To be the next mayor, the old medium is still the message

  

The Jewish Voice

The city comptroller, Scott M. Stringer, is kicking off his first television ad campaign this week, marking the beginning of a new, intense, and expensive phase of the race eight weeks out from the June 22 primary that is likely to determine the next mayor of New York.

 The first phase of the most important mayoral campaign in our lifetime did nothing to help the public find a new mayor who can reverse the economic destruction caused by COVERT to the city.   Phase one of the campaign consisted mostly of candidates taking selfies with supporters around the city for twitter and Facebook and zoom calls. The zoom calls often had several candidates speaking to special interest insider groups, were not debates, but talking point discussion written to gain the support of the group hosting the call, written by the candidate’s public relations consultants

 So far, we know the candidates want more money for bike lanes, animal rights and everything else, but they do not explain where the city which is suffering the worse fiscal crisis since the depression, will get the funding.  The voters have no idea which of the candidates will better manage or fix the city’s long-term problems like homelessness or the new ones like 40% of the city’s businesses closed permanently, because they are not discussed beyond the candidate promising to fix all the city’s problems.

   There has been no vetting by debates or by journalists of any of these candidates’ promises or plans.As the TV phase of the campaign now begins more New Yorkers will be exposed to the better funded mayoral candidates as their TVs, Phones and Computers will be bombarded with campaign ads, but those commercials will still be talking points written by campaign consultants.  However if the past is prolog those TV ads, if done right. could be enough to elect the next mayor.

In 1977 the Brilliant TV commercials created by media genius the late David Garth were enough to elect Ed Koch as mayor.   Mario M. Cuomo was running for mayor against Mr. Garth’s come-from-behind creation, Edward I. Koch, Mr. Cuomo sardonically demanded: “What hath Garth wrought?”   

Koch often said he would never have been elected mayor without Garth’s commercials.  He was 10 points behind before Garth started his commercials.

 The late Roger Ailes, former Fox News president and political consultant himself, said “Garth was a political guy who learned how to use television rather than a television guy who learned politics,” Mr. Ailes said. “Nobody knew New York better.   Years after his lost to Koch, Mario Cuomo would recruit Mr. Garth for one of his own campaigns for governor, which he won.   So did Rudolph W. Giuliani and Michael R. Bloomberg who both became mayors of NYC.

Shout out to @UnitedNYBlogs, who wrote this post for the Jewish Voice and ran the essential True News blog, for still tagging me in his tweets even though I'm still unreasonably and unjustifiably deplatformed.

  #FreeJQLLC

Why is de Blasio sending the homeless to NYCHA less often?

From the Daily News:

Homeless New Yorkers are getting a smaller share of Housing Authority apartments under Mayor de Blasio than under previous administrations, a report to be released Tuesday found.

De Blasio, who is grappling with record-high numbers of homeless people needing shelter, has pledged 750 NYCHA apartments a year for homeless New Yorkers, about 12% of the total NYCHA placements available.

That’s a sharp decrease from the number of units provided in prior administrations, when fewer New Yorkers were homeless, according to the Homes for Every New Yorker coalition report.

Former Mayor David Dinkins prioritized an average of 1,215 NYCHA units annually for homeless families, at a time when fewer than 25,000 New Yorkers were living in shelters nightly — as compared with 60,000 people today.

Under Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the shelter census was at about 30,000 a night, and the city set aside an average of 854 NYCHA units a year for the homeless, according to the report.

In his first term, ex-Mayor Michael Bloomberg continued with the practice of placing thousands of homeless in NYCHA apartments, averaging about 1,662 public housing placements a year through 2005. But he completely stopped giving homeless families priority, saying in 2004 that doing so creating an incentive for families to go to shelters.

Overall, there are about 270,000 New Yorkers on the NYCHA waitlist.

The report, to be released Tuesday, urges de Blasio to increase the number of homeless placements in NYCHA apartments to 2,550 a year.

Is this the way to reform workfare?

From the NY Times:

Mayor Bill de Blasio is revamping the city’s welfare program, vowing to dismantle what was once the largest workfare program in the nation and to embrace new strategies for moving thousands of people off the welfare rolls and into jobs.

Workfare? Do you remember workfare? It is the program that ballooned during the administration of Rudolph W. Giuliani, with 36,224 people working in it or assigned to it by the year 2000.

