The Societal Value Of Parking Placards Goes Well Beyond Providing Real-Life Examples Of Irony For New York Students

They contribute an easy source of humor for a beaten-down populace, and remind us that biting investigative reporting is alive and well, as well:

A Waterfront Commission honcho used a cushy job perk to illegally park his Lexus outside New York University Law School while he taught a class on corruption.

. . .

When asked how parking illegally on Washington Square South jibes with teaching a course on corruption, [the honcho] slammed his door shut, yanked the placard off the dashboard and sped off.

The Governor/Mayor’s Plan To Go After Sugar Hits A Snag

Apparently the cops need stuff to do:

Two Bronx men were locked up and left to rot in a filthy jail cell for nearly a week after a pair of bumbling cops mistook their candy for a bag of crack.

The “drugs” were finally tested five days later and determined to be popular Coco (coconut) Candy. The charges were dropped — but there were no apologies from the NYPD.

“Sweet happens,” a police source glibly said of the boondoggle.

. . .

The trouble began the night of Jan. 15, as José Pena, a 48-year-old plumber, and his longtime pal and colleague Cesar Rodriguez, 33, were headed to a party, and decided to stop at a bodega on 181st Street and the Grand Concourse.

When they came out, cops were waiting and asked to search their Ford minivan. “I said ‘Go search.’ I even opened the door,” Rodriguez told The Post.

An officer rummaged around, came out holding a “Hello Kitty” sandwich bag, and shouted “Bingo!” the men said.

“It’s only candy!” Rodriguez said, as the cops handcuffed him and Pena, and several other police cars rushed to the scene.

Rodriguez said he buys a 50-cent bag of Coco Candy, a hard coconut-based treat, almost every day. Because it easily crumbles, he puts it in a sandwich bag.

“I didn’t know having candy was a crime,” he said.

This Seems Like A Good Way To Get Out Of Having To Run Again

For the sake of everyone, jokes about the governor’s eyesight have been omitted:

Gov. Paterson was spotted nuzzling, neck-kissing and cooing like a smitten schoolboy with a pretty young woman — not his wife — in a New Jersey steakhouse yesterday afternoon, The Post has learned.

“I saw him kissing her neck,” said Sharon Farrell, a lawyer sitting two tables away from Paterson and his mystery gal pal at the River Palm Terrace in Edgewater. “He was right on her neck, nudging, like back and forth.”

. . .

Farrell’s friend and dining companion, special-ed teacher Carol McGuirt, said Paterson and his lady friend, a leggy Latina in her 20s, were ensconced in a cozy, curved banquette for several hours during lunch, and clearly were enjoying each other’s company — immensely.

“A young, young girl was with him,” McGuirt said of Paterson, who was stylishly accoutered in a shiny purple dress shirt and slacks. “I would say they looked like a young couple who are very into each other . . . and enjoying themselves.”

“Pest! Grip Lotion, Cross” Is An Anagram Of “Progress Not Politics”

Here’s a figure for you all — Bloomberg probably spent $100 million to win a third term with about 550,000 votes (about 200,000 fewer than he received in 2005). That’s somewhere around $180 a vote. There’s your mandate.

The Bloomberg victory speech was horrifying in several ways, not least of which being that the mayor conflated his “squeaker” with talk of a Yankees ticker tape parade. Talk about wishing bad luck on oneself:

Thank you. Gracias. What a week this is turning out to be. Tonight, a hard-fought victory in a very difficult year, and — who knows? — maybe in a few days, the biggest victory parade that Broadway has ever seen.

Thank you, Jimmy Fallon, that was maybe the nicest thing a Red Sox fan ever said about a Yankees fan, and I appreciate it.

. . .

Will the Yankees win Game 6? You better believe it.

The problem here of course being that Jimmy Fallon only became a Red Sox fan after running around like an idiot for that one movie, and his true allegiance is basically disputed. No matter — baseball, like politics, is full of bandwagoning idiots.

But Jimmy Fallon aside, the mayor really needs to purge Howard Wolfson from his mental space (I need to purge Howard Wolfson from my mental space) — the spin of this being “a very difficult year,” which Wolfson also tried using last night, is especially specious. The mayor’s narrow victory wasn’t because the economy sucks, it was because he overturned the will of the voters without a referendum and poured $100 million into a campaign. Be upfront about this. Quit bullshitting. The election is over.

Speaking of the narrow victory, I also think the media is to blame for making this out to be a landslide from day one:

Still, the margin seemed to startle Mr. Bloomberg’s aides and the city’s political establishment, which had predicted a blowout. Published polls in the days leading up to the election suggested that the mayor would win by as many as 18 percentage points; four years ago, he cruised to re-election with a 20 percent margin.

