This Candidate Kills Islamofascists (And Urban Poverty!)

Just as he did for Bush in 2004*, Rudy Giuliani argues that only Michael Bloomberg can save us from the post-9/11 specter of international terrorism:

Former mayor Rudy Giuliani warned Sunday that crime rates could soar to 1990s levels and the city could again be a victim of terrorism if Mayor Bloomberg doesn’t win reelection.

Giuliani’s dire predictions came during a tag-team campaign swing – the first time Bloomberg has tapped the one-time GOP star for help on the stump this election season.

“This city could very easily be taken back in a very different direction,” Giuliani told a crowd of ultra-Orthodox Jews at a breakfast sponsored by Brooklyn’s Borough Park Jewish Community Council. “It could very easily be taken back to the way it was with the wrong political leadership. Politics is important. It’s important toour safety. It’s important to our security.”

Bloomberg said that New York could become another Detroit.

“We all know that cities have gone through great boom times and then turned around and collapsed. Take a look at Detroit,” he said. “It went from a great city with lots of good-paying jobs to a city that’s basically holding on for dear life. All of our gains are always in danger of being turned around.”

*(“The former mayor said he believed that Mr. Bush was in the better position to protect the country from further terrorist attacks. ”One of the reasons the world is safer now is that we are going out and trying to find our enemies and demobilizing them,” he said. ”I was sitting there in Congress the night Bush announced the Bush doctrine. And I remember leaving that night feeling better that the president of the United States had reversed 20 or 30 years playing defense” against potential enemies, he said.”)

See also: Bloomberg For Mayor 2009.

Assuming We Can, We Ask Ourselves, “Are We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For?” And We Sit Back And Think “Yes, Yes We Can, At Least I Think We Can”

If you parsed this any more it would mean nothing, but I think Robert Gibbs means something along the lines of “Bill Thompson is a real man for all men”*:

On Friday afternoon, when much of the political world was transfixed by President Obama’s surprise Nobel Peace Prize, the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, was asked a seemingly throwaway question about the New York City mayor’s race, the last inquiry of a busy news briefing.

“Can you say who, exactly, the president supports in the mayoral race up in the city?” asked a reporter from The Daily News.

Mr. Gibbs at first seemed to mock the question. “New York-centric over there,” he said. “There’s more than one city.”

After a few moments of playful banter, he offered this: “The president is the leader of the Democratic Party, and as that would support the Democratic nominee.”

Who would that be? Mr. Gibbs did not say. But he did manage to invoke another name — Mr. Bloomberg’s.

“The president,” Mr. Gibbs said, “obviously has had a chance to, throughout campaigning and in his time both as a candidate and as a president, to meet, know and work with Mayor Bloomberg, and obviously has a tremendous amount of respect for what he’s done as well.”

When asked later to confirm that the president had, in fact, endorsed Mr. Thompson, a White House spokesman said that he had.

As word of the quasi endorsement reached Mr. Thompson, his campaign scrambled to issue a statement.

It read, “Yes we can in New York City: President Barack Obama supports Bill Thompson for mayor.”

Mr. Thompson rushed to his campaign office in Midtown Manhattan to hold a press conference. He stood at a lectern in a cramped room, beaming. “Let me just say how proud and honored I am to have been endorsed by the president of the United States today,” he said. “Obviously, he thinks I’m going to be the next mayor of the city of New York.”

*As in.

I Love Football On TV, Shots Of Gena Lee, Hanging With My Friends . . .

. . . and twins:

Seventeen months out of Rutgers University, they live in an unwelcome continuum of mass rejection. Between them, Kristy and Katie Barry, identical twins who grew up in Ohio, have applied for some 150 jobs: a magazine for diabetics, a Web site about board games and a commercial for green tea-flavored gum; fact-checking at Scholastic Books, copy editing for the celebrity baby section of People.com, road-tripping for College Sports Television.

They did not get any of these. More than a year has lapsed without so much as an interview. Apparently, even a canned response was impossible in New York.

Are You Fucking Kidding Me?

Of course it’s just the Queens Gazette, but with all the talk about how the NYPD may have actually bungled the FBI’s recent terror bust, I kind of can’t believe the Gazette’s “editorial board” is arguing what they’re arguing:

Three weeks ago, suspects with ties to terrorist groups abroad were arrested here and in Denver, Colorado. The investigation that led to the arrests continues as we speak. Those arrests and the ongoing investigation that continues to ensure New York City’s ranking as the safest big city in America are due in large part to the efforts of the man the Gazette endorses for a third term as the city’s chief executive. Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office on Jan. 1, 2002, and for the last seven years has made the counter-terrorism measures of the New York City Police Department at home and abroad of equally high priority to police street and index crime eradication efforts.

Maybe it’s meant to be an ironic endorsement.

Because It’s Always Important To Understand Why 19 Frustrated Virgins Would Fly Planes Into Buildings

Do you give a fuck what drove these assholes to kill thousands of people? I’m not sure I really care:

The museum being built at the site of ground zero will display photos of the 19 men who hijacked the four airliners on Sept. 11, 2001, and may also include printed quotations from the so-called martyr videos they made before the attacks, in an effort to “create an accurate historical record,” the museum’s president said Friday.

The images of each hijacker will be roughly 4 inches wide and 6 inches tall, and mounted on a wall of the underground museum’s primary exhibition. The museum is exploring the idea of displaying some quotations next to the pictures, but no final decision has been made, and no text has been selected, said Joseph C. Daniels, president and chief executive of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum at the World Trade Center.

“We will not, and we do not, want to hide the truth of what happened, and identifying those who did it is core to that,” Mr. Daniels said. He added: “It answers the question of who did this. Let’s show the world the 19 individuals who boarded planes and murdered so many. To not do that would be a major disservice to the public.”

We really do live in the greatest country in the world.