Little Ralphie Parker, Realizing That His Gun-Toting Ways Were Long Behind Him, Decides To Cash In

You can turn in your BB guns for cash in the Bronx:

Although not normally lethal, BB and air guns sometimes are used by criminals to scare victims into thinking the weapons are conventional, deadly handguns.

People who surrender such weapons Jan. 23 at several churches in The Bronx will be given a $50 gift or cash card for each BB gun turned in, up to a $150 cap.

The churches will also accept regular guns.

BB guns retail for between $40 and $60.

That’s What We Were Waiting For In A Third Term!

Huge cost overruns and corrupting influences from Bloomberg gadgets:

While he made $250,000 a year from the city to devise the payroll system, CityTime, Salamone was running a full-fledged lobbying business.

During the past four years alone, he was paid another $1.4million by firms such as Sun Microsystems, Symantec, Keane Inc. and Intergraph to lobby the Bloomberg administration for additional computer contracts, city records show.

And since he is a retired city employee, Salamone, 69, also collected more than $50,000 annually in a city pension.

So how did he find all that extra moonlighting time?

A spokesman for the city’s Office of Payroll Administration, when notified of the consulting business, said Salamone never disclosed his other interests to agency chief Joel Bondy.

“While Mr. Salamone was not a city employee and did not recommend any purchases or consultant hires for [the] project, we will be reviewing the matter,” the spokesman said.

The CityTime project has ballooned from an initial price tag of $63 million in 1998 to nearly $700 million today and has fallen years behind schedule, with only about 45,000 city workers using it.

Now This Is What We Were Waiting For From A Third Term!

Another campaign against another food additive . . . and the Campbell Soup Company weeps big, salty tears as they shake in their boots, hoping against hope that Supernanny Bloomberg finds another blighted neighborhood or some great new gadget to focus his attention on instead:

On Monday, the Bloomberg administration plans to unveil a broad new health initiative aimed at encouraging food manufacturers and restaurant chains across the country to curtail the amount of salt in their products.

The plan, for which the city claims support from health agencies in other cities and states, sets a goal of reducing the amount of salt in packaged and restaurant food by 25 percent over the next five years.

The BATC Editorial Board weighs in:

• First thought, Wow, it’s pretty ballsy for a city government agency to attempt to change the food industry. Second thought, This might work, but… Third thought, Hey, wait, why is a city government agency doing this? Don’t they have something better to do with their money and time?
• The Health Dept. is really cheesing me off now. Just glory hogs using the agency as a stepping stone. I buy that transfats are bad, but salt is not universally bad for you, and it’s a lame slippery slope to other goofy shit, like smoked/charred foods (possible cancer link), or whatever else. Fewer glossy ad campaigns, more stuff like vaccines.
• But maybe they don’t have something better to do…? Salt is a big issue in the American diet, that’s not in doubt, the question is just what to do about it and who should lead the change. Even if pressuring the food industry to change its ways — a la the transfat issue — is the way to make us healthier, I think it’s still something I’d feel better about seeing come down from the Surgeon General (beats talking about masturbation, anyway) than Bloomy.
• I’m guessing they do have a lot of better stuff to do, including vaccines, probably HIV/STD campaigns & education, probably putting money into their low-income clinics. I just really, really mistrust glossy media-whoring campaigns like this.
• There’s good point about whether this is more appropriate for a federal agency — right now, most of the places that have taken on trans fats (and who knows who will jump on the salt bandwagon) are cities and counties on the coasts . . . not places with a vested interest in making those salty, trans-fatty foods.
• Yeah, I’m not always against half steps, but I don’t think tweaking the ingredients in processed foods is going to do all that much good for public health. Processed foods represent a host of problems for people who overconsume them. Cutting transfat isn’t cutting the actual fat in the diets of people chugging Oreos, and cutting salt in canned soup isn’t going to do much for hypertension either.
• The food industry muzzles the truth, which is that there just aren’t many processed products that come with a shelf life that are actually healthy for you. It might be worse for the average American to get the idea (we call it a “health halo” around here) that now that x, y, and z REALLY BAD ingredients are out, now that box of fatty o’s is totally fine to eat at will.
Posted: January 11th, 2010 | Filed under: Feed, Follow The Money, Things That Make You Go "Oy"

---

Say It Ain’t So, Bill!

If you weren’t already discouraged enough by the city’s recent mayoral election, Wayne Barrett piles on:

If voters had a vague sense that this was a mirage of a mayoral election, what follows is a damning set of facts that shows that these two supposed opponents were actually far more connected than we ever knew. They shared a very personal and subterranean agenda, the funding of a project dear to Thompson’s heart. Remarkably, Bloomberg continued pouring new money into a project that benefited Thompson even in the heat of the campaign. It is a connection begging for explanation, but Thompson would not answer virtually any of the post-election questions posed by the Voice.

Stranger still, Bloomberg’s press managers refused to provide any public information about that project — a museum — in the lead-up to the election, prompting me to tell the mayor’s press secretary, Stu Loeser, that he was more helpful when I was writing an exposé about the mayor than when I was reporting on the mayor’s opponent. Since November, however, the city agencies that once stonewalled me have piled public papers on my desk.

Here, then, is the story about Bill Thompson that Mike Bloomberg didn’t want you to know when he was running against him.

It starts with a single, unsettling fact: The mayor has directed or triggered between $43 million and $51 million in public and personal subsidies into a museum project led by Thompson’s current wife and longtime companion, Elsie McCabe-Thompson, dumping $2 million of additional city funding into it as late as September 30, in the middle of the mayoral campaign.

. . .

We do know, though, regardless of what the museum becomes, that this is not the way it should have been built, one compromise atop another, a memorial to machination. The sheer size of the Bloomberg subsidies, as well as his eagerness to add to them right into October, has cast a cloud over an election already darkened by the unprecedented end-run around two popular referendums. The bizarre specter of a mayor unloading public funding on a project so tied to his public bookkeeper and eventual opponent has distorted democracy, both in the years before this election, and in the only moment when New Yorkers, at least theoretically, had their say. If legitimacy is necessary to govern, even for the richest man in New York, he cannot rig consent.

See also: Bloomberg For Mayor 2009.

All The News That Bit Now Shits

My metro section seems thin today:

The dining room at the paper’s headquarters on Eighth Ave. and 40th St. was shut down Thursday after several employees fell ill with digestive problems.

. . .

The culprit is rumored to be the pasta salad, a source told the Daily News. As many as 15 staffers are sick, the source said.

Location Scout: New York Times Building.