The new $11 billion operating budget is actually just an ominous warning that in a year—or maybe a few months—the Transit Authority will once again cite the need to hike fares in order to strong arm Albany in finding a newer, more regressive way of funding operating costs.

They have basically promised it already:

In addition to the 2010 budget, the MTA released a four-year fiscal plan. It envisions 7.5% fare and toll hikes in 2011 and 2013 as the agency tries to establish a pattern of regular inflation-based increases.

There is really not so much inflation right now, in America, is there? (But who knows what the future holds!)

But, yes, it is insane that our mass transit is operated by a rotating cast of idiot millionaires with free E-Zpasses for life (and beyond!) beholden to absolutely no one, at all, operating with two sets of books, and yet we have to actually sympathize with them because the people who profit from the way an efficient mass transit system allows for the mobility of cheap labor don't think they should be forced to pony up any money to keep transit affordable. Fares are simply taxes—incredibly regressive taxes, just like the sales taxes that New York City residents suffer to fund our own transit while suburban New Yorkers bitch about the prospect of being charged to clog our streets with their cars, and Jersey dicks bemoan the tolls they have to pay to enter the city where they make all of their money while contributing nothing back.

Meanwhile, though, the MTA lies, about everything, all the time. They are saving just enough of the money from the emergency bailout earlier this year to allow them to not threaten to raise fares again for one (1) year (while fighting transit workers' promised wage increase in court). And thanks to that bailout, we only had to endure a slight fare increase with no service cuts! Except that not a single goddamn line is running on schedule anymore, ever, and that's been the case all year and it only gets worse every week.

Track and signal work must be up 1000% across the board, because there's hardly a line that isn't out of commission on the conveniently poorer or less utilizied portions of the routes these days. The F just gives up at Jay St now. The service advisories, when they are actually correctly posted, which is rarely, grow longer every weekend. If you live outside Manhattan, you better catch a train home before 11 pm, because otherwise who the fuck knows when a train will show up and where it will actually take you. Lord only knows what the hell the G train was doing last weekend, and why. Everyone, anecdotally, has noticed this. But no one has just straight-up said that these are the across the board service cuts that they promised they wouldn't need to institute once we saved them from disaster a few months ago.

It is time, now, immediately, to do a few things:

• To end the insane federal transit funding system that a) overfunds highways and b) dispenses capital project money for urban mass transit systems but forbids any federal spending on operating costs for cities of more than 200,000 people. The Reagan administration slashed mass transit funding, of course, but it was Mr. Bill Clinton who eliminated operating assistance altogether. Do you want to know about how much highway funding has increased over the same period of time? No, you don't. Real estate taxes and fares are not the proper way to fund the nation's largest subway system, especially when we will earmark federal cash for the Robert Byrd Memorial Frontage Road to the Erma Ora Byrd Conference and Learning Center and Community Swimming Pool.
• To destroy the MTA. The public authorities reform bill that just passed the Assembly is a wonderful start! But the entire board needs to be dissolved and replaced with, you know, actual subway riders, elitist technocrat transit wonks, and people with experience in government management and accounting. Civil servants, in other words.
• Everyone in Albany should be tarred and feathered. This is an important part of our prescription for any local problem.
• Also fuck Bloomberg.

Anyway! No fare increases until January 1, 2011! And some day—maybe in like 2015, when you ride the robot-operated Second Avenue line to your favorite soup kitchen—there may be those little signs that tell you when the next train is coming! This "install little signs" project is only a zillion dollars over budget (so far!).

The San Francisco mayor/golden child hasn't been seen in public since Oct. 30, and his staff had no idea if he went to Hawaii as reported because he didn't tell them anything. Now the local Board of Supervisors is debating whether Newsom might be hunkered down with a city-funded svengali, according to Brock Keeling at SFist:

It is rumored that the San Francisco Mayor spent little time with anyone else other than his life coach during the last few days of his gubernatorial bid. Said life coach also might have accompanied Newsom to Hawaii last week... Supervisor Chris Daly asked the city controller to look into whether or not city funds were used to pay Newsom's life coach.

