Masturbators Of The Universe

First the entire financial services industry collapses, then the skirt gets all uppity. These guys just can’t win:

They shared their sad stories the other night at an informal gathering of Dating a Banker Anonymous, a support group founded in November to help women cope with the inevitable relationship fallout from, say, the collapse of Lehman Brothers or the Dow’s shedding 777 points in a single day, as it did on Sept. 29.

In addition to meeting once or twice weekly for brunch or drinks at a bar or restaurant, the group has a blog, billed as “free from the scrutiny of feminists,” that invites women to join “if your monthly Bergdorf’s allowance has been halved and bottle service has all but disappeared from your life.”

. . .

Some women in the group said the men in their lives had gone from being aloof and unattainable to unattractively needy and clinging. Others complained of being ignored — one, who called herself A.P., wrote on the blog that three weeks had passed without her boyfriend “asking a single question” about her life. Another wrote, fearfully, that her beau had told her to make a list of their favorite New York restaurants before the bad market forced a move to the Midwest.

“Next time you are stressing over some finance guy, remember that he is just a math-club nerd,” one woman wrote after recounting a breakup. “This recession just bought everyone an extra two years of the single life.”

All You Need To Know

It’s simple:

With costs ballooning to replace two Bronx parks that were bulldozed for the new Yankee Stadium — the latest estimate is almost $195 million — the city’s Independent Budget Office said on Tuesday that more than $16 million of the higher expense “remains to be explained.”

The latest cost is almost $79 million over the 2005 estimate of $116 million, which itself was considerably more than the $96 million figure based on “conceptual designs” in an environmental impact statement using 2004 dollars.

The Yankees will be using their new $1.3 billion ballpark for opening day in April, but Little Leaguers, tennis players and picnickers are unlikely to have access to all eight replacement parks until the end of 2011, a year later than promised, the budget office said in a report.

Mission Accomplished

Maybe you wondered why the MTA would actually bother with like six separate public hearings about fare hikes and service cuts — how different could each hearing be? But the genius part of it is that this way they’ve gotten at least six different “hits” in the media about how indispensible the M8 or the B75 is. Who would want to cut transit subsidies now? Screw the zoos . . . and the school band:

For the past nine years, Carroll Gardens senior citizen Vida Ebrahim has relied on the B75 bus to get her to church, the supermarket and the occasional trip to the movies.

This spring, the MTA may eliminate Ebrahim’s route along with five others in Brooklyn to cut costs, a move that would leave commuters scrambling.

“They’ll cut my life,” said Ebrahim, 78, who collected 100 signatures to keep the B75 running. “The train is completely out of my reach. I can’t go up and down the steps. I get out breath and my knees and hips hurt.

“I’m hoping that they don’t harden their heart and take away the bus, because I’d be lost without the bus.”

The MTA is holding a public hearing Wednesday night at the Marriott Hotel in downtown Brooklyn from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m., where riders are expected to sound off to transit officials about the proposed cuts.

From The Presidential Dais Ex Machina

Talk about “moral hazards” . . . so basically the city can gamble on getting huge tax revenues from Wall Street in flush years and then get bailed out by the federal government when all that disappears:

President Obama’s economic stimulus package will send nearly $3.4 billion in aid to New York City.

According to Sen. Chuck Schumer, the funds — part of the $10 billion to $15 billion in federal stimulus money the state is expected to receive — should help the city offset its budget deficit and aid shortfalls in education funding.

Schumer (D-N.Y.) said he fought to include in the stimulus package a provision to send budget aid directly to cities — to ensure New York City gets its fair share.

“This is a lifeline. This is the biggest shot in the arm the federal government has given New York City in a long time,” he said.

The package includes about $1.8 billion in budget aid for New York and $1.6 billion for education, Schumer said.

Maybe you don’t consider the city’s workforce bloated — eh, maybe it is, maybe it isn’t — but a economic stimulus via unionized workers’ paychecks doesn’t quite strike me as the sort of “shovel ready” project we’ve been reading about . . . besides, what happened to all those green construction jobs?

Apparently most of the “budget aid” is intended for Medicaid. Medicaid spending is higher in New York — fine. But the stimulus package isn’t so much about Medicaid as it is about stimulating the economy, right? And if the city doesn’t have to spend that money on Medicaid then they’ll spend it on other stuff that cities spend money on — like labor costs — it’s not like they’re going to build a bunch of bus stops.

Another note — and it’s an honest question and not a lazy rhetorical trope of “raising questions,” because I honestly don’t know the answer — didn’t the governor just expand SCHIP or propose expanding it? So is the “stimulus” a back-door way of funding it?

How About We Try A Little Experiment?

Given that special elections are so complicated and prohibitively expensive, especially in this economically fraught time, we could just go a year without a Bronx Borough President. It might prove instructive:

The Bronx borough president’s chair is still warm, and the Benjamin Franklin Reform Democratic Club is trying to figure out who’s going to sit in it next.

The Riverdale-Kingsbridge-area political club hosted beep hopefuls Assemblyman Ruben Diaz Jr. and City Council Majority Leader Joel Rivera at a meeting last week. Both men explained their qualifications for current Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrión Jr.’s job and didn’t debate directly, according to people who attended the meeting.

Ever since Mr. Carrión’s slip of the tongue at a speaking engagement at Yale last year, it’s been widely rumored that he will go to Washington, D.C. to head the Office of Urban Policy under President Barack Obama.

. . .

If Mr. Carrión leaves, Mayor Michael Bloomberg would have to call a special election — but since no announcement has been made, Ben Franklin leaders have postponed any endorsement until their annual meeting at the end of this month.

I mean, it’s already the case that the Office of the Borough President has no real authority — a fact that even leads some legislators to look into the possibility of creating a sort of shadow borough presidency:

The leadership deal that resulted in the Democratic Party taking a majority in the state Senate for the first time in decades included a little discussed agreement that gave Riverdale and Kingsbridge lawmaker Pedro Espada Jr. leeway to lead a legislative coalition on Bronx economic development.

Mr. Espada describes it as “an active coordinating council that will really work to do the things that the borough president can’t do by statute.”

He says it will include the Bronx delegations to the City Council, Assembly, state Senate, and Congress, and will be funded by the state Senate’s Democratic majority. A spokesman for state Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith deferred questions about the plan’s details to Mr. Espada.

“Its ultimate goal and mantra would be to remove the designation of the poorest county in the state,” Mr. Espada said.

Borough presidents have a degree of oversight over all aspects of city government in their county, but long-term strategic planning for economic development is a special part of the job description. Mr. Espada has long coveted the borough presidency.

Among the policy ideas Mr. Espada has for the post is creating an authority, similar to the city’s Industrial Development Agency, to issue bonds for public works exclusively in the Bronx. The IDA issues bonds for big capital projects like Yankee Stadium — a controversial deal itself — and is overseen by the city Economic Development Corporation.

“Simply put, a borough president should have the bully pulpit, and that will continue to be their main job description,” Mr. Espada said. “They don’t really have any legislative authority.”

Riverdale and Kingsbridge politicians familiar with the deal aren’t sure why it’s been a stealth program. Mr. Smith’s office hasn’t made any official announcements about it and it’s still unclear whether the plan will stick.