Don’t You Always Sneer At The People Who Use The Grandstand At A Parade?

If there’s one thing New Yorkers seem to like, it’s parades. Now Bloomberg wants to save $3.1 million — $3.1 million! — out of a $60 billion budget! — by mandating that they end earlier:

On Monday, the department announced that starting on April 1, the city’s parades must cut the distances they cover by 25 percent — and also not be more than five hours long. The scaled-down celebrations will cost $3.1 million less for police presence, the department said, and will help it avoid cuts in “essential police services,” like investigating crime and terrorism threats.

. . .

Several city officials, however, said cuts to parades made sense, given the dire financial times.

Deputy Mayor Edward Skyler noted that his boss, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, said that New Yorkers could not afford a tax increase and that “we can’t take our eyes off the ball when it comes to keeping crime low.”

He added that whittling the size and duration of parades was preferable to downsizing the Police Department.

The Bloomberg Era: Flashy Initiatives, Little Followthrough

Apparently the mayor’s ambitious GreeNYC plan — the initiative that, among other things, encourages office workers to be more environmentally aware by “re-purposing used sheets into scrap paper” or “shredding it to serve as packing material” — the initiative so efficient that it actually uses fewer “Ns”! — was just window dressing, as thousands of pounds of recycling is set to be discarded on Broadway:

For seven years, legal secretary Joanie Kissell has been collecting hole punchings at her job at Kenyon & Kenyon along the Canyon of Heroes.

The 58-year-old from Queens began gathering the little bits of paper even before she scored a job at a firm on the parade route.

Co-workers thought she was crazy. She says she was optimistic.

“They think I’m nuts,” Kissell said. “I’d say to them, ‘Wait! Don’t throw that out!'”

They’ll be grateful today when they can all look to her jar labeled “New York Yankees. 2009” to join in showering paper onto the Yankees to celebrate their 27th world championship.

. . .

At the Downtown Alliance’s transportation division, sanitation workers were busy yesterday bagging up a half-ton of shredded paper donated by a Red Hook recycling facility.

They planned to drop off about 400 bags of the stuff at buildings along Broadway between 4a.m. and 5 a.m. on Friday.

Voters, Like Sniveling Little Adolescents, Most Hate Hypocrites

A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips*:

As a billionaire in one of the dining capitals of the world, he can eat anything he wants. But he is obsessed with his weight — so much so that the sight of an unflattering photo of himself can trigger weeks of intense dieting and crankiness, according to friends and aides.

His food issues have become New York City’s. Although he has described his battle against unhealthy foods as common-sense public policy that will shed pounds (and save lives), many of his targets overlap with his own cravings.

“I like a Big Mac like everybody else,” he confessed the other day, explaining the city’s warts-and-all approach to fast food. “I just want to know how many calories are in it.”

Under his watch, the city has declared sodium an enemy, asking restaurants and food manufacturers to voluntarily cut the salt in their dishes by 20 percent or more, and encouraging diners to “shake the habit” by asking waiters for food without added salt.

But Mr. Bloomberg, 67, likes his popcorn so salty that it burns others’ lips. (At Gracie Mansion, the cooks deliver it to him with a salt shaker.) He sprinkles so much salt on his morning bagel “that it’s like a pretzel,” said the manager at Viand, a Greek diner near Mr. Bloomberg’s Upper East Side town house.

Not even pizza is spared a coat of sodium. When the mayor sat down to eat a slice at Denino’s Pizzeria Tavern on Staten Island recently, this reporter spotted him applying six dashes of salt to it.

And then there’s the concept of Asshole-In-Chief:

When he does not like the food, he rarely holds back. After dining at Blue Smoke, Mr. Meyer’s barbecue restaurant on East 27th Street, the mayor told Mr. Meyer, “I just don’t like it.”

Mr. Meyer tried inviting him back, but the mayor would not budge. “It never feels good when somebody tells you they don’t like your restaurant, but it’s nice when a politician does not pander,” he said, adding that the mayor has heaped praise on Union Square Cafe.

*In fact, Thompson should consider making this a slogan of sorts, e.g., you think it’s OK to suspend term limits just this once, but consider the deleterious long-term effects . . .

Let’s Make A Deal . . .

You let me drink hooch down on the corner, and I’ll think about voting for you. More, please:

“I never understood why we don’t let you drink in the park.”

The brown-bag phase of the mayor’s campaign . . . Avella, you sure you still want to ban foie gras?

Though We Wouldn’t Need A Faster M42 If We Could Just Have Coca-Cola In The Fountain At Bryant Park

Mayor Bloomberg’s full of ideas about shit he can’t control. In that sense he’s just like every other person striving for elected office. Wow, maybe that means he’s just a Regular Joe — you know, someone you could call “Mike” and have a beer with. Howard Wolfson is a genius:

It was billed as the first major proposal in Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s quest for a third term in office. But in the chronicles of city elections, Mr. Bloomberg’s choice of topic on Monday was an odd one because it involved a sweeping overhaul of mass transit, an area over which the mayor has very little say.

In a 33-point proposal spanning subways, buses, roads, ferries and other parts of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the mayor appeared to be trying to assert a greater role for the city in mass transit even though the authority is a state entity.

. . .

But the gap between Mr. Bloomberg’s ambitious plan and actually putting it in place is wide: Unlike the Police Department and the school system, the transportation authority is subject to scant influence by the mayor, who controls only 4 of 17 votes on the authority’s board.

Still, Mr. Bloomberg’s proposal quickly became fodder for widespread discussion, debate and criticism, especially his idea for dealing with Manhattan’s notoriously slow crosstown buses, like the M34, M42 and M50.

Those lines move at such a snail’s pace that the transit agency should stop collecting fares on them so that the buses can load riders and take off more quickly, Mr. Bloomberg said.