Here’s a figure for you all — Bloomberg probably spent $100 million to win a third term with about 550,000 votes (about 200,000 fewer than he received in 2005). That’s somewhere around $180 a vote. There’s your mandate.

The Bloomberg victory speech was horrifying in several ways, not least of which being that the mayor conflated his “squeaker” with talk of a Yankees ticker tape parade. Talk about wishing bad luck on oneself:

Thank you. Gracias. What a week this is turning out to be. Tonight, a hard-fought victory in a very difficult year, and — who knows? — maybe in a few days, the biggest victory parade that Broadway has ever seen.

Thank you, Jimmy Fallon, that was maybe the nicest thing a Red Sox fan ever said about a Yankees fan, and I appreciate it.

. . .

Will the Yankees win Game 6? You better believe it.

The problem here of course being that Jimmy Fallon only became a Red Sox fan after running around like an idiot for that one movie, and his true allegiance is basically disputed. No matter — baseball, like politics, is full of bandwagoning idiots.

But Jimmy Fallon aside, the mayor really needs to purge Howard Wolfson from his mental space (I need to purge Howard Wolfson from my mental space) — the spin of this being “a very difficult year,” which Wolfson also tried using last night, is especially specious. The mayor’s narrow victory wasn’t because the economy sucks, it was because he overturned the will of the voters without a referendum and poured $100 million into a campaign. Be upfront about this. Quit bullshitting. The election is over.

Speaking of the narrow victory, I also think the media is to blame for making this out to be a landslide from day one:

Still, the margin seemed to startle Mr. Bloomberg’s aides and the city’s political establishment, which had predicted a blowout. Published polls in the days leading up to the election suggested that the mayor would win by as many as 18 percentage points; four years ago, he cruised to re-election with a 20 percent margin.

How no outlet could have honestly reported the closeness of the race in the weeks leading up to it seems particularly egregious. Here’s one example of bullshit spin from October 30:

The Thompson campaign keeps insisting that momentum is on their side in the closing days of the mayoral campaign. But a poll released Friday by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion suggests otherwise.

The survey, like other recent polls, shows Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg with a commanding double-digit lead over his Democratic opponent, William C. Thompson Jr., the city comptroller.

. . .

On Thursday afternoon, the Thompson campaign released the results of an internal poll that portrayed the race as much closer, with Mr. Bloomberg leading Mr. Thompson by just 8 percentage points. But internal polls are notoriously suspect.

In a news release on Friday, Howard Wolfson, a Bloomberg campaign spokesman, dismissed Mr. Thompson’s poll, saying that it “gives new meaning to the term margin of error” and that every other reliable public poll done over the past month confirms Mr. Bloomberg’s comfortable lead.

There are so, so many other examples that it’s hard to pick just one. But a prime example of conventional wisdom appeared in the election day Times op-ed from Joyce Purnick. Purnick is someone who is very up on Bloomberg’s machinations, having just written a book about the mayor, and her tone — like the tone of nearly every piece written about the election — was that the result was always a foregone conclusion:

Memo to the 108th mayor of New York, Michael R. Bloomberg: You didn’t have to do it. You didn’t need to set a new national campaign spending record. You didn’t have to become a one-man stimulus program, employing costly campaign consultants, ad producers and all those “volunteers.” You didn’t need that barrage of television ads, those wasteful glossy mailings or maddening robocalls.

None of it. You are the incumbent. You are in and destined to stay in after today’s mayoral election because — unless unduly provoked — New York voters don’t reject their incumbent. They’re pragmatic, even complacent, when their city is not in anguish. You could have spent more on your philanthropy and less on yourself and still be leading your Democratic competitor, City Comptroller William C. Thompson Jr., in the polls.

Even columnists unfriendly to Bloomberg bought into the inevitability — again, pick any, but here are two I remember: Patrice O’Shaughnessy in the Daily News and Clyde Haberman, who while continuing to go after the ridiculousness of the Bloomberg machine, did it in a way that telegraphed a depressing inevitability.

All of which brings me back to the Phillies’ Game 4 meltdown in the ninth inning, after the team tied the Yankees in the eighth, and Brad Lidge self-destructed, giving up three runs and ensuring that Rivera would close out the win; yes, the game was only tied, but the momentum was there for Philadelphia. The series was so close to being evened at two games a piece, and was especially painful for Phillies fans to watch. So was this election. Thompson lost by about 50,000 votes with somewhere around 1.1 million cast. What if things went a little differently?

What if, for example, Cory Booker wasn’t bought off by Bloomberg? What if Obama hadn’t been such a pussy? (And all that Corzine support got him exactly nothing in the end.) And most importantly, what if the media had been a little less incurious about polls and not actively worked to dissuade voters from actually participating? It’s true that this would have cut both ways — I’m sure many voters supportive of Bloomberg were apathetic about voting in a landslide — but the inevitability of a Bloomberg reelection was overpowering to watch day after day, and had to have had an impact.

