Does Your Mom Have Your Back?

Probably not like this mom does:

An Annadale woman is set to face the music after she allegedly stabbed a teen Monday night because she believed he stole her son’s iPod.

Davida Montano, 56, approached 19-year-old Joe Applebaum near his Monterey Avenue home around 10:30 p.m. Monday, accusing Applebaum of stealing the portable music player, a cop source said yesterday.

When Applebaum denied it, Ms. Montano slapped him in the face, breaking his prescription glasses, the source said.

Then, Ms. Montano — who lives around the corner from Applebaum on Marne Avenue — allegedly grabbed one of the broken lenses and stabbed Applebaum once in the right side of his chest.

Applebaum fled to nearby Barlow Avenue, leaving a bloody trail before he collapsed on a resident’s front stairway, the source said.

News You Can Reuse

When it comes to the City Council’s new bill banning the pilfering of curbside recyclables, where the Times fears to tread, the Post understands what we most want to know:

Sanitation officials say their staff has witnessed unmarked trucks with out-of-state plates carting materials meant to be recycled. The current penalty for taking recyclables is only $100. Since January, 128 summonses have been issued.

The new law is aimed solely at those who come with trucks or cars — not people who simply rummage through trash looking for treasures.

“This is not a bill that goes after the occasional garbage pilferer,” [Councilman Michael] McMahon said, “or somebody who is looking for a new couch for their college room or picking up recyclables with a push cart.”

You Know Bloomberg’s Not Running For President . . .

. . . when he compares the Iraqi insurgency to George Washington’s militia:

In his most detailed comments on the Iraq war, Mayor Bloomberg last night suggested the United States was in the same difficult position as the British in the Revolutionary War — facing a determined band of insurgents.

Bloomberg said the comparison occurred to him when he visited his mother recently and was driving through Lexington, Mass., where a scrubby group of farmers rose up against a well-trained militia more than 200 years ago.

“We’re the British,” the mayor said during an interview with Tom Brokaw at Cooper Union, part of a series featuring potential presidential contenders hosted by former Gov. Mario Cuomo.

Pitch perfect and ready for prime time!

I Grandstand, You Look Good Back Home — It’s Win-Win!

With any luck, Lee Bollinger personally will have strengthened Ahmadinejad’s public perception in Iran and possibly contributed to the delay of the clerical regime’s inevitable demise — that is, if anyone outside the Northeastern U.S. even notices what happens at Columbia:

Before Iran’s president took the stage at Columbia University on Monday, the university’s president, Lee C. Bollinger, sent out an early-morning e-mail message, calling on students and faculty “to live up to the best of Columbia’s traditions.” Yesterday, many critics questioned whether Mr. Bollinger had met that test himself.

On campus and in editorials across the nation, on political blogs and throughout academia, there was a sharp division of opinion about Mr. Bollinger’s pointed introduction of the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as a man who exhibited “all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator” and whose denial of the Holocaust was “either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.”

. . .

Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said Mr. Bollinger’s speech was counterproductive.

“If you invite someone, you have to be polite,” he said. “Ahmadinejad scored points, especially in their culture. If you permit an enemy to come into your home, you still treat him with dignity and respect. Therefore, we lost. The points that President Bollinger made were fine. But to close with insulting words almost undid everything he said before. It was not a good teaching experience.”

Bill O’Reilly Visits Sylvia’s, Discovers That People Of Other Races Order Food, Just Like Us!

Buried lede — the researchers at Media Matters may be the only ones who pay attention to him:

After eating dinner at a famed Harlem restaurant recently, Bill O’Reilly of the Fox News Channel told a radio audience, he “couldn’t get over the fact” that there was no difference between the black-run Sylvia’s and other restaurants.

“It was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there and they were ordering and having fun,” he said. “And there wasn’t any kind of craziness at all.”

Mr. O’Reilly said his fellow patrons were tremendously respectful as he ate dinner with Al Sharpton.

The comments were made during Mr. O’Reilly’s nationally syndicated radio broadcast last week. The liberal media watchdog Media Matters for America called attention to them by distributing a transcript and audio clip on the Internet. Karl Frisch, a Media Matters spokesman, called Mr. O’Reilly’s comments “ignorant and racially charged.”