It's a great move on Newsom's part: Making a grand show of his pain and introspection will only make his future claims that "I have truly changed!" or whatever all the more believable. Especially since, as Keeling points out, life coaches are well known to dedicated reality TV viewers. Those are any wife-fucking recovering-alcoholic gay-marrying mayor's core constituents! (Life coach footage below, via SFist.)

(Top pic: Newsom by darthdowney on Flickr)

Socketside heard Cruise was the buyer of an $18 million mansion in the ritzy Sea Cliff neighborhood. NBC Bay Area soon pointed out that, if that's true, Cruise's neighbors would be Robin Williams, Cheech Marin and the guitarist from Metallica. It's like the Bay Area's very own stunted little fog-swept Beverly Hills. But many locals will remember that the Church of Scientology was on the hunt for "apparent expansion" space starting in 2006, nosing around the once countercultural North Beach neighborhood.

So is Cruise, the alleged inspirer of Scientology beat-downs, spearheading a renewed expansion campaign by the cult to which he belongs? Maybe, or maybe said SF mansion is just being bought by another local tech exec like Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, per a SocketSite update:

Another reader quickly notes the mailing address for the purchasing LLC ("Tawaraya") is that of "a high-end accounting firm in Walnut Creek" which happens to advise Larry Ellison (amongst others). And The Real Estalker adds, "Tawaraya is a super posh and searingly expensive, 300-year old ryokan–which is essentially a Japanese bed and breakfast sort of place–located in Kyoto" which is rather Ellison-esque.

Oh great, more Larry Ellison dick waving. Don't we at least deserve some fresh megalomaniac mansion owners, out here?

There is already a scandal: Mets fan Rep. Eliot Engel wore a Yankees cap on the House floor last Friday! His spokesman had to note, to Roll Call, that the hat was only on his head for a little bit, and that Engel "hasn't switched allegiances" (he is not Spike Lee, people).

Then there is this:

But some Mets fans weren't buying into the Empire State rendition of "Kumbaya," politics be damned: Rep. Anthony Weiner (D) was notably absent from the list of sponsors of the resolution formally congratulating the Bronx Bombers. One might think Weiner, who is thought to have aspirations of being the Big Apple's mayor, would want to curry favor with the big chunk of its residents who root for the Pinstripes.

It seems, though, that Weiner's loyalty to the Mets runs even deeper than his political ambitions - even though he acknowledges that his team isn't in the same league as the Yanks. "I only follow double-A baseball," Weiner tells us. "I'm a Mets fan."

Oh, Anthony Weiner. You are such an annoying person, even though that was a very good Baseball Quip. It may seem counterintuitive for a man with mayoral aspirations to not root for the most successful and popular New York baseball franchise, but in 2013 this guy needs to win Queens, Brooklyn, and a New York City Democratic primary election. The Mets are his ticket to Gracie Mansion!

Heard on the Hill [Roll Call]

First of all: two awesome TV ads. Governor Paterson looks so much more professional clean-shaven, right? We miss the mustache though. The first ad is all "I never asked to be governor and also I have too won some political victories" and the second one is mostly "look, you don't actually know anything about this man, so we will tell you that he was very smart and went to Columbia and stuff."

But why TV ads, now? Because he would like to raise money. And you have to spend campaign money to make money.

Ickes was, maybe, the most reality-based of the triumvirate of assholes who destroyed Hillary Clinton's dreams, but he was also the guy still running around in June of 2008 crowing about how superdelegates and his magical maps of Michigan meant certain victory for the White Lady of Experience.

Still: he was and is not Mark Penn. For the most part, Paterson has hired the Good Clinton People, leaving the Bad Clinton People to Bloomberg and evil PR firms and the Wall Street Journal and little talking head boxes on Fox News.

Meanwhile, the Governor is preparing to push for gay marriage again. And it will fail, spectacularly. This is maybe a smart way to point out how evil and useless everyone else in Albany is, and how that is not even the governor's fault, or it is maybe just him trying to fuck with the State Senate because he hates them.