Going back to that disgusting Times article about the campaign that they only published last night hammers home two big points:

Mr. Tusk, extremely self-confident and forceful, talked about “taking the oxygen out of the room”: hiring so many staff members, rolling out so many endorsements, and tossing up so many television ads that opposition seemed futile.

A sky-is-the-limit ethos, unfettered by spending limits, infused the effort. Mr. Tusk told his outreach coordinator for Asian voters, Oliver Tan, to find him a Bollywood star to endorse the mayor. After weeks of transcontinental phone calls, he did.

“It was selling inevitability,” a campaign adviser said.

Selling inevitability — and everyone — everyone! — bought it. Maybe we need to look at ourselves a little bit, too. The other part, the oxygen sucking, is well illustrated with the Cory Booker quid pro quo. Thompson just couldn’t get a break with any free airtime of the kind that Bloomberg got over and over again. It wasn’t so much the endorsement that Cory Booker gave Bloomberg as it perhaps was Booker actually shepherding the mayor around to black churches in Queens on the Sunday before the election — that of course became a big story for Bloomberg. If Booker had simply sat this out — and not crossed party lines to endorse a Republican — this story doesn’t exist, and oxygen remains intact. But Booker going as far as actually campaigning in Southeast Queens with the mayor was just one of many non money-related examples of Thompson’s huge, huge disadvantage over the course of this race.

The whole experience — from the furtive talk about running for president through to the City Council overturning term limits to the obscene spending and consolidation of power during the campaign — was profoundly discouraging. But you know what really got my goat? That insipid fucking new Black Eyed Peas song “I Gotta Feeling,” which was played before Bloomberg came out to speak; it’s lazy songwriting, tailor made for opening montages of televised sports events and, now we know, campaign appearances.

The other day I bemoaned the deleterious effects of this campaign on younger people. On our way out of the polling place last night, a cheerful high school student handed us one of the glossy pieces of Bloomberg campaign literature that this morning are littering the sidewalks of our neighborhood. The student insisted she wasn’t getting paid, though she did admit that a pizza party (Bloomberg spent thousands on pizza this campaign) was in the cards. I’m sure she was also angling for a letter of recommendation of some sort as well because, ultimately, everyone is in it for something. And that’s the real legacy of this dispiriting campaign.

See also: Bloomberg For Mayor 2009.

If you’re interested, Wayne Barrett takes a close, sober look at Bloomberg’s tenure, including his agency appointees, mayoral control of the schools, public employee pensions (and massive layoffs after November 3), illegal guns, public health and stadium financing (thankfully, the mayor’s glory-hogging, grandstanding, questionably effective environmental record seems to be missing):

When I was in high school, and John Kennedy and Richard Nixon were squaring off, my father helped me craft a list of the qualities and issues we should use to judge the two candidates, a score card so logical that it did not take into account the heart or the gut. I wound up the only kid in my class, at a small Catholic high school in Virginia, willing to champion Nixon in a debate.

There is only so far that a checklist of pluses and minuses can carry you, though this one is not as detached as the one I concocted in 1960. I won’t let my emotions rule, either, however. I believe that the self-serving reversal of term limits was the greatest abuse of power I have covered in more than three decades on this beat. But elections are choices between names on the ballot — not opportunities to file a protest.

You can view elections in a sober manner like this or you can, like me, be content to simply file a protest.

Robert Sietsema* asks:

NY1 reports this morning that 18-20 sanitation, anti-graffiti, and steam-cleaning trucks recently descended on Inwood in preparation for a campagin appearance by Mayor Bloomberg scheduled for that afternoon.

. . .

Don’t such over-the-top cleaning efforts, in neighborhoods normally neglected and left filthy by the Sanitation Department, for the sole purpose of creating a pristine stage for the mayor’s campaign appearances, constitute an expropriation of city resources for the mayor’s own uses?

*Didn’t realize he was blogging this kind of stuff in addition to food-related items.

The three most important things about the 2009 mayoral election are term limits, term limits, term limits:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s re-election campaign can generate reams of statistics on how quickly the city repaired potholes in each neighborhood. It can produce memos on climate change and public health, and even translate fliers into Creole.

Just don’t ask about term limits.

Rosemary DeStefano found that out on her doorstep in the Bronx the other day when a Bloomberg volunteer showed up, asking for her vote.

When she complained about how the mayor had the law changed to stay in office, the volunteer recited details of his economic plan. When she persisted, he extolled Mr. Bloomberg’s promise to create 400,000 jobs.

“They missed the whole point,” she said.

. . .

Those involved in the mayor’s campaign said the issue has unexpected staying power, a year after City Hall introduced the legislation allowing officials to serve three consecutive terms, not two.

