Remember The Maine, To Hell With Canadian Geese!

The Post treads a dangerousely Hearst-like line by inflaming the anti-geese passions of at least three middle-aged men in Queens:

New Yorkers clamored yesterday for flocks of geese near area airports to be killed to prevent them from taking out another plane like the US Airways carrier forced to crash-land in the Hudson.

“These geese are a blight,” said William Santos, 50, as he walked the World’s Fair Marina near La Guardia Airport, where more than 100 geese gathered. “The city has to get them out of here, just for our own safety, never mind the mess they leave behind.”

Another marina visitor, Jack Riley, 43, was more blunt: “They should have a hunting season here on these geese. Let the criminals shoot the geese instead of people.”

A collision with a flock of geese is being blamed for the engine failure of the US Airways flight.

Canada And Geese: Two Great Targets In One

And now that Canadian Geese have attracted the attention of the Post editorial board, it’s a bad time to be one:

It’s time to kill the geese.

It’s especially time to kill those geese most likely to wreck another jet airliner, much as a gaggle of Canada geese seems to have brought down US Airways Flight 1549 Thursday.

This time, all 155 passengers and crew were lifted from the icy Hudson River — an extraordinarily exceptional outcome.

Next time? Who knows.

Canada geese are a serious threat to human life and property — not to mention a major pain to pedestrians, motorists and folks who just like to spread a picnic blanket in a park.

Obviously, the official cause of the crash won’t be declared for a while. But nobody doubts that it was what pilots call a “bird strike” — just as nobody doubts that the guilty birds were Canada geese.

That’s because Canada geese are everywhere — and they’re out of control.

. . .

Beyond airport vicinities, it’s even harder to tamper with geese (let alone kill them) — even as they coat parks and playgrounds everywhere in layers of disgusting goose poop.

This is unsightly, unsanitary — and totally unacceptable.

Something needs to be done.

The Power Broker

The Times’ David Carr goes local and explains how the city’s major editorial boards slid into the tank for the mayor:

Mr. Bloomberg said that he understood the situation and did not take the people’s verdict lightly. “But as newspaper editorialists and others have pointed out,” he said, “the current law denies voters the right to choose who to vote for — at a time when our economy is in turmoil and the Council is a democratically elected representative body.”

It is no coincidence that Mr. Bloomberg cited voices from the city’s opinion leaders. With a fiscal crisis at hand, the business leaders of New York has already held a private referendum and decided who the next mayor should be. So in spite of his rather breathtaking grab for another term, there will be no opprobrium forthcoming from the editorial pages of the city’s newspapers.

Before Mr. Bloomberg took this controversial step — remember when Rudolph W. Giuliani got clobbered for seeking three more months in office after Sept. 11? — he made the rounds and locked up the support of the editorial pages of The New York Post, The New York Times and The Daily News, three city newspapers not known for moving in lock step.

. . .

To set the stage, the mayor had spent the last month making plain his interest in staying put at City Hall. He did not post a Web site or drop items in various blogs, but instead called Howard J. Rubenstein, a master of the city’s power grid. Meetings were set up with the owners of the daily newspapers, as well as with potential opponents and the city’s corporate overlords.

It was a gambit that would not have been out of place in the 1970s — or the 1870s, for that matter. This being a Bloomberg administration, there were no smoke-filled rooms, but there was definitely the sense that issues of civic moment were being handled in private environs.

“The only thing that my clients have been talking about for the past few weeks is the fiscal dilemma that this city is facing,” said Mr. Rubenstein, the public relations mogul who helped broker a deal in 1975 involving Abraham D. Beame, then mayor of the city, and Governor Hugh L. Carey back when the feds told the city to more or less drop dead.

“I did step up because I want to see the city survive and prosper,” Mr. Rubenstein said, “and I think we all agree that he is the person who we would like to see leading us through this crisis.”

In mid-September, after a year of talking on and off, Mr. Bloomberg and Rupert Murdoch, who owns The New York Post, met for dinner at an Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side and sealed a deal. Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of The New York Times, had two breakfasts with the mayor, and although no specific commitments were made, an understanding was reached.

Mortimer B. Zuckerman, owner of The Daily News, said he had no trouble throwing his support behind Mr. Bloomberg. He said there had been no cabal, no conspiracy, just three newspaper publishers all arriving at the same conclusion at a critical juncture in the life of the city.

“Suggesting that the publishers can decide who the next mayor is is a little like being a 90-year-old named in a paternity suit,” Mr. Zuckerman said on the phone. “I only wish we had that kind of power. I think he has been a remarkable mayor, we face tremendous challenges as a city right now, and it’s clear that he is the person for the job.”

Daily News Vs. Post, Too

More gloating, this time on the part of the Daily News:

You might want to think twice before you take any sweet-tooth recommendations from the New York Post.

Just Wednesday, the fact-challenged paper crowned a Staten Island bakery named Cake Chef as the best in the city for classic black-and-white cookies.

Too bad the Health Department shut the place down last week for a string of sanitary violations.

The Post crowed that the bakery on Jewett Ave. is “fabulous” and “one of the best in the city,” but inspectors ordered the place shut last Thursday after it racked up 62 violation points.

The place was deemed “conducive to vermin,” there was evidence of mice and workers’ personal cleanliness was rated “inadequate,” according to the report.

Yet With “Ramone And Groan,” The Daily News May Trump Both The Times And The Post . . .

On the one hand you have “Hey Ho — You Owe!”. On the other we see “Hey! Ho! Let’s Sue!” Now care to guess which is the Post and which is the Times?