose clear signs we collectively ignored, the surging devastation of climate change after many years of warnings were not heeded, the preventable loss of life as leaders waved away the threat of COVID.

Now, there’s Donald Trump. With Super Tuesday powering the former president forward towards the Republican nomination and dispelling any last remaining grains of doubt about his eventual candidacy, we are again hurtling to a showdown between Joe Biden and Trump. Yet despite the rematch, this is not the same situation we had four years ago.

We know much more about the lengths to which Trump is willing to go to secure his power and subvert the rule of law. We know about Jan. 6, about how close we came to having sitting members of Congress and the vice president violently attacked and perhaps hanged during a violent takeover of our halls of power. We know how hard Trump tried to nullify the voters’ choices, and how he’s lionized the insurrectionist shock troops of his attempted coup.

More importantly, we know about what he’s planning if he’s ever allowed presidential power again. We do not have to speculate, because Trump has said it himself, that he would implement the “termination” of parts of the Constitution, that he would be a “dictator” on his first day in office.

He has promised rather explicitly to utilize federal law enforcement to pursue his political enemies on spurious grounds, an approach already pioneered by his MAGA followers in Congress with sham impeachments. His closest allies have spelled out, in detail, plans to deploy the military widely across the country, for immigration enforcement and who knows what else.

At least, we should know. Some recent polling makes clear that far too much of the country remains unaware of some of Trump’s most authoritarian impulses and comments. There is the sense that he can’t be serious, or that these are politically-motivated attacks even when they’re direct quotes from Trump and his MAGA entourage. Normalcy bias again at work, threatening to lull us into false security.

When Trump talks about subverting our government and shaping it to his own image, we should take him at his word. Most voters are relatively casual politics observers, tuning in occasionally as elections near and developing their views on sporadic information. Between now and November, it’s imperative to put front and center the dominant political story of our lifetimes, that of Trump’s open authoritarianism. Only the American public can stop him.

Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy testified via Zoom. But he wasn’t speaking in favor of his own sound plan for NJT, but rather against congestion pricing backed by Gov. Hochul. Sorry, sir, we support both proposals and they both need to be adopted (and the way the gubernatorial-dominated NJT and MTA boards work, they both will be adopted.)

The higher NJT fares start on July 1, probably right after the MTA’s congestion pricing begins. We have spent a great deal of time on the benefits of congestion pricing to everyone (including Jerseyites who like to drive into Midtown and Downtown), so we will focus on the NJT fare hikes.

The fare, which has been held flat for far too long, must go up 15% and then there will be regular, annual inflation-based fare increases of 3%. We call that the Ravitch Rule, after Dick Ravitch, who repeatedly saved the subways, among other amazing accomplishments.

Murphy was an old friend of Ravitch, knowing him long before Murphy entered electoral politics with his first run in 2017, as the governor explained when he spoke at Ravitch’s funeral last summer.

Murphy also wants, for the first time, to have a dedicated and dependable revenue source for transit, with a proposed tax. That was also a Ravitch invention. Under Ravitch’s arm-twisting, the Legislature created a bunch of dedicated taxes for the MTA in 1981 when, as MTA chair, he saved the subways the first time.

And then Ravitch did it again with a dedicated payroll tax for transit that he successfully pushed for in 2009. And he kept at it, championing more financial support from Albany, which came last year, shortly before he died just shy of his 90th birthday.

The Ravitch Rule, of small and predictable fare increases, came in 2009, and with a few exceptions, the MTA has wisely stuck to the schedule.

Murphy, by catching up fares with the strong medicine of a 15% jump, and then setting a steady course with routine fare bumps and a dedicated tax stream, can do the same for NJT.

Murphy also knows well that Ravitch dearly wanted congestion pricing.

Ravitch agreed with us, as does everyone in New York, that it is unfair and bad policy for NJT to charge an extra, Manhattan-only fee for trips to and from Newark Airport’s rail station. The Manhattan-only surcharge began when the AirTrain debuted in 2001, with an added few bucks for only New York travelers. (Any knowledgeable rider can legitimately avoid the fee.)

We complained for years and in 2010, Gov. Chris Christie chopped the penalty to 25 cents, but refused to eliminate it. Now NJT is going to make the Manhattan fee 30 cents. Even though Penn Station is by far NJT’s busiest station, there are no fare hearings there this week.

Hochul should just tell Murphy to cut it out. Come on, sir, with these Ravitch-like moves, you are putting NJT on track. Now, just drop that unfair airport penalty.

That was enough to end the Colorado case and keep Trump on the Centennial State ballot, where today is the Super Tuesday primary that he’s likely to win. And it also ends the various state-by-state challenges around the country. Both proper outcomes.