“It comes up a lot with voters,” said one campaign staff member. In the fall of 2008, when Mr. Bloomberg and his aides fought to change the rule, they made two predictions: that voters would be distracted by the presidential election, and that any anger over the move would recede by Election Day 2009.

They may have been overoptimistic, pollsters and analysts said.

“The anger in the electorate remains an inconvenient truth for the Bloomberg campaign,” said Bruce N. Gyory, a political consultant.

Note that they wouldn’t need to sit down with merchants and “retrain” their agents if City Hall wasn’t trying to balance the budget on dubious double-parking tickets:

“New instructions have been given to our traffic agents. The way we issue summonses will be different and we ask our agents to be patient,” said Frank Sepulveda, the NYPD’s director of traffic enforcement for the city. “By the end of this month all our agents should have the new training. We will look at how we can handle difficult summons situations differently.”

. . .

On problems, businessman Dan Texeira led the complaint barrage. “I stopped my car to let off my son. Just then a traffic agent cut off in front of my car and gave me a ticket.

“That wasn’t right,” said Sepulveda.

First, set aside the inconvenient facts that owning a dog in a cramped city apartment is inherently cruel and that installing dog runs (i.e., red-light districts for dog defecation) constitutes a ludicrously generous surrender of precious public space. The big problem is that a vocal minority of dog owners are pushing public debate in favor of pets over humans, and we must give huge credit to the state parks department (and not the permissive city parks department, which was infiltrated by dog apologists when the agency’s animal policies were gutted) for putting an end to dog dominance; they are absolutely doing the right thing, and they absolutely deserve our support:

A grassy knoll is the latest territory causing friction between the state Parks Department and Long Island City dog owners after the agency barred canines from the area in Gantry Plaza State Park. Dogs were also banned from the old piers when the rest of the new, six-acre grass area opened up in July.

Rachel Gordon, a state Parks regional director, said the manager of Gantry Plaza saw the grass at the “knoll,” a small strip of grass with a picnic table next to an athletic field, had been turned brown by the effects of dogs relieving themselves there. The ban went into effect last week.

Dog owners can still walk their dogs on the cement areas or in the community garden.

But dog owners in the Queens West towers have not taken the situation lying down. After they said parks [employees] shooed them off the wooden piers in July, they formed DOG LIC to push for more pooch-friendly facilities in the rapidly evolving neighborhood.

. . .

There are three dog runs in the Hunters Point area of Long Island City: one near the now-defunct Tennisport on the site of what will become the Hunters Point South Development; one on Vernon Boulevard between 48th and 49th avenues; and one on 31st Street [actually, 21st Street].

The bottom line is that dog owners will let their animals shit on the grass you sit on, even if there is a dog run directly across the street — because dog owners don’t use the grass except to tear it up around a turd. Additionally, they think nothing of destroying trees, completely ignoring what “curbing your dog” actually means*. Instead of agitating for more permissive policies, they should really be teaching their fellow owners how to be less inconsiderate. As for the rest of us, we shouldn’t give up and we shouldn’t give in — these people’s animals are disgusting and we don’t deserve to have them in our faces . . .

*And even that is a generous allowance — walk through any dog-friendly neighborhood on a hot summer day and the tell-tale scent of dog urine wafts through the streets . . . the smell is horrible, like a pungent chicken broth, and it makes our streets way more pedestrian unfriendly than most other quality-of-life obstacles that the city spends time worrying about.

Location Scout: Gantry Plaza State Park.

A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips*:

As a billionaire in one of the dining capitals of the world, he can eat anything he wants. But he is obsessed with his weight — so much so that the sight of an unflattering photo of himself can trigger weeks of intense dieting and crankiness, according to friends and aides.

His food issues have become New York City’s. Although he has described his battle against unhealthy foods as common-sense public policy that will shed pounds (and save lives), many of his targets overlap with his own cravings.

“I like a Big Mac like everybody else,” he confessed the other day, explaining the city’s warts-and-all approach to fast food. “I just want to know how many calories are in it.”

Under his watch, the city has declared sodium an enemy, asking restaurants and food manufacturers to voluntarily cut the salt in their dishes by 20 percent or more, and encouraging diners to “shake the habit” by asking waiters for food without added salt.

But Mr. Bloomberg, 67, likes his popcorn so salty that it burns others’ lips. (At Gracie Mansion, the cooks deliver it to him with a salt shaker.) He sprinkles so much salt on his morning bagel “that it’s like a pretzel,” said the manager at Viand, a Greek diner near Mr. Bloomberg’s Upper East Side town house.

Not even pizza is spared a coat of sodium. When the mayor sat down to eat a slice at Denino’s Pizzeria Tavern on Staten Island recently, this reporter spotted him applying six dashes of salt to it.

