Start Spreading The News . . . He’s Running Today

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.

Are You Ready For The Suburbs?

Because they never looked better than today.

It’s all about teaching your children teamwork and dedication:

Two brothers who owned an infamous, mobbed-up Long Island restaurant savagely beat a Little League coach after he benched one of their sons for spewing an obscenity at practice, police said yesterday.

The coach, whose name the police are withholding, had an “ongoing problem” with the 11-year-old boy being disruptive during practices of the Bellmore Lightning team on Tuesday night, said Nassau County Police Sgt. Anthony Repalone.

When he tried to discipline the kid, the boy told the 45-year-old coach to “go f- – – yourself,” said Repalone. The coach then benched the child.

The boy called his father, Frank Basile, 48, of Bellmore, owner of the formerly mobbed-up fish-and-chips eatery Hudson & McCoy in Freeport.

Repalone said Basile, along with his brother Roger, 43, rushed over to the baseball field, screaming and cursing “in a fit of rage.” The coach spotted the two men heading toward him and told the kids to move away.

That was when Frank Basile “immediately punches him, rendering him semiconscious. He and his brother start pummeling and kicking” the victim, Repalone said.

But of course, boys will be boys:

A pair of nooses — including one around the neck of a tar-painted doll — were found hanging from a forklift truck on Long Island yesterday afternoon at the Town of Hempstead highway yard in Roosevelt.

The find was the latest in a recent rash of noose hangings that have fanned painful memories of segregation-era lynchings of blacks in the deep South.

But you should rest assured that the super-scary super-drug-resistant staph infection moving across the nation hasn’t come anywhere near the city . . . until now:

At least one Weston [Connecticut] HS student has been diagnosed with a potentially deadly antibiotic-resistant staph infection.

School officials sent a letter home to parents informing them that one case of the Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus Aureus infection, or MRSA, has been confirmed at the school. Health officials are waiting for results of tests on another student.

Clarke Represents!

Maybe Congress is the best place for her after all:

Nine months into her tenure as congresswoman for New York’s 11th district in Brooklyn, a freshman Representative, Yvette Clarke, submitted her first bill this week. She was the only remaining first-term congresswoman to have not yet introduced legislation. Her lack of activity contributed to her earning a “D” grade last month from a congressional watchdog, CBC Monitor.

From The Dept. Of Corrections

It turns out that the big Post story about 30 NYPD officers being investigated for taking steroids was off by about a zero:

Yesterday’s Post incorrectly reported that as many as 30 cops were rounded up to take drug tests as part of the NYPD steroid investigation. In fact, three officers were ordered to an NYPD medical facility, and a total of six are being probed.

On Conduct Ordered And Disordered

Maybe like Justice Stewart’s description of obscenity they know it when they see it:

Millions of people have paused to stand amid the hustle, bustle and neon of Times Square.

And sure, those who pause — to gawk, talk or eat a gyro — can slow the progress of pedestrians around them.

But when Matthew Jones of Brooklyn lingered on the corner of 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue in the early morning of June 12, 2004, gabbing with friends as other pedestrians tried to get by, something unusual happened: He was arrested for it.

A police officer said Mr. Jones was impeding other pedestrians and charged him with disorderly conduct.

Mr. Jones is not taking the charges lying down (so to speak). After trying twice to get the charges dismissed, he has taken his case to the state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, which heard arguments here on Wednesday.

In the prosecution’s view, it appears, the innocent do not dawdle. According to the original complaint against Mr. Jones, the officer “observed defendant along with a number of other individuals standing around” on a public sidewalk in June 2004. Mr. Jones was “not moving, and that as a result of defendants’ behavior, numerous pedestrians in the area had to walk around defendants.”

. . .

And on Wednesday, Mr. Jones’s circumstances appeared to reach a friendly audience before the Court of Appeals.

“Isn’t that lawful conduct?” wondered Judge Robert S. Smith. Later he added, “Your conduct can’t be illegal just because an officer noticed it.”

. . .

The court is likely to rule on the case next month. Should it rule against Mr. Jones, the available evidence on the scene on Wednesday suggested that the police would soon have their hands full.

Just before 5 p.m., near the corner where Mr. Jones was arrested, stood the following assemblage: a man eating clams out of a Styrofoam container; two men smoking cigarettes together; a man waiting for a woman to finish a phone call; a guy looking at a map; a young woman sending a text message; two men handing out tour brochures; and a family of five, including an infant in a stroller, who stopped to look at the brochures.