The program mostly dropped out of the headlines after Mr. Giuliani, a Republican, left office, but his work-first ethos still prevails: In April, 9,194 welfare recipients participated in or were assigned to workfare, and thousands more were required to engage in job-search programs that de Blasio administration officials have described as largely unsuccessful.

Now, Mr. de Blasio says, it is time for change.

Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat, plans to prioritize education and training for able-bodied welfare recipients instead of automatically assigning them to workfare positions — cleaning parks and subway platforms and performing clerical duties — that have been described as dead ends by advocates for impoverished families.

Over the next two years, city officials say, those workfare jobs will vanish completely and be replaced by transitional employment programs, internships and community service positions in growing sectors of the economy to ensure that more welfare recipients find paying jobs.

Research shows that programs heavily focused on education and training have been less successful than others at moving welfare recipients into the workplace. And somewhere out there, Mr. Giuliani must be wagging his finger, warning of the dangers ahead.

Coming out of the woodwork

From The Politicker:

A name familiar to millions of New Yorkers could enter a volatile Queens City Council race.

Rudy S. Giuliani, chief of staff to Republican Councilman Eric Ulrich and second cousin to the former mayor of the same name, is mulling a run for indicted GOP Councilman Dan Halloran’s seat, multiple sources told Politicker.

Mr. Giuliani is perhaps the only candidate who could keep the seat in their party’s possession, two GOP sources argued, since Mr. Halloran was arrested two weeks ago for participating in an alleged bribery scheme and the Republican Party lacks a deep bench in the northeastern Queens district. The sources said Mr. Ulrich is encouraging Mr. Giuliani to run for the seat if Mr. Halloran does not seek re-election.

A special election, which would automatically occur if Mr. Halloran resigned or is convicted of a felony, could present a unique opportunity for a Republican candidate. A crowded field Democrats are already vying for the competitive seat, and as councilmanic special elections are non-partisan, a unified Republican front would be hard to defeat.

Dennis Saffran, a Republican who ran against Mr. Halloran’s predecessor, Democrat Tony Avella, in 2001, may also be weighing another run for the seat. Last year, Mr. Giuliani passed on his own bid against Mr. Avella, who’s now in the State Senate.

This woman cannot be trusted

From the Daily News:

A group of citizens bands together and takes out an ad criticizing a candidate running for mayor. The candidate who is the subject of their criticism — City Council Speaker Christine Quinn — is stung by it. She believes it falsely characterizes her positions.

But instead of just responding, which of course she has ample resources to do, she takes steps to prohibit the critical ad from appearing. First, her campaign’s attorney threatens the cable company on whose network the ad ran, suggesting that it could lose its license if it continues to run the ad. Then Quinn writes to all the other mayoral candidates, asking them to join her in condemning and rejecting all such ads by independent citizens or groups of citizens operating outside of the city’s campaign financing system.

In other words, only the candidates themselves and established media outlets, like newspapers, can offer their opinions in elections. Citizens should not have a voice. Or if they do have a voice, it should only be muted, never amplified on the airwaves.

What Quinn is proposing is exactly what the founders of our country tried to avoid when they passed the First Amendment, guaranteeing all Americans — not just candidates and newspapers — the right of free speech.

Who does she think she is? Quinn can reject contributions to her own campaign from sources she doesn’t like. But she cannot reject what I or any other New Yorker wants to say about her. Nor can she “reject” my right to band together with others of like mind and voice our opinions. That’s what free speech is, and it’s the oldest tradition of liberty we have.

Richard Nixon infamously sought to target and punish his critics. Rudy Giuliani set a city record for being sued for violating the First Amendment. We don’t need another mayor with this little respect for our traditions of free speech, or with so little regard for the First Amendment that she would respond to criticism by trying to repress it.

Underground clubs still a problem

From the Village Voice:

It's surely a hackneyed complaint that the city's last two mayors have done their best to force out New York's bohemian culture in hopes of creating a future perfect Gotham. But it's also demonstrably true. Not long after the new Quality of Life Task Force began to crack down on long-unenforced cabaret laws during the Giuliani administration, the Social Club Task Force—established after the 1990 Happy Land fire—evolved into the Multi-Agency Response to Community Hotspots (MARCH), overseen by the New York Police Department. "Unauthorized dancing" was now only one of many potential infractions.