And then there’s the concept of Asshole-In-Chief:

When he does not like the food, he rarely holds back. After dining at Blue Smoke, Mr. Meyer’s barbecue restaurant on East 27th Street, the mayor told Mr. Meyer, “I just don’t like it.”

Mr. Meyer tried inviting him back, but the mayor would not budge. “It never feels good when somebody tells you they don’t like your restaurant, but it’s nice when a politician does not pander,” he said, adding that the mayor has heaped praise on Union Square Cafe.

*In fact, Thompson should consider making this a slogan of sorts, e.g., you think it’s OK to suspend term limits just this once, but consider the deleterious long-term effects . . .

Buried in the story about the Parks Department ticketing “elderly” ladies for swimming after hours is this tidbit:

Mayor Bloomberg, at a recent sit-down with reporters and editors at this newspaper, denied that the tickets were part of a way to balance the city’s books, but did say some form of quota system is needed to make sure enforcement agents are doing their jobs.

Another possibility is that they’re just being more “efficient” by hanging out and waiting for every tiny infraction:

Merchants and drivers in Riverdale and Kingsbridge say an ongoing city ticket blitz is bad for business — but the NYPD denies that there’s a ticket blitz at all.

By the NYPD’s count, the numbers of parking tickets given out this year are down by a sizeable margin across the city and a considerable one in the Bronx, with 874,541 tickets issued so far, compared with 905,428 during the same period in 2008 — 122,055 of those in the Bronx compared with 136,926 during the same period last year.

How is it possible to reconcile what many people say they see on the streets with the police’s accounting? How do the numbers from the last two years match up with those over a longer period of time? A representative of the NYPD’s Deputy Commissioner, Public Information says the police no longer have data from 2007, so they say there’s no way of knowing.

Look, the guy has one of the shittiest jobs in city government, given the last couple of years, but you just can’t cut him any slack now, can you:

The New York city comptroller, William C. Thompson Jr., is staking his mayoral campaign on his skills as a financial manager, which he says are exemplified by his supervision of the nation’s largest municipal pension system.

But a review of how the $80 billion system has performed since he took office shows it has consistently lagged behind many of its public pension peers even as the city tripled the number of money managers it uses and the fees that it pays those firms.

Over the last seven years, four of the five city pension funds performed below the median for similar funds around the country. In fact, more than two-thirds of the nation’s large pension funds did better than the city’s largest fund, the New York City Employees’ Retirement System, the data shows.

You know, the ones precipitated by the DC37 contract? Through fare hikes, of course:

The acting head of the MTA said on Tuesday she can’t rule out a fare hike to pay for raises granted to bus and subway workers, which hiked their pay 11.3% over three years.

Irony alert: Bloomberg has the gall to grandstand about it.

Then there’s this tidbit, from the Post: “The MTA will have to raid $360 million from its federal stimulus dollars, the budget that funds mega-projects like the Second Avenue Subway, and from its reserves to fund fat raises for rank-and-file transit workers, angry officials said yesterday.”

Or even this, from the Times:

During contract talks, the agency dropped its demand for one-person train operation, instead of two, thinking that Transport Workers Union Local 100 would make health care concessions in return.

But an arbitration panel has found there had been “no evidence” of a quid pro quo — handing a victory to the workers, who had been seeking to limit their health care contributions.

Establishing one-person train operation has been a major goal of New York City Transit for more than a decade. Using one-person crews would save millions in labor costs, and the agency, which wanted to start the program on the No. 7 and L lines, has already invested in new compatible subway cars.

No comment necessary:

Mayor Bloomberg swore he wouldn’t run for a third term — and then he did. He recently promised he wouldn’t seek a fourth term, but Thursday wouldn’t rule that out either.

Asked if he’d be interested in making it 16 years at City Hall, Bloomberg responded, “The law does not permit it.”

. . .

Later Thursday, Bloomberg spokesman Stu Loeser pointed out that the mayor in June said he won’t seek a fourth term — “period.”

Notably, it was Loeser who, back in January 2008, insisted: “The mayor is absolutely not seeking a third term.”

Seems like help is on the way.

Until you request an area code 718 Queens number to put in the newspaper so Little League execs and coaches can call to volunteer.

Then a Parks spokesperson tells you to have them call 311, so that your request to help the department can be screened by the Big Brother of the Mayor’s Office and then ground through the bureaucracy while the outfield grass grows another 6 inches.

This is a runaround and not helpful.

Therein lies the problem.

The Queens Courier has endorsed Bloomberg for mayor. I wasn’t cranky today . . . until now:

The Queens Courier is proud to endorse Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg in his quest for a third term because he cares about our city, its people, its cultural institutions and our future.

Over the years, we have watched as Bloomberg rode the good times, but always with an eye to the next budget shortfall. His business acumen is invaluable to the city.

He is a builder and an innovator. The 3-1-1 system is a tremendous success. His NYC2030 Plan, which includes planting one million new trees, is turning our city green again.

