Michael Bloomberg’s gamble with opprobrium

Michael Bloomberg's 6,000-or-so square foot beach shack in Bermuda.
He escapes there frequently via private jet, usually to play golf. Sound familiar?

In quite a few ways, Michael Bloomberg is simply Donald Trump Lite.

Trump has Mar e Lago. Bloomberg has a waterfront estate called Stokes Bay, in Bermuda.

Trump, when he’s not tweeting obsessively, plays golf obsessively. Ditto Bloomberg when he’s in Bermuda. In fact, “obsessively” is just the word the New York Times used to describe Bloomberg’s golfing behavior there.

Perhaps more pertinently, neither man has demonstrated much respect for established law. With Trump I wouldn’t know where to begin. With Bloomberg, I know where it all might end. After New York City’s voters approved mayoral term limits by referendum, Bloomberg overrode the referendum by a tricky political maneuver. He essentially bribed New York City Council members by granting them an extra term as well. 

Bloomberg's excuse for flipping his own city's inhabitants the bird was that he needed a third term to fix the city's financial crisis. He alone could do it! Does that sound familiar? 

The 120-year-old President?

So much for the will of the people, and possibly for presidential term limits. If Bloomberg, now 77 years old, lives to be 120, we could have a 120-year-old President of the United States.

Would Bloomberg be a better president than Trump? Absolutely yes, for the same reason that getting bitten on the ankle by a rabid pig would be better than getting crushed to death and then swallowed by a boa constrictor. 

Bloomberg has already placed “at least” $37 million worth of advertising, CNN reported recently. Even billionaires don’t throw that kind of money around just to hear the sound of money bags knocking network advertising sales managers off their feet.

That’s also why, just for starters, Los Angelinos who watch the local news on NBC in the afternoon or evening could be seeing nine ads for Michael Bloomberg every day, according a tweet from Shane Goldmacher, a New York Times political reporter.

Moreover, Bloomberg’s sudden apology to the African-American community, for 12 years of stop-and-frisking black people for the offense of being outdoors while black, rang loud with almost the same total lack of sincerity that marks Donald Trump when he reads a prepared speech written by some political consultant.

An apology of convenience

“I see now that I was wrong,” Bloomberg said to a black church congregation that he had chosen for his mea culpa. 

How come now rather than a dozen weeks ago, or when you were mayor for twelve years and could do something about it, Mike? You didn’t notice all the lives needlessly ruined, all the jobs lost, all the loss of civic comity created by needlessly harassing African-Americans for twelve years? Of course you didn't. Or perhaps you just didn't care.

For Mr. Bloomberg’s sake, if God forbid he wins the Democratic primary, I sincerely hope he also wins the Presidential election.  Because if he jumps in and spoils it for strong Democratic candidates, and then the election goes to Trump, the cloud of opprobrium that follows Bloomberg for the rest of his life will be so thick you’ll be able to cut it with a crowd of waving pitchforks. And my guess is, he'll want to spend even rainy weekends in Bermuda. Not to mention midweeks.

If he gains the Democratic nomination, Bloomberg will either make himself President … or the Democratic Party’s biggest pariah in history.

Now Emperor Bloomberg’s I-don’t-give-a-damn administration feels free to make a residential building unlivable for its tortured inhabitants

The world is beginning to discover what an insufferable s.o.b. Mayor Michael Bloomberg really is. Well, it’s about time. This blog has laced into the mayor on numerous occasions, for egregious acts ranging from overturning vote-approved term limits, to fibbing about how he commutes to work, to persecuting scrap collectors. (A longer but still partial list, with links, at the end of this post.)

At last, the press in New York is beginning to wake up to the mayor’s racial profiling of blacks and Hispanics via his baseless stop-and-risk policies, thanks to a Federal judge who put a kibosh on the city’s policing policies.

"You're complaining about noise?
Sorry, I can't hear you."

Now there’s a new nightmare. Nearby residents in the West 50s of Manhattan are subject to ear-splitting barrages of noise, all day, all night, around the clock, while the mayor’s Department of Buildings looks on benignly, completely ignoring  justifiable noise complaints.

So says reporter Heather Holland of the online publication DNA Info. Seems that a high rise luxury condo at 157 West 57^th Street is under construction – 24 hours a day. The fewer calendar days spent building the building, the sooner the developers can start selling off apartments and earning rich profits, so you can’t blame them for trying.

