Now That Bush Is Out Of The Way, Can We Agree That This Might Not Be The Best Idea?

Did the NYPD’s vaunted* counter-terrorism unit blow the FBI’s cover? Who knows:

Zazi had been under FBI surveillance, but the criminal complaint against him suggests NYPD officers acting without the bureau’s knowledge may have blown their cover by questioning Afzali, who is an imam in the New York City borough of Queens.

“They came to ask me about your characters,” Afzali told Zazi in a secretly recorded Sept. 11 telephone conversation. “They asked me about you guys.”

At least one of those New York Police Department detectives, referred to in the recently unsealed criminal complaint, works for a division that operates independently from an FBI-run terrorism task force.

The complaint also suggests investigators may have tipped off Zazi, a 24-year-old Denver airport shuttle driver, by towing and searching a rental car he was using on a New York City trip that heightened fears of an attack.

The maneuver, authorities say, produced evidence of bomb-making instructions retrieved from a hard drive on Zazi’s laptop.

But it also apparently didn’t get by the suspect: In the phone conversation with Afzali, Zazi said the car’s disappearance convinced him he was being watched.

NYPD and FBI officials have denied that the potential missteps forced their hand in a series of high-profile raids last week, prompted Zazi to abort his New York visit and caused friction between the two agencies, which work together through the Joint Terrorism Task Force.

And the Times notes that it’s actually misleading to consider the NYPD one monolithic entity because there is infighting within the department:

Current and former police and federal officials said the approach to the imam, and the resulting disruption, added to a long history of tensions and rivalry between the New York Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which in recent years have developed a new dimension: a clash of sorts within the Police Department, between its two primary antiterrorism units.

Those tensions, according to police and federal officials, have led to communication and coordination problems between the two police units and between one of them, the Intelligence Division, and the F.B.I. The other unit, the Counterterrorism Bureau, oversees the more than 100 detectives assigned to work with the F.B.I. on the Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Bumbling police departments are a time-honored tradition — see Seasons 1-5 of The Wire! — but imagine the Congressional hearings that will take place if one day something like this actually costs lives . . .

*The New Yorker published one of the worst puff pieces during the Bush Administration.

Greatest Country Ever

Eid-al-Fitr at Chuck E. Cheese:

For at least five years, Muslim families originally from Beirut and Bangladesh to Khartoum and Kuala Lumpur have flocked to Chuck E. Cheese on Eid, which marks the end of the month-long Ramadan fast. The tradition has spread from Bedford-Stuyvesant to Bay Ridge entirely by word-of-mouth.

Voters, Like Sniveling Little Adolescents, Most Hate Hypocrites

A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips*:

As a billionaire in one of the dining capitals of the world, he can eat anything he wants. But he is obsessed with his weight — so much so that the sight of an unflattering photo of himself can trigger weeks of intense dieting and crankiness, according to friends and aides.

His food issues have become New York City’s. Although he has described his battle against unhealthy foods as common-sense public policy that will shed pounds (and save lives), many of his targets overlap with his own cravings.

“I like a Big Mac like everybody else,” he confessed the other day, explaining the city’s warts-and-all approach to fast food. “I just want to know how many calories are in it.”

Under his watch, the city has declared sodium an enemy, asking restaurants and food manufacturers to voluntarily cut the salt in their dishes by 20 percent or more, and encouraging diners to “shake the habit” by asking waiters for food without added salt.

But Mr. Bloomberg, 67, likes his popcorn so salty that it burns others’ lips. (At Gracie Mansion, the cooks deliver it to him with a salt shaker.) He sprinkles so much salt on his morning bagel “that it’s like a pretzel,” said the manager at Viand, a Greek diner near Mr. Bloomberg’s Upper East Side town house.

Not even pizza is spared a coat of sodium. When the mayor sat down to eat a slice at Denino’s Pizzeria Tavern on Staten Island recently, this reporter spotted him applying six dashes of salt to it.

And then there’s the concept of Asshole-In-Chief:

When he does not like the food, he rarely holds back. After dining at Blue Smoke, Mr. Meyer’s barbecue restaurant on East 27th Street, the mayor told Mr. Meyer, “I just don’t like it.”

Mr. Meyer tried inviting him back, but the mayor would not budge. “It never feels good when somebody tells you they don’t like your restaurant, but it’s nice when a politician does not pander,” he said, adding that the mayor has heaped praise on Union Square Cafe.