When Michael Bloomberg succeeded Giuliani in 2002, MARCH activities rose immediately by 35 percent and kept growing. (MARCH shut down Silent Barn.) "If you listen to stories about what led to this homicide or what led to this assault, you would be surprised how many stem from nightclubs," Robert F. Messner, a police commissioner who oversaw club shutdowns, told the Times. "We don't want those places in New York. We make it very clear." In 2003, the smoking ban went into effect, outlawing one of the city's longest-running cultural institutions: the smoky jazz club. Regulations have kept creeping into other bastions of the old, free New York. The Algonquin Hotel has had to confine its lobby cat to a space behind the check-in counter, and don't even think about trying to have a bar dog.

I agree that cracking down on hotel cats and bar dogs is ridiculous. But preventing another HappyLand disaster is something the City should definitely be involved with. Most of these places are a tossed cigarette away from just that.

Again?

From the Gotham Gazette:

Instead of packing onto crowded, often delayed and inconvenient subways, commuters along the Brooklyn/Queens waterfront will have an alternative way to travel when a new ferry service begins making stops along the East River later this year.

The service is the latest in a long line of attempts to boost commuting by water in New York in an effort to revitalize the waterfront and ease congestion. It comes in the wake of a few successes and many failures. The ferries, which will serve Greenpoint, Williamsburg, DUMBO, downtown Brooklyn and East 34th Street, will be operated by BillyBey Ferry Co., which contracts with NY Waterway and whose boats bear the NY Waterway logo.

According to the city Economic Development Corp., the East River ferry system will cost passengers $3 to $5.50, depending on distance. Currently, the city is constructing piers for the new service, and hopes to have them operating by the time boats are ready to take passengers -- probably by June, although no date has been announced. According to development corporation spokesperson Julie Wood, if the new service becomes a success, the city will look to expand ferry service in other places.

The new ferry service comes after years of unsuccessful effort to promote ferries. In the mid-1990s, then Gov. George Pataki and then Mayor Rudy Giuliani asked NY Waterway to provide service between Hunters Point and East 34th Street. The ferries ran between every 15 to 20 minutes, but only carried 135 people per day at its peak. The service was not subsidized by the city and ended in 2001.

In 2002, NY Waterway once again tried to bring ferries to the East Side of Manhattan. The ferry served the 90th Street pier on the Upper East Side, Long Island City, 34th Street and Pier 11 in Lower Manhattan. Costing only $5 per trip, the ferries operated every 30 minutes during rush hour and had no off-hour service. The second attempt faltered due to low ridership, having only carried 150 people per day. Upper East Side opposition to shuttle bus service NY Waterway provides to its terminals further complicated matters, and low ridership from Long Island City resulted in the service ending once more in 2004.

The administration also has attempted to bring ferry service to other parts of the city. In May 2008, NY Water Taxi offered service from Breezy Point in The Rockaways, to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan. Despite having community support, the ferry only served 160 people per day and cost the city $1.5 million in subsidies. The service ended last year 2010.

...the ferries will link up to a free bus service in Midtown as well as to the M34 bus. The ferries also will accommodate bicycles.

Who is going to board a ferry to then have to board a bus to then also probably have to board a train? Why do they think ferry service will have a different result this time? Why are we subsidizing this guaranteed failure?

Hello?

Goldsmith failed major test

From the Daily News:

Bloomberg named Goldsmith his top deputy in April and has handed him enormous power to do the same thing here.

The blizzard was the new deputy's first big test - and he flunked.

To begin with, Goldsmith and Bloomberg refused to declare a snow emergency, even after they learned a blizzard was on the way.

"I started getting text messages from ambulance drivers at 3 a.m. Monday that they were stuck in the snow," said Pat Bahnken, president of the EMS workers' union. "I urged the Fire Department to declare a snow emergency, but they were told City Hall said 'no.'"

Back in 1996, a similar monster storm struck our city. It dumped 20 inches, closed airports, and left drifts 20-feet high.

Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani not only declared a snow emergency and ordered all nonessential vehicles off the road, he took 3,300 city buses out of service so they wouldn't block sanitation trucks and rescue vehicles.

Giuliani also asked then-Gov. George Pataki for help. Pataki dispatched 400 national guardsmen with 100 Humvees that were used as ambulances to transport medical supplies and health workers.