As we mentioned on Monday, Dan Halloran is a member of a pre-Christian pagan religion that worships the Norse gods. There were actual photos of him performing rituals and stuff. He is the "First Atheling" of his "theod."

And he is a now a Republican City Council member from Queens. So, hey, let's all hoist our horns of mead, in his honor.

(Obviously voters across the nation are sick of Barack Obama's liberal monotheism, and this bodes il for Abrahamic Democrats in 2010.)

The Dellums situation, in which he has acknowledged underpaying at least some taxes, is especially sad. While Dellums has been, on balance, tragically ineffective as mayor of Oakland, he had a distinguished, 28-year career in Congress that included passing anti-apartheid legislation over Ronald Reagan's veto. Now he's part of the "disgusting" backdrop of local deviance and depravity that techies love to hate, until the day they (read: some!) up and leave.

[East Bay Express, SF Chronicle]

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.

And about that stadium: what the fuck was that? And the Olympics thing? After bitching about Giuliani's disgraceful subsidizing of the fucking Yankees, Bloomberg both turns around completely on that particular issue and attempts to build the fucking Jets a stadium, so that New York could get an Olympics that it did not want. And that failed, and everyone forgot about it. Meanwhile: 40,000 people in shelters! Bloomberg could personally buy every single one of those people an apartment in a vacant Williamsburg luxury condo building and still have enough left over to bribe a City Council member into supporting his fifth term.

And those luxury Williamsbug condo buildings, by the way, that stand vacant? Yes, well, that was part of this brilliant plan to utilize rezoning to spur the free market (which always allocates resources more efficiently than anything else in the history of civilization but sometimes it needs government help, like with tax breaks and stuff) to create affordable housing all over the waterfront. This did not work, as developers decided to just not bother to build all those affordable housing units they were supposed to build. More than 2,200 promised new affordable apartments in Williamsburg and Greenpoint have turned out to be 768, 20 percent of which are renovations of apartments that were already affordable. There are lots more of these stories.

His record on housing, like his record on nearly everything having to do with the outer boroughs and poverty and human beings who make less than $100,000 a year, has been a ridiculous disgrace. His entire philosophy of development solving everything turned out to be precisely, 100% wrong, and suddenly the city itself was driving the real estate boom, driving up land prices to absurd levels across the boroughs and tearing down neighborhoods only to replace them with vacant lots and half-filled cheaply built hideous high-rises once the bottom fell out of the City Hall-inflated market. But hey, we got the High Line and 311! So you can sleep in that fancy park while you call 311 asking if there is room in a shelter because you can no longer afford your home.

Eight years into the Bloomberg administration, Ground Zero is a still a hole that everyone continues fighting about.

The MTA has raised fares while cutting service (without actually cutting service, officially—it's just that whatever line you happen to ride is suddenly experiencing a whole lot of track work every single goddamn weekend).

The Gays: still not married! And also a lot of them are getting beaten up on the streets these days for some reason?

Bloomberg is also the beneficiary of the most friendly news coverage of any big city mayor in the nation. Easily. It helps that, you know, he is a media mogul, himself, and he is good, close, personal friends with the three publishers who run the newspapers that went after each one of his predecessors for shit they've let slide under this mayor, because they know he's a good, decent guy, at heart, and the only one who can Fix New York, because of his Money.

Can you imagine how the Post would've blown up if David Dinkins lied about taking the Subway to work every day? The Daily News response to discovering that John Lindsay flew to Bermuda every weekend?

Let's talk about the cops, for a second: they are still operating under Giuliani levels of complete disregard for the law. They are getting drunk and running people over and shooting unarmed black people and sodomizing people in subway stations. The Civilian Complaint Review Board has become a joke, unless your case gets a lot of publicity. There's obviously no accountability, whatsoever, and no attempt to recruit and train more cops from the communities they actually police. The NYPD remains, primarily, the home of roided-out white people from outside the city with a great deal of contempt for civil liberties. The Mayor always sounds properly upset when some of them rape someone, but he's never done a damn thing to rein them in or change the culture.

