I fell asleep before the election results were in and woke up to the nightmare of another four years of Michael Bloomberg. The only thing that gives me a little comfort is knowing….. No, I can’t think of anything that gives me comfort.

I’m one of those people who sometimes doesn’t know what he thinks until he starts writing. It was different with Bloomberg. From the moment he said if the city council overturned term limits, that he would run again, I knew he’d be on the ballot and I knew what I thought about it. I really did.

All the stuff about the fight to get them to overturn term limits was silly. You don’t have to be an insider to understand Christine Quinn and the gang. As for the Republican and Independence Party bosses who gave him their ballot line, the only issue was how much.

I don’t blame any of them. You’ve got to pay the rent and feed the kids. These days, except for the mega rich who are feeding egos and libidos (Not all of them; I like Corzine, for example.), that’s what politics is about.

Is there anyone in that crowd who is employable outside of politics? Well, there are some, but not many.

What I didn’t know was whether Weiner would drop out or how badly Thompson’s campaign would be run. Weiner made a mistake but it was understandable. He didn’t want to repeat Andrew Cuomo’s 2002 resignation in his first run for governor. Recall how Cuomo dropped out, leaving the field to H. Carl McCall, the first Democratic gubernatorial nominee. Cuomo was still on the Liberal Party line, but he didn’t campaign.

It was the coup de grace for the party, which didn’t get the requisite 50,000 votes to qualify for the ballot in the next statewide election. As that piece of political real estate had already been sliced, diced and sold to Rudy Giuliani, nobody but a few old timers missed it. I’m sure Weiner understood that a Democratic primary, not only against Thompson but against the New York Times, would have damaged his career. Too bad. He might have won.

Maybe the take away from all this — if you didn’t know it already — is never believe a word you read in the New York Times, not about the Middle East (remember Judith Miller), and certainly not about New York politics, at least not in the news section. Krugman and most of the other columnists are excellent. Their opinions are worth reading. And you can trust the sports section, at least the scores. For the rest of it, you’d better find a blogger or two.

Unless it’s signed by someone else, anything you read in this space from here on in, will be written by Mike Dang. My wife and I are going to San Miguel for a couple of weeks and then I’m hoping to restart www.hacksandflacks.org. Mike and I are talking about it, but we’ve got to figure out the money.

Thanks for any attention you might have paid to what we’ve been reporting and for the kind words some of you have written. They meant a lot to us.

- Neil Fabricant