Thank goodness a more accurate label has emerged:

Five weeks into a federal probe of City Council slush funds, Mayor Bloomberg revealed yesterday that he kept his own secret taxpayer-funded cash stash — and used it to reward favored lawmakers.

The mayor’s $4.5 million slush fund had never before been made public — and some council members said they weren’t even aware of it.

After being doled out to selected lawmakers, the money was passed along to dozens of nonprofit groups supported by legislators — including at least one with a checkered history.

The largest chunk, $1.9 million, went to Councilman Simcha Felder (D-Brooklyn), one of the mayor’s most ardent supporters.

Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, who has publicly praised Bloomberg as the greatest mayor in city history, received $900,000 to help fund two popular concert series.

Poor Christine Quinn . . .

More on those discretionary funds:

City Council members running for citywide office are allocating “member item” money to organizations miles away from their council districts, a New York Sun analysis has found.

The disclosure is reinforcing concerns that the taxpayer funds are being used to buy political support. It is also undercutting one of the most commonly made defenses of member items in the city’s budget, which is that no one knows a district’s needs better than the local representative.

The disclosure that council members are attaching their names to money sent to organizations miles from their constituents’ homes, in boroughs they don’t represent, is the latest angle in the “slush fund” scandal that began with the news that the City Council was budgeting money for made-up, nonexistent organizations as a way of stashing funds away to be allocated at the discretion of individual council members. After federal indictments of council aides, all four metropolitan daily newspapers in the city have come out with editorials calling for abolishing the grants of taxpayer funds at the sole discretion of individual council members.

The out-of-district grants are raising concern from council members and advocacy groups, who say it’s another sign that the member item system needs to be overhauled or ended completely.

“Why would you give your small discretionary funds to groups outside your district unless you are trying to curry favor for future elections or political purposes?” a council member of Queens who is running for mayor, Tony Avella, said. “It’s not like we get enough money as it is.”

See also: “Longtime Practice of City Council Financing Lands on Speaker’s Shoulders” (NYT, May 11, 2008).

Mayor Bloomberg is a man who loves all kinds of gadgets. So disturbing hobby time is a risky proposition, done at your own peril:

A defeat of congestion pricing in the Assembly may irrevocably rupture the relationship between Speaker Sheldon Silver and Mayor Bloomberg and provoke an open conflict between the two city leaders.

Mr. Bloomberg, who has said repeatedly that he supports politicians who back his policies, might be tempted to do the opposite if his plan to charge motorists a fee to drive into the busy parts of Manhattan collapses in the Assembly, on which Mr. Silver wields tremendous influence.

“The danger could be that it does get personalized,” a former top aide to Mr. Bloomberg, William Cunningham, said. “Could there be a time when the mayor gets fed up with the games? Yes, I suppose so. He’s human.”

The mayor may use his political influence and fortune against Mr. Silver, political insiders say. This year, Mr. Silver, 64, is expected to face at least two Democratic primary opponents in September. Mr. Bloomberg could go as far as to endorse and provide financial support for one of the challengers.

Is it horse trading or something worse? Some council members aren’t sure:

The City Council may have approved congestion pricing Monday, but Council foes were still fighting Mayor Bloom­berg’s traffic fee yesterday, hoping their complaints will be heard in Albany.

The 30-20 vote, they said, was actually a squeaker, sending a message of division to the state Legislature, which must now pass the plan by April 7. To hear them tell it, the days leading up to the vote were filled with arm-twisting and backroom deals.

Last Friday, Brooklyn Council member Lewis Fidler believed the plan couldn’t pass — he counted 29 votes against it.

Horse-trading is expected, he said.

“The ‘we’ll do a project in your district,’ that’s politics,” Fidler said. “But without these deals, there were not 26 votes in favor of this plan. Albany understands that, too.”

Fidler claimed Bloom­berg had offered to hold a fund-raiser for one Council member in exchange for switching sides.

“If other people did that, the U.S. attorney would be called,” he said. “I’m not suggesting it’s criminal, but it’s hypocrisy that can’t be waved off with a Bloomberg-esque wave of the hand.”