What he has done is Keep Us Safe by never once giving a shit about Civil Liberties. The cops stop and frisk thousands more people every year, your 4th Amendment rights do not apply in the Subway system, and expensive and completely ineffective new rings of cameras are going up across Manhattan.

Bloomberg deserves to be run out of town on an inadequately funded public rail line for the 2004 GOP convention alone. Remember that ridiculous farce? No, of course not, no one does, besides the thousands of people improperly spied on, arrested, harassed, and detained by the NYPD. All of this was completely illegal. No heads rolled.

One more special bonus factoid: New York leads the world in marijuana arrests! Specifically, marijuana arrests of black people!

And he is personally a jerk. He is a thin-skinned, unpleasant, sanctimonious asshole. His company is being sued for a culture of sexual discrimination that plaintiffs say Bloomberg himself contributed to. He is a tremendous dick to reporters whenever he gets cranky. He is fucking race-baiting with Rudy Giuliani again, because why not?

He has been a shitty mayor and he does not deserve the support of anyone who claims to be a liberal. Though what all of his most destructive missteps as mayor have in common is that they do not in any way upset or inconvenience the well-off self-professed liberals who support him. Besides maybe a couple Critical Mass riders arrested in illegal sweeps. (Though he sure does like bike lanes, so it's a wash, right?)

We cannot encourage you to vote for the Democrat in the race, because even we still aren't sure if we'll go for him or the much more delightful Billy Talen. Just don't fucking vote for Michael Bloomberg.

Stuck twenty points behind Democratic rival Jerry Brown and without the support of "major San Francisco donors who helped underwrite Newsom's successful campaigns in the city," Newsom is dropping out of the governor's race. Newsom dropped the word "young" into his exit speech, a move that helps remind people he's a rising political star who in all likelihood plans to try again for higher office, just once he tackles some of those festering homelessness and crime problems he promised to attack when first elected mayor six years ago.

Though losing an alcoholic wife-fucker like Newsom will take some fun out of the gubernatorial race, the contest still features Democratic hopeful Brown, who proposed a state space academy last time he was governor, and Republican contender Meg Whitman, the former eBay CEO whose personal voting record is "unacceptable," according to one Meg Whitman.

Queens Democrats will instead endorse Assemblyman Jose Peralta. All because Moneserrate switched parties earlier this year in an attempt to seize control of the State Senate and then went on trial for slashing his girlfriend's face with a broken glass and also there are dozens of campaign finance disclosure and ethics violations that someone should probably be looking into!

It's not all bad, though! The Democrats still haven't decided whether or not they should expel Monserrate from the Senate (hint: you should), and so far they have just asked him politely to resign, which he will not do.

And! Some good news! Secret billionaires are paying all of Monserrate's legal bills, in a gross and obvious violation of State Senate ethics rules that, once again, no one is investigating.

Still: not having the backing of the Democratic party might make it difficult for Monserrate to fundraise for his reelection.

Of course, it could be worse! Someone could've slashed his face open with a broken glass, literally dragged him kicking and screaming from his apartment, and dumped him off at a hospital miles away from home. That might put a damper on his day.

[Photo: Getty]

First, Emeryville mayor Ken Bukowski killed a guy with his car. Then he was slapped for inappropriate loans. Now his niece accuses him of meth addiction. A lone bad apple? Not among San Francisco Bay Area mayors.

Bukowski is no longer mayor of Emeryville, the small city that's home to Steve Jobs' Pixar, and was even stripped of his vice mayorship. But that's not to say misbehavior is regularly punished. In the superficially spiritual Bay Area, the belief in redemption and personal reinvention springs eternal, and the locals don't need the unifying trauma of a world-changing metropolitan disaster to get over a leader's moral failings; a half-sincere pledge of contrition will do just fine.

