You’re Not Using That, Right?

An early start to looting at old Yankee Stadium:

Stealing and bunting are normally encouraged in baseball, but a pair of dumb Yankee season-ticket holders learned the hard way that the two do not go together.

John Bunjaporte, 41, and Keith O’Rourke, 39, both of Westchester County, allegedly tried to snatch a piece of the red, white, and blue bunting that hangs over the edge of the upper deck, police said.

The team took the highly unusual step of revoking their $55-per-game season tickets because the Yanks intend to auction off every last brick and grain of dirt in the stadium after the season, officials said.

Both were charged with petit larceny and criminal mischief. They face fines and up to a year in prison.

Location Scout: Yankee Stadium.

Less Exciting Than Getting Boatloads Of Federal Money Congestion Pricing, But Since You Asked . . .

Part of the problem of city employees taking advantage of free parking is that many of the permits are actually fake. That’s some clown shit:

The city’s most comprehensive study of curbside parking has found that 9 percent of all vehicle permits in lower Manhattan are phony, The Post has learned.

The yearlong study confirmed what regular motorists have been screaming about for years — that privileged parkers are creating havoc downtown.

Among the study’s other findings:

• Nearly one in eight vehicles with permits were parked illegally at a bus stop, crosswalk, fire hydrant, driveway or were double parked.
• Forty-two percent of vehicles with “official business” permits parked outside their designated spaces for more than three hours, a violation of their permits.
• On a typical day between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., more than 3,300 vehicles displayed a law-enforcement placard.
• Each parked an average of 41/4 hours, meaning they accounted for almost a quarter of all the “vehicle hours” available.
• Eighteen percent of meters weren’t available to the general public because privileged parkers hogged them.

When In Doubt, Just Say You’ll Cut Library Hours; Public Sympathy Follows

But when no one blinks at across-the-board five percent cuts, you might have to make your threats a little clearer:

Insisting the state budget is shortchanging the city by nearly $750 million, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration is mandating that each city agency cut its upcoming budget by 3 percent, in addition to the 5 percent cuts the mayor laid out earlier this year.

The supplementary cuts, which will affect agencies typically held harmless from the budget ax, such as the Department of Education, stunned City Council members who learned of them yesterday from Mark Page, director of the city Office of Management and Budget.

Page announced the combined 8 percent slash for fiscal year 2009 during his annual budget testimony before the Council’s Finance Committee in City Hall. He delivered scathing remarks about the state’s proposed budget, which he said reduces city funding by $747 million.

And don’t forget to roll out the children:

Council members and education advocates, already reeling from the $100 million cuts hitting the city’s roughly 1,400 public schools last month, slammed the additional reductions.

“This year, with the 2.5 [percent], it’s impacting the schools and it’s hurting the kids. I have literacy programs that aren’t fully supplied with [materials]. These are the things that impact kids,” said Sean Rotkowitz, the Staten Island liaison for the teachers’ union. “At the very least, the classrooms and the schools should be held harmless.”

Imitation Is The Sincerest Form Of Flattery . . .

But bitching about not being acknowledged is rather unbecoming:

The Villager was the source of last week’s hottest international business news story, though one would never have known it from the many media outlets that failed to give the newspaper a mention.

I mean, really . . .

Tipper Gore Opens Frayed Scrapbook, Strokes Chin And Wonders About The Possibilities

Marty Scorsese has blood on his hands:

A wiseguy wannabe who killed for the mob apologized yesterday to Italians everywhere for being a living, breathing stereotype — and blamed Hollywood for turning him into one.

“Although I made all my drastic decisions on my own, Hollywood intensified my love for that life and in the process blindsided what being Italian meant,” Bonanno crime-family informant Francesco Fiordilini said at his sentencing for killing a drug dealer in 1993.

“The mob is a gang. It’s made up of individuals with very low self-esteem who together feed on the weak — and most of the time their own,” Fiordilini told Brooklyn federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis.

After apologizing to the drug dealer’s family, Fiordilini offered a sweeping apology to Italians everywhere for “conspiring and utilizing our culture in the same manner the entertainment industry does with its stereotypes.”