New York is ready to legalize recreational marijuana. The state would impose special pot taxes and prepare to license dispensaries under an agreement reached by Gov. Andrew Cuomo and legislative leaders.

“It is my understanding that the three-way agreement has been reached and that bill drafting is in the process of finishing a bill that we all have said we support,” state Senate Finance Committee Chair Liz Krueger told Bloomberg Government on Wednesday.

Cannabis use would become legal for adults 21 years old and up.

The deal that legislative leaders brokered with Cuomo (D) calls for a 13% sales tax, 9% of which would go to the state and 4% to the localities, Krueger said. Distributors additionally would collect an excise tax of as much as 3 cents per milligram of THC, the active ingredient in cannabis, with a sliding scale based on the type of product and its potency.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has decided against appointing the Los Angeles area congressman to lead the state’s law enforcement agency, a post recently vacated by Xavier Becerra when he was confirmed to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. It is not yet known whom Newsom has chosen for the AG role, though a formal announcement is expected soon.

Schiff was angling for the job with the blessing of powerful Democrats in Washington, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. A Harvard Law School graduate and former prosecutor who serves as the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Schiff had aggressively lobbied Newsom to appoint him to the role, which in the past has been a stepping stone for the governorship or U.S. Senate.

Schiff’s office declined to comment.

Newsom, who is facing the threat of a recall over his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, has spent months mostly keeping his own counsel on filling the AG job. He’s run much of his own reviews of potential candidates and kept the fierce outside lobbying at bay, according to aides and advisers to the governor and top contenders.

Senate Democrats are eyeing the next phase of the filibuster fight as they plan a series of tests to try to squeeze Republicans and sway their colleagues wary of changing the Senate’s most famous rule.

As the House passes several big policy priorities, Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) is vowing that he will put the bills on the floor this year, setting up high-profile showdowns on President Biden’s campaign promises.

Democrats say the strategy is two-fold: It will make Republicans go on the record in opposition and could demonstrate to Democrats wary of reforming the legislative filibuster that much of their agenda will be stuck in limbo without reforms.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) pointed to House-passed bills or legislation coming out of Senate committees that unify the caucus and garner broad support as potential areas that could elevate the filibuster discussions among Democrats.

The June 22 Democratic primary race for mayor is still “wide open” — with half of voters still undecided, a new poll released Wednesday reveals.

Entrepreneur and former presidential candidate Andrew Yang is in the lead, but with support of just 16 percent of likely Democratic voters, the survey by Fontas Advisors/Core Decision Analytics found.

Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams is in second with 10 percent backing, followed by Maya Wiley, a former top legal counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, with 6 percent. City Comptroller Scott Stringer with 5 percent and former top Citigroup executive Ray McGuire with 4 percent.

Former top Obama administration official Shaun Donovan, ex-city Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia and social services advocate Dianne Morales each had 2 percent of the vote.

https://nypost.com/2021/03/24/poll-dem-primary-for-nyc-mayor-wide-open-half-of-voters-still-undecided/

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud has emerged as the largest party with the majority of the vote counted in Israel's unprecedented fourth election in two years. However, Netanyahu still does not have a clear path to a 61-seat majority needed to form a coalition. The vote count is expected to continue through Friday.

The anti-Netanyahu bloc, a motley crew of left, right and centrist factions, was also just shy of a majority. The Islamist United Arab List party, headed by Mansour Abbas, and Naftali Bennett's Yamina have not yet declared their support for either bloc.

Christian, the DCCC raised $11.5 million in February. Yes, $11.5 million in one month.

The DCCC recruits corporate Democrats and protects establishment incumbents while taking money from Wall Street and corporate PACs. All that money goes towards stopping progressive legislation like Medicare for All and a Green New Deal.

Justice Democrats doesn’t take a cent of money from corporate PACs because we’re fighting for the people, NOT corporate profits. We’re recruiting and running working-class progressive primary challengers to challenge the status quo.

This month, we’re trying to raise just 1.8% of what the DCCC raised last month. Christian, now is the perfect time to make a contribution fueling our work to find the next progressive primary candidates to challenge the establishment. Can you donate today?