If Bloomberg and Goldsmith had done the same, we wouldn't have had hundreds of stuck buses and ambulances blocking main arteries.

"Under Rudy, every snowstorm was considered a big deal," one former Giuliani official said. "All commissioners and top staffers were expected to be at the command center and we all worked hard together."

This time, Goldsmith was out of town and didn't even show up at the command center until Monday. A City Hall spokesman wouldn't say where he was.

Community gardens endangered

From the Daily News:

Gardeners are upset the proposed rules leave the door open for development of the plots.

The rules were drafted to replace a 2002 agreement with then-state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer which preserved hundreds of gardens, settling a battle between gardeners and the Giuliani administration.

The agreement, which expires next month, promised "permanent protection to hundreds of community gardens...a fair process for reviewing future proposals to develop other garden properties," Bloomberg said in announcing the 2002 agreement.

The new rules allow any garden property to be sold if the City Council approves, though officials say they have no current plans to get rid of any of them.

Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe said Bloomberg was not guaranteeing gardens would be preserved forever.

"Permanent protection to hundreds of community gardens, not permanent gardens," he said.

"The intention is to help community gardens continue to succeed," Benepe added. "It is unfortunate there is such strong misperception of this."

What? Can someone translate that, please?

Bloomberg just an Archie Bunker!

From the NY Times:

Since winning a third term in November, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has announced a parade of major appointments: bringing aboard three new deputy mayors and six commissioners and trumpeting most of those arrivals in the Blue Room at City Hall.

All nine are white. All but one is a man.

Those selections are hardly anomalous. Despite a pledge he made when he took office to make diversity a hallmark of his administration, Mr. Bloomberg has consistently surrounded himself with a predominantly white and male coterie of key policy makers, according to an analysis of personnel data by The New York Times.

The city’s non-Hispanic white population is now 35 percent, because of an influx of nonwhite immigrants and other demographic changes in the past two decades.

But Mr. Bloomberg presides over an administration in which more than 70 percent of the senior jobs are held by whites, and he has failed to improve on the oft-criticized diversity record of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.

The Bloomberg business subsidy scheme

From the NY Times:

For all the giddy wealth that ran through the city before the economic crash, prized commercial real estate was often subsidized through state and city tax benefits, sometimes in special deals made behind closed doors.

And now, Condé Nast, which was granted $10.8 million in rent and tax breaks to move into a Times Square tower that was already heavily subsidized, is said to be having discussions with government officials about relocating downtown, into the tower planned as 1 World Trade Center. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has agreed to provide $1 billion in financing for the building.

The city has not decided if it will pitch in with taxpayer money to move companies from other parts of the city into the tower, but it has “a policy goal to help Lower Manhattan rebuild, and the new World Trade Center is a critical part of that,” said David Lombino, a vice president at the city’s Economic Development Corporation.

We all know that the bill has come due for lavish spending by the city and state: swelling public pensions, huge borrowing by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority that bought next to nothing, government salaries that grew faster than inflation. There is another, off-the-book cost that is also being paid: billions in public incentives given to some of the richest companies in the world.

For more than 25 years, they have been distributed by mayors, with little oversight or control, as an exercise of their discretion when faced with threats by companies to leave town.

They were criticized as forms of corporate welfare — often by the mayors themselves — that simply shifted the burden to other, smaller taxpayers, most of them not as well-connected.

Many of the threats to leave were barely disguised feints, and sometimes not even that. Condé Nast, for instance, publishes some of the most exalted titles in the magazine business, and the chances that the company would move out of Manhattan are slim to none. Other businesses equally unlikely to leave the media capital — The New York Times Company, CBS, Reuters, NBC, News America, ABC, McGraw Hill, Viacom, Hearst — were also given public money.

Mr. Giuliani also awarded subsidies for new baseball stadiums, but those deals were canceled by Michael R. Bloomberg almost as soon as he took office in January 2002. The city had a major deficit. There wasn’t enough housing or space for schools. “It is just not practical this year to go and build stadiums,” Mr. Bloomberg said.

A few years later, Mr. Bloomberg used hundreds of millions in public money to help the Yankees and Mets build stadiums.