. . .

“This isn’t going away,” insisted Queens Council member Tony Avella, another opponent of congestion pricing. “The use of taxpayer dollars to lobby Council members is clearly inappropriate.”

Avella vowed to file Freedom of Information requests for phone records, e-mails and other correspondence from Bloomberg’s office and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who backed the mayor’s plan. “It’s bad government,” he said.

John Catsimatidis — Gristede’s founder and maybe mayoral candidate in the Goldman Sachs mold (e.g., Corzine, Bloomberg or any one of a number of wealthy individuals deigning to lead an unruly electorate*) — has a vision for New York City’s future:

“I have a vision for New York,” Catsimatidis said. “I’ll tell you one of the things I’ve been proposing is the 2014 World’s Fair.” (In 2003, he floated the idea of the 2007 World’s Fair.) “When Mayor Bloomberg asked me, ‘John, where would you have it?,’ I said, ‘Your Honor, we’d take a blighted area of the city, and we’d put in permanent infrastructure, so there’s something left over afterward.’ And his eyes lit up! But that’s the way a businessman thinks.” Catsimatidis, who grew up in Harlem, recalled his experiences at the 1964 World’s Fair, in Queens, visiting the Belgian pavilion. (”You know there was no such thing as a Belgian waffle before that?”)

Ugh . . . what is it with these guys and fairs, olympics, etc.?

*As opposed to the Cory Booker type of Teach For America candidate (David Brooks, take it away . . .).

Oh no. It may actually come to pass now that Spitzer finds himself on the wrong side of a press conference about a prostitution ring:

Mr. Spitzer, a first-term Democrat who pledged to bring ethics reform and end the often seamy ways of Albany, is married with three children.

His real goal emerges:

Former US Sen. Alfonse D’Amato, a Republican who all but endorsed Democratic Gov. Spitzer in 2006, yesterday backed Mayor Bloomberg for the state’s top job in 2010.

D’Amato offered his strong endorsement of the mayor at a private Republican gathering honoring Sen. Dean Skelos (R-Nassau) at the Woodmere Country Club on Long Island where Bloomberg was present.

“D’Amato said, ‘This is the person who would put the interests of the people of New York first and that’s what we need, instead of the same old tired politics, instead of people who promise change but engage in the same old partisanship,’” said a prominent Republican who attended the event.

“D’Amato said flatly, ‘Bloomberg should run for governor,’” the source continued.

The suggestion was greeted by loud applause.

. . .

“The mayor said something like, ‘Read my lips. I’m not running for governor,’ and everybody laughed,” the source recalled.

Connecting with the people is about making promises and sticking to them:

No nationally known political figures graced the ninth annual St. Patrick’s Parade in Sunnyside and Woodside, and even Mayor Michael Bloomberg gave notice he wouldn’t be around this year, though once he had said he’d attend each parade faithfully, even after he had left office.

But when no one blinks at across-the-board five percent cuts, you might have to make your threats a little clearer:

Insisting the state budget is shortchanging the city by nearly $750 million, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration is mandating that each city agency cut its upcoming budget by 3 percent, in addition to the 5 percent cuts the mayor laid out earlier this year.

The supplementary cuts, which will affect agencies typically held harmless from the budget ax, such as the Department of Education, stunned City Council members who learned of them yesterday from Mark Page, director of the city Office of Management and Budget.

Page announced the combined 8 percent slash for fiscal year 2009 during his annual budget testimony before the Council’s Finance Committee in City Hall. He delivered scathing remarks about the state’s proposed budget, which he said reduces city funding by $747 million.

And don’t forget to roll out the children:

Council members and education advocates, already reeling from the $100 million cuts hitting the city’s roughly 1,400 public schools last month, slammed the additional reductions.

“This year, with the 2.5 [percent], it’s impacting the schools and it’s hurting the kids. I have literacy programs that aren’t fully supplied with [materials]. These are the things that impact kids,” said Sean Rotkowitz, the Staten Island liaison for the teachers’ union. “At the very least, the classrooms and the schools should be held harmless.”

