Are Treasury Department Vending Machines Stocked With Too Many Transfats Or Something?

I mean, Pennsylvania Avenue is already a pedestrian mall between 15th and 17th Streets, so it can’t be that . . . then again, it has always been a dream of mine to have the mayor autograph a dollar bill:

CNBC host Larry Kudlow went on the air yesterday to report that “a very well-informed political source” had told him that the mayor would be named to replace Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

First In Crime And First In The American League

“Yankees caps seem to turn up on suspects and in police sketches more often than those from other teams”:

Gym-locker heists, bank robberies, daylight holdups — these New York City crimes have only one thing in common, and it is not the culprits.

It is the Yankees caps they wore.

A Modest Proposal

Let’s face it — pennies are annoying. Even if you don’t use them to clog up your sofa, it’s a pain to try to get ride of them. So this story about a thieving Home Depot automatic checkout machine on Staten Island made me think that best way to fix New York’s budget problems may be to “spare the change”:

On July 6, the reporter bought a screw priced at 56 cents. The tax was 5 cents, for a total of 61 cents. With 75 cents inserted, the receipt indicated 14 cents change due but just 12 cents popped out.

On Tuesday, the reporter bought a pack of key caps priced at $1.27. The tax was 11 cents, for a total of $1.38. The reporter put in $1.55 and got back just a nickel and two pennies.

. . .

Yesterday, a senior manager in Home Depot’s public relations division promised that a team would be dispatched to evaluate the machines’ operation.

Who knows how much money might be raised by invoking a temporary “spare the change” tax on all cash purchases. We’d see rising productivity in the retail sector — less change to count! In a time when the MTA is considering making Orwellian changes to the meaning of “unlimited”, it makes sense . . .

If I Can Make It There, I’ll Make It Anywhere

At least in a “little town” it doesn’t take a Freedom of Information request to uncover the nepotism:

Of course, it is not unusual for young people with connections to win choice internships in all kinds of workplaces. But the records offer a glimpse inside the social and power circles of the Bloomberg administration, which has accommodated dozens of young people with connections to the mayor’s friends, business associates and government appointees for the prestigious, if unpaid, slots.

Take Jacob Doctoroff, whose father, Daniel L. Doctoroff, was deputy mayor and is now the president of Bloomberg L.P. He had an internship in 2002. He was in the eighth grade.

“It was either that or going to summer camp,” Jacob Doctoroff said in an interview. Now at Yale, he recalled enjoying his stint at the mayor’s office of management information systems. “I truthfully couldn’t tell you how I got the internship,” he said. “But you’d be working with a bunch of 35- to 45-year-olds, and you didn’t have a sense that you were in an internship program.”

You Can Pin A Lot Of Stuff On Bloomberg If You Put Your Mind To It

The Times’ Jim Dwyer goes for gold:

Woven into the narrative, but largely unremarked on, is a shadow world: the private fund-raising that is now part of many public school budgets. Accountability for individuals who have made terrible mistakes is, if not simple, then reasonably straightforward. But figuring out the equities of private fund-raising in public schools would require the invention of an ethical supercomputer. Relentless fund-raising, nonetheless, is surely part of the chain of events that led to Nicole’s death.