But you can blame them, and the Department of Buildings, for the brutal, nonstop assault of noise.The builders, Holland reports, have received over 300 variances from the Department of Buildings, despite irate complaints of residential neighbors.

Much of the noise comes from a hoist. One neighbor told Holland, “The hoist is incredibly loud. Imagine sitting in a subway station. When the train comes through, you can’t talk….”

Another residential neighbor complained to Holland, “There’s no place in this apartment that’s remotely quiet. When things have to be done, I have to step out in the hall. I have to turn everything up to its loudest level, to hear anything, and even with the soundproof windows, I have to wear headphones on the computer to hear what I have to hear.”

"This is not my department.
Also there is no department."

“Noise is not their issue,” a spokesman for the Department of Buildings said of his department. Except, of course, that it’s pretty damn rare (if this isn’t actually the only case) that 24-hour permits are issued for construction work. Evidently, complaints to the city’s Department of Environmental Conservation have also failed.

All of this leaves the city open to some cranky (and justifiable) speculation.

We suggest following the money

Are the builders also the buddies of Mayor Bloomberg, or of City Council President Christine Quinn (a Bloomberg disciple and herself a mayoral candidate) – and therefore getting special dispensation to make the lives of some New York City citizens miserable?

Does the billionaire mayor have a big investment in the building, which will be the tallest residential building in the city when it’s completed? If so, his administration’s failure to grant relief to the neighbors would be a clear case of corruption.

Is somebody in the Department of Buildings, or the Department of Environmental Protection, taking payoffs to issue these quality-of-life destroying variances, in violation of criminal law?

Some enterprising investigative reporter ought to look into the matter. Are you listening, all you young Turks at the New York Times?

A cranky (partial) catalogue of previous

sins of Michael Bloomberg

commented on by The New York Crank

Sexual discrimination at Bloomberg News when Michael Bloomberg was directly running the place. 

Fiercely fibbing about his “subway commute” (in part via two limos, as it turned out) from home to City Hall. 

Overthrowing the will of the people on term limits: 

Implying that you have to be a communist if you think people in New York should earn a living wage. 

Blocking reports of police spying on legitimate political activity. 

Persecuting scrap collectors.

Multiple offenses.

Billionaire New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants to keep the citizens of his city in poverty. He says it's good for business.

When he was running for his second term as Mayor (or was it his third after he overturned a term limits law to keep his job?) New York’s Michael Bloomberg ran advertising on television showing him  on the streets of new york without necktie, wearing a windbreaker, and getting referred to as “Mayor Mike.” Since then, I can’t remember seeing him in public wearing anything less than a perfectly tailored suit and tie. And these days it's "Mayor Bloomberg," thank you very much. But never mind that.

Lately, “man of the people” Bloomberg is willing to spend a significant part of the city’s dwindling treasury to make sure a bunch of working stiffs don’t earn a penny more than $7.25 an hour.

This is in a city so expensive to live in that, regardless of national figures, an income for a family of three below $16,841 means you're poor. At $7.25 an hour, your annual income would come to $15,080. That’s more than a thousand bucks below the poverty line, where currently 21 percent of the financially drowning population is gasping to survive. (See chart.) 

Billionaire Bloomberg’s anti-living-wage stance stems from a fracas he’s having with his own City Council and its speaker, Bloomberg’s usual political ally, Christine Quinn. This time, even Quinn isn't going along with him.

The Council wants to pass a law requiring owners of buildings subsidized by the city’s taxpayers to pay a minimum wage of $10 an hour plus benefits.

Seeing a man earning ten bucks an hour really rankles Bloomberg’s precious sensitivities, even as he counts his billions. (I’ve seen estimates that he has as little as $17 billion. And as much as $21 billion.) 

Now the extra $2.75 an hour probably wouldn’t pay the heating bill on Bloomberg’s personal mansion on East 79^th Street, not to mention the cost of traipsing off to Bermuda regularly with his girlfriend. (And no, he doesn’t get there flying tourist class. Why go through all that when you can just take a fistful of high denomination bills out of your pocket and rent a plane that leaves when you’re ready, skipping all those inconvenient schedules and security screenings.)