No sooner than . . . does . . . ugh:

Running for president was always an unlikely next step for Mayor Bloomberg. Running for governor is likely, and becoming more so.

Mr. Bloomberg and Governor Spitzer don’t get along very well. They understand their mutual need to accomplish individual goals while in office, but as individuals they don’t have much in common beyond liking a coffee shop situated near their Upper East Side residences.

Don’t expect to hear much talk from the Bloomberg camp about running for governor. The nonstop talk about running for president was a requirement to make Mr. Bloomberg a viable candidate. The concept of Mr. Bloomberg entering the presidential race seemed absurd when the rumors first began two years ago. A coordinated pre-campaign was required to make plausible a campaign that now is not happening. Convincing voters and opinion makers that Mr. Bloomberg is a reasonable gubernatorial candidate with a reasonable chance of winning isn’t an issue. Polls at this early date — nearly three years before the election — even show Mr. Bloomberg ahead of Mr. Spitzer. So in terms of running for governor, talk would only hurt Mr. Bloomberg’s chances, as it could cause trouble with the current governor.

Now that Sheekey’s Machine is safely out of commission, the mayor can go back to his true colors — protecting landlord’s rights (”Mr. Bloomberg said the bill, while well-intentioned, prohibited landlords from making sound business decisions and required them to enter into contracts with government agencies that they might otherwise avoid”) and helping State Senate Republicans:

While declaring his commitment to nonpartisanship, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is quietly injecting himself — and his money — into one of the most explosive partisan battles in decades in New York.

Several weeks ago, the mayor wrote a $500,000 check to help keep the dwindling and increasingly imperiled State Senate Republicans from losing their grip on power, according to an official with direct knowledge of the donation.

The Democrats are seeking to gain control of the Senate for the first time in 40 years, and the race is growing personal and bitter.

Why is he starting to sound like he’s running in the Democratic primary? If you say “vice president” or even “president of the World Bank,” I will be upset:

If the Board of Elections isn’t reformed, it’s “not beyond the realm of possibility” that voters will lose confidence in the entire electoral process as they did in Kenya, Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday.

On his WABC radio show yesterday, Bloomberg went on a tear against the city’s Board of Elections after unofficial tallies in the Democratic presidential primary showed Barack Obama implausibly received no votes in 82 districts.

But the mayor backed off on his charge of election “fraud.”

The first election in years that actually meant something actually ends up not meaning much:

Supporters expect Barak Obama to pick up one or two delegates when primary results from New York City are recounted.

The unofficial results were strikingly under-recorded in several districts around the city — in some cases leaving him with zero votes when, in fact, he had pulled in hundreds, Board of Elections officials have said.

Those results gave Obama no votes in nearly 80 districts, including Harlem’s 94th and other historically black areas — but many of those initial tallies proved to be wildly off base.

“Every election has problems, but in this case, all the problems seem to have been his,” said state Sen. Bill Perkins (D-Harlem). “He got all the zeroes and undercounting.

“Some gross mistakes have been made. Very often, there are clerical errors. In this case, it was strictly with regards to Obama.” Perkins told The Post the issue is more than the “one or two delegates” that could be added to Obama’s tally, noting that if the results were accurately represented, there would not have been a “false momentum” for Hillary Rodham Clinton.

A sampling of what Rudy now avoids next week:

Jessica Matos, 25, a single mother from the South Bronx, sounded almost giddy as she talked about the results from Florida and the possibility that Mr. Giuliani would abandon his campaign.

“I was waiting for this moment — he stinks,” declared Ms. Matos as she finished off the last of her French fries at the Crown Donuts Diner on East 161st Street, not far from Yankee Stadium. “Giuliani was always for himself, never for the people. Where I live, a lot of people need help, and he made everything hard for people who needed help. Everything was always for the middle class or the high class. He just forgot about everyone else.”

Across the table, her friend Ivonne Rivera, 38, nodded enthusiastically. “He’s a hypocrite,” she said.