He knew from day one that education was the key to the city’s future. Under Bloomberg’s Mayoral Control plan — and with the aid of Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein — the scores in math and reading have been going up steadily and the graduation rates are increasing.

Michael Bloomberg is his own man; he takes no money from lobbyists or special interest groups. No one has control or influence over his decisions — he makes them for the good of the people of Queens and the other boroughs.

A tough leader in a tough town, he has fought crime with a modern, well-equipped police force using leading-edge technology. Year after year, crime has decreased in the city, including a 17 percent drop just this past year.

Bloomberg knows that jobs and their creation are vital to keeping businesses in New York. He observes how resilient the private sector can be. Restaurants watched their patrons downgrade from steaks and a bottle of wine to burgers and beer and rebound to meatloaf and a glass of wine during the past few months.

It takes a leader, not a follower, to navigate the kind of economy that we will all have to live through for the next several years. Bloomberg is a true visionary who looks for the traps and pitfalls before we fall victim to them. He is already worrying about the 2011 budget as he keeps his eye on what Albany is doing too.

There is no other candidate currently running or contemplating a run for mayor that is as qualified and worthy of your votes in the coming Primaries and November elections. To cast your vote against Bloomberg and for someone else is simply throwing your vote, and maybe your future, away.

. . . including the dick who wouldn’t take us to the airport just the other day (if you’re truly “off duty,” turn on your fucking off-duty light and don’t pull up when we hail you*): I don’t believe you. I will never believe you. And when people like me believe a city regulatory agency over you, you’re in trouble. So quit complaining and take our credit cards already:

The average cabby works nine and a half hours a day. A cab’s busiest hours are 6 to 8 p.m. And even as the economy has fallen deeper into recession, the number of cab rides each day in New York has remained relatively steady.

Those are among the most vivid bits of information about the yellow cab industry to emerge from a trove of new data collected by the Taxi and Limousine Commission from cabs equipped with new computerized systems that record each trip and fare.

Among the more surprising findings is that credit cards may be saving the industry from feeling the worst effects of the recession.

“The credit card that we put in cabs has helped keep them afloat,” said Matthew Daus, the chairman of the Taxi and Limousine Commission.

By last November, every yellow cab in the city was equipped with a credit card reader — as a part of the new computerized system — and as a result, Mr. Daus said, many corporations that once ordered black cars for their employees have begun telling them instead to take a cab (which costs less) and charge it.

That has hurt the black car business, which was already reeling from the impact of the Wall Street crisis on its main customers, financial services firms. The black car business is down at least 30 percent, Mr. Daus said.

But the shift has helped yellow cabs and appears to have made up for lost business as tourism and air travel have slumped and the disposable income of ordinary New Yorkers has dwindled.

*And yes, I know the drill: Get in the cab before telling the driver where you want to go, but he caught me off guard as I was fumbling with the luggage (where did he think we were off to?)

Here’s something “shovel ready” that isn’t a gigantic waste of money. Let it die already.

The Daily News declares open season on the vestigial (“not much more than figureheads”) Office of the Borough President — all of them.

In addition to U.S. Senate aspirations, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer has two chauffeurs:

“It’s true that the office had changed,” he said. “There’s no Board of Estimate anymore. We came in and said we can do anything we want.”

So, Stringer said, he created a policy unit and hired experts to research problems and develop solutions in Manhattan.

He employs 57 people, the smallest staff among the borough presidents, and has an overall budget of $46 million. The bulk of that — $42 million — is capital funding he directs to city agencies for specific projects.

Stringer was planning to spend $1.5 million of those funds on interior renovations at his 1 Centre St. office, but scrapped the plan last fall “given the state of the economy,” spokesman Dick Riley said.

Stringer uses his $4 million operating budget to randomly distribute 200,000 newsletters in December and May each year. The newsletters prominently feature his photograph.

His office also bought two Kobra 400 shredders for $4,477.70 last June “to replace the malfunctioning ones that were in the office,” Riley said.

Riley said the shredders are used on “investment memos and confidential employee or constituent information as it becomes outdated.”

Stringer’s office pays two chauffeurs a combined salary of $115,000. Only Brooklyn has more.

Meanwhile, Marty “Fugheddaboudit” Markowitz has three chauffeurs:

Borough president Marty Markowitz is known for putting on a show, so maybe that’s why he spent $38,000 on a tricked-out SUV and pays three drivers to cart him around Brooklyn.

His brand-new $38,705 black Toyota Highlander Hybrid comes with four-wheel drive, a touchscreen navigational system, heated seats, a power tilt/slide moonroof, running boards and “VIP glass breakage sensors.”

It is one of nine taxpayer-funded vehicles in his office. The drivers all work full time and earn between $37,000 and $67,000 a year.

Staten Island Borough President James Molinaro dispenses with the chauffeurs and goes straight for the helicopter.