We need a Democratic Party that fights for its voters, not corporate donors. JD does the hard work of recruiting, training, fundraising, and organizing with bold, progressive candidates.

On one side of this intra-party ideas battle, you have the DCCC, which raises huge sums of money to support establishment candidates that keep the Democratic Party status quo alive.

Then there’s our side. We’re building a solid base of progressives in Congress fighting for Medicare for All, racial justice, COVID-19 relief — and we’re doing it with an incredibly low budget. But the reality is we could be doing more if we had more resources to go against the DCCC.

Exit polls released by all three of Israel's main TV networks on Tuesday project a narrow victory for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc — but the picture could still change as the official results come in.

Why it matters: Three inconclusive elections have left Israel in a prolonged political crisis. If Netanyahu's bloc does win a majority in Israel's fourth election in two years, he could form the most religious and conservative coalition in the history of the country and potentially take steps to undercut his corruption trial.

What to watch: The exit polls are not official results, and they will continue to be updated as the real numbers come in.

According to the Channel 13 exit poll: Netanyahu's Likud party is projected to win 33 seats and his right-wing bloc a total of 61. The center-left bloc is projected to win 59 seats with Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party projected to win 16.

My dad’s politics wouldn’t be of much interest to the wider world, except that he’s part of a group that constituted one of the most puzzling footnotes to the 2020 election: Latinos who voted for Trump. Between 2016 and 2020, Trump improved his overall support among Latinos by four percentage points, while Biden’s support declined from Hillary Clinton’s by one point — and in some places the change was even more significant. In Florida, Biden won Latinos by just five points, a massive swing from Clinton’s 27-point margin in 2016. In Texas, Trump closed the margin among Latino voters by 10 points.

To many progressives, the trend was a shock — how could a president who so brazenly denigrated Latinos and immigrants actually increase his stock among those same voters? — but it was also a wake-up call. For a generation, Democrats have taken comfort in the assumption that long-term demographics were on their side: As America became less and less White, Democrats would enjoy an increasing advantage in national politics. The growing Latino vote was a — maybe the — linchpin of this thinking. Which means that if, in fact, Latinos are drifting from Democrats, it constitutes an emergency for the party, one that could haunt them in 2022, 2024 and beyond.

Drawing on a number of conversations with experts, plus two with my dad, I recently spent time trying to figure out why this was happening. There are no simple answers, but I was particularly intrigued by one subplot of the story of Latino voters: Nationally, Biden won Latino men by 23 points but Latinas by 39 points. In 2016, Clinton won Latino men by 31 points and Latinas by 44. In other words, Trump gained among both groups over four years, but he gained more among men. In some states, the 2020 gender disparity among Hispanic voters was quite dramatic. In North Carolina, Trump won Latino men by 20 points but lost Latinas by 54 points. In Nevada, Biden won Latino men by only six points but Latinas by 47 points. Why, I wondered, did Latino men seem to be shifting to the right? And what could Democrats do to win them back?

President Donald Trump speaks at the Latino Coalition Legislative Summit in Washington in March 2020. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
Writing about gender differences within the Latino vote is inherently thorny terrain. There’s a long-standing, racist stereotype that associates Latino men with machismo — and, as we all saw for the past six years, Trump’s political brand was built partly on an exaggerated macho sensibility. Ian Haney López, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, told me that there is a risk of reducing Latino men’s support of Trump to being about machismo — which takes “a pervasive social dynamic” and makes it into “an attribute of Latino culture.” “Patriarchy is a problem across racial groups,” he says, though he adds: “It’s also fair to say if you’re a man in a low-status group, masculinity may become more important to claiming high status.”

A better place to start might be jobs: what the experiences of men and women look like in the American economy right now, and how that might influence their thinking about politics. Stephanie Valencia of EquisLabs, a Democratic research firm that surveyed Latino voters in 11 states starting in 2019, says that, in the run-up to the election, they found plenty of men who had what she called “Trump intrigue.” “They see him as the successful businessman, and they see him as somebody who has built himself up from his bootstraps, even though we all know that’s not necessarily true,” she told me.