The diner’s owner, Peter Katsihtis, took a more analytical approach. A Republican who plans to vote for a Democrat in November because he wants the United States out of Iraq, Mr. Katsihtis said Mr. Giuliani had not managed to get his message and positions across. “When people decide to vote,” he said, “they want to know what a candidate stands for. He wasn’t effective in getting that across.”

Louis Duran, an elevator mechanic’s assistant seated at a booth by the window, spoke up for Mr. Giuliani.

“I used to be a criminal — I’ve spent time upstate — and I don’t hate Giuliani,” he said. “I thought he did a great job as mayor. I want my parents and family to be safe, and I would have voted for him.”

Your cynicism and disrespect is foiled again by the mayor’s superior public relations prowess:

Defying expectations that the city would increase property taxes to help close a projected $3.1 billion budget gap, Mayor Bloomberg will argue today that the budget can be balanced without the pain of a tax hike.

In his annual State of the City address, Mr. Bloomberg will propose extending the 7% property tax cut he instituted last year, initially presented as a one-time bonus, an aide familiar with the speech said.

Mr. Bloomberg also will call for an extension of a $400 property tax rebate for homeowners, the aide said.

Backing away from a property tax increase as the city heads into an uncertain fiscal period may be seen as a sign Mr. Bloomberg is attempting to differentiate himself from the Democratic presidential candidates in advance of a possible White House run, and to avoid being characterized as a politician who would rather raise taxes than find savings in the city’s budget.

(Dagnamit! He got us again! How could this finely honed BS detector miss this?!)

For a would-be Presidential candidate, coming home can be a drag:

Fresh from a trip to China and Indonesia, Mayor Bloomberg is turning his attention away from issues of international importance and toward one that is decidedly local: potholes.

At his first public event since returning to New York from his week-long travels abroad, Mr. Bloomberg kicked off the start of pothole season by urging New Yorkers to call the city’s help hotline, 311, to report any craters in the road.

The city fills the equivalent of 22 potholes every hour, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. In the past five months, more than 70,000 potholes have been filled. Mr. Bloomberg said that since 2002, the city has filled 1.25 million potholes.

Although potholes may not be the most glamorous item on Mr. Bloomberg’s to-do list, he tried to draw a connection yesterday between filling holes in the ground and the essence of government. He said the city’s efforts to keep streets in good repair is making a vital difference when it comes to traffic fatalities, which are down more than 20% since 2001.

In our haste, we neglected one of the more obvious obstacles:

For all of his billions, Mayor Michael Bloomberg lacks one thing all the current presidential candidates proudly display: a spouse.

The country has not elected a bachelor president since 1884, when Grover Cleveland won the White House despite newspapers huffing that “a man who will not marry a woman and take care of her has no right to be a president.”

Singles haven’t had much luck getting nominated either. The last unwed candidate chosen by a major party was Adlai Stevenson, the divorced Democrat who lost to Republican Dwight Eisenhower twice in the 1950s.

Bloomberg, 65, has a companion of seven years, Diana Taylor, and essentially lives with her. Their arrangement and his star-studded past love life would present him with new political territory to navigate if he runs.

If there’s one thing we know about Presidential elections it’s that American voters don’t want to hear that you’ve raised taxes:

Rules dating back to the city’s fiscal crisis of the 1970s call for the sales tax charged in the city to drop 1 percentage point, to 7.375%, this summer. Mr. Bloomberg is working to make sure the scheduled tax cut never happens.

The Bloomberg administration is asking Albany legislators to authorize a tax increase that cancels out the reduction so that the tax remains at 8.375%.

“We are working with the State and we anticipate that they will provide the necessary authorization,” a spokesman for the mayor said via e-mail.

During the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, the state raised the city’s portion of the sales tax to four cents on each dollar of goods sold from three cents to create a revenue stream dedicated to bailing out the city from its financial troubles. When the law that imposed a financial control board on the city expires on July 1, 2008, the sales tax increase also is set to dissolve.

