Presidential Good Cop-Bad Cop

With predecessors like these of course Al Sharpton will see you as a friend:

The Reverend Al Sharpton, who has not endorsed a candidate for president, is heaping praise on Mayor Bloomberg and, in turn, criticizing the legacy of Mayor Giuliani.

Mr. Bloomberg changed the “tone of ugliness” in the city, Rev. Sharpton said, so that even when there is disagreement, those on conflicting sides still speak to each other.

“It is important that even when we disagree that we not have a climate of disagreeability,” Rev. Sharpton said yesterday at an annual rally held in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. at the headquarters of Rev. Sharpton’s National Action Network in Harlem.

“Michael Bloomberg has torn down the curtain of polarized dialogue in the city and he has done it in an effective way,” he said.

Craig’s Dissed

If I wanted to give you my number, believe me, I would have:

Are you the one I kissed New Year’s Eve?

That’s the question haunting dozens of New Yorkers desperately trying to track down the virtual stranger they hooked up with — or tried to hook up with — as the ball dropped.

“I am looking for the identity of the man I kissed New Year’s Eve night/morning,” wrote one lovelorn Upper East Side woman in an ad on Craigslist.

“You were wearing a black and white checkered/flannelish shirt. You decided not to stay because of the disorganized chaos. I love you! Find me!” wrote a guy from the Lower East Side.

“You were wearing a gold dress. Your friend dragged you out before I could get your number,” wrote another poster.

While most New Yorkers nursed hangovers, nearly 100 romantics posted heartfelt “missed connections” messages on the Web site.

“Mike – you kissed me at a house party on 96th and 3rd on New Years. From the moment I saw you . . . I wanted you,” wrote Anne Huynh, 22.

The actress said she was on the prowl in a hot purple dress at a party on the Upper West Side when she spotted Mike in a neighboring apartment.

She crashed the neighbor’s party to meet him, a “hot hybrid between Jake Gyllenhaal and Freddie Prinze Jr.” in a tux, strumming on his guitar.

They sneaked away for the first kiss of 2008. “I had butterflies in my stomach,” she said.

But she left him shortly after without giving or getting a last name or phone number.

“I just want to see him again, and tell him how much I like him,” she sighed.

At a restaurant in Brooklyn, Robby Hecker, 30, spotted a “beautiful” woman chatting with her parents. It wasn’t long before he was invited over to the table. But shortly after, the girl disappeared without leaving a name or a number.

You Fall 47 Stories, Miraculously Survive And Your Wife Won’t Give You One Lousy Pass?

Really though, it’s rare that you catch a doctor around here throwing around words like “miraculous”:

Alcides Moreno plunged 47 stories that morning last month, clinging to his 3-foot-wide window washer’s platform as it shot down the dark glass face of an Upper East Side apartment building. His brother Edgar, who had been working with him on the platform, was killed.

Somehow, Alcides Moreno survived.

He was given roughly 24 pints of blood and 19 pints of plasma and underwent an operation to open his abdomen in the emergency room because, his doctor said, they did not want to risk moving him to an operating room. As December went on, he endured nine orthopedic operations.

Yet somehow, Alcides Moreno, the man who fell from the sky, survived.

In his hospital room, amid all the machines that helped keep him alive, his wife, Rosario, lifted his hand again and again to stroke her face and her hair, hoping against hope that a simple tactile sensation would remind him, would help bring him back.

Then on Christmas Day, Alcides Moreno reached out — and stroked the wrong face.

“Apparently he tried to do it to one of the nurses,” Rosario Moreno said on Thursday, describing how she chided him, gently, when she was told what had happened. “I looked at him and said, ‘You’re not supposed to do that. I’m your wife, you touch your wife.'”

. . .

Surrounded by doctors who had helped save her husband, Mrs. Moreno told her story at a press conference at which medical professionals with long years of experience in treating traumatic injuries used words like “miraculous” and “unprecedented” to describe something that seems remarkable: a man who fell nearly 500 feet into a Manhattan alleyway is now talking and, with a little more luck, a few more operations and some rehabilitation therapy, may well walk again.

