Shh . . . Don’t Let Bill O’Reilly Hear About This

The War on Christmas continues:

Santa Claus has been bumped.

Instead of having pride of place in the center of the Staten Island Mall, the Jolly Old Elf has been relegated to the JCPenney wing — separating him from the holiday congestion near the Christmas tree and train ride.

St. Nick also is being nudged out by two new kiosks installed in center court: Vonage, the online discount telephone company, and the Piercing Pagoda, which also has a kiosk in the Macy’s wing.

It’s a question of space, Mall general manager James Easley insists.

“Center court is always so crowded with . . . [long lines waiting] for Santa and the train. Moving Santa and his chair will allow us to accommodate a lot more people by spreading things out,” he said.

. . .

“These three things — the Christmas tree, the train and Santa — should be together,” said Patricia Leahy of Greenridge, mother of 3-year-old Christopher. “There is plenty of room in center court for a tree, Santa and the trains. I can’t figure out how Mall management thinks there is more room by JCPenney.”

At least Santa will be there, said Ms. Leahy, who e-mailed the Advance last week to check on what turned out to be a false report that Santa Claus would skip his appearance at the Mall in New Springville this year.

But she was skeptical about his new spot: “I personally think it is a way of de-Christmasing Christmas.”

I Guess I Suffered A Siginificant Lapse Of Judgment . . . And Did I Add That I’m Quite Penitent?

I guess if you’re going to get fined, the race better be competitive*:

An East Bronx public school principal has been fined $10,000 for endorsing a Democratic candidate in a letter sent home with students the Friday before the election. The Department of Education is also investigating the school’s parent coordinator, who apparently used her city government e-mail address to solicit campaign volunteers for the same candidate, who is running for re-election to the state Senate.

As The New York Sun first reported yesterday, the principal of Public School 71, Lance Cooper, issued a letter praising City Council Member James Vacca and state Senator Jeffrey Klein. The letter encouraged parents to “endorse these Community Leaders when they need our support as a way of saying thank you for always being there for P.S. 71!”

Mr. Klein, a Democrat who represents portions of Bronx and Westchester counties, faces the Bronx Republican chairman, Joseph Savino, in today’s election. Mr. Vacca, a first-term council member, is not up for election this year.

After authenticating Mr. Cooper’s letter yesterday, education department officials consulted with the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board. The Board determined that Mr. Cooper’s letter violated the Chancellor’s Regulations, which forbids school employees from endorsing a candidate while at work, or in contact with students. Mayor Bloomberg was briefed on the matter, an education department spokesman, David Cantor, said.

In addition to the fine, which will go to the city’s general fund, Mr. Cantor said a letter would be placed in the principal’s personnel file “denoting the unacceptable action that he took.” He added that Mr. Cooper seemed “quite penitent,” and “acknowledged, as soon as we contacted him, if not earlier, that he suffered a significant lapse of judgment.”

But why bother also endorsing someone not even running?

*Competitive? Depends who you ask.

I Got Two Words For Ya: Die Bold!

New York’s nifty old lever-powered voting machines actually, finally, perhaps may be retired after this election:

Over the next few months, the New York City Board of Elections will have the formidable task of complying with the Help America Vote Act, which requires that updated voting machines be installed for the 2007 elections.

With many states already using varying types of the new machines in today’s election, the New York City Board of Elections, which has created an evaluation team, will no doubt be looking around the country to help determine a game plan for next year.

The board has already faced criticism for its failure to implement the voting machines for this election, but some experts say the delay could actually pay off.

“I think on one side of the coin, it’s a good thing that we’re not the guinea pigs,” the executive director of the Citizens Union and the Citizens Union Foundation, Dick Dadey, said.

New York failed to meet the deadline imposed for the Help America Vote Act, and was sued by the U.S. Department of Justice. The suit called for the New York City Board of Elections to implement a token amount of disabled voting machines for 2006 and to be fully compliant with all new voting machines for 2007.

. . .