But if a working stiff threatens to earn an extra $2.75 for cleaning out ten floors of urinals and mopping up the pee puddles under them, what does the mayor do?

Bloomberg throws a hissy fit

Pay the workers? As Bloomberg sees it – and said it on the radio – that’s akin to bloody communism. 

Declared the mayor: “It’s interesting if you think about it. The last time we had a big managed economy was the USSR, and that didn’t work out so well.”

And then he waxed poetically impressionistic: “We cannot stop the tides from coming in. We need jobs in the city. It’d be great if all jobs in the city paid a lot of money and had great benefits for the workers...But if you force that, you will jut drive business out of the city.”

Whoa! Wait! Just wait an effin’ second! We’re talking only about employees working for the landlords of buildings that the city is subsidizing with taxpayers’ money. Most employers in the city would be completely unaffected. Most building owners would face the choice of paying a handful of employees an extra $2.75 an hour or giving up hundreds of thousands, and in many cases millions of dollars in subsidies. Who does the mayor think he’s kidding?

The mayor also argued that requiring a minimum wage would interfere with the free market. Speaker Quinn replied that this is exactly what the Bloomberg subsidies to his corporate real estate pals do in the first place, adding that if a business isn’t looking for taxpayer dollars, they’re under no obligation [ to pay the proposed $10 minimum hourly wage.] 

Somewhere in there, the 12^th, (Or is he the 15^th? Or is he the 17^th?) richest man in the world let his deep inner resentments of paying a few of those nasty poor a piddling $2.75 boiled to the surface. Wage bills like the one under discussion, he complained, are “a throwback to the era when government viewed the private sector as a cash cow to be milked rather than a garden to be cultivated. In those days, government took the private sector for granted. We cannot afford to go back to those days…..” and on and on.

Oh that poor under-cultivated billionaire flower! How he must smart at getting “milked” and getting “taken for granted.”

He vetoed the bill. The City Council overrode him. So what’s the mayor going to do?

In a city whose treasury is squeezed for cash, with a budget gap of $4.63 billion that had to be closed by cutting city services and, umm, "increasing revenues, "he’s planning to take his own city to court. 

He’ says, in other words, that he’s willing to spend big bucks to have city lawyers sue their own city  – to take $2.75 an hour out of the pockets of janitors and building superintendants, rather than out of the pockets of landlords to whom the city gives hundreds of millions.

I mean, is Emperor Mike a great American, or what? 

Cross posted at No More Mr. Nice Blog

New York’s Emperor Mayor Michael Bloomberg, hoodwinked by fairies, seems to think subway beggars have been whisked off to Never-Never Land

So if you regularly ride the New York subways, you’ve heard speeches something like the these a couple of times a week from somebody shaking a filthy paper coffee cup full of coins at you:

“Ladies and gentleman, your attention please. I got AIDS. My wife is in the hospital with TB. I’m homeless. I got three kids to support and one of them is in a wheel chair when he fell out a window on the other two, who are on crutches. I’m a Viet Nam veteran. I lost my job. All I’m asking is that you give me a dollar, a dime, even a penny will help, anything you got….”

“I am part of da United Effort To Help Da Homeless Inc. If you’re carrying a cheese sandwich you don’t need, a ham sandwich you don’t need, a happle you don’t need, anything like dat, we will pass it on to some hungry people. Udderwise, please donate money…”

“I ain’t out there robbing nobody or killing nobody like other people….all I want is money to buy food. Do you want me to have to mug you for it?”

You’ll also occasionally hear people around you muttering, “Why doesn’t the mayor do something about this? This is against the law.”

Well here’s why he’s doing nothing – or at least nothing effective. According a story by Leo Standora in the New York Daily News, during a press conference somebody asked the mayor about panhandlers in the subway. His immediate reaction?

“Bloomberg got irritated when the question of panhandlers came up in a press conference.

He cut off the questioner, saying, "There aren't very many panhandlers left, in all fairness to the MTA. Come on."

Yeah, right. Come on, Emperor Mike. There are also the quartets that come through crowded cars, elbowing riders out of the way to sing do-wop songs or to play mariachi music, followed by some aggressive passing of a hat. There are people with sunglasses banging passengers' shins with white canes while holding out a cup or a hat or a bag.