While states can use 14th Amendment to forbid “any office, civil or military” on the local and state level to insurrectionists, they cannot exercise that authority over federal offices, such as Congress and the presidency and federal appointive positions.

What the unanimous nine didn’t agree on which feds have the power to use the 14th Amendment to police the ballot. Granted that a determination needs to be made on a federal level, but what federal person or persons? A federal judge? A federal agency? Congress? It’s a question that didn’t need to be addressed in the Colorado case, but the five men on the high court went ahead and said it was Congress, which needs to write a law for this situation.

The four women on the court said that was unnecessary, that the court should have just stopped at saying that the 14th Amendment is about federal power being imposed on the states, not the other way around, with states imposing on federal matters like presidential and congressional elections.

The narrow majority of the five Mr. Justices wrote that Congress should pass a law about this, but it must be before the November election. With the Republicans in control of the House, that won’t happen, but say the Democrats win the House and Senate this fall.

The new Congress starts on Jan. 3 and they could then pass a law, blocking Trump — should he have won — from being certified on Jan. 6 and being inaugurated on Jan. 20. That would be a disaster and the court said no to that nightmare scenario.

The best outcome is that Trump doesn’t win. And then the new Democratic Congress could bar him for 2028, remedying the error of the Senate for failing to convict him during his impeachment trial in 2021 after the sacking of the Capitol by his mob and forbid him any future office.

What none of the nine justices did was do anything to counter the finding of the Colorado courts that Trump is an oathbreaking insurrectionist. Nor did they address the trickier notion that the presidency is the sole public office for which the 14th Amendment’s prohibition doesn’t apply, which is what the Colorado trial judge found and the Colorado high court waved away.

Should someone try another, federal approach, to use 14th Amendment, such as suing in federal court, yesterday’s decision has preemptively shut it down, saying that the Congress must act. As that is how the majority was going to rule, they have saved everyone the time and effort of trying.

Assuming he’s the GOP nominee, Trump will be on 50 state ballots. Stopping him will depend on the American people.

It’s not particularly unusual for the two ends of City Hall to differ in their estimates, nor is it a rarity for the Council to find more money between the cushions in the form of greater tax and general revenue projections as well as some decreased costs. Last year, the Council had an even more substantial difference of opinion, projecting that the city would take in $5.2 billion more over fiscal years 2023 and 2024.

Ultimately, they were more on the mark, and the mayor’s office has certainly undermined its position by backtracking on its project of significant budget cuts across all city agencies — a supposed necessity announced just months ago that was never very well-explained and quickly discarded.

Budget Director Jacques Jiha himself acknowledged that the administration’s projections incorporated the potential for an economic recession that did not materialize and were otherwise cautious in anticipation of higher migrant spending costs.

Speaking of those costs, the mayor’s office has been pretty quiet on an audit issued by Comptroller Brad Lander last week finding that the city is massively overpaying for migrant services in emergency, no-bid contracts.

Put another way, the spending that was ostensibly the underlying reason for the budget cuts, and which was presented as practically single-handedly dragging the city into insolvency, was inflated by potentially hundreds of millions of dollars.

The city’s explanation — that it was reacting to an acute, unprecedented situation and had to act quickly to provide services — has some merit, but it would be more acceptable if we weren’t nearly two years into this situation.

Does that mean that we’re all good, and the state and federal governments have no need to step in and help? Of course not. President Biden, who’s been focused on the enforcement part of the puzzle, has never presented a satisfactory reason why the federal government, which breaks out the checkbook routinely for priorities at home and abroad, has made such anemic funding pools available to the cities and states contending with large migrant populations.

It all seems to be an effort to not be a draw for further immigration, but that doesn’t seem to have worked one bit; the bill is being covered anyway, except that it’s cities paying up.

This also doesn’t mean that the city should go on a spending spree. It did not make sense to preemptively cut agency budgets and services, but Eric Adams is right that the city has seemed quite comfortable ballooning its spending over the last few years, and not always for any clear positive impact.

COVID proved that the rainy days can come without warning, and it’s incumbent on the city to have the ballast to weather these storms and ensure that its investments are getting the most bang for the buck.

Whether that’s streamlining agency processes, cutting down on wasteful emergency contracts, judiciously allocating police overtime costs, or anything else, the extra cash still comes with the same responsibility to the public purse.

That downtown courtroom has limited seating and since New York wrongly bars cameras and microphones from trials when witnesses are testifying, Merchan must take steps to ensure maximum transparency in the proceedings of the People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump, defendant. The People are represented by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, but the larger public, both Trump fans and Trump foes, must have access.