The board is considering two types of voting machines: an optical scan device that reads a paper ballot that is filled out in a private voting booth, and a direct-reading electronic machine that functions like an automated teller machine with a push-button screen. The two technologies leave a paper trail.

In Ohio during the September primaries, the optical scan voting machines received criticisms. About 18,000 ballots were deemed unreadable by the scanners due to subtle paper variations. The optical scanners were manufactured by one of the same vendors that the city is considering, Diebold.

At Least Someone In Marketing Had The Good Sense To Cancel The “Mission Accomplished” Banner Before Things Really Got Embarrassing

The Intrepid is not going anywhere:

If elaborate fanfare were all it took to propel an old aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Intrepid would be across the Hudson River in New Jersey by now. Despite a sendoff yesterday that involved two senators, two former mayors and a few admirals, however, a team of powerful tugboats failed to pull the old ship out of the mud off Manhattan.

The Intrepid, which has housed a military museum on the West Side for almost 25 years, was to be towed to Bayonne, N.J., to begin an overhaul that would take up to two years. But after more than an hour of heaving and straining, six big tugs with a total of nearly 30,000 horsepower had moved the ship no more than 15 feet in a few lurches that left it wedged in the river bottom.

The tugboat operators scrubbed the mission at 10:30 a.m., sending the museum’s managers scrambling to draw up Plan B. Bill White, the president of the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum, said he had called the Navy and the Pentagon for help and ordered a team of divers to take a close look at what was gripping the four propellers of the 920-foot ship. Jeffrey McAllister, the senior docking pilot for McAllister Towing, the tugboat operator, said: “There’s a buildup of mud underneath the vessel. We were trying to get it to wiggle.” But the ship “came to a fix,” he said, and now “it just is solidly held.”

. . .

[A]t 9:20, at the crest of the high tide that followed the full moon, the Christine McAllister, a tug with 6,140 horsepower, pulled taut a cable hooked to a chain attached to the ship’s stern and revved its mighty engines. Four other tugs stood by to help guide the Intrepid downriver.

But soon they, too, were spewing black smoke as they churned up foam in the brown water of the Hudson, trying to separate the Intrepid from the pier.

After five minutes, the retired crewmen lining the ship’s rails and the few hundred onlookers gathered on Pier 84 began to realize something was amiss. The hulking Intrepid, which survived five kamikaze attacks in World War II, looked like a mule resisting the force of several farmhands.

At 9:50, Matt Woods, the Intrepid’s vice president of operations, stood on the flight deck and reported that the ship had moved just 10 feet. “I didn’t think it was going to come out easy,” he said. Referring to the propellers, he added, “The screws are in the mud.”

Tom Cerniglia, 68, of Tappan, N.Y., who was a petty officer on the Intrepid from 1958 to 1960, was unimpressed.

“Ten feet. For a ship like this, that’s nothing,” said Mr. Cerniglia, who now performs at birthday parties as a clown named Tic-Toc.

I Told You Not To Lean Against The Door!

Next to getting your foot run over by an 18-wheeler while waiting to cross at an intersection, this is probably everyone’s second-worst fear:

A subway train roared underground with some doors open, sources told the Daily News yesterday, describing a frightening ride for the passengers.

The Manhattan-bound A train left the Grant Ave. station in Brooklyn with some doors open late Saturday night and didn’t stop until the first few cars reached the next station, at Euclid Ave., a transit source said.

“The doors were in fact open,” another source said.

The Transit Authority has launched an investigation, said TA spokesman Paul Fleuranges.

“This incident should NOT have happened,” Fleuranges said in a statement. “If it happened as you describe it . . . then there were some very serious violations of our operating rules and procedures. We are all relieved there were no injuries to our customers or crew.”

The train was taken to a TA yard for a battery of tests, and the crew was taken off the rails, Fleuranges said. Both the motorman and conductor were given drug and alcohol tests, a standard investigatory move.

According to the transit source, the conductor told supervisors that he left his cab at the Grant Ave. station to see what was preventing a door, or doors, from closing. As he walked from car to car, the train took off, he said. After some difficulty, the conductor contacted the motorman by intercom and the train was halted.