And did I mention the insane homeless who can empty a car during rush hour while they lie across seats, reeking unbearably of days-old sweat and excreta in their pants, picking lice and bedbugs from their hair and clothing, while laughing insanely, or cursing, or glaring menacingly at the passengers halfway down the car who are trying not to inhale?

Nope, the mayor, who claims to ride the someway to work regularly (although he takes a limousine, escorted by a security detail, to a subway entrance in midtown rather than walk to the one near his private mansion)…the mayor hasn’t noticed any of this.

Maybe he’s just out of touch. Maybe, as the New York Daily News suggested, the security detail that precedes him into the subway at 59^th and Lexington (his home is on East 79^th Street, a mile and two subway stops to the north)…maybe the security detail scares the panhandlers away. Maybe he’s secretly blind and has cotton stuffed up his nose and in his ears.

Or maybe he’s been hoodwinked by his staff, or maybe even by leprechauns or fairies, into believing those aren’t really beggers, they’re tailors who are sewing him a new suit of clothes. After all, the expensively-tailored Bloomberg did in effect declare himself emperor, overturning a term limits law that he had himself supported so he could run for a third term.

Given the Bloomberg bait-and-switch record on term limits and other matters, my guess is that he’s simply a liar.

So is he so out of touch that he doesn’t see or hear about the legions of panhandlers in the New York subways? Or does he see them but pretend they don’t exist? As my pal Hotwire Kellington from down the block during my Brooklyn childhood used to say, “Youse pays yer taxes and youse takes yer cherce.”

"Police State USA?" Well thanks to its mayor, New York is working hard to earn that title.

You’re walking down the street. Say, on your way to the supermarket. A cop stops you and demands you lie down on the ground, face down. Then he frisks you.

Poof! You're forever a criminal suspect.

You haven’t done anything illegal. It doesn’t matter. The cop finds your driver’s license in your wallet and calls it in. That action puts your name in a database for suspicious people. Along with your picture. Now, whenever there’s a criminal investigation, people will be asked if they recognize you, if they know your name.

Chechnya? Moscow? Peking?

Nope. New York.

As New York Times columnist Bob Herbert recently pointed out, it happens with regularity to African-Americans and Hispanics in New York.

This is racist behavior. It’s police state behavior. And it’s disgraceful.

Why won't Napoleon Bonaparte Bloomberg
stop this disgraceful behavior?

It would stop in a second if Mayor Michael Bloomberg told his police commissioner, Ray Kelley, “Cut it out or you’re fired.”

Fat chance! Since Michael Bloomberg overthrew New York’s election laws and did the equivalent of what another pipsqueak tyrant, Napoleon Bonaparte did when he crowned himself emperor, New York is only for people Mayor Bloomberg thinks ought to be living here.

The Mayor effectively threw out term limit laws by making a devil’s compact with the City Council. It said, in effect, “Let’s all override the public referendum that imposed term limits.” Job-greedy City Councilmen went along.

Drowning out legitimate opposition

Then, with $60 million or so of campaign spending, Bloomberg drowned out the protests of anyone who’d dare run against him.

Now corporations have the same right to drown out the free speech of others, thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court. I’ve already made a case for why justices Roberts and Alito ought to be impeached. Now you know why Bloomberg out to be sent to the woodshed, too.

Not that it’ll ever happen. Unless you start to make a lot of noise.

Pissed off groundhog takes a bite out of Bloomberg: an anthropological, meteorological and political explanation for my foreign readership

This piece is solely for the edification of my foreign readers. Please don’t read it if you’re a U.S. citizen and most especially if you’re a New Yorker. Mind your own business.
I want to explain to you, dear foreign readers, a curious American folk custom called Groundhog Day.

The “groundhog,” also known as a “woodchuck,” (M. monax) is a North American rodent about the size of what you Europeans and Latin Americans call a “football.”

It lives in the forests of the northeastern United States where it busies itself burrowing holes to sleep in and munching on nuts and other forest flora.

Death on four wheels

Like its fellow North American forest occupants such as the squirrel (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus), the raccoon (Procyon lotor), and the possum (Didelphis marsupialis), the groundhog’s most threatening natural predator is the automobile. (Automobilis horriblis.)