. . .

The 8.375% sales tax charged in the city is divided into three parts: 4% goes to the state, another 4% to the city, and .375% to the Metropolitan Commuter Transportation District.

According to a Preliminary Official Statement from the city sent to prospective bond buyers on December 5, the city projects that if it is unable to push through the tax increase, sales tax revenues in the city would drop by approximately $1.19 billion in the fiscal year 2009, $1.25 billion in 2010, and $1.31 billion in 2011.

“On July 1, 2008, the local sales tax, which is currently imposed by the State at the rate of 4%, will expire and, absent legislative action, a 3% local sales tax imposed by the City would be in effect. The Financial Plan assumes that the City will receive the legislative authorization to continue the local sales tax at the rate of 4%,” the document states.

Previously on Why Bloomberg Will Never Run For President: Hizzoner explaining the Iraqi insurgency at Cooper Union, Hizzoner placing the threat of terrorism below that of a hurricane, Hizzoner being alarmist about a return to the days of Hoovervilles, the steak dinner genesis story, his administration’s spendthrift ways (no really, check the MySpace page) and — worst of all — his clumsy Wesley Clark-like name checking of Shakira. And that list doesn’t even take into account his pro-choice position . . .

Leaving a mixed legacy (1 Train 1 Stop!), Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff announces his departure:

Daniel L. Doctoroff was to have been the Robert Moses of the Bloomberg era, a bold visionary who would guide a sweeping revitalization of New York and put to rest the notion that the age of building big had ended.

But now, as Mr. Doctoroff ends his tenure as the longest-serving deputy mayor for economic development, much of his agenda remains unrealized, despite his many achievements.

Mr. Doctoroff, 49, announced yesterday that he would resign at the end of the year and become president of Bloomberg L.P. in February.

There is no question that he brought a brash new imagination and relentless determination to City Hall, but those very qualities sometimes alienated, rather than motivated, the people who could help him achieve his goals.

The announcement, which again blurs the lines between Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s public and private spheres, could signal the twilight of an administration still bursting with grand visions but running out of time, raising questions about what Mr. Doctoroff’s, and by extension Mr. Bloomberg’s, final legacy will be.

. . .

Chosen by the mayor as an outsider with a new vision for City Hall, Mr. Doctoroff brought a curly-haired, whiz-kid energy to the job and favored colorful PowerPoint presentations packed with history, statistics and renderings of what could be. He was often charming in public, but could be forceful and even threatening in private. He rode his bicycle from his Upper West Side home for 7 a.m. meetings and surrounded himself with a coterie of whip-smart young people, nicknamed the Kids, several of whom have gone on to important posts in the public and private sectors.

“He brought the private sector voice into City Hall, as opposed to government telling the private sector what to do,” said Marc V. Shaw, who served as first deputy mayor during Mr. Bloomberg’s first term.

Mr. Doctoroff’s impatience with bureaucracy and his disdain for what he regarded as the corrupt politics of Albany led him to attempt the unconventional, like using city money for the extension of the No. 7 subway line, rather than waiting for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to do it.

For illumination on Eliot Spitzer’s floundering governorship, look no further than his reading list:

Rudolph W. Giuliani has been talking up the new book by President Nicolas Sarkozy of France. Mitt Romney reads Thomas L. Friedman on globalization and Doris Kearns Goodwin on Lincoln. John McCain quotes from Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls.”

What about Eliot Spitzer?

Flying back from an environmental summit in Portugal this fall, he devoured a 40-year-old biography of one of his predecessors as governor of New York — a Republican, Charles Evans Hughes.

The book is subtitled “Politics and Reform in New York,” a vanilla description of Hughes’s destructive struggle with the State Legislature after his election in 1906 to the first of two two-year terms. It is one of several political histories Mr. Spitzer has read lately; another was Robert A. Slayton’s biography of Gov. Alfred E. Smith.

. . .

If Mr. Spitzer figures that all his problems will evaporate if Democrats seize control of the State Senate next November (for the first time since 1965), history says he might want to be careful about what he wishes for. Hughes’s chief adversaries were his fellow Republicans.