*In fact, Thompson should consider making this a slogan of sorts, e.g., you think it’s OK to suspend term limits just this once, but consider the deleterious long-term effects . . .

The First Real Bloomberg Reelection Metric: Padma’s Dry Cleaning Bill*

At the risk of making Thomas Farley weep fat hypertension-inducing tears, as Tom Colicchio might say, this is undersalted:

Nothing perhaps encapsulates the approach of the Bloomberg campaign better than its primary night event, where people were invited to “celebrate” the evening with the mayor, essentially congratulating themselves for supporting his decision to put himself on the ballot again. In a space big enough to park a few airplanes, with enough drink tables and salt-free pretzel carts scattered between the sign-up tables to make the scene seem more massive multicultural bar mitzvah than political rally, people picked up the buttons or posters that fit them best, whether African-Americans for Bloomberg (written in African national colors) or Ferry Riders for Bloomberg. They stuffed themselves full with free brownies and blondies. They cheered every time Padma Lakshmi, the model and Top Chef host, arrived at a pre-selected face in the crowd to talk up another aspect of the volunteer effort.

The safe, scrubbed atmosphere of the event, for which the campaign is not disclosing a price tag before the scheduled Oct. 2 filing, paralleled Bloomberg’s vision of the city as a place that is easy, non-intrusive and wholesome, one perfectly encapsulated by Lakshmi’s introduction, which began with the Indian beauty confiding, “I sleep at night because Mike Bloomberg is my mayor.”

She grasped for reasons why, beyond being able to use credit cards in taxis instead of having to carry around a wad of cash and being able to go to a bar without having her hair smell like smoke afterward. But Bloomberg helped her along when he took the microphone, delivering an unusually cutting speech keyed to match with the “Progress, Not Politics” placards that had been distributed through the crowd he called his “grassroots supporters.”

*In fact, Wolfson should start integrating this Reagan-esque concept into campaign appearances — e.g., “Is your dry cleaning bill cheaper now than it was four years ago?”

OK, Really, Fuck You

Maybe I’m cranky having seen Bloomberg’s “New York Minute” ad — you know, the one where the narrator says how running New York is “the second toughest job in America” — right after the actual president was on David Letterman, but I think there are a lot harder jobs out there than installing lawn furniture on Broadway.

First, the phrase “second toughest job” has pretty clearly always been used in either a self-deprecating way of referring to serving as the mayor of an “ungovernable” place or as an “Aw Shucks” euphemism for the mayor of New York in AP reports reprinted in far-flung places. But I don’t think any of these people actually thought being mayor of New York was that tough — or at least has been since the bad old days of Abe Beame.

For the record, here are some people in the public sector that I think have a marginally more difficult job in 2009: Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is somehow managing California’s $25 billion debt (see here for relative sizes of economies); Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, who is managing a military undertaking two difficult wars; how about General Stanley McChrystal? — while Obama said little on Letterman about New York’s traffic congestion, he did have a lot to say about Afghanistan; Tim Geithner’s job seems like it has been pretty tough; even Schools Chancellor Joel Klein’s job seems tougher than Bloomberg’s; and while we’re talking about mayors, I think both Adrian Fenty (D.C.) and Cory Booker (Newark) have it a little tougher.

And because the campaign ad either skipped or overlooked that portion of the phrase that usually indicates “elected officials,” that means we can meditate on which people in the private sector also have “tough” jobs. That friendly man on the GM ad seems like a good place to start! Any of these jobs seem about fifty times as complicated as walking in a parade or banning smoking. We could go on . . .

All of which is kind of a symbol of the Bloomberg Era of New York: If Jimmy Walker or, I don’t know, Mad Men has taught me anything, New York was once kind of a swinging sort of wink-wink place that didn’t take itself all that seriously. Bloomberg (and not 9/11) has made New York insufferably earnest — from nanny statist initiatives to this absurd notion that anyone west of Morristown or north of Milford gives a shit about what the mayor of New York thinks. Bloomberg’s campaign using the phrase “the second toughest job in America” sincerely is the quintessence of Bloomberg’s megalomania, not to mention a perfect snapshot of his humorlessness. To make matters worse, running that ad right after Obama was doing something historic on television (e.g., spending an hour on a talk show) showed a complete lack of self-awareness. Do you really want four more years of that?