This is because the groundhog likes to cross roads. If in the course of crossing a road it sees an automobile speeding toward it, the groundhog assumes that if it stands very still, the automobile won’t notice it and will kill something else instead. Unfortunately for the groundhog, it is only half correct. Squish!

This may lead you to conclude that groundhogs are not very bright. However, everything is relative. For example, Americans believe you can use groundhogs to predict the arrival of spring weather.

Rodent long-range
weather forecasts

According to a popular myth, if the groundhog emerges from his burrow on February 2nd and sees his shadow, there will be six more weeks of winter. On the other hand, if he doesn’t see his shadow, spring is, umm…well, closer than six weeks away, regardless of the calendar.

Americans believe this myth because we are stupid.

Well, let’s face it. We really are. Mine is the nation that allowed George W. Bush to become president not once but twice, correct? I rest my case.

Belief in the ability of groundhogs to predict weather has led to a ceremony in a little town in Pennsylvania called Punxsutawney. Every year, the Punxsutawney town fathers dress up in top hats and frock coats. While the press watches and cameras roll, the bewildered groundhog gets yanked out of a box that serves as his man-made burrow. He is held up for all to see. Miraculously, he almost always sees his shadow, even if the rest of us can’t.

There are loud cheers, which scare the hell out of the poor rodent. Then all of us go back to work, relieved to know that winter will last another six weeks. And the groundhog can sleep off this horrible moment in the public eye until next year.

The groundhog’s name is always Punxsutawney Phil. I say “always” because this annual ceremony has been going on since 1887. The groundhog you see on TV cannot possibly be the groundhog they started with. All the same, there never seems to be a Phil Jr., or more likely a Phil the Fiftieth or Phil the Hundred-And-Twenty-Second.

Mayor Bloomberg’s New York
grows jealous of Punxsutawney 

Groundhog Day brings a lot of prosperity to rural Punxsutawney, population 6271. The press come and overwhelm the local diner’s capacity to brew coffee. The town gets lots of free publicity. So naturally, Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City, population somewhere between seven and eight million, grew jealous.

Consequently, we now have a Groundhog Day celebration in New York, starring a groundhog named Staten Island Chuck. Well, it doesn’t happen in the center of New York. If we had this ceremony in Manhattan, too many people would stand in line overnight just to jeer.

Instead, Groundhog Day gets celebrated in a remote zoo in our remotest borough, Staten Island. Only a Staten Islander could tell you how to get there. Not that New Yorkers are all that knowledgeable about getting around their city in any case. If any of us knows how to get to JFK airport by subway, we probably learned it from a French tourist.

This Groundhog Day, Mayor Michael Bloomberg schlepped out to Staten Island, one assumes by limo, to check out Chuck (the groundhog, not New York Senator Chuck Schumer) and see if Chuck’s meterological prediction agreed with Punxsutawney Phil’s prediction.

A furry critter in a foul mood
foils the whole PR thing

Unfortunately, Staten Island Chuck was in a foul mood that morning and didn’t want to come out of his box.

Equally unfortunately, this mayor doesn’t tolerate those who don’t cooperate with his public relations efforts. For example, his cops went out and illegally busted demonstrators, most especially bicyclists, in police state raids against protestors during the 2004 Republican convention.

And when he can’t bully them, the Mayor, who on his own is wealthy enough to bail out a bank, finds a way to buy what he wants.

He has in effect bought elections by drowning the opposition in advertising they can’t possibly afford to match. And he has in effect bribed his own city council into overturning a law twice mandated by voters for term limits on elected officials. He did this by encouraging the Council members to overturn their own term limits as well. But back to Staten Island Chuck…

Irritated critter disses mayor.
I say, “Good for you, Chuck!”

Staten Island Chuck was having none of this photo-op. If the mayor woke you up at 7:30 am so that he could aggrandize himself by having paparazzi fire off strobe lights in your face, you’d be disagreeable, too.

Bloomberg then tried the same tactic he used with his City Council. Bribery. He left about half an ear of corn in front of the entrance to Chuck’s box to coax him out. No fool that Chuck. He grabbed the corn and backed into his box with it. I’d rather have breakfast in bed, too.

So the mayor, who wants what he wants — citizens and ground hogs be damned — reached into Chuck’s box to yank Chuck out by the neck. And that’s when Chuck bit Bloomberg, as you'll see in this video.