Since the venue isn’t being changed to the largest room in Manhattan, Madison Square Garden, what Merchan should do is bring in TV cameras for those portions without testimony by working with state Chief Administrative Judge Joe Zayas. That means televising the opening statements by Bragg’s prosecutors and Trump’s defense lawyers. Ditto for the closing arguments.

While not the whole trial, this is allowed under state law and will provide Americans a window to the historic event while preserving Trump’s right to a fair trial and Bragg’s ability to present his case.

And rather than be a circus, TV cameras for those portions will help reduce the circus atmosphere that we’ve seen in previous Trump trials, with him holding hallway press conferences. Merchan can’t stop Trump from talking and Zayas can’t bar the press or the public from the courthouse, but TV cameras inside for the arguments will reduce the side commentary.

What also needs to be done, as we have urged, and Daily News op-ed contributor Nick Akerman also called for in the Washington Post, is making the trial transcripts available to the public daily. As Akerman wrote, that should apply in Trump’s other trials in federal court in D.C. and Florida.

However, there’s the conundrum that New York State court stenographers, despite being public employees, with full salaries and benefits, sell the transcripts and keep the money personally and are opposed to the publication of the transcripts. That’s just wrong, as public court transcripts are public records, not copyright material and anyone who purchases a transcript should be able to freely publish it.

The stenographers can still pocket the proceeds from selling transcripts, but shouldn’t be able to restrict the use of the transcripts. Zayas and Merchan must side with the public.

The same goes for other documents from the upcoming case, such as briefs and evidence submitted by either side and orders issued by Merchan. All those paper records should be published each day, as Zayas correctly did with Merchan’s 30-page order, upholding Bragg’s charges. But neither Trump’s objections nor Bragg’s rebuttal have been published.

Compare this to Trump’s civil trial, brought by state Attorney General Tish James before Manhattan state Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron. That case has 1,703 documents entered on the available-to-all public docket, including many portions of the trial transcripts.

Engoron erred in not allowing TV cameras for the opening and closing statements, but the paper trail is complete, permitting anyone to read at will.

With the higher stakes of Trump’s criminal trial, Merchan should have both TV cameras and a full record of all the transcripts and documents.

It’s not necessarily worthwhile to take the settlement numbers as directly connected to police performance; many are downstream of wrongful convictions or misconduct that happened years or even decades ago. In that sense, it’s something of a delayed metric. Nonetheless, it’s an sign of nothing good if the numbers keep rising.

What we should look at the settlements as is to some degree a sign of where attitudes and procedures are too lax. If many of the settlements were arising out of wrongful convictions, that should tell us that there should be more concrete oversight  for both cops and prosecutors to ensure that they’re not rushing through cases and that, for example, cops known to lie on the stand actually face consequences.

If other settlements are coming from cops taking a heavy-handed approach to public protest, as many did from the NYPD response to the 2020 George Floyd protests, it should be a signal to NYPD brass and policymakers that the force needs to better understand the bounds and importance of First Amendment activity.

A recent settlement with Attorney General Tish James was meant to build out a more robust framework for police responses to public protest, yet there have been some indications that the NYPD has continued the trend with its response to pro-Palestinian protests in the city.

Ultimately, all accountability flows from the top, and unfortunately the NYPD and Mayor Adams’ public safety leadership have not set a tone for accountability. Deputy Mayor Phil Banks has taken it upon himself to leapfrog the police commissioner in the chain of command. So has Adams, most notably to protect his old pal Jeff Maddrey from any consequences for his role abusing his authority to spring a friend from jail after the latter was arrested for waving a gun at some kids.

It’s not Maddrey’s only misconduct rodeo; NYPD’s own internal investigators determined he lied to them about a physical altercation with another officer with whom he’d had a tumultuous years-long affair. He was also accused of reassigning an officer who dared to give a traffic ticket to a friend of his. Yet there he remains as the top uniformed officer on the force.

Meanwhile, Maddrey’s boss, Commissioner Eddie Caban, has retained his predecessors’ habit of overruling the Civilian Complaint Review Board and doling out little or no punishment to officers and particularly high-ranking pals who have already been found to have engaged in misconduct. Just last month, he declined to issue any discipline to a deputy chief who grabbed a woman by the hair and slammed her face into the ground during a 2020 arrest.

NYPD misconduct, wrongful arrest lawsuit settlements cost NYC taxpayers $114.5M in 2023

NYPD doubles down after named wrong judge in Twitter post slamming release of Bronx repeat offender

The example of proper behavior must come from the top. The NYPD don’t have much incentive to minimize settlements that come out of the city’s coffers, but they should see them as at least some flashing warning signs for their own operational integrity and credibility. If they can’t reform themselves, policymakers should remind them who calls the shots.