A mayor can then move on to greater things. Like running for governor. And people wonder why some top tech talent finds the area "filthy" and utterly dysfunctional. Some of the mayors in question (click each to expand):

It's not just Gavin Newsom's hair that's oily. The San Francisco mayor slept with his chief of staff's wife., and within four days said he would seek treatment for alcohol abuse. Since then, Newsom has repeatedly declined to discuss his "treatment," but has launched a campaign for California governor and won an endorsement from, of all people, Hillary Clinton. And she thought she was done forgiving adulterous men. (Pic: by Thomas Hawk)

Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates eventually pled guilty to trashing about 1,000 copies of the University of California, Berkeley student newspaper after the paper endorsed his opponent. He initially denied throwing away the papers, but confessed, in the words of the San Francisco Chronicle, "a month later, after campus police prepared a report to send to the district attorney." His punishment? Re-election in 2006 (with the Chronicle's endorsement). (Disclaimer: I edited the UC Berkeley student paper in college but was long gone when the Bates thing happened.) (Pic: by Allen Lew)

When mayor of Emeryville two years ago, Ken Bukowski accidentally struck and killed a security job in his car on a rainy day. What did he tell the San Francisco Chronicle? "I don't feel the accident will impair my ability to serve as the city's new mayor." Police reportedly did not test the mayor for drugs or alcohol.

But his niece has just accused him of being a meth addict and ratted him out for keeping a rent-controlled apartment across the bay in San Francisco even though he's a councilman in Emeryville. Bukowski has also been investigated and stripped of various city council titles for taking tens of thousands of dollars in loans from developers and other businesses; busted for failing to pay taxes and fined for misusing campaign funds.

You can blame Bukowski's constituents for electing him, but not for making him mayor: that position is selected by the council on a rotating basis.

"This is the best story of the day!" Jonah writes. And then quotes:

At a town hall meeting last night in Morningside Heights, residents wept and shouted at Ms. Rolnik. They complained about deteriorating public housing, the lack of housing subsidies for AIDS patients, landlord harassment and many other issues, large and small.

Hah! Ha ha ha! Isn't that just a laugh riot, to you?

We suppose the "joke" is... the U.N. is ineffective? Like, it will investigate all of this and then send a sternly-worded letter to the president, or something. Right? Is that we we are supposed to find funny, here? Or is the very idea of the stupid UN thinking that "housing" is a "human right" the funny bit?

Look, there's a follow-up that will make you split your sides. Hope you can suppress the giggles long enough to hit publish on this one too, Jonah!

At an hour-long presentation at the Sedgwick Branch Library on University Avenue and 176th Street — a futuristic 90's building that looks part space shuttle and part Star Wars, — the rapportuer was told that in a four-square-mile area of the North and South Bronx, six private equity firms have officially driven 2,738 apartment units into foreclosure or risk of foreclosure.

Cesar Guzman, who lives at a building formerly owned by Ocelot Capital Group, said when Ocelot officially "disappeared" — meaning they literally can't be traced, they "packed up everything and left town" — they also left his 16-unit building in foreclosure and total disrepair, with things to this day "getting worse."

Other tenants told the the rapporteur similar horror stories. Dina Levy, organizing and policy director for the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board, who helped organize the tenants, found one common denominator in all these cases: buildings with over-leveraged mortgages that their rent revenues can't support.

And when a building is over-leveraged, said Levy, the landlord inevitably fails to maintain it. "The landlords have these outrageous mortgage payments," she said. "And they either have two choices: they can pay the mortgage, or they can fix the building."

Every single building holding the 2,738 endangered or foreclosed units saw a dramatic increase in violations, going from a handful to over 200 in less than a year. For Guzman and many others, this meant no heat and no hot water last winter. (He told us he took a cold shower this morning because the boiler broke down — again.)

Well, maybe you had to be there.

"This city could very easily be taken back in a very different direction," he continued. What direction is this, exactly? "It could very easily be taken back to the way it was with the wrong political leadership." Hmm! He must not mean taken back to the way it was when he was mayor. So maybe he means the way it was under the guy before him? What does that guy, David Dinkins, have in common with Bloomberg challenger Bill Thompson, exactly? Oh, right, they are Democrats.

When Bloomberg was asked if he agreed with Giuliani's statements, on how the blacks are going to take over the city and mug all the Jews to death forever, Bloomberg said he was worried that New York could become Detroit.

As usual, Bloomberg means real New York, not the bits that are basically already as bad off as Detroit.