Well, no real damage done. From what I hear, the Mayor required no more medical attention than a Band-Aid.

All the same, given the fact that a lot of New Yorkers are madder than a pissed off woodchuck about the mayor’s usurping of their term limits mandate, I’d get a tetanus shot if I were Michael Bloomberg.

And now for the weather…

For whatever it’s worth, Staten Island Chuck didn’t see his shadow. Which means, if you believe in this crap, that spring will come very early to New York this year, even if it doesn’t come early in not-so-far-away Punxsutawney. Well, that’s meteorology for you.

Okay, American readers, you can come back in now. Especially if you live in New York. In fact, for your own good, you’d better. As I write this, it’s snowing hard outside.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg vs. New York City’s taxi industry: Here’s wishing a plague of boils and oil leaks on both their vile, law-flouting houses

Let me start with my cranky prejudices. I hate New York City taxis.

Generally speaking, New York’s cabs are filthy, uncomfortable rattletraps. The “clear” Plexiglas partitions between the front and back seats (actually, most of them are opaquely grimy), designed to keep the driver from getting shot by a stickup man, can also get a passenger’s face flattened if the vehicle stops suddenly.

The seats in most of New York’s taxis (they’re rejiggered Ford Crown Victorias) are low on the floor. The seats supposedly offer lots of “leg room” but don’t you believe it. The front seats get pushed so far back (I assume for the comfort of the driver) that sometimes passengers can’t even find “foot room.”

Still more reasons to hate New York taxis: The driver’s identification card, only sometimes posted where it’s supposed to be, is generally unreadable behind the filthy Plexiglas shield. At night, lighted by the rough equivalent of a dim flashlight bulb, it’s just as unreadable.

Cell phone madness

Its also rare — extremely rare — to get in a cab in which the driver isn’t chattering away on his cell phone. I’ve had drivers take me to the wrong destination because they were too engrossed in their conversations to listen to where I said I wanted to go or to notice that we had passed my destination.

Much as I hate the taxi industry I also have an equally intense loathing for Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the who's ultimately in charge of regulating taxis.

"The voters be damned!"

Bloomberg campaigned for term limits, got them, and subsequently decided that contrary to the term limits law and he will of the voters, he wanted a third mayoral term. So now he has used his considerable political clout to overrule term limits (which the New York's citizens voted for twice) with the complicity of the City Council. The Council was in effect bribed by having their own term limits lifted, too.

That's only a small part of it. Another item: In his misguided efforts to achieve something that would make his record look good, the mayor unsuccessfully fought for a lunatic congestion pricing plan which would have done little to relieve congestion, but would have driven up the cost of doing business in New York. You’ll find a number of informative rants on the subject here:

Turning yellow cabs “green”

The latest bee in the mayor’s slightly cockeyed bonnet has to do with “green taxicabs” — you know, the kind that spew out less pollution and carbon dioxide and drink up less fossil fuel.

Never mind that Mayor Bloomberg could save New York from tons of hydrocarbons, not to mention a good part of the traffic that’s clogging the streets simply by outlawing cruising. That’s the practice the cabs have of trawling the streets for passengers—a practice that puts just about all 13,000-plus cabs on the city on the street. They're out there 24 hours a day, seven days a week according to a taxi industry legal brief for which I’ll produce a URL shortly.

If we simply had a law like the one in Paris that prevents flagging down taxis in streets, the vehicles could line up at designated taxi stands, engines off, until a passenger came along. And during rush hours, you wouldn’t have potential passengers desperate for a ride wading into oncoming traffic to snare an empty cab.

Less traffic? Less pollution? A safer city? Nope, that would be too easy. Instead, the Bloomberg-controlled Taxi and Limousine Commission suddenly decreed that all new taxis have to be of a new and fuel efficient design that gets 25 miles to the gallon. Nothing wrong with that, right?

Sad to say, wrong.

Cute, clean, green and dangerous —
maybe the mayor’s people can’t read.

There are already some of these cute 25 mpg-or-better vehicles out on the street. I like to ride in  them. They’re of a completely different design than the traditional, modified Ford Crown Victoria that gets only 12 mpg. They’re higher off the ground, therefore more comfortable than the Crown Victoria. They're easier to get into and out of. They seem to offer about the same amount of legroom, but offer passengers the added advantage of being able to sit up straight. And maybe just because they’re new, they’re not as filthy as the Crown Victorias.