Robert Wesser, who wrote “Charles Evans Hughes: Politics and Reform in New York, 1905-1910″ (Cornell University Press, 1967), concluded that he was insecure as a politician and ineffective as a party reformer. He would not bargain with lawmakers. And when he appealed directly to the voters, he “moved ahead of public opinion and never efficiently enlisted its support.”

Topping his political reform agenda was legislation to let the voters, instead of boss-dominated conventions, nominate statewide candidates. But all Hughes had to show for his dramatic battle for his direct primary bill, Mr. Wesser wrote, “was the satisfaction of having made the fight, not having won it.”

Jeez, even Bush knows to at least tell people he’s reading that massive Alexander Hamilton biography no one can seem to finish . . .

Can Diane Cardwell be a little less subtle with today’s lede? No! Go, Diane, go:

As Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg again prepares to trot around the world with a gaggle of cameras behind him, a question is emerging: Is he traveling so much for the city? Or for much-denied presidential aspirations?

The mayor — whose official trips this year have taken him to Mexico, Paris and London as well as New Orleans, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston, Seattle and St. Louis — will fly to China and Indonesia the week of Dec. 9.

He is taking along Deputy Mayor Kevin Sheekey, who has been promoting Mr. Bloomberg’s presidential prospects almost since the mayor was re-elected in 2005. The mayor is also bringing his companion, Diana Taylor.

This way he will be better equipped to answer the tough questions at controversial ribbon cuttings or perhaps even in response to contentious City Council resolutions. Hizzoner’s presidential aspirations surge ahead:

A report that a foreign policy adviser in the Clinton administration who is a critic of the war in Iraq, Nancy Soderberg, is briefing Mayor Bloomberg about the war offers some indication of the foreign policy approach Mr. Bloomberg might take if he were to run for president.

Ms. Soderberg is considered a centrist who supports using international institutions to further American interests abroad. In television appearances, she has spoken out about the war in Iraq, saying it has been botched from the beginning.

Get rid of one problem and take on another that will surely boost those sagging numbers:

New Yorkers going Christmas shopping online at Amazon.com will find an 8.375% surprise at the virtual cash register, courtesy of Governor Spitzer, who is moving aggressively to collect Internet sales taxes that have gone widely unenforced.

Under a new policy, major electronic retailers, such as Amazon.com, will be required to collect sales tax on all purchases from New York. The policy, based on a novel legal theory, could hasten the end of the Internet’s era as a duty-free marketplace if other states follow New York’s lead. With the policy, New York immediately took the lead among states that are seeking to tax online commerce.

“I’d say this puts us at the front,” one state tax official, who requested anonymity, told The New York Sun.

Having pledged not to raise taxes, Mr. Spitzer is increasingly scrounging for ways to close a projected $4.3 billion deficit next year. State officials estimate that this latest initiative, which goes into effect in December, will bring in about $100 million more each year, split between state and local government tax revenue. Statewide, the sales tax averages about 8%, although in New York City it is 8.375%.

. . .

When it comes to charging sales tax, e-retailers have been held to the same old standard that the U.S. Supreme Court set for mail-order vendors: The seller only needs to collect the tax on purchases in states where the vendor has a physical presence, such as a storefront or salesman. New York is saying that it has found a way around that obstacle to tax collection. Many e-retailers may have unwittingly lost their exemption because of the way they direct traffic to their Web sites, according to a tax memo recently released by the state’s tax department.

At issue is the “affiliate program” used by many e-retailers. Web site operators can provide a link to an e-retailer in return for a commission on any sale resulting from customers using the link. While the affiliate program may consist of little more than a non-descript advertisement on the computer screen, the tax consequences may be huge: New York state says it is the equivalent of having an instate salesperson.

“It’s just treating the affiliate the same way we would treat any other type of sales representative,” Mr. Spitzer’s budget director, Paul Francis, said in an interview.