As a point of reference, the combined $450 million borough president slush fund* is larger than the 2008-09 City of Buffalo budget ($435 million).

*Yes, $42 million out of Scott Stringer’s $46 million goes towards capital projects like building parks — but what’s wrong with a legislative body deciding which parks to build? Why give one person the ability to raise his or her profile with major projects?

Piven — you Golden Globe-attending, Broadway-ditching, recession-widening slacker — you don’t deserve even a passing thought that the guy rescued from Flight 1549 bears even the slightest resemblance to you. So quit trying hog the limelight, you fraud:

Yes, one of the passengers on US Airways Flight 1549 bore a striking resemblance to Jeremy Piven — at least on some TV shots — but the “Entourage” actor was not on the plane.

Video footage of Piven’s doppelganger surfaced, spurring Internet rumors and calls to all the Golden Globe nominee’s own entourage.

“He’s totally fine,” the star’s rep confirmed. “He’s in New York, and he did ‘Good Morning America’.”

It cheapens our sense of righteous indignation to say “Yankee Stadium Burdens Mayor’s Campaign” like it’s just a case of political posturing when the larger story is that much more egregious:

On Tuesday, the comptroller said the city had made a bad deal, a complaint that the mayor’s office dismissed as “political posturing.”

Without a doubt, politics is part of the invisible cost benefit analysis of the Yankees and Mets stadium deals — not only for those who now criticize them, like the comptroller, William C. Thompson Jr., who approved them in 2006, but also for those few who champion them, like Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

Such political values may not turn up on any public balance sheet, but it would be unwise to ignore them simply because they are invisible.

Suppose you are Mr. Bloomberg, your hopes of becoming president or vice president all but vanished. You have to step down as mayor in 2009 because a law that you unequivocally supported says you only get two terms.

How handy, then, to have powerful allies, like the developer, Jerry I. Speyer and the lobbyist, Howard Rubenstein, to convince other influential people that term limits will deprive the city of an essential leader during an era of financial crisis.

Mr. Speyer is building Yankee Stadium. Mr. Rubenstein represents the Yankees. Their stated case for Mr. Bloomberg never rested on the mayor’s support for the stadium, but on his qualities as a manager and their view that he would be the most capable steward of the city during hard economic times.

Mr. Bloomberg not only abandoned his own emphatic support for term limits, but his own opposition to corporate welfare for professional sports. After canceling deals made by his predecessor, Mr. Bloomberg has gone on to subsidize the most expensive baseball stadiums in the country.

. . .

There is far more to building a stadium than simply its construction. To replace the 22 acres of parkland the city turned over to the Yankees, to build sewers and roads that will support the stadium, the city will spend $325 million — money that will be borrowed by the taxpayers, leaving that much less for other public projects.

With interest, that $325 million could come to $700 million, an aide to Mr. Thompson said. The city must also pay to tear down the old stadium, a cost now put at $27 million. It is contributing $39 million toward a new Metro North station. (The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is paying another $52 million.)

Both Mr. Bloomberg and his predecessor, Mr. Giuliani, even gave the Yankees and the Mets a $5 million annual rebate on rent the teams were paying to the city for their old stadiums — money that could have restored at least some music programs to public schools, but instead was turned back to the baseball teams for the explicit purpose of planning ballparks that the public is paying for.

. . .

The city is proud of the deal, officials say, because it will create “1,000 permanent new jobs.” If you scratch into the official filings, it turns out that there are actually only 22 new full-time jobs expected. The rest are seasonal positions — valuable, certainly, but only if they really exist.

Location Scout: New Yankee Stadium.

Actually I’d be quite happy with one grace period and see no reason to hassle you for more of them, as most sensible adults understand that grace periods don’t really work that way, but I guess if you’re used to nannying people you probably would think that the slippery slope applies here:

Mayor Blommberg slammed a proposed five-minute parking ticket grace period as a recipe for chaos.

“If you change the time, people would wait another five minutes and then ask for a grace period and pretty soon you’d have absolutely no ability to collect parking meter payments,” Bloomberg said.

“In an event that organizers hope will become a New Year’s tradition, New Yorkers and tourists were invited to bring bad memories from 2008 to Times Square on Sunday and feed them to an industrial-strength shredder”.

OK, here goes:

• Bugs on above-ground public transportation
• Our innovative economy
• The notion that members of law enforcement are somehow unable to keep foreign objects out of perps’ buttholes
• The strong traditions of representative democracy and a free press
• Probably cockfighting, too
• People in their 20s sexing one another
• The bully pulpit
• People who hurt animals
• Posing as a gynecologist
• The cult of trees
• Fucking bed bugs
• Yankees fans
• Pregnant women who smoke
• Shit that just drops right out of the sky
• Jeremy Piven

Location Scout: Times Square.

