Curses

I’ll tell you what — if cab drivers quit being such assholes and accept credit cards, I’ll gladly look the other way if they want to curse at each other:

A New York City cab driver has been fined $1,000 for launching a foul-mouthed tirade at another cabbie. The confrontation occurred Oct. 8, 2007, on the West Side of Manhattan when neither driver had a passenger.

Driver Malik Rizwan honked at fellow cabbie Zbigniew Sobczak after Sobszak cut him off, prompting Sobszak to jump out of his cab and use a vulgarity repeatedly.

Rizwan called the police and accused Sobczak of assault. A city administrative law judge found Sobczak guilty of verbal harassment, not assault, and recommended a $350 fine.

But Taxi and Limousine Commission Chairman Matthew Daus, in a ruling last Friday, increased the penalty to $1,000 and a 30-day suspension.

There was a time when cab drivers were given more leeway with language.

A 1982 legal decision in a case called TLC vs. Baudin found that a “driver’s use of profanity during a fight with a pedestrian was not misconduct given cognizance to the realities of life in New York City.” But Daus, in a letter to Sobczak, said, “To the extent that decisions issued before my tenure, such as TLC vs. Baudin, may be read to overrule the penalty of license revocation for verbal harassment or abuse, I would override those decisions.” “The city has changed over the years,” Daus said in an interview Wednesday. “It’s become more civil. … The days when drivers can curse at each other are over in my opinion.”

Then again, not all agencies agree:

Using profanity may be unprofessional for cabdrivers or newscasters, but cops are often free to shoot their mouths off, city officials said.

In fact, a well-placed F-bomb can be part of good police work, and may even help prevent the use of deadly force, said Andrew Case, spokesman for the Civilian Complaint Review Board.

. . .

The NYPD patrol guide calls on cops to be “courteous and respectful,” but does not explicitly forbid profane language.

Of the 4,024 complaints lodged against officers for “discourteous” (as opposed to offensive or bigoted) language in 2007, only 6.6 percent were substantiated.

And in 7.6 percent of cases, choosing to swear and protect was not only acceptable, but actually warranted, Case said.

The rest of the complaints were either unfounded or impossible to prove.

“If [cops] have used ordinary language and a person continues to do what was improper, [the officers] are allowed to raise the tone of the exchange,” Case said. “It is called using verbal force.”

A Taxing Tautology

Because if you didn’t buy counterfeit goods, then we would have more police to investigate the selling of counterfeit goods:

The city is poised to unveil a campaign to educate tourists and locals alike about the harsh realities of supporting the counterfeit goods industry, which officials say costs the city more than $1 billion in lost sales taxes each year.

Beginning Monday, posters adorned with messages that relay the lesser-known perils of counterfeiting will be plastered on phone booth kiosks in areas of the city infamous for harboring peddlers of fake name-brand goods, such as Chinatown and Times Square, officials announced yesterday.

Unveiled at the Harper’s Bazaar Anticounterfeiting Summit, the posters warn shoppers about the harmful consequences of counterfeiting with messages such as “when you buy counterfeit goods, you support child labor.”

Deputy Mayor Edward Skyler announced the two-month campaign in front of a room of executives from businesses wounded by counterfeiting, an industry experts say generates upward of $650 billion a year. He said the sales tax lost to counterfeit goods would provide the city with funds to hire 10,000 new police officers, firefighters, or teachers.

“This is a problem that is a little like weeds, we need to keep pulling them out,” he said.

Except that . . . if all sales taxes only generate $4.5 billion for the city budget (see, for example, this .pdf from the city’s Independent Budget Office), is it really possible that New York City is losing $1 billion in revenue from counterfeit bags? Doesn’t that basically mean that counterfeit bags account for 25% of all sales in the entire city? (Geez, maybe New York really has become the Tijuana of the U.S.)