“If you are a believer in miracles, this would be one,” said Dr. Philip S. Barie, the chief of the division of critical care at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan, where Mr. Moreno, 37, is being treated.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Text, Too

Maybe the mayor should return from all that campaigning to get this straightened out*:

The Department of Education appears to be taking a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to its ban on students bringing cellphones into the classroom.

Administrators at public middle and high schools have loosened the city’s ban on cellphones — as long as the gadgets are hidden, students and principals told The Post.

Principals said that even before a City Council bill that prohibits interfering with a student’s right to carry a cellphone to and from school recently went into effect, it was “close to impossible” to enforce the ban.

One Queens middle school principal, who asked for anonymity because she was bucking the ban, said her students can bring their phones as long as they’re turned off.

*It obviously undermines his earlier hardline position — not good for a presidential candidate who needs to appear tough!

Keep Wes Anderson Far, Far Away From This Family . . . Or Should It Be The Other Way Around?

In case you ever doubted your parenting skills, there is new reason to worry:

The Goldbergs live on the top floor of a rent-stabilized building on Broome Street. The loft is airy and neat, with tall ceilings and skylights. Alex’s father, Richard, gut-renovated the place himself when he first moved in, in the early seventies. He now works as a wine consultant and has just uncorked a bottle of Côte du Rhône. He pours a glass for Alex’s mother, Robin, dressed in skinny jeans and a designer blouse, as they sit down to talk about their son.

Alex is “a phenomenon,” says Robin. “A self-made man.” She’s constantly surprised by how many people he knows. In California, a man recognized Alex from the salad line at Peasant. In the Hamptons, people ask, “Is that cool little kid your son?” Her trainer at the gym knows Alex; he bought shoes from him at NikeID. Occasionally, she even thinks about asking his help to get into places. “It’s cool,” she says. “He’s master of a universe that he’s created for himself.”

Richard credits Nolita for Alex’s development. “Look around,” he says. “Look at what and who Alex has at his disposal.” This is why Robin has worked to help keep the corporate intruders out of their neighborhood, at least as much as possible. Peasant will show him how to cook a goose; Starbucks won’t. “It’s hard to imagine Alex growing up the way he has anywhere else,” she says.

Robin worries, of course. She worries about “maintaining his childhood.” She worries that he’ll develop an inflated ego. And she worries that all the attention he receives for playing grown-up could lead to problems with other kids. While Alex does have friends his own age, like Julian Schnabel’s twin boys, Cy and Olmo, he can be a bit of a schoolyard bully. And earlier this year, Alex was temporarily suspended from school for calling his teacher a “dick” under his breath. His teacher needn’t have taken the comment personally. Alex curses at everyone, even his parents. “Like, he’ll be in the middle of the restaurant and say, ‘Fuck you, Dad.’ I mean, it’s crazy,” says Frank DeCarlo, the Peasant owner.

Richard and Robin try to discipline Alex about his language, but overall they’re lenient. In Miami, instead of grounding him for sneaking out, Robin let him hang out with the Delano crew all weekend. (At one point, Alex found himself chatting up three topless women on the beach. “He was literally surrounded by six grade-A Miami titties,” says Fernando Gil, a former “Page Six” reporter who met him there. “He was like a kid in a candy shop.”)

The Goldbergs don’t consider themselves a traditional family, and they’re proud of Alex’s precociousness and ingenuity. Richard is impressed when he goes to Knicks games with Alex and watches his son chat up Jay-Z and Beyoncé. He feels the same way when Alex calls from the golf course near his camp in Maine, asking him to send Cuban cigars by FedEx so he might bribe his counselors. Richard was never like that as a kid. He never had that uninhibited ability to create these kinds of opportunities. “All you really have to do is let him loose,” he says.

And for those of child-bearing age, a cautionary tale: Manhattan is better earned than learned.