. . . this piece is for you*:

By the time the bus got to 125th Street at Lexington Avenue, frustration had hit fever pitch.

Passengers on the M60 bus who had already been forced to stand were pressed against the doors. Others, trapped by tall suitcases, could not get up from their seats. Two dozen people with yet more bags tried to board, but a wave of exiting riders, shouting loudly, pushed them right back off. The same scene was replayed at the next stop, Third Avenue.

“They pack us in like cattle,” said Clay Crawford, 40, who lives in Harlem and was commuting to his job as a security guard in Queens. “Who wants this?”

Flo Lyle, 60, an Upper West Side resident, nodded. “If there’s one line in the city calling out for more buses, it’s this one,” she said.

Or, given that the M60 is the only public-transit option directly from Manhattan to La Guardia Airport, at least increased service at travel-heavy times like Christmas, suggested other sardine-packed riders this week as the bus inched its way along 125th Street.

This time of year, the M60 quickly fills up with airline travelers — and their luggage, resulting in a testy mix of passengers and delays that makes the idea of getting home for the holidays a dicey proposition.

Vikaas Sharma, a Columbia University student who was trying to wiggle a blue suitcase out of the way, boarded the M60 at 2 p.m. on Tuesday to catch a 3:45 p.m. flight on his way to San Francisco, where he grew up. But the bus did not arrive at La Guardia until 4 p.m., so he missed the flight, which turned out to be the last one available until Christmas Day — leading to the first Christmas Eve of his 20 years that he spent without his family.

*Grrr.

The good news is he’s no longer the super. The bad news is he’s still your neighbor:

Richard Martin was his usual ornery self Tuesday when he told the Daily News his new landlord is just canning him — not evicting him.

“I can stay in my home, but I’ve lost my super job,” Martin said. “That means I’m out $150 a month. $150 a month! So yeah, I’m upset.”

. . .

“Have you seen the garbage out front of the building?” he said with a laugh.

“The doorway is a mess. There are big black garbage bags just sitting on top of the cans. He hasn’t done a damn thing since he became super.

“The new super — he’s a little Mexican man — hasn’t even swept the building yet. Not once. The last time it was swept was Nov. 23, and I should know because it was me who swept it.

“I told the new super that I’m giving him two months before he loses his mind and goes crazy over the sloppy tenants,” he said.

One tenant, who refused to give his name because he’s afraid of Martin, said he’s glad about the changing of the guard.

. . .

“Why would I miss Richard Martin …. He was the crankiest super in Brooklyn. Now he has been downgraded to the crankiest neighbor in Brooklyn.”

So given the history, I guess this means what I think it means:

Proposals being considered by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority could raise the base subway and bus fare as high as $3, the 30-day MetroCard to $105 and bridge and tunnel tolls to $7 next year.

Who knew a picture of a tunnel was could be so enraging, in that where-the-fuck-is-all-this-money-coming-from kind of way:

Construction, it seems, is indeed under way for the extension of the No. 7 line, the cornerstone of the Bloomberg administration’s planned development of the far West Side.

The MTA’s capital construction page shows an update for November with pictures from below, where the agency is hollowing out the cavern for the station and making way for the eventual launch of a tunnel-boring machine, which will slowly dig its way along the 1.5-mile route.

The project, budgeted at $2.1 billion, would extend the line from Times Square to the base of the Javits Center on 34th Street, adjacent to the West Side rail yards. The Bloomberg administration has been the driving force behind the extension, which it says will help spawn tens of millions of square feet of West Side development.

The cash-strapped MTA had no desire to pay for the project, so the city is footing the entire bill, up to the $2.1 billion. Should costs exceed the budget (which many onlookers assume they will, given rising costs everywhere), the city and the MTA have yet to negotiate an agreement on who would cover them.

(Given the lack of real funding sources for the MTA’s next five-year capital plan and the $1.2 billion deficit in its operating budget, it’s safe to assume the agency isn’t eager to pony up any cash for a project the Bloomberg administration pledged would be paid for entirely by the city.)

On the other hand, waiting a half-hour in the middle of the night sucks rat tail:

The MTA’s doomsday budget will wipe out the W line, zap the Z line and ax more than 1,500 NYC Transit jobs, the Daily News has learned.

The list of bus and subway cuts the Metropolitan Transportation Authority will unveil at its monthly board meeting Thursday is extensive and potentially bruising, sources said.

. . .

According to sources, the cuts include:

- Elimination of at least a handful of bus and subway routes, including the W and Z subway train lines.

- Fewer transit workers in the subways because 600 or so station agent positions will be axed and about 350 administrative posts.

- Longer gaps between scheduled trains at midday and between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m.

- Expanded subway loading guidelines to allow for more crowding of trains.

- Eliminating bus service during late nights and weekends on dozens of routes that have low ridership.

I’m still pissed about that asinine public relations stunt back in ‘05 . . . give me my ten minutes back!