How no outlet could have honestly reported the closeness of the race in the weeks leading up to it seems particularly egregious. Here’s one example of bullshit spin from October 30:

The Thompson campaign keeps insisting that momentum is on their side in the closing days of the mayoral campaign. But a poll released Friday by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion suggests otherwise.

The survey, like other recent polls, shows Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg with a commanding double-digit lead over his Democratic opponent, William C. Thompson Jr., the city comptroller.

. . .

On Thursday afternoon, the Thompson campaign released the results of an internal poll that portrayed the race as much closer, with Mr. Bloomberg leading Mr. Thompson by just 8 percentage points. But internal polls are notoriously suspect.

In a news release on Friday, Howard Wolfson, a Bloomberg campaign spokesman, dismissed Mr. Thompson’s poll, saying that it “gives new meaning to the term margin of error” and that every other reliable public poll done over the past month confirms Mr. Bloomberg’s comfortable lead.

There are so, so many other examples that it’s hard to pick just one. But a prime example of conventional wisdom appeared in the election day Times op-ed from Joyce Purnick. Purnick is someone who is very up on Bloomberg’s machinations, having just written a book about the mayor, and her tone — like the tone of nearly every piece written about the election — was that the result was always a foregone conclusion:

Memo to the 108th mayor of New York, Michael R. Bloomberg: You didn’t have to do it. You didn’t need to set a new national campaign spending record. You didn’t have to become a one-man stimulus program, employing costly campaign consultants, ad producers and all those “volunteers.” You didn’t need that barrage of television ads, those wasteful glossy mailings or maddening robocalls.

None of it. You are the incumbent. You are in and destined to stay in after today’s mayoral election because — unless unduly provoked — New York voters don’t reject their incumbent. They’re pragmatic, even complacent, when their city is not in anguish. You could have spent more on your philanthropy and less on yourself and still be leading your Democratic competitor, City Comptroller William C. Thompson Jr., in the polls.

Even columnists unfriendly to Bloomberg bought into the inevitability — again, pick any, but here are two I remember: Patrice O’Shaughnessy in the Daily News and Clyde Haberman, who while continuing to go after the ridiculousness of the Bloomberg machine, did it in a way that telegraphed a depressing inevitability.

All of which brings me back to the Phillies’ Game 4 meltdown in the ninth inning, after the team tied the Yankees in the eighth, and Brad Lidge self-destructed, giving up three runs and ensuring that Rivera would close out the win; yes, the game was only tied, but the momentum was there for Philadelphia. The series was so close to being evened at two games a piece, and was especially painful for Phillies fans to watch. So was this election. Thompson lost by about 50,000 votes with somewhere around 1.1 million cast. What if things went a little differently?

What if, for example, Cory Booker wasn’t bought off by Bloomberg? What if Obama hadn’t been such a pussy? (And all that Corzine support got him exactly nothing in the end.) And most importantly, what if the media had been a little less incurious about polls and not actively worked to dissuade voters from actually participating? It’s true that this would have cut both ways — I’m sure many voters supportive of Bloomberg were apathetic about voting in a landslide — but the inevitability of a Bloomberg reelection was overpowering to watch day after day, and had to have had an impact.

Going back to that disgusting Times article about the campaign that they only published last night hammers home two big points:

Mr. Tusk, extremely self-confident and forceful, talked about “taking the oxygen out of the room”: hiring so many staff members, rolling out so many endorsements, and tossing up so many television ads that opposition seemed futile.

A sky-is-the-limit ethos, unfettered by spending limits, infused the effort. Mr. Tusk told his outreach coordinator for Asian voters, Oliver Tan, to find him a Bollywood star to endorse the mayor. After weeks of transcontinental phone calls, he did.

“It was selling inevitability,” a campaign adviser said.

Selling inevitability — and everyone — everyone! — bought it. Maybe we need to look at ourselves a little bit, too. The other part, the oxygen sucking, is well illustrated with the Cory Booker quid pro quo. Thompson just couldn’t get a break with any free airtime of the kind that Bloomberg got over and over again. It wasn’t so much the endorsement that Cory Booker gave Bloomberg as it perhaps was Booker actually shepherding the mayor around to black churches in Queens on the Sunday before the election — that of course became a big story for Bloomberg. If Booker had simply sat this out — and not crossed party lines to endorse a Republican — this story doesn’t exist, and oxygen remains intact. But Booker going as far as actually campaigning in Southeast Queens with the mayor was just one of many non money-related examples of Thompson’s huge, huge disadvantage over the course of this race.