[Photo: AP]

It is a shitty decision, frankly. Misdemeanor reckless assault means it was unintentional, but if the judge didn't see any intent, why did he issue an "order of protection" keeping Monserrate away from his girlfriend until the sentencing? According to a New York criminal law blog, if the judge had found Monserrate guilty of intentional misdemeanor assault, the fact that he used a "dangerous instrument" would've made it an automatic felony, which would've forced his removal from the State Senate, once again throwing Albany into chaos.

But whatever! What's slashed and dragged to a hospital is done! What is next for ol' Hiram?

Albany Democrats were, perversely, praying for a felony conviction, if you believe the anonymous quotes in the Daily News. This would've saved them the trouble of having to oust Hiram themselves.

"I was praying that [expletive deleted] would get convicted and he would be gone," one furious Democratic senator said.
[...]
"A lot of people want to oust him," a Senate Democrat said. "As the days go by, I think most people will (agree) that we should get rid of the guy. This is not a guy who most of his colleagues want to see back."

But!

Fearful of losing their slim majority in the Senate, Democratic leaders were vague about the what kind of "disciplinary action" Monserrate might face.

Hah. Yes, and when the pol in question is happy to switch party allegiances whenever it suits him (making Republican calls for ouster equally amusing), and when that switch has the potential to give the other party the Senate majority, your disciplinary options are limited, especially if you're a bunch of scum-sucking political cowards and hacks. Which they are.

At last night's mayoral debate (sigh), Bloomberg announced that he thinks Rudy would be a "good governor." That right there should disqualify Bloomberg from holding any elected office, that he'd just straight-up lie like that. He knows full well that Rudy is a corrupt, race-baiting little would-be tyrant who'd make Spitzer's tantrums look like shrewd political deal-making.

From when Rudy attempted to run for a then-illegal third term through when Bloomberg bitched about the deficits he inherited to when Rudy got pissed at Bloomberg for dipping his toes in the 2008 presidential race, theirs has been a friendship for the ages. We are thrilled to see it still so strong.

At the end of the press briefing today, Robert Gibbs said this:

"The president is the leader of the Democratic Party and as that would support the Democratic nominee," Gibbs said in response to a question from DN reporter Kenneth Bazinet.

"The president obviously has had a chance to, throughout campaigning and his time both as a candidate and as president, to meet, know and work with Mayor Bloomberg and obviously has a tremendous amount of respect for what he's done as well," Gibbs hastened to add.

Hah. "The Democratic nominee." That's Bill Thompson, though you wouldn't know it from Gibbs' statement.

Bloomberg might be the single most self-impressed person in New York, which is frankly a stunning feat. But he happens to think that his career making a lot of money and then semi-competently steering New York during an economic boom makes him basically more qualified to be President than anyone else. He still lives in that bubble where "management" skills are proof of political acumen and not evidence that you're just a dick. And "management" contempt for underlings generally goes unpunished if you're profitable.

Bloomberg didn't like Barack Obama. He never endorsed Barack Obama. Even after making a big deal of meeting with him, he offered only perfunctory compliments. But, you know, if they back a loser, they'll look weak!

This particular incident is imbued with racial overtones and, as such, is likely to be something of a YouTube sensation. According to a translation posted on YouTube, the Chinese woman said the fight started when she asked to sit next to the other woman, who is African American, and was rebuffed. "She has no heart, always bullying chinese people," the woman reportedly says. YouTube commenters are discussing the matter in their typical nuanced, racially sensitive manner (i.e. being flaming bigots, repeatedly).

The racial angle aside, the incident is yet another example of how you really can't freak out on mass transit or on the streets or in airports any more:

• Have a tantrum because you missed your flight? You may well be remembered as the Cathay Pacific airport lady, for the rest of your whiny life.
  
• Flash your dick on the subway? There's an app for taking a picture of that.
  
• Shove a guy off his bicycle, while he's in motion? Someone will film it, and you'll have to pay.

