11. Everyone in New York knows you don't get between Chuck and a camera.

10. Two words: Caroline Kennedy.

9.  Chuck was planning on council run this year, but won't due to term limit extension.

8.  Any New Yorker who doesn't live near Park Avenue knows you don't stick your finger in front of a two-foot rodent.

7.  Chuck's a Mets fan, but the Yankees got the sweetheart deal.

6.  The Mayor delayed Chuck's $400 rebate too long, so he still has to live in a hole in the ground.

5.  Chuck's a Democratic consultant, and his phone hasn't rung yet.

4.  Eminent domain forced Chuck out of Willets Point.

3.  Chuck thinks the Mayor should pick a party and stick with it already. 

2.  Payback for zoo's budget cuts.

And...the Number one reason Mayor Bloomberg should have seen it coming: 

1.  According to today's Times, the Mayor got Chuck fired (perhaps he saw him playing Solataire in his hole)! 

Secondly, I'm not into sports, granted, but if your Sunday news show has the PRESIDENT ELECT on it, it should start on time. But in any case, I watched most of the excellent President-Elect Obama interview on my DVR until it cut off tonight and, um, WHAT WAS UP WITH THE EXTREME CLOSE UP???

Totally inappropriate. As Paul Begala said, politics is showbiz for ugly people. President-Elect Obama is actually quite good looking for a politician, but those close ups where beyond anything I have EVER seen in a political interview. So much for the liberal media.

As if Mr. Obama is liberal. Um, 40 years ago, his politics would have been considered Republican.  

It has been pointed out to me that a few have them in their own right, or at least for reasons other than term limits, including Madam Speaker Quinn, who got her seat in a Special Election (as did Councilmembers Eugene and James and probably a couple of others).

So I will clarify: everyone in the Council has benefited from term limits, including the Speaker, who, um, woulnd't be be Speaker, if it weren't for term limits (and for that matter Una Clarke would probably have Mr. Eugene's seat if it weren't for term limits).

Um, they do know they have their jobs because of terms limits, right? (A point the Times neglected to mention.)

We have a word for this people: HYPOCRISY. 

Gatemouth, however, had a better comment (apologies for reproducing it in it's entirety)(emphasis added):

Judicial Delegate is a party position. Delegates get to attend and vote at the convention which nominates the Democratic Party candidates for Supreme Court in the Brooklyn-Staten Island Judicial District. It is a one-day job.

Like any other party office, unopposed candidates do not face any election; they win automatically without ever appearing on the ballot.

There are actually contested races for delegates position in three of Brooklyn's 21 Assembly Districts; however the 52nd is not one of them. Owens and the rest of the slate he is running on is unopposed.

Moreover, the day Owens posted his appeal, July 14, is four days after the deadline for filing, so Owens must have known at the time he posted his appeal for funds that he was unopposed and would not even be appearing on a ballot.

I have often criticzied Owens in the past, but never for dishonesty. In fact, in at least one instance I commended him for his honesty in public embracing a politically risky position I happened to disagree with. If Owens needed money for his expenses as an Alternate Obama delegate in Denver, for a future race, or to help others in their races, I would say he was within his rights to solicit those funds AS LONG AS HE STATED IT WAS FOR THOSE PURPOSES. Or, if he were running, even unopposed, for a party office such as District Leader, which actually had a term of office longer than one day, and therefore would entail more expense than one day's car fare.

But to say one needs $10,000 to run an unopposed race for judicial delegate is so fundamentally dishonest and disturbing that I am having trouble believing that Owens did it. It is so unlike him.

I was thinking of posting about this on my own blog, but I do so here instead in the hopes I will hear a plasuible explantion for something that is seemingly unfathomable. If I do here an even half-plausible explanation, I will leave it alone; I am not looking for a fight with Chris Owens; just a credible explanation.

Honestly, Chris, I am sure you can understand why I raise these issues; normally, it is the sort of issue that I expect you to raise yourself.

Mr. Owens is the current President of the Central Brooklyn Independent Democrats, which is a "reform" club. I believe that Mr. Owens has called himself a "reformer"; in addition, he is a frequent commenter on this site. Maybe he doesn't read The Daily Gotham, and no one pointed out the post to him, but Gatemouth's comment is approximately 24 hours old (an eternity in blog time), yet there's been no response from Mr. Owens.

So, I will ask generally the same inquiry: As this $10,000 is clearly not about running for a position that is uncontested and won't even appear on the ballot, please come clean and tell us what you are really raising money for.