The whole experience — from the furtive talk about running for president through to the City Council overturning term limits to the obscene spending and consolidation of power during the campaign — was profoundly discouraging. But you know what really got my goat? That insipid fucking new Black Eyed Peas song “I Gotta Feeling,” which was played before Bloomberg came out to speak; it’s lazy songwriting, tailor made for opening montages of televised sports events and, now we know, campaign appearances.

The other day I bemoaned the deleterious effects of this campaign on younger people. On our way out of the polling place last night, a cheerful high school student handed us one of the glossy pieces of Bloomberg campaign literature that this morning are littering the sidewalks of our neighborhood. The student insisted she wasn’t getting paid, though she did admit that a pizza party (Bloomberg spent thousands on pizza this campaign) was in the cards. I’m sure she was also angling for a letter of recommendation of some sort as well because, ultimately, everyone is in it for something. And that’s the real legacy of this dispiriting campaign.

See also: Bloomberg For Mayor 2009.

We Are All Philly Now

If nothing else, Cliff Lee’s no-earned-run complete-game mastery and brilliant fielding last night during Game One of the World Series between the Phillies and Yankees will be useful in that it may actually shut up the New York Post, which has been stupidly and relentlessly on Philadelphia’s case for some reason or other since the Yankees finally clinched the pennant.

You know the type of stories the paper is running — the ones where it takes like six reporters to go out and interview yahoos who will say stuff about how Philadelphia is “a nothing city” (I often wonder whether people outside of New York actually care about New York as much as people in New York want to believe people outside of New York care about New York) or that the Phanatic mascot isn’t even as cool as the “retarded” Mr. Met mascot (classy, printing that quote). I almost want the Yankees to lose just to chasten the Post.

As Lee continued to shut down the Yankees’ offense over the course of the game — while the Phillies’ Chase “WFC” Utley hit not one but two home runs against Yankees ace C.C. Sabathia — it was tough to resist that time-worn cliche of “that’s why they play the game.” And sometime last night — probably after Lee struck out A-Rod for the third time — it occurred to me that a Yankees World Series loss would lessen the sting of a Bloomberg victory: The Yankees could be the sacrificial lambs for the sins of Michael Bloomberg.

If Bill Thompson can’t fulfill the role of underdog, then maybe the Phillies can. It will prove that maybe you can’t just spend hundreds of millions to win. It will put the elite in their place. It will shut up the Post! And should this all transpire, I want to believe that Bloomberg sycophantically hanging around the Yankees clubhouse on Sunday night and pandering to fans in Times Square on Wednesday will be the curse that catalyzed the team’s World Series failure.

. . . .

Speaking of the Post, let’s keep picking on the Post. The paper’s noxious endorsement of the mayor hinged on three areas — education, crime and the city’s finances.

On education, the Post’s editorial board argues that “Mike Bloomberg will be remembered as the mayor who brought accountability to the system. Supervisors, principals, teachers, students — all are now expected to show results. And they have, often spectacularly.” Let’s put it into perspective. Bloomberg put the board of education under the control of the mayor, which allows voters to punish a mayor for an under-performing system. That’s nice if you’re a lazy voter, and can’t be bothered to pay attention to the machinations of the school system, much less figure out which board members to vote for when school board elections come up. But I question whether this mayor — or any mayor — can really take credit for success in the school system. Bloomberg knows this, which is why they’ve been puffing up the test scores, this despite questionable results (and I’m assuming there’s a perfectly good reason why the NAEP scores for New York City are going to be delayed two weeks). Bloomberg shouldn’t oversell mayoral control, and he shouldn’t go after Thompson for an under-performing school system during Thompson’s tenure as board president when the truth is much more complicated than that. Look at it this way — is it Bloomberg’s fault that the Department of Buildings was apparently infiltrated by the mafia? Hey, now that I think about it, maybe Bloomberg should be held accountable — goose, gander, etc. At least Board of Education incompetence didn’t cause actual deaths . . .