In 2004, Mr. Bloomberg declared that he had “ended corporate welfare as we know it, by no longer paying companies — who wouldn’t have left anyway — to stay in our great city.”

He has not. But he has cut down on the number of deals, and in some cases, has put in provisions that require the companies to pay back their subsidies if they don’t keep their promises to keep jobs in the city.

Will the taxpayers now pay to move companies from one part of the city to another?

Truth about police stats finally coming out

From the NY Times:

More than a hundred retired New York Police Department captains and higher-ranking officers said in a survey that the intense pressure to produce annual crime reductions led some supervisors and precinct commanders to manipulate crime statistics, according to two criminologists studying the department.

The retired members of the force reported that they were aware over the years of instances of “ethically inappropriate” changes to complaints of crimes in the seven categories measured by the department’s signature CompStat program, according to a summary of the results of the survey and interviews with the researchers who conducted it.

The totals for those seven so-called major index crimes are provided to the F.B.I., whose reports on crime trends have been used by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his predecessor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to favorably compare New York to other cities and to portray it as a profoundly safer place, an assessment that the summary does not contradict.

In interviews with the criminologists, other retired senior officers cited examples of what the researchers believe was a periodic practice among some precinct commanders and supervisors: checking eBay, other Web sites, catalogs or other sources to find prices for items that had been reported stolen that were lower than the value provided by the crime victim. They would then use the lower values to reduce reported grand larcenies — felony thefts valued at more than $1,000, which are recorded as index crimes under CompStat — to misdemeanors, which are not, the researchers said.

Others also said that precinct commanders or aides they dispatched sometimes went to crime scenes to persuade victims not to file complaints or to urge them to change their accounts in ways that could result in the downgrading of offenses to lesser crimes, the researchers said.

Lighthouse museum goes bust

From the SI Live:

It’s official: The National Lighthouse Museum’s board has formally disbanded, essentially sinking the cash-strapped 11-year-old project here.

In a statement released today, the board said its long-anticipated decision was based on "dwindling prospects" the project could advance at its St. George location.

The 10-acre site abuts the St. George Ferry Terminal and was the 19th century home of the U.S. Lighthouse Service, a precursor to the U.S. Coast Guard. Once viewed as a linchpin in a multimillion-dollar harbor enclave designed to rejuvenate St. George and attract tourists, the project was to feature the museum, housing, shops and restaurants.

The board cited the current economic downturn, the dramatic post-9/11 change in the funding climate and difficulties in finalizing plans and development agreements with government agencies as reasons for its dissolution.

The board also failed to raise the $15 million needed to open the museum’s doors.

A national steering committee awarded Staten Island the museum project in 1998 after then-Gov. George Pataki, former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and former Borough President Guy V. Molinari put up a combined $5.5 million in public money.

The city Economic Development Corporation has already spent $8 million to stabilize two other buildings — former lamp and machine shops — at the site and Borough Hall has allocated millions of dollars.

The EDC is batting 1000% lately. Willets Point will be the next great failure.

Bloomberg uncomfortable in Queens

From the NY Times:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg looked like he couldn’t get wait to get out of Howard Beach, Queens, soon enough. Former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani couldn’t stop grinning from ear to ear.

That was how it went Sunday, when the two men who have ruled New York City for the last 16 years marched side by side in the Howard Beach Columbus Day Parade.

The conditions were hardly ideal: It was raining. It was a windy and biting 46 degrees. And the big Giants-Saints football game was about to start.

Mr. Bloomberg, glum-faced, did not look happy for most of the route. But with Election Day just around the corner, he had little choice but to make an appearance in a heavily Italian community that he hopes to win resoundingly en route to a third term.

As for Mr. Giuliani, who was wearing a Yankees (what else?) baseball cap, his reaction was more like, What rain? “I am very, very happy to be here in Howard Beach on this beautiful day to celebrate Columbus and to celebrate the community — a wonderful community that I always felt a great deal of fondness and closeness to.”

Why do NYers love this guy so much?

From Bloomberg Watch:

“Michael Bloomberg is the most corrupt politician New York has seen in our generation.”

Isn’t it about time that someone said that? Well, I just did.

Hyperbole?