How many times have you heard this recently? More than you think you wouuld, given the city’s modern, you know, world-class image:

Names of registered voters mysteriously vanished from the books.

And even given the circumstances, apparently the other day wasn’t any busier than normal . . .

Note to Elections Board: I’m still pissed about that cheesy provisional ballot I had to use back in ‘06!

Will the Department of Sanitation start picking up my trash if I put it in brown paper bags? Because those plastic ones come in handy, you know:

Call it a mixed bag.

Mayor Bloomberg has proposed slapping shoppers with a 5-cent surcharge for each plastic bag they get at stores — a move that left consumers sharply divided yesterday.

“Ugh, they’re going to start taxing everything now,” moaned Dora Capers, 47, of Brooklyn.

In a move intended to help the environment and the Big Apple as it faces a $4 billion deficit over the next two years, Bloomberg has recommended that the city impose a nickel surcharge for plastic bags.

Although the details of the plan are still being worked out, the surcharge could rake in upwards of $16 million — money that the Sanitation Department could use to offset the cost of collecting and disposing of plastic bags currently not recycled.

The plan — which may need approval from the state Legislature if it’s determined to be a tax — may include charging shoppers 6 cents, with a penny going to stores as incentive for collecting the new tax.

*Which is to say, you can push through a lot of unpopular ideas under the guise of finanical hardship.

So not only did the Yankees use their planning money to lobby the city but they went ahead and deducted more than allowed from that $5 million credit so that now the city has to go after the team for what is, in effect, “back rent”:

The Yankees have agreed to fork over $11 million to the city in back rent — money the team probably would have preferred to spend on an ace starting pitcher for next season.

The team underpaid the city the equivalent of Mike Mussina’s salary between 2003 and 2006, according to an audit by City Comptroller William Thompson.

Under the team’s rental agreement, the Yankees pay the city a percentage of all revenue from tickets, parking and cable television, officials said.

During that three-year period, the team took in more than $1 billion and paid the city $17 million.

But according to the audit, the Yankees improperly deducted costs above and beyond the $5 million permitted for planning for the new stadium.

More than $9 million was improperly deducted for stadium planning in 2006.

The team also low-balled its gross revenue during the three years, costing the city another $2 million, the audit states.

Is that “well oiled” as in “snake” or “well oiled” as in “grease the system”? Either way, a Freudian slip:

At times, he slouched in his chair, crossing his arms, then uncrossing them. His eyes darted around the room, sometimes settling on the clock. He fidgeted.

The body language was not difficult to read: Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was uncomfortable.

“To hell with your agenda,” thundered David Tieu, a 21-year-old deliveryman from Brooklyn, as the mayor sat about 15 feet away, staring at him.

Patrice Senior, a nurse from Brooklyn, accused Mr. Bloomberg of “plantation politics.” And Patti Hagan, a writer, assailed his “strong-armed knuckle-busting” tactics.

Custom at City Hall has long allowed anyone to appear at a bill signing and offer an opinion on the legislation being enacted. Most such ceremonies are sleepy affairs that attract a handful of political gadflies.

But on Monday, this tidy ritual was turned on its head. For four uninterrupted hours, scores of New Yorkers walked up to a microphone, looked at Mr. Bloomberg and rendered a blunt verdict on the legislation that would allow him to seek a third term.

It was a singular moment in the Bloomberg era of government. For much of his tenure, the mayor has been showered with accolades and surrounded by friendly crowds that have treated him like a head of state.

But during the bill signing, a man unaccustomed to direct, public criticism endured a heavy — and very harsh — dose of it from those he governs.

Dozens of speakers accused the mayor of arrogantly disregarding the will of New York voters, who overwhelmingly endorsed the current eight-year term limits in two referendums in the 1990s.

There were many voices of support, too — from average New Yorkers, elected officials and union heads — and Mr. Bloomberg appeared relieved when they spoke of his proven leadership and financial résumé.

“You have everything well oiled, and I would like you to sign this so the people of New York City have a choice to keep you in office,” said Jill Whitaker, a personal assistant in Manhattan.

. . .

When the testimony was over, around 2 p.m., it was Mr. Bloomberg’s turn to speak. Still sitting behind the table, with the room half empty, he said that “I thought long and hard” about the issue. After long opposing any attempt to tweak term limits — he once called the idea “disgraceful” — the mayor said he had decided to reverse himself.

“You know that I have, over a period of time, fundamentally changed my opinion in terms of how long somebody could be in office,” Mr. Bloomberg said.

“Nobody is irreplaceable,” he said. “But I do think that if you take a look at the real world, at how long it takes to do things,” he added, and finished the thought, “I do think that three terms makes more sense than two.”

With that, the left-handed Mr. Bloomberg picked up a black and gold pen and, with a flick of his wrist, rewrote New York City’s term limits law.