On crime, the Post writes “Bloomberg and Commissioner Ray Kelly took a crime rate that already was declining dramatically and drove it to levels not seen since the ’60s. And they did so even while deploying significant resources into counterterrorism — helping to keep New York safe from another 9/11.” You don’t even have to read that closely — “a crime rate that was already declining.” Do you really think a mayor has much control over the crime rate? If so, then you’re much more idealistic than I am, though I’m guessing you probably also haven’t watched all that much of The Wire either. As for counterterrorism — well, for argument’s sake, let’s say the mayor actually does get out there, Jack Bauer-like, to keep us all safe. Actually, no, let’s not, because that is another absurd argument (though are you really impressed by the NYPD’s spurious sting operations and bungled investigations?). What’s more, it’s offensive to the many municipal and federal law enforcement officials who actually do their best to keep us safe to act like the mayor is somehow responsible for our safety. Giuliani’s recent Giuliani-like boasting about Bloomberg’s terror-fighting prowess was the quintessence of this asinine argument.

On finances, the Post writes “Eight years ago, Bloomberg took a city driven deep into recession by 9/11 and helped bring it back. Last June, he delivered a budget that cut spending by $1.5 billion — even as Albany’s budget grew by 10 percent” before acknowledging that the mayor’s deals with the unions may bankrupt the city (in so many words). I don’t buy that the city was “driven deep into recession” after September 11, 2001 because — especially compared with the current recession — the one following 9/11 wasn’t all that deep. And — let’s be crystal clear — mayors don’t fix the economy. Mayors may fix potholes and sanitation schedules, but they sure don’t do much for a worldwide economy. Even really smart businessmen like Michael Bloomberg. As for the second claim — that Bloomberg delivered a budget that cut spending — well, OK, maybe he cut spending a little. But A) I’m not convinced the budget savings weren’t merely the result of illusory accounting, since it’s easy to squirrel away or otherwise conceal $1.5 billion of a nearly $60 billion budget — and we’ll see how he manages a budget in 2010, should he make it that far; and B) you’re really comparing the city to what they do in Albany? Sounds like a backhanded compliment to me . . .

But you have to like an endorsement that starts out saying “It can be hard to warm to Bloomberg’s governing style, and we have little patience for his often arrogant nanny-state meddling in New Yorkers’ private lives.” Nice.

The Times’ Bloomberg endorsement — hidden in the Saturday paper, by the way — works similar debate-club style gymnastics to come to a conclusion. Their lede is absurdly fawning: “The real test of any mayor is how well the city works. In his eight years in office, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has managed to make the unpredictable city of New York work astonishingly well.” Wow — “astonishingly”? Were you at any point “astonished” by how well the city ran during Bloomberg’s tenure?

Second paragraph: “Mr. Bloomberg has been a first-rate steady hand during unsteady times. He guided the city out of the post-9/11 recession, then tucked away money during the boom years that followed.” “Guided the city out of the post-9/11 recession” sounds familiar to what the Post wrote. Is this taken from bullet points or something? We’ll see just how much money has been “tucked away” — I question whether it will be anywhere near what is supposed to be needed to plug a 2011 budget gap — but it is interesting to note that candidate Thompson spoke out last year for an actual rainy day fund, and not just raiding random accounts.

And check out this important point: “He has run the $60 billion government with a keen attention to accountability and efficiency. He has chosen some of the best people in the country to work for him, and he has mostly let them do their jobs. As a result, many city services operate better than they have for years. The garbage mostly disappears on time.”

The garbage “mostly disappears on time.” Again — wow. If that’s the case, why not go for a fourth term? What else here . . . oh, “Public education is better over all” (no real data or argument to back that up) and “Crime is down under Raymond Kelly, the police commissioner” — at least they didn’t try to say that Bloomberg actually “drove crime levels down,” like the Post wrote.

Both editorials feel the need to admonish Bloomberg’s churlishness. That’s not insignificant. The Times writes, “Finally, like others who have not always agreed with the mayor, we worry about his difficulty brooking dissent.” I think they are talking about mayor’s leadership qualities, especially vis a vis building consensus, which Bloomberg is not good at and which is one of the few traits that actually matters in an executive. Take his West Side Stadium defeat and failed congestion pricing proposal — two initiatives that would have been cornerstones of his development/job creation and environmental record. Those failures can’t all be due to a recalcitrant state legislature (or even Sheldon Silver). There’s a pattern there, and that pattern shouldn’t be relegated to near the end of a lukewarm endorsement.

. . . .

You want to read something funny? Compare the Observer’s endorsement with the Times’ endorsement. First the Observer (emphasis added):

The mayor’s record speaks for itself. Critics complain that voters are being brainwashed by the mayor’s free-spending campaign, but Mr. Bloomberg’s popularity has more to do with his accomplishments than with the quality of his television commercials. His place in history was ensured the moment he took office, because on January 1, 2002, the city still was recovering from the attacks of 9/11. The city was on edge, emotionally and fiscally, on that January morning. Mr. Bloomberg helped lead the city from its despair with a combination of reassurance, compassion and financial acumen.