In the past eight years Bloomberg has paid millions of dollars to the Republican Party and ended up with its ballot line three times. He did the same with the Independence Party, which also received sole source contracts from the Bloomberg administration. As far as I know, these contracts have never been questioned, let alone investigated. Is nobody interested? Taxpayer money aside, Bloomberg simply says:

It’s my money and I can spend it any way I want. And it’s all legal. And you’re a disgrace to even question it. I stand for progress, not politics.

Giving public officials cash in exchange for favorable government action is of course a crime. Granted, the real estate lobby, the hedge fund operators, the predatory equity crowd, and to be bipartisan about it, the trial lawyers do it all the time. If the exchange or the promise is explicit and can be proved, people go to jail. But the quid quo pro is rarely contemporaneous. Instead, the players carry around ledgers in their heads, political due bills. But it’s corrupt and everyone knows it. It’s just that the beneficiaries have made so much of it legal.

Is the Bloomberg Way really so different?

Bronx golf boondoggle gets worse

From CBS 2:

Rudy Giuliani's dream of building a highfalutin Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course on the site of a toxic waste dump in the Bronx has become Michael Bloomberg's nightmare, but the city is still going through with it even though it's $100 million over budget and is expected to be at least 12 years late.

"It is a complete waste of money. It's a boondoggle and it's something that never should have gone forward," said Geoffrey Croft of the NYC Park Advocates.

There are a lot of questions. Like what happens if the golfers hit their balls into the cemetery next door? Who wants to play on a toxic waste dump? And how much will it cost? The original plans called for charging $120 for a single round of golf. The Black Course at Bethpage, where the U.S. Open was held this summer, charges $60 on weekends. Weekdays are cheaper.

So who can afford to pay $120 for a round of golf?

"The mayor and the real estate developers -- certainly not the people who live around here," Croft said.

An avid golfer, the mayor said the city still plans to build the course, though it is, as he said, "embarrassingly" delayed and has a new problem.

"What we don't have is a developer who's willing to build the clubhouse and that's the problem at the moment," Bloomberg said.

And here's the rub: if contractors don't meet their targeted completion date, which is four years from now, it will be another mayor's problem.

The original development plans were drawn up by Robert Moses in 1949. He promised a sandy beach, lots and lots of public parkland and a tiny golf course.

Oh, how things have changed.

Someone is assuming Bloomberg will still be mayor 4 years from now. Heh.

Great news from the Bloomberg administration, part 4

The sobering news includes the decision not to start a new class of more than 1,000 police cadets this January. The police department will go without those officers, and the next class will begin in July. It is an unusual decision for a mayor — during tough times in the early 1990s, both Mayor David Dinkins and Rudy Giuliani delayed the start date of academy classes by a few months, but did not cancel them entirely.

Mayor Bloomberg to cut jobs; new cop class

Photo from NY Magazine

Another major surprise - schools are overcrowded

More then a third of the city's students - and more than half of all high school kids - are in overcrowded classrooms, a report to be released Wednesday shows.

The city would have to create more than 167,000 new seats, far more than its current 63,000 target, to reach its own goals, according to the study.

The report, by the Manhattan borough president's task force, Class Size Matters; the teachers union, and the Center for Arts Education also finds that more seats were added under the last six years of former Mayor Rudy Giuliani's tenure than during the first six years of Mayor Bloomberg's.

City classrooms packed, expansion slows in Bloomberg era, says study

Four more years!

DEP Commissioner resigns

NYC environmental protection commissioner resigns

NEW YORK - Mayor Michael Bloomberg says New York City's environmental protection commissioner is leaving city government for a new job.

Bloomberg says in a statement that Emily Lloyd resigned Wednesday and will become chief operating officer of Trinity Church's real estate operation.

The mayor is praising Lloyd's work on the city's water infrastructure. He notes that tunneling was completed for a new city water tunnel during her tenure.

Before becoming commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection in 2005, Lloyd headed the Sanitation Department under mayors David Dinkins and Rudy Giuliani.

Third time's not a charm

Bloomberg gave everyone a great example this morning of why he needs to go.

A reporter asked what's different about this crisis, versus September 11, 2001 (when Rudy Giuliani was mulling a third term). Bloomberg said in spite of the tragedy of 9/11, people "pulled together right away" and said "We're not going to let the terrorists take away our freedom." But the financial crisis is a global, long-term issue.

Apparently Bloomberg doesn't believe terrorism is a global, long-term issue as well. Imagine this ass as president?