I Grandstand, You Look Good Back Home — It’s Win-Win!

With any luck, Lee Bollinger personally will have strengthened Ahmadinejad’s public perception in Iran and possibly contributed to the delay of the clerical regime’s inevitable demise — that is, if anyone outside the Northeastern U.S. even notices what happens at Columbia:

Before Iran’s president took the stage at Columbia University on Monday, the university’s president, Lee C. Bollinger, sent out an early-morning e-mail message, calling on students and faculty “to live up to the best of Columbia’s traditions.” Yesterday, many critics questioned whether Mr. Bollinger had met that test himself.

On campus and in editorials across the nation, on political blogs and throughout academia, there was a sharp division of opinion about Mr. Bollinger’s pointed introduction of the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as a man who exhibited “all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator” and whose denial of the Holocaust was “either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.”

. . .

Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said Mr. Bollinger’s speech was counterproductive.

“If you invite someone, you have to be polite,” he said. “Ahmadinejad scored points, especially in their culture. If you permit an enemy to come into your home, you still treat him with dignity and respect. Therefore, we lost. The points that President Bollinger made were fine. But to close with insulting words almost undid everything he said before. It was not a good teaching experience.”

Maybe He Can Bring His Wreath With Him

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won’t be allowed to lay a wreath at Ground Zero but he will be allowed to speak at Columbia:

The Iranian Mission to the United Nations requested the invitation through a professor in the Middle East department, Richard Bulliet, who is a specialist on Iran.

“Opportunities to hear, challenge, and learn from controversial speakers of different views are central to the education and training of students for citizenship in a shrinking and dangerous world,” the dean of SIPA, John Coatsworth, said in a statement. Mr. Coastworth invited Mr. Ahmadinejad to kick off a series of lectures and events about Iran, he said in a statement. The president of Columbia University, Lee Bollinger, is scheduled to introduce Mr. Ahmadinejad on Monday to an audience that will be made up exclusively of Columbia students, faculty, and a few invited guests.

Mr. Ahmadinejad was invited by SIPA to speak at Columbia last fall, but Mr. Bollinger revoked the invitation on the grounds that he could not ensure that the program would reflect the academic values of the university. In his talk on Monday, Mr. Ahmadinejad will field questions from the audience and from Mr. Bollinger on his government, as well as his views on Israel and the Holocaust.

Those Who Receive The Cash Transfer Can’t Believe It, While Those Who Haven’t Taken It Can’t Believe It’s Real

In the mayor’s plan to outbid poverty, participants seem very pleased:

For Wayne Logan, a single father of two, being selected for the city’s experimental cash-rewards program for the poor was like hitting the lottery.

“I’m happy. I’m grateful,” he declared, sounding somewhat amazed at his good fortune.

“To get paid to do things I’m doing anyway is a welcome feeling.”

Logan, 49, was among the first enrollees in a daring $50 million pilot project launched by Mayor Bloomberg with private funds to pay poor families as much as $5,000 a year simply to do the right thing.

A child getting a library card is worth $50.

A student who passes a standardized math or English exam is eligible to get a $300 payoff for each.

Complete two dental visits a year? That’s $100 in your pocket.

Logan insisted that almost all the 28 activities prescribed by the city are already on his checklist.

He was recertified for Medicaid (worth $40), gets an annual checkup ($200), and recently took his son to the dentist.

. . .

Surprisingly, only 3,000 of the 5,100 families selected for the program signed up by Sept. 1, leading officials to extend the deadline by a month.

Half of the families will be in a control group that doesn’t receive benefits.

Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs said some families in the six neighborhoods picked for the program “found it hard to believe it’s real” and didn’t enroll.

But she said officials intend to track down the non-responders because “we want to see how incentives work in those hard-to-engage households and those who are the poorest of the poor.”

Wouldn’t He Also Say That Trading On Sept. 11 Cred Is “Ghoulish”?

The first rule of politics is never to exaggerate easily verifiable claims:

On at least three occasions, in responding to accusations that the city failed to adequately protect the health of workers in the wreckage, [Presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani] has boasted that he faced comparable risks himself. In one appearance he declared that he had been in the ruins “as often, if not more” than the cleanup workers who logged hundreds of hours in the smoldering pile.

Another time he brushed aside safety claims by asserting that his long hours at the site had left him susceptible to “every health consequence that people have suffered.”

So, how much time did Mayor Giuliani spend at ground zero?

A complete record of Mr. Giuliani’s exposure to the site is not available for the chaotic six days after the attack, when he was a frequent visitor. But an exhaustively detailed account from his mayoral archive, revised after the events to account for last-minute changes on scheduled stops, does exist for the period of Sept. 17 to Dec. 16, 2001. It shows he was there for a total of 29 hours in those three months, often for short periods or to visit locations adjacent to the rubble. In that same period, many rescue and recovery workers put in daily 12-hour shifts.

(Who’s ghoulish now?)

To Answer The Obvious Followup, Because I’m Running For Mayor, That’s Why!

Step one is easy:

Independence Party activist Lenora Fulani yesterday renounced for the first time her past anti-Semitic rhetoric as she declared she’s considering a run for mayor.

Fulani had previously refused to disavow her 1989 statement that “Jews had to sell their souls to acquire Israel” and had to “function as mass murderers of people of color.”

. . .

But at a press conference on the City Hall steps yesterday, Fulani said, “My comments reflected my feelings about the situation during that time. I felt it important to stand up for the people I thought were singularly oppressed.

“The language I used was harsh and today I would call it excessive,” she added, insisting she “never intended to express anything demeaning or derogatory to Jewish people here or in Israel . . . I do not view Israel as an aggressor.”

“In light of that, I am repudiating my remarks of 18 years ago,” she said.

Step two — explaining how you’re a member of a quasi-Republican, anti-tax party to a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans five to one — will be a little more difficult, I imagine.