In the years since, Mr. Bloomberg has defied conventional wisdom, as he and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly continued to drive down crime even after the historic decreases under Rudolph Giuliani. He told us to hold him accountable for the performance of the city’s public schools, and he is now reaping the benefits of a school system that no longer is dysfunctional, unaccountable and unsafe. He returned the city to its rightful place as a leader in public health through his campaigns against smoking and trans-fats. He recruited capable deputies and let them do their jobs.

Then the Times (again, emphasis added):

What makes the mayor stand out is not his political skill, although he has come a long way since his first clumsy days in office. He has run the $60 billion government with a keen attention to accountability and efficiency. He has chosen some of the best people in the country to work for him, and he has mostly let them do their jobs. As a result, many city services operate better than they have for years. The garbage mostly disappears on time. The police and fire departments respond quickly. Mr. Bloomberg’s 311 phone line allows New Yorkers to complain to a live human being. Often, they even see tangible results.

Public education is better over all — although parents still need more access to their children’s teachers and schools. The mayor’s new complaint line for parents should help, as will other changes imposed by the Legislature. But in a third term, the mayor and his team should still work harder to listen to those who hand over their children each morning to his educators.

Crime is down under Raymond Kelly, the police commissioner, although there is concern again about stop-and-frisk actions, which seem to focus too heavily on Hispanics and African-Americans. Mr. Bloomberg also has been a national leader in gun control.

The mayor’s environmental efforts — stalled in Albany — show admirable concern about the city’s future. And he has worked hard to improve the city’s health — most effectively with the smoking ban.

The Post endorsement actually sounds even more similar to the Observer’s language on crime: “Bloomberg and Commissioner Ray Kelly took a crime rate that already was declining dramatically and drove it to levels not seen since the ’60s.” The “accountability” portions in the Post and Observer endorsements sound similar as well. All three endorsements sort of lob up there the same hackneyed reasons to vote for the mayor. All three sound like stupid bullet points. None seem serious.

The largest issue for most voters is the third term nonsense — another “not insignificant” concern, but the Post brushes it off: “No doubt, some New Yorkers are angry about how Mayor Mike used his considerable resources to having them set aside to allow him to run again. It was a characteristic display of Bloombergian hubris, and we suspect that it will cost him on Election Day.” The Times doesn’t mind that the term limit issue went down the way it did because the editorial board happens to agree with the outcome (I recall similar arguments during the Iraq War and subsequent failure to uncover WMD). Instead, the Times somehow believes that allowing every city councilmember, borough president, the public advocate, comptroller and mayor to run again somehow offers voters “more choices” — and they’re right; after all is said and done, voters will get precisely one more choice. It’s Orwellian logic. The Daily News makes the same argument in its endorsement.

. . . .

But let’s move to real talk. The real problem with the third term isn’t that Bloomberg either bought off or wielded power to influence the elite — the editorial boards, the power players — to accept the proposal to ignore term limits. The most egregious thing is that Bloomberg poisoned the democratic well for those of us who aren’t in roles of power, and that will have a much longer effect on the city. When voter apathy is low everywhere, but especially in sclerotic New York (cf. eight percent turnout for last month’s runoff, a vote that actually had a significant outcome), it sends a bad message. And it doesn’t just send a bad message to educated, older voters who will participate anyway (and continue to vote in years to come) but rather to those who don’t see a reason to participate in the first place. How many youths — even people into their 30s — have come of age politically during Bloomberg’s tenure, and developed their ideas about democratic participation while he steamrolled through $200 million-plus to get himself elected? How will this third-term charade affect their ideas about democracy? Bloomberg and his supporters (Bono! Shilpa! Cherry!) haven’t answered for this or even acknowledged it. We deserve better.

. . . .

But what if the unthinkable happens? Is a Bloomberg victory really a foregone conclusion? Remember the Phillies. For one bright, shining moment last night, the Phillies reminded Yankees fans “that’s why they play the game.”

And if somehow both the Yankees and Bloomberg lose, then that would be epic. New York Magazine will craft a trend piece on the end of New York. Spike Lee could make a film about it, just like he did with 1977. Howard Wolfson will walk away looking like a huge dick. And maybe, just maybe, the rest of the country will breathe a huge sigh of relief knowing that New Yorkers are not nearly as vapid as they appear! It will be a victory for all. So go vote Tuesday. You know what to do.

See also: Bloomberg For Mayor 2009.