At This Rate, By Summer Bloomberg’s Going To Look Like Abraham Motherfucking Lincoln

The mayor sounds like kind of a dick:

John J. Doherty is New York’s longest-serving sanitation commissioner, with decades of blizzards under his belt. But he did not expect quite such a tough time when he agreed to postpone retirement for a few more months to aid the infant administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Now, Mr. Doherty, 75, is the butt of criticism, facing the usual snowstorm complaints about sluggishness and poor preparation, along with a few novel accusations, such as plowing poorer neighborhoods before wealthier ones.

On Wednesday, after battling the latest mix of ice and sleet to afflict his city, Mr. Doherty stood stern-faced at a news conference as another nuisance, a potential salt shortage, was raised by reporters. When it came time for Mr. de Blasio to thank his team, the commissioner’s name went conspicuously unmentioned.

[. . .]

Mr. de Blasio’s response was a departure from the Bloomberg years, when the mayor fiercely defended his commissioners. (A spokeswoman for Mr. de Blasio said the mayor considered Mr. Doherty “a valued member of the team.”)

At the news conference on Wednesday, Mr. Doherty, clad in a leather jacket, stood at the far end of the city officials gathered at City Hall. When the commissioner was asked by a reporter about lessons from this latest storm, Mr. de Blasio looked at his sanitation chief.

“What did you learn in school today?” the mayor asked Mr. Doherty, with a laugh.

The Man Who Would Be The Shining Lodestar For A New Progressive Era In This Country . . .

. . . if only he could get to his press conferences on time and avoid pissing off the reporters who cover him:

Some reporters say they are even wistful for chilly Michael Bloomberg, who, though openly contemptuous of the press, was more or less respectful of schedules and deadlines.

“There are no press conferences that start even 10 minutes late,” said one City Hall reporter, who, like most journalists interviewed for this story, would only speak on background. “The resentment is starting to show. This wouldn’t happen with Bloomberg in a hundred-million years.” [. . .]

Another political reporter said the mayor’s disregard for scheduling “affects deadlines and meetings. He’s up to an hour late, which makes it hard when you have to work within the constraints of a deadline.”

Though Mr. de Blasio rode into office as a man of the people, apparently, they do not include the (mostly) 99-percenters known as journalists.

New Orleans In April (Read: Jazz Fest!!!!!)

Eventually we’ll find out that they’re surveilling nearly everybody, and then we won’t have to worry that they’re being discriminatory:

In April 2008, an undercover NYPD officer traveled to New Orleans to attend the People’s Summit, a gathering of liberal groups organized around their shared opposition to U.S. economic policy and the effect of trade agreements between the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

When the undercover effort was summarized for supervisors, it identified groups opposed to U.S. immigration policy, labor laws and racial profiling. Two activists — Jordan Flaherty, a journalist, and Marisa Franco, a labor organizer for housekeepers and nannies — were mentioned by name in one of the police intelligence reports obtained by the AP.

“One workshop was led by Jordan Flaherty, former member of the International Solidarity Movement Chapter in New York City,” officers wrote in an April 25, 2008, memo to David Cohen, the NYPD’s top intelligence officer. “Mr. Flaherty is an editor and journalist of the Left Turn Magazine and was one of the main organizers of the conference. Mr. Flaherty held a discussion calling for the increase of the divestment campaign of Israel and mentioned two events related to Palestine.”

. . .

Flaherty, who also writes for The Huffington Post, said he was not an organizer of the summit, as police wrote in the NYPD report. He said the event described by police actually was a film festival in New Orleans that same week, suggesting that the undercover officer’s duties were more widespread than described in the report.

Flaherty said he recalls introducing a film about Palestinians but spoke only briefly and does not understand why that landed him a reference in police files.

“The only threat was the threat of ideas,” he said. “I think this idea of secret police following you around is terrifying. It really has an effect of spreading fear and squashing dissent.”

You Want Me Frisking That Kid Against That Wall! You Need Me Frisking That Kid Against That Wall!

As the Mayor might put it, Ray Kelly executes a “cute” rhetorical maneuver:

The defensive scowl etched into Mr. Kelly’s face dropped away as he suggested that the Council was notably at a loss to offer ideas — any ideas at all — for how to stop violence among young minority men.

“What I haven’t heard is any solution to the violence problems in these communities — people are upset about being stopped, yet what is the answer?” Mr. Kelly asked Councilwoman Melissa Mark-Viverito, who had been asking the commissioner to acknowledge that the department’s practice of street stops in minority communities left many people “feeling under siege.”

“What have you said about how do we stop this violence?” Mr. Kelly asked, asserting that violence among minority youth is “something that the government has an obligation to try to solve.”

Look, no one wants any one of the 51 city councilmembers thinking about how to stop violence — lord knows what they’ll come up with. But just because they’re morons doesn’t make it OK to stop over half a million people (actually, 684,330; if that were a city, it would be the 19th largest in the country, ahead of Baltimore, Boston, Seattle, DC, Denver and Oklahoma City) last year under god knows what pretense.

The Bloomberg Rule: Technology Is Only As Good As The Revenue It Creates

Otherwise, it’s “impractical”. The context of all this is that Sanitation ticket agents have been caught on film issuing tickets for violations that either didn’t exist or were insufficiently investigated. (Do they have quotas, too, or something?):

At the news conference, two Democratic state lawmakers, Senator Jeff Klein, who represents the Bronx and parts of Westchester, and Assemblyman Dov Hikind, who represents Brooklyn, said they would introduce legislation to require Sanitation Department agents to photograph the condition of a property at the time a sanitation ticket is issued.

The agency and the city oppose the bill.

The Bloomberg administration says photographing every instance in which a summons is issued would be impractical and would interfere with the Sanitation Department’s operations.

. . .

Councilwoman Letitia James, the chairwoman of the Council’s sanitation committee, said photographic evidence would save the city money by reducing paperwork and the cost of adjudication proceedings.

“This administration has been all about embracing technology,” Ms. James said. “If you don’t embrace technology in this case, then its about revenue, not sanitation.”

And all of the sudden you find yourself agreeing with Letitia James . . .