They Need To Suspend Term Limits For This?

If it’s common to ask questions composed by interest groups during hearings then elected officials are obviously interchangeable, and we don’t really need them there for another term:

Nearly half the members of a City Council committee who got cue-card questions from the teachers union at a heated charter school hearing got campaign cash from the labor group.

Eight of the 17 members of the Council’s Education Committee collected $25,650 from the UFT’s political arm in the last three years, campaign records show.

The totals ranged from $1,600 to $4,950 each for Council members Bill de Blasio (D-Brooklyn), Melinda Katz (D-Queens) and John Liu (D-Queens).

. . .

“In the past, I have asked questions recommended by the UFT — as well as dozens of other organizations participating in hearings,” Liu said.

Gothamschools.org posted images of the cards with questions like “Doesn’t the Department have a clear legal and moral responsibility to provide every family in the city guaranteed seats for their children in a neighborhood elementary school?”

Several Council members said it is routine for constituents or groups to suggest questions for them to ask during hearings, but they had never seen such an organized effort.

The Mother Of All School Library Threats

Yesterday it was “appearing to set the stage” . . . today, the stage is set (that was quick!):

Mayor Bloomberg is threatening to lay off up to 7,000 city workers, saying municipal unions and state officials haven’t done enough to help New York balance its budget.

Budget Director Mark Page told agency heads Wednesday to cut $350 million from their budgets, saying previous cuts of $3.1 billion starting July 1 weren’t enough.

“This next step would most likely rely heavily on additional headcount reductions, whether through attrition, or, as is more likely, through layoffs,” Page wrote them in a letter.

“It is expected that these savings could result in a reduction of as many as 7,000 positions citywide.”

. . .

The mayor has asked municipal unions to pay for 10% of their health care costs and find additional health cost reductions to save $557 million, in order to avoid layoffs.

“This is a ploy to get more money from Albany, and he really deserves it,” said Harry Nespoli, head of the Municipal Labor Committee, which negotiates for city unions.

“We’re still at the table. He just made it more difficult to negotiate.”

While Bloomberg’s request for $350 million in savings won’t plug the $1.6 billion gap in next year’s budget, Nespoli said he would tell the city’s 310,000 employees that the threat is real.

“I’m going to tell my workers there’s a possibility of layoffs in the city of New York. I’m not going to lie to them,” said Nespoli, who heads the sanitation workers’ union.

“In this crazy world today, nobody can eliminate layoffs.”

Exterminators, Not E-Z Passes

So if higher-than-normal asthma rates in the Bronx are the result of cockroaches and not car pollution (as the mayor repeated over and over with scientific certainty*), I suppose that means that congestion pricing and trees are really unnecessary then:

Asthma is the most common chronic disease of childhood, one that strikes the poor disproportionately. Up to one-third of children living in inner-city public housing have allergic asthma, in which a specific allergen sets off a cascade of events that cause characteristic inflammation, airway constriction and wheezing.

Now, using an experimental model that required leaving the pristine conditions of the lab for the messier ones of life, a team of scientists from the Boston University School of Medicine have discovered what that allergen is.

“For inner-city children,” said the lead researcher, Dr. Daniel G. Remick, a professor of pathology, “the major cause of asthma is not dust mites, not dog dander, not outdoor air pollen. It’s allergies to cockroaches.”

*He’s been doing that a lot lately.

The Kennedy (Fried Chicken) Of Our Generation

After all that nationwide publicity, he’d be a fool to change the name:

The man who caused a stir by calling his fast-food restaurant Obama Fried Chicken no longer plans to change the name, despite a growing outcry from protesters who say the name conjures up disturbing racial stereotypes.

On Monday, about 20 people, including the Rev. Al Sharpton, protested outside the restaurant, at Rutland Road and Rockaway Parkway in Brownsville, Brooklyn.

“He wasn’t a man of his word,” one of the protest organizers, Kevin McCall, said Tuesday, referring to the restaurant’s owner. “He didn’t keep his commitment of having this sign down. This is very offensive to African-Americans.”

The restaurant, previously called Royal Fried Chicken, took the Obama name in late March in a gesture of fondness for the president, said Mohammad Jabbar, the manager and spokesman for the restaurant.

Under pressure last week, Mr. Jabbar, who said he is not the owner, said the name would be changed to Popular Fried Chicken over the weekend. But on Monday, the sign was still there — a fact noted by the free newspaper amNY, under the print headline “What the Cluck?”

1991: The Year The Union Broke

The last time there were city layoffs, city government cast the choice in terms of employee concessions (“The city has threatened to go through with the layoffs if they do not get the concessions they seek from union leaders, who in turn assert that they must protect their members”). Today, the Bloomberg Administration appears to be setting the stage for a similar scenario:

The [Citizens Budget Commission] study feeds into the Bloomberg administration’s aggressive campaign to get health care givebacks from the unions while urging state legislators to cut pension benefits for future employees.

In fact, Deputy Mayor Ed Skyler spoke to members of the Citizens Budget Commission at the University Club last week and warned that out-of-control benefit costs could push the city to the brink of bankruptcy.

Just a coincidence, commission officials said.

“I’m delighted that the mayor is joining us,” said Charles Brecher, director of research and executive vice president at the commission. “We’ve been concerned about this longer than he has.”

“Pensions are important to people. They are important to people who work for the city, but they are also important to taxpayers, because they are a growing expense in the city budget.”