All the candidates for public advocate joined together to protest a 40% cut in an already modest budget of $2.9 million, amounting to $1.8 million. Mark Green asked rhetorically, “Why has only the watchdog over City Hall been cut 40 percent?”

Quinn’s response?

The notion that politics was behind the cut was “ridiculous.” It’s because of the extraordinarily grim economic forecast.

And Bloomberg?

“Nobody’s suggesting cutting them out, but it may just, it may very well be that we cannot afford to have any one agency at the level that it was before,” he said. “So it’s no slap.”

No slap? The royal couple thinks we’re stupid. Remember — whenever Quinn says “That’s ridiculous” — as in the slush fund scandal — you know you’re onto something.

Ed Note: We started to write that not even Bloomberg could cut the office out altogether because the public advocate is a charter-mandated office. But that bit of irony was immediately obvious.

(Source: The New York Times)
Also see Betsy Gotbaum’s article in the Huffington Post.