A small problem:
they’re also not as safe.

The taxi fleets that successfully sued the Mayor to lift his regulations pleaded that the little cars weren’t as safe as the big Fords. I assumed for many weeks this was just an industry red herring. I was wrong, as I learned when I examined court papers filed by the taxi industry. Some examples of safety problems:

…just weeks ago, the TLC [Taxi and Limousine Commission] was forced to issue a warning and directive stating that one of its mandated after-manufacturer vehicle alterations - the addition of vinyl seat overings – hinder the deployment of side curtain and front seat air bags in the hybrids. Had the TLC taken time to read the owners manuals of the approved vehicles, it would have seen that they explicitly warn against the installation of vinyl seat coverings. The TLC, however, ignored this safety warning and many others in its rush to mandate hybrid taxis.

Oh, and even one of the manufacturers agrees these fuel efficient babies aren’t safe as taxis:

…Toyota, who created and licenses hybrid technology – refuses to support the use of its cars as taxis due to its engineers’ concerns. A Toyota spokesman said: “Our engineers are nervous about it because they were not designed for commercial use. (NY Times, April 27, 2008) Another Toyota representative explained that the hybrids “have not been designed to withstand the rigors of 24/7 commercial use.”

And in the “You’re doing a
heckuva job, Bloomie” department…

In October 2004 the TLC [Taxi and Limousine Commission] conducted a sealed bid auction fort the CNG or hybrid (collectively “alternative fuel”) licenses. The City set the minimum bid price at an amount significantly below the then-prevailing market price for unrestricted licenses because the TLC recognized that alternative fuel vehicles are more costly to own and operate than conventional gasoline-powered vehicles…

…At the time of the auction, the TLC knew that there were no commercially available alternative fuel vehicles that meet TLC specifications for use as a NYC Taxi….Despite the lack of available alternative fuel vehicles, the TLC went forward with the auction …Eighteen of the licenses were successfully bid on…The bidders proposed the use of hybrid Ford Escapes, but the TLC refused to allow them to use these vehicles because they did not meet the TLC specifications for interior room. The TLC rejected all other vehicles the bidders proposed, and did not offer any other vehicles that could be used with the alternative fuel licenses…

Congatulations, license bidder —
you’ve successfully bid on…nothing.

Because the TLC refused to issue the bidders licenses and refused to approve any vehicles for use with the alternative-fuel licenses, on April 21 2005 the bidders sued the TLC demanding that the TLC close on their licenses.

We were for the Hondas before
we were against them —but now we’re
umm...ahh...ummmm....

In July 2008…the Honda Civic Hybrid and Honda Accord Hybrid were removed from the list. Plaintiffs were told that the Honda Civic Hybrid was removed due to particularly poor performance. Later in July, however, the Honda Civic was inexplicably added back to the approval list. In August 2008…the Honda Civic was also removed again.

Here are my own cranky solutions
to New York congestion and taxi problems

1. Outlaw taxi cruising. Require all taxis to wait for passengers at taxi stands, or to be summoned to specific addresses by telephone. It works in Paris, where the streets are even crazier. It'll work here, too.

2. Detroit’s on the rocks. Require them — require them I said — to manufacture hybrid cars safe enough to be used as taxis. Just tell them, “no taxis, no bailout.”

3. With city taxis lined up at taxi stands, it’ll be easy enough to subject them to a daily filth inspection. If they’re filthy inside, cut off their medallions (which the City auctions off like permanent real estate for a minimum upset price of $700,000. In fact, in the aftermarket those medallions sell for well over a million bucks. Is it any wonder a taxi ride costs so damn much in New York, while taxi drivers barely eke out a living working 12 hour days?

4. Stop the city’s cabbies from talking on the phone, with or without hands-free devices. If they’re caught talking on any telephonic devices in their taxis, don’t cut off their medallions. Cut off their ears.

5. Put a moratorium on those million dollar taxi medallions. (An exception can be made for individuals who own just one medallion and are trying to make a living.) After two years, all other medallions should become invalid and the taxi owner (usually a multi-car fleet) will be forced to rent taxi medallions from the city for an annual and more reasonable price. The city will collect a steady income stream — instead of an occasional taxi medallion windfall that the city then has to pay for by spewing more taxis onto the street. And because taxi overhead will be so much lower, drivers who lease their cars should be able to earn more, while passengers pay less.

