Mayor Bloomberg Has Thoughts On Health Care . . .

The lesson being, if you ever start a sentence by sneering “the last time I checked,” you probably should have actually checked:

Mayor Bloomberg Friday interrupted a radio health care discussion to blurt out that drug companies — and their execs — don’t make big bucks.

“Last time I checked, pharmaceutical companies don’t make a lot of money,” he said on his WOR-AM radio show. “Their executives don’t make a lot of money.”

Someone must have quickly rechecked, because he backpedaled after a commercial break.

“I looked up the top pay of some of these executives in big pharma,” Bloomberg said.

“Some of them are making a lot of money. Some of them are making a decent amount of — more than a decent amount of money.”

Corollary: Voters probably don’t care about what you think about R&D costs . . .

Dude, You’re Standing In The Middle Of Times Square In A Big Fuzzy Red Suit

Of course people are going to want to take pictures:

The dirty and creepy character demanded money from people and, when he didn’t get it, swore and jostled them.

“No picture. No picture. You have to tip Elmo. You have to tip Elmo or Elmo gets angry,” the imposter shouted as he stuck a filthy red paw over a Texas tourist’s camera lens.

“What the hell, Elmo? Keep your hands to yourself,” shouted Victoria Vought, 47, pulling away.

Wide-eyed at the loud to-do, Vought’s son, Dylan, 4, asked, “What’s wrong with Elmo, Mommy?”

“That’s not the real Elmo. That’s a bad Elmo,” she quickly explained.

Yankee Stadium Firsts: First Couple To Fetishize Sports Facility By Using It For Something Non-Sports Related

“Couple becomes first to get married at new Yankee Stadium in The Bronx.”

As Howard Wolfson Might Say, “It’s Ancient History”

After the Wolfson campaign went after Bill Thompson’s comptrolling, the Observer’s Azi Paybarah points out that not only did Bloomberg endorse him in 2007 but there are also several of the mayor’s appointees on the pension board.

Cheaper, Easier Collars

Another possibility is that they’re just being more “efficient” by hanging out and waiting for every tiny infraction:

Merchants and drivers in Riverdale and Kingsbridge say an ongoing city ticket blitz is bad for business — but the NYPD denies that there’s a ticket blitz at all.

By the NYPD’s count, the numbers of parking tickets given out this year are down by a sizeable margin across the city and a considerable one in the Bronx, with 874,541 tickets issued so far, compared with 905,428 during the same period in 2008 — 122,055 of those in the Bronx compared with 136,926 during the same period last year.

How is it possible to reconcile what many people say they see on the streets with the police’s accounting? How do the numbers from the last two years match up with those over a longer period of time? A representative of the NYPD’s Deputy Commissioner, Public Information says the police no longer have data from 2007, so they say there’s no way of knowing.