Maybe he is going to run for President after all:

Mayor Bloomberg is giving a boost to Councilman Simcha Felder’s efforts to ban people from feeding pigeons. “My recollection when I came into office, there was a ferret issue, which I very cleverly and tactfully avoided,” the mayor said yesterday, referring to Mayor Giuliani’s efforts to ban the pet rodent. “While I love animals and I love birds, we do have a lot of pigeons and they do tend to foul a lot of our areas and people would be better off not feeding the pigeons. Those that are here will find food and they just won’t grow at such a rapid rate — we’ll all probably be better off.”

On the one hand, they just announced another chintzy $400 rebate ($250 million a year) while on the other they want to implement draconian-sounding “hiring freezes”:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, responding to shrinking revenues from a cooling economy, imposed a hiring freeze for all agencies yesterday and directed commissioners to devise spending reductions of 2.5 percent this fiscal year and 5 percent in the next.

It is the first time officials have resorted to a citywide plan to make cuts since October 2002, when the budget was still reeling from the aftershocks of the Sept. 11 terror attack. Since then, the city’s superheated real estate market and fat payouts on Wall Street have led to surpluses, including a record $4.4 billion in the last fiscal year, which allowed the mayor to increase spending and services while cutting taxes and offering rebates.

. . .

Commissioners are to submit their plans for budget cuts by Nov. 19, and will not be permitted to fill any positions other than those directly related to public health or safety at least until the mayor decides which cuts to make. If they find they have additional expenses, Mr. Page wrote in bold type, “you should reprioritize your existing budget.”

Although the reductions would yield an estimated $500 million for this year and $1 billion for the next, Mr. Page wrote that the numbers were targets and did not mean that final decisions had been made about how much each particular agency would need to cut.

“A hurricane is much more likely than something, a terrible tragedy like 9/11″ will come in handy for the Clinton campaign should Bloomberg run for President, which is not to say that tapping into everyone’s deepest fears about Manhattan hurricanes is not a smart move:

A set of booklets designed to prepare the city’s students for a range of natural and manmade disasters is missing one obvious crisis scenario: a terrorist attack.

The Bloomberg administration is distributing 1.3 million children’s safety guides that make no mention of the attacks of September 11, 2001, or the possibility of a future terrorist attack. The city has produced a booklet for elementary school students and another for middle school and high school students.

The city’s guide for older students depicts a range of troubles on its cover, including a heat wave, power outage, hurricane, flood, fire, and explosion. “These Things Happen Here, Too,” it says. “New York, It’s Time To Get Ready.”

. . .

Speaking at P.S. 29 in Brooklyn yesterday to announce the new emergency preparedness campaign, Mayor Bloomberg said the city’s Office of Emergency Management, which worked to put out the booklets, should be preparing New Yorkers “for those things that are most likely.”

Referring to the photographs of six disaster scenarios on the pamphlet cover, Mr. Bloomberg said that all the situations are so likely that nearly all of them have happened during his time in office.

“A hurricane is much more likely than something, a terrible tragedy like 9/11,” he said. “When it really gets to be that scale, what you can count on is a bunch of dedicated people who have been training all the time, but you can’t plan for something like that.”

In case you were wondering, the last hurricane to hit the city was in 1938, and is generally considered to be a once-every-75-years occurrence, which isn’t to say that it’s not scary, just that Hizzoner is ridiculously (purposely?) tone deaf (hope that works out for you, Sheekey!).

Opening given, gladly taken:

Celebrating her 60th birthday last night with a fund-raiser that netted $1.5 million, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton took a rare shot at an old New York rival and current Republican presidential candidate, Rudolph W. Giuliani, for saying he would root for the Red Sox in the World Series.

Mr. Giuliani, a Yankees fan, has mocked Mrs. Clinton over the years for professing allegiance to the Yankees, even though she grew up a Chicago Cubs fan and recently said she would split her loyalty between those teams if they met in the World Series.

But Mrs. Clinton smiled widely last night as she got in her dig at Mr. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor. After the Yankees lost in the first round of the playoffs this month, Mr. Giuliani said he would rally behind the archrival Red Sox — an endorsement seen in some quarters as pandering to New Hampshire primary voters in Red Sox Nation.

