P.S. Conservancy

If you A) encourage it with park conservancies like the kind you see at Central, Bryant, Madison and Prospect Parks and then B) cut funding and cram more kids into classrooms then you may find that your local school looks more like a public-private partnership than an example of equality of opportunity:

Nearly 200 teaching assistants and other school staffers get their paychecks from the city’s wealthiest PTAs in violation of Department of Education rules.

The PTAs that do the most rogue hiring are on the Upper East and Upper West sides of Manhattan.

Parents at Lower Lab School on Third Avenue pay for 43 extra staff members, the DOE revealed.

The parent groups contend their schools need the extra hands, and some principals encourage staff padding.

Screw The Stupid Monkeys

Forgive me for saying so — because lord knows animals are so, so cute, cuddly and I just want to slurp them up through a straw — but when I see such crass grandstanding in advance of final budget votes it almost makes me want to root for the UFT to get another fat buyout . . . or for DEP to hire 2,500 more administrative staff . . . or for the Police Department to lower their retirement age to 38:

Layoffs in the city have spread from the piggy traders on Wall Street to the animals at the Bronx Zoo.

The institution is closing four exhibits and shipping hundreds of creatures to zoos and aquariums around the country, officials told the City Council Cultural Affairs Committee yesterday.

Deer, bats, porcupines, foxes, lemurs, caimans and antelopes will be pink-slipped as part of the 114-year-old zoo’s effort to cope with a $15 million budget shortfall.

“We plan to close four exhibits, four areas of the zoo . . . and we will have to reduce our collections in order to handle the cuts that we already know about,” said Bob Cook, executive vice president of the Wildlife Conservation Society, which runs the zoo.

Councilman Domenic Recchia (D-Brooklyn), who chairs the committee, was incredulous when Cook told him the loss of “hundreds” of animals would be permanent — not a temporary fix during the recession.

“It’s much, much more serious than what I even thought it was going to be,” Recchia said.

But perhaps I’m just being surly.

You Only Got $60,000 Out Of It? The Entire Network Is One Big Commercial!

The only difficult thing about rerunning a bunch of city council meetings is that there isn’t that much advertising revenue to skim from. But at least the production quality was raised.

Just Add A Snappy Abbreviation Like “TPEP” And No One Will Notice!

First they came for the cafes and movie theaters, and everyone agreed that even though it’s annoying to hear cellphones during a movie or, god forbid, brunch, it’s probably kind of illegal to jam cellphones. Then the cops tried to argue that jamming cellphones might be useful during a terrorist attack, but people sort of hesitated because it sounds kind of drastic and possibly dangerous for the government to reserve the right to do this. So then they moved on to the cab drivers because, well, fuck those guys, they barely pay attention to you anyway, and it kind of feels good to go after them:

The city may finally silence chatty cabbies — with cell-phone blockers that make their mobile phones unusable, officials said Monday.

Cabbies talking on cell phones continue to be a safety concern for the Taxi and Limousine Commission — and a nuisance to passengers — despite enforcement efforts by the agency, TLC Commissioner Matthew Daus said.

Passengers would still be able to use cell phones, but the front seat would be blocked, Daus said.

The silencing-of-the-cabs concept is one of a slew of possibilities the TLC wants to investigate as it develops next the “Taxicab Passenger Enhancement Program,” Daus said.

Securing The Homeland

Maybe all those cameras everywhere are good for something after all:

Surveillance cameras have captured the faces of criminal suspects in banks, in elevators and on street corners. But they have also surfaced in an unexpected law enforcement role: as evidence against police officers accused of misconduct or of lying on the witness stand.