To some extent, we can thank the Federal Reserve’s needle-threading on rate hikes and the pro-labor and pro-industrial policy stances of the Biden administration. But what really stuck the landing is what’s been the United States’ economic secret sauce for two centuries: immigration.

Recent economic analyses by the Economic Policy Institute, the Congressional Research Service and others shows that the labor force has grown enormously in large part on the back of rebounding immigration, which had fallen during the pandemic. This helped plug labor force problems that were in large part leading to inflation, as well as kept consumer demand high and money flowing around the economy.

Here we can hear critics jumping in to roll out the persistent myth that these foreign-born workers are “taking” jobs from the native born; that would pack some more punch if unemployment weren’t at historic lows across the board, or wages rising especially for lower-income populations, immigrant and native born alike.

To the extent that there are negative economic circumstances, such as rising child poverty rates following the expiration of pandemic-era child care and other assistance programs, these are areas where immigration can be a significant boon.

Birthrates have dropped below replacement levels in the United States, and a big chunk of the child care, nursing and general health care workforce now is drawing from immigrants, who will ensure against the demographic crash.

Unfortunately, you won’t hear much about this from political leaders, from Joe Biden to Donald Trump, who are competing for who can appear tougher on immigrants rather than touting the substantial benefits of continuing to be a global destination for talent and culture.

Mayor Adams last week upped the ante on his public frustrations with immigrants, suggesting that New York should essentially reverse its sanctuary policies and begin cooperating with ICE just when an immigrant is suspected of a crime, not convicted, suggesting that they “should be held accountable.”

The mayor apparently forgot that the criminal justice system that he was a part of for decades as a police officer is already the entity responsible for holding accountable people suspected of crimes. There are specific and in fact constitutional reasons why people who are suspected of criminal activity — regardless of what activity that is — are presumed innocent until proven guilty, and not sentenced until that guilt is legally established.

Deportation is a very harsh fate, yet the mayor is suggesting we effectively presume guilt for immigrants arrested for crimes and send them packing.

It’s not right and it’s not in keeping with New York values. Rather than threatening heavy-handed enforcement, Adams should focus on cutting down on the massive waste happening in migrant services contracts and continuing to push the Biden administration to assist arriving migrants itself instead of foisting it all on municipalities and states.

But with Einstein’s fame and worldwide acclaim as a man of science, he only bestowed his name to one institution, a medical school in the Bronx, in 1953, two years before he died.

It was to be a different kind of med school, open to all students and faculty, regardless of race and religion, breaking with the shameful legacy of limiting Jews and other “undesirables” from medical schools. Before Einstein, there was Middlesex University in Massachusetts, which did not bar students. Yet Middlesex failed and its campus was taken over by Brandeis University (which doesn’t have a med school).

So it was tried again in New York. Founded under the auspices of a Jewish institution, Yeshiva University, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine was nonsectarian from its start and the great physicist freely gave his name.

In recent years, Einstein has been part of Montefiore Medical Center, the largest employer in the Bronx.

And now, the legacy of Einstein’s mission of being open to all has expanded with an extraordinary gift of $1 billion by Ruth Gottesman, who served on the faculty for more than 50 years and is chair of the board.

The money, the largest donation ever to a medical school, will make Einstein forever tuition-free. The current tuition of $60,000 a year, over four years, has meant that young doctors, MDs and PhDs, were starting their careers with a quarter million dollars in debt. No more. The lectures and the labs will be free to all students.

Gottesman, who is 93, is the widow of investor Sandy Gottesman. In 1964, he founded the Wall Street firm First Manhattan and teamed up with Warren Buffet and his Berkshire Hathaway. At around the same time, Ruth Gottesman, who holds a doctorate in education, joined Einstein’s Children’s Evaluation and Rehabilitation Center and became a clinical professor of pediatrics, focusing on learning disabilities.

Sandy and Ruth both flourished in their pursuits for decades. He died two years ago at age 96, leaving her a bequest of $1 billion to use as she saw fit. She decided to give the mountain of money to Einstein.

With such an enormous gift would normally come the donor’s name on the door, but she refused and even was reluctant to have her gift be public. Indeed, a stipulation of the gift is that Einstein remain the med school’s name.

And so the promise that Albert Einstein College of Medicine began with is now fully realized. Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Black, white, Hispanic, Asian; people of all types are welcome as students to learn and now there is no financial barrier. The only criteria is that the applicant be someone who will become a good doctor, a compassionate and learned healer for the betterment of all of humanity.

Ruth Gottesman found the perfect place for the money.