"How would you like to use your mobile device to see a map of available parking spaces in your neighborhood," Mayor Bloomberg asks in a Daily News op-ed, "and also use it to pay your meter?" That would be amazing, if we had a car. (Though we don't think people should be using their "mobile devices" while driving around our neighborhoods maybe?)

Then Bloomberg promises to get rid of the dreaded alternate-side parking in the nicer Brooklyn neighborhoods, and announces that "soon, we'll begin a pilot program in the Riverdale section of the Bronx."

Oh, good. A pilot cell-phone parking meter project will begin soon, in the Bronx.

Man, that reminds us, what were we just reading about the Bronx again? Oh, right, it remains America's poorest urban county with more than a quarter of the population living below the poverty line. And that is not counting the homeless!

"Last year, according to the Coalition for the Homeless, there were more than 110,000 people who spent at least one night in a shelter," said Joel Berg of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger.

The report also found 26 percent of Hispanics are at poverty level — the highest of any ethnic group in the city. The Bronx and Queens are the only boroughs that saw the overall number of poor go up between 2007 and 2008. The Bronx came in with nearly 22,000 people.

"One of the reasons that is, is poor people are being pushed out of places like Manhattan and forced to relocate to the Bronx," Berg said.

Well, hopefully the 2009 numbers will show the effects of Mayor Bloomberg's ambitious, poverty-fighting "mobile device parking meter pilot program."

Gaspard, who is besties with Cuomo, had a little meeting with Paterson last week. Paterson apparently neglected to decide on the spot to hand the the governor's mansion over to a legacy admission, and so, a week later, the White House arranged a front-page New York Times story on how the White House did not support this stupid incompetent unpopular Democratic governor of New York (half of whose staff is currently made up of Hillary Clinton vets).

And that was stupid. Because this is not Chicago and people do not take kindly to Rahm Emanuel muscling in on local matters. And Paterson would have to be an incredibly weak-willed and self-loathing politician to decide to step aside now. It's incredible to imagine that no one in the White House foresaw the Times gambit making the Governor dig in, but that appears to be what happened. And there is precedent:

Lloyd Grove, who's been around, remembers when Rahm tried this exact same tactic with a conservative Democratic senator in 1993. That little Senator grew up to be Richard Shelby, still a senator from Alabama, but now a Republican. (This tone-deaf approach to political hardball also suggests that Rahm is much better at whipping up support in the House than in the incredibly self-important and thin-skinned Senate.)

To be fair, everyone is out to get Paterson. He is not really that great at governing, but this state is currently ungovernable, as the dearly departed Eliot Spitzer could also attest to. And the mess in this state is actually the fault of Malcolm Smith, Pedro Espada, Dean Seklos, Ruben Diaz, and lady-slasher Hiram Monserrate. Everyone would like David to politely step aside but he is kind of justifiably angry at everyone in the world for treating him like shit and blaming him for all sorts of things that are not so much his fault, and as long as people continue yelling at him and calling him names he will continue to pretend that he is going to run for governor.

Also who wants to be told to step aside for Chris Andrew Cuomo? (Whatever they are ALL terrible.) Ugh!

One thing Karl Rove and his Bush Administration were really good at was meddling in local politics. Until his power evaporated in 2006, Karl basically ran various local Republican parties across the entire nation, telling them who to run for what offices and doing everything in his power to strengthen that permanent Republican majority that has guided us through these troubled times.

Rahm Emanuel, theoretically, should be playing this same part in the Obama administration. But if he is, he is not doing it so well! Like with poor Jon Corzine (who might pull this one out still!) and now with this Paterson mess. Obviously the White House doesn't think Paterson will win reelection, and they would prefer a Democrat to be the Governor of New York, but this is not how you handle this situation.

Fred Dicker thinks they panicked because Obama does not want to face Giuliani in 2012,? Or they think that Giuliani on the ballot in 2010 will be energize New York Republicans and then they will all vote against various Democratic congressmen or something. But that is ridiculous. Giuliani is unelectable. (He was polling double digits behind McCain in the 2008 New York Republican primary!) If Rudy ran against Paterson the embattled governor would suddenly be the most popular man in the state.

Hah, maybe Hillary does want to be governor?