This is not to say that buying counterfeit goods is some kind of harmless, victimless crime — I don’t believe it is — but, again, what is the city doing carrying the water for the fashion industry? Don’t the police have better things to do? And citing “lost sales taxes” isn’t enough . . . if that were true then we should crack down on all sorts of things . . .

Time Was, They Referred To Them As “Discretionary Funds”

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 . . .

Look For These And Other Exciting Officially Licensed Products At Your Nearest New York State Giftshop

[Heart] the brand, lest things get out of control:

This year, state officials plan to introduce new tools — like a difficult-to-reproduce hologram — that will assure consumers that a product is officially licensed by New York State.

For those who sell unofficial “I ♥ NY” products, officials plan to warn and then penalize offenders.

Thomas Ranese, 37, chief marketing officer at Empire State Development, admitted, “We haven’t always invested in protecting the brand as much as we should have.”

Trademarks were allowed to expire in the 1990s in the United States and abroad, leading to the widespread perception that the heart symbol was in the public domain and did not require a license, he said. The trademark registrations have been renewed, he said, but the damage had already been done.

New York State has lost millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars in licensing fees since the symbol was introduced in 1977, Mr. Ranese said.

The result, visible all over New York City but especially in Midtown Manhattan, is a vast alternate universe of “I ♥ NY” products, almost all of which are unlicensed fakes.

Is there any way for a public-spirited tourist to detect a fake? “The simple answer is no,” Mr. Ranese said. Even the registered trademark symbol is easily counterfeited, he said.

Still, the products are fun.

In need of something sartorial? There is a “I ♥ NY” men’s tie (with Statue of Liberty) for $4.99 and a Betty Boop “I ♥ NY” T-shirt for $19.99. Crave something culinary? There’s a dinner bell for $3.99, salt and pepper shakers for $8.99, a beer can holder for $4.99 and a dinner plate for $12.99. And a kitchen towel, $8.99, to clean up.

Need something for the children? There are teddy bears ($9.99 small, $19.99 large) and baby clothes for $9.99. Need authentic New York tchotchkes? There’s a computer mouse pad for $8.99, a thimble for $3.99, a glass paperweight for $14.99.

Feel the need for exercise? There is a baseball for $9.99, golf balls for $12.99, and a fur football for $9.99.

Only one of the above is an officially licensed product.

Never Forget . . . That $2 Billion Project That Will Allow JFK Passengers To Avoid The Broadway Junction A Train Stop

It’s embarrassing that it takes a Republican from New Hampshire to state the obvious:

New York officials were outraged Tuesday when a Republican lawmaker compared a planned rail line to the Ground Zero vicinity with pointless pork-barrel projects, calling it a “train to nowhere.”

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) had attached nearly $2 billion to a transportation bill to extend the existing AirTrain between JFK Airport and Jamaica, Queens, to lower Manhattan.

But Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, the top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, complained on the chamber floor that New Yorkers were trying to fleece taxpayers.

“They have decided to raid the federal treasury for the purposes of building this, this train to nowhere,” Gregg told fellow senators.

An incensed Schumer insisted Ground Zero is hallowed ground, not a dead-end destination, and that the cash is the “last part of the $20 billion that President Bush promised to New York after 9/11” to rebuild the devastated city.

“It was always intended for transportation projects around lower Manhattan,” Schumer said. “It is blasphemy to New Yorkers and all Americans to exploit the sanctity of Ground Zero to score a cheap political point.”

Gregg’s portrayed the effort as a “train to nowhere” was an allusion tohis Republican colleague Sen. Ted Stevens’s infamous “bridge to nowhere” — a $223 million project to connect a tiny Alaskan island to the mainland.

“This ‘nowhere’ of lower Manhattan is also the heart of American and world finance,” said Mayor Bloomberg’s spokesman, Stu Loeser. “The senator might not remember what happened there seven years ago and what happens there every day, but the rest of us cannot forget.”

One of Gregg’s top aides insisted the senator wasn’t trying to sting New York’s 9/11 victims, but to point to a questionable project.