Addressing a packed Beacon Theater on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Mrs. Clinton noted that both she and the evening’s M.C., Billy Crystal, were devoted to the Yankees.

“I have been a fan, and I remain a fan of the New York Yankees — no changes, no looking to curry favor with anyone else,” she said to much laughter and applause from the audience of mostly New York Democrats.

Hillary has an opening here to become the one true Yankees fan running for President:

As he moves about the country campaigning for the White House, Rudolph W. Giuliani is not always kind in describing where he comes from. New York City, he will say, is a tough town, hard to govern. It’s liberal to a fault and unruly as a child.

Now, however, there has come what is for many the true unpardonable insult: Mr. Giuliani has declared he will be rooting for the dreaded Boston Red Sox against the Colorado Rockies in the World Series, which began last night. From the Bronx to his childhood haunts in Brooklyn, there was a baffled anger bordering on rage.

“They should burn his seat that he sat in at Yankee Stadium — how’s that?” said George Patsin, a Brooklyn restaurateur. “They should burn it on TV so I can watch.”

. . .

By way of explanation, Mr. Giuliani couched his shift in loyalty as support for the American League. (”I’m an American League fan and I go with the American League team,” he told reporters — not coincidentally — in the primary state and Boston neighbor of New Hampshire.) “I thought he was loyal to New York,” said Kebrae H. Scott, 30, a maintenance worker who wore a Yankees cap as he was heading to his home in the Ebbets Fields Apartments in Brooklyn near where Mr. Giuliani grew up.

. . .

Of course, his most revealing comment on the subject was perhaps the answer he provided to The Providence Journal in Rhode Island when asked, this June, if he would agree to be president if it hinged on his becoming a Red Sox fan.

“I have great respect for people who really are fans of the team they say they are fans of,” Mr. Giuliani said. “But probably that’s a deal I could not make.”

Because Hillary is so far to the left and Rudy is so far to the right you need exactly the right kind of candidate to thread the needle and sway the roughly eight people in the country who might actually give a poop that Bloomberg would run. And yet the New York Press gives him the full OJ treatment in “If He Did It”:

To all outward appearances, the Bloomberg plan seems to be running exactly according to schedule. Here’s what happens next.

According to several experienced campaign observers, Bloomberg has a few months to continue laying low, periodically bursting into the news and then issuing his presidential denials. He cannot be coy, and he cannot let the anticipation morph into expectation. There is much he can learn — though he probably does not need to be taught — from the experience of Fred Thompson, the former Tennessee senator and “Law & Order” district attorney, who toyed with the idea for so long that the story had already become stale by the time he declared.

Bloomberg and his advisers know something about marketing. If he does run and intends to win, he will need to sell himself as the fresh alternative. Products cannot be sold as new for 12 months. Bloomberg and those around him with their marketing expertise would understand this. Even if Bloomberg has definitively made up his mind to run — as many who have watched him closely believe he has — part of the way to win would be to keep things under wraps for now.

Instead he sloughs off the story as overzealous publicity on the part of the DA, and intimates that the amount was barely a drop in the bucket:

Anyone would be a little snippy after falling victim to identity theft — but leave it to Mayor Bloomberg to take it to a new level.

When asked yesterday about an alleged attempt to steal $450,000 from his personal account, the mayor took a shot at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, which is handling the case.

“No. 1, it was a few months ago,” he snipped. “Why the district attorney chose to put it out now? It must have been a quiet news cycle.”

For the record, the DA’s office put out its press release on Tuesday, the first day one of the suspects appeared in court.

Bloomberg also scoffed at the suspects, whose alleged half-million-dollar theft attempt represents a tiny portion of his estimated $13.6 billion fortune.

“I don’t think they ever got any money,” he said. “Some guy walks in with a check from Bloomberg for $450,000, and he wants to take it all in $100 bills. Fortunately, the banks are a little smarter than that.”