Thankful

Over at Talking Points Memo there's a hilarious video collecting "Testimony We Give Thanks For" by the Cheney/Bush Administration officials who appeared in front of Congress over the past year, the first of Democratic control in twelve years. Disgraced ex-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is the star scumbag, but there's no shortage of forgetters and pretenders.

While crime in D.C. has gone up during Republican rule, i.e. in the Federal government with seemingly anything they've touched, it's actually decreased in NYC, and some credit should go to faux-Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg switched parties from Democratic to GOP in order to get a nomination (he was right that the NYC Dems would never nominate him) but he's led as a pragmatic, connective centrist, much more so than the self-myth of ex-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

So since I'm closing out a holiday family visit to the city, I'm grateful for these statistics from The New York Times:

New York City is on track to have fewer than 500 murders in 2007, by far the lowest amount in a 12-month period since reliable Police Department statistics became available in 1963.

But within the city’s official crime statistics is a perhaps even more striking figure: so far, with roughly half the killings analyzed, only 35 were found to be committed by strangers, a microscopic statistic in a city of 8.5 million.

That's right -- it's not so dangerous to visit anymore.

Let's hope this holds until we're safely on the plane and headed back to sunny Santa Monica.