But it all has to start with dumping Mayor Bloomberg. Despite a considerable amount of image doctoring, he’s not a successful mayor. He’s just as incompetent as George Bush. Send him back to Wall Street, with the rest of the investment world failures.

Michael Bloomberg attempts to declare himself "Emperor And Beloved Mayor Of New York For Life"

New York:- Mayor Michael Bloomberg has decided to shred the will of the voters and declare himself Emperor.

Oh well, actually just Mayor for a third term (and perhaps a fourth and fifth term after that) which would in effect make him Mayor For Life.

New York City has a term limits law, which limits the Mayor and City Council members to two terms in office. Bloomberg is determined to trash that law, which was approved in two different referendums by the city's voters.

Bloomberg is supported in his decision to usurp the law by former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who at the end of his own mayoralty briefly considered seizing power and continuing on as mayor “for an extra three months” on the grounds that after 9-11 he was “indispensable.” Turns out he wasn’t.

City Council members say it’s
easier than finding honest work

Under the the city’s bizarre charter, the City Council can overrule voters by writing a new election law eliminating term limits, then passing it without voter approval. By going along with the mayor, Council members get to save their rear ends when their own terms expire.

With an extra term, they will be able to go back to drawing city pay for what is essentially a do-nothing job in this strong mayoralty city, rather than having to seek work as low-level lobbyists, influence peddlers or ambulance chasers.

The Emperor-To-Be is declaring this a “one time only” deal until, of course, the next time. However, his usurpation of the law theoretically would not extend to future mayors, if there ever are any. 

“Let them spend their own billions to seize power,” somebody close to City Hall — well, anyway, somebody only a few blocks away — declared huffily.

Lauder capitulates and 

saves himself billions

Emperor Napoleon Bloomberg had feared loud opposition to this power grab from fellow billionaire Ronald Lauder, who himself twice tried unsuccessfully to run for mayor. In 1989, Lauder spent $12 million in the Republican mayoralty primary and won 37,000 votes for his money — the equivalent of almost $350 a vote.

Lauder in the past had been a champion of term limits and it was feared at Bloomberg Palace that Lauder might launch an advertising campaign against the Bloombergeonic power grab. This would force both Lauder and His Majesty, Emperor Napoloen Bloomberg into a political advertising war in which they’d have to match each other’s spending, billion for billion.

It is not known  precisely how His Royal Majesty, Emperor Napoleon Bloomberg convinced Lauder suddenly to reverse his own highly principled stand on term limits.

While the word passing from Bloomberg Palace to the press is that it’s only because in a financial crisis, His Royal Majesty, Gracious Emperor Napoleon Bloomberg feels just as indispensable as Giuliani felt after 9-11, Lauder must surely know the maxim coined by the late French general and president Charles DeGaulle: “The cemeteries are full of indispensable men.”

More likely, His Royal Majesty, Most Gracious Emperor-for-Life Napoleon Bloomberg hissed into Lauder’s ear, “Listen Ronnie, if you don’t go along with this I’m going to have Ray Kelly send some cops over to squeeze your nuts between two bricks.”

Up next: public hangings
of weeping 10-year-olds

Kelly is the Emperor’s police commissioner. His cops are already known for such draconian measures as roughing up and arresting cyclists on phony charges when they demonstrate against the mayor, confiscating their bicycles and holding them in jails until some judge has an apoplectic fit over the matter. There's one such example here. 

Now it turns out that the Emperor’s police commissioner is also arresting children and leading them out of school in handcuffs for minor and non-criminal offenses.

A Palace spokesperson who requested anonymity because the Emperor hasn’t officially been crowned yet, confirmed this and added: 

“At His Majesty, Most Beloved Gracious Emperor-for Life Napoleon Bloomberg Dada’s inaugural coronation, there will be a display of imperial power during which any protesters against His Magnificent Imperial Graciousness will be tied to posts and flogged, while approximately 300 ten-year-olds will be executed in a mass simultaneous hanging for grave transgressions — not only smoking pot but also stealing a piece of blackboardchalk or throwing an eraser.”