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

Single digits. As Bill Thompson said in his concession speech tonight, it’s important that the all the issues we’ve highlighted during the last few months doesn’t disappear into the shadows of public discussion.

Returns Via NY1:

New York Times society reporter, Joyce Purnick, author of a recent semi-authorized Bloomberg biography, wrote Bloomberg a “memo” in the form of an op-ed piece in Tuesday’s paper. She said that he had made a “bad investment” spending all that money to win an election. As the incumbent, she wrote, “you are in and destined to stay in.”

Purnick went on to deliver a history lesson on the last fifty years of mayoral elections in which only two incumbents, Beame and Dinkins, three if you count Koch’s try for a fourth term, won reelection. New Yorkers, she opined, are “pragmatic, even complacent, when their city is not in anguish.” She wondered why anyone would even bother to run against the man who is managing our “stable” city so well.
Read rest of story…

From Jillian Jonas, freelance journalist and former national political analyst for U.P.I.:

As Mayor Michael Bloomberg approached the end of his first term in 2004 with his eye toward re-election in 2005, the administration was able to momentarily turn away from the city’s economic turmoil. Bloomberg began re-examining some of New York’s social service policies, putting fighting poverty and homelessness at the top of his list.

In June 2004, Bloomberg announced an ambitious five-year plan called “Uniting for Solutions Beyond Shelter” with the goal of tackling the complex questions of homelessness — particularly ending chronic homelessness within 10 years — and cutting the homeless population by two-thirds. “At its heart, this new plan aims to replace the city’s over-reliance on shelter with innovative, cost-effective interventions that solve homelessness — and to make visible headway in reducing homelessness on the streets and in shelters,” said the mayor.

To be sure, there have been bumps along the way: controversial moves offering homeless individuals one-way tickets out-of-town or enforcing a never utilized Pataki-era state law charging homeless families for their shelter stay. There also was an extremely unpopular attempt to move a Manhattan intake shelter to Brooklyn. And, at a recent Working Families Party mayoral forum, media reports quoted Bloomberg as saying New York’s homeless find shelters “a lot more attractive” than “permanent living situations.”

But more significantly, Bloomberg’s lofty goals have not materialized. In fact, rather than cutting the population by two-thirds, the administration has seen homelessness increase substantially.

[See the rest of the story at Gotham Gazette]

From Seth Miller:

As we know, the city didn’t bother to enforce the J-51 law at Independence Plaza North, under which every apartment should have been registered as stabilized before HPD permitted the development to leave Mitchell Lama. Instead, nearly two years after IPN left the Mitchell Lama program, after numerous in-person meetings between HPD’s commissioner and Gluck’s lawyers (to which the tenants were not invited), HPD accepted back Gluck’s repayment of the post-Mitchell Lama J-51 benefits, giving Gluck a fig leaf to defend against what had by then become the tenants’ lawsuit for rent stabilized status. Part of the logic here is that, to Bloomberg, it is better to have the federal taxpayer pay for vouchers that protect only the poorest tenants, while the landlord gets market rents, than for the City to actually enforce a law that mandates affordable rents for everyone.
Read rest of story…

Make your vote count.

Via Pareene and Gawker:

Tomorrow is Election Day! You will probably not vote, because there are no contested races for anything important in 90% of the nation. But if you are a New Yorker, we have one message: don’t vote for Michael Bloomberg.

You know those idiots who don’t know anything about politics but think it sounds smart to say “I am a social liberal and an economic conservative?” Bloomberg is the candidate for them, if they love a liberal nanny state and a conservative religious fervor for the eternal goodness of private enterprise.

For all the talk of Bloomberg the power-player who at least gets things done without worrying about the unions and special interests, he’s been unable to win any political battle with anyone he couldn’t literally buy off. Like Sheldon Silver, who (thankfully) killed the West Side Stadium and (annoyingly) ended all that “Congestion Pricing” talk. And those unions and special interests were just bought off, which worked fine back when the boom whose end Bloomberg never saw coming was in full swing.
Read rest of story…

Tom Tomorrow is one of the country’s greatest social critics. I read this book to my soon-to-be four-year old grandson. He enjoyed it and he got it! If only adult New Yorkers understood as much — our readers excluded of course. Then again, he hasn’t been exposed to the relentless spin factory. We recommend it. Can’t start strengthening our kids’ immune systems soon enough.

[Please visit Tom Tomorrow's Web site for more information]

Via Comedy Central:

November 7, 2001: Indifference 2001 – New York Mayoral Races

[For the rest of the videos, visit Comedy Central]