But it does list (in handy graphic form!) the people her campaign owes the most money to; it's pathetic that these organizations continued to enable her after she had statistically little chance of winning and was already so far in debt:

[For the record, the estimate of $30 million I was using was a bit high, it's only estimated at $21 Million now, $11 of which she owes herself and has to pay back this year or she'll lose most of it.)

Like it or not, money makes politics go. If you can't raise enough money to keep going, or don't have a personal fortune to spend, then you should not be able to keep running.

She had the nerve to stay in this thing for months after it was statistically highly unlikely that she could win. How does she justify continue putting her campaign millions and millions of additional dollars in debt to keep running a campaign that all but her most die-hard supporters knew was essentially over?

I, for one, have no desire to give her campaign a PENNY for debt relief. Even if she stated that she would only pay herself back after every debt is paid, it is completely unacceptable that she continued running up her debts while arguing she was still viable.

Her inabilty to raise enough money to keep going without incurring an outrageous amount of debt should have been proof enough that she was not viable.

Further, our money should be going to Sen. Obama, the DNC, Moveon.org and anyone else helping to make sure Sen. Obama wins and Sen. McCain loses. Any diversion of a single dollar to Sen. Clinton's debt relief is money poorly spent.

Sen. Clinton should pay everything she owes out of her own pocket and not even suggest that Obama or any Democrats help her pay it off.

Update 5 minutes later:

Who are her creditors that kept giving her services without being paid, when her anemic fundraising and high debt was already known? I don't mean the local print shops and caterers, but the people producing commercials and airing them or providing other high-cost services. These are sophisticated business people who, what, just assumed someone would kick in the money to pay them down the road? I have to say that any creditor owed more than $10,000 who extended this campaign credit since her second announcement of a loan from herself to her campaign doesn't deserve to get paid, because they never should have provided an indebted campaign these services. This is starting to feel like the mortgage crisis. You feel bad for the little people who default on their loans, but there's no sympathy for the mortgage companies that never should have given them loans in the first place.

Well, if Obama doesn't want her, maybe she can be John McCain's running mate.

Please help Mayor Michael Bloomberg get over the fact that Congestion Pricing was killed by the Assembly today.

Please help him remember that when he ran for Mayor in 2001 he was against congestion pricing and when he ran for reelection in 2005 he was against congestion pricing. So, really, anyone who disagrees with him now, agreed with him both times it was relevent: When they were deciding whether to vote for him.

I know Mayor Bloomberg is the Best Mayor since Mayor McCheese was in office in McDonaldLand, so he has the right to run for office on one position and then be the biggest bully in the world against people who have the audacity to agree with his position back when he was running, but disagree with him now.

And Lord, please help Mayor Bloomberg's bruised ego to heal. I mean, his ego must have shrunk to the size of Brooklyn by now, but we really need a Mayor with an ego the size of all of New York City.

Amen.

Please bless and keep safe New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn.

If Mayor Bloomberg, the greatest Mayor of any City ever in the History of the World says that Christine Quinn is "the most honest person" he knows, then she must really be something special and should get through this and become our next mayor.

I mean, I know Mayor Bloomberg has sycophants lying to him all the the time, but Mayor Bloomberg knows a lot of people, like way more people than I do, and I know a quite a few. Coming from a billionaire mayor with a rolodex bigger than some countries, him calling her "the most honest" says a lot.

So God, please let Speaker Quinn pass through this crisis and emerge ever stronger as a candidate for Mayor. Clearly, as the "most honest person" Mayor Bloomberg knows, he must be considering an endorsement. And why would she sell out her constituents so often to please him, if that wasn't a strong possibility?

With the endorsement by the Greatest Mayor Ever in the Known Universe, Madam Quinn clearly will win, right?

So God, again, please let the press accept her totally plausible explanations and move on to find something horrible about Rep. Anthony Weiner or Comptroller Bill Thompson or Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz. Mayor Bloomberg knows all of them, so they must all be less honest than Christine Quinn.

So God, please help the Fourth Estate do their job, exonerate Speaker Quinn and find the dirt on her less-honest opponents.

Amen.  

Please bless Silda Spitzer and the kids who are going through a horrible time right now.

The Politicker's top story right now is that disgraced Gov. Eliot Spitzer "hasn't decided" if he's going to resign. Although the press is clearly loving every minute of this story, this whole situation is just awful for regular New Yorkers. Please help Eliot Spitzer resign immediately.

Eliot Spitzer sold New Yorkers a bill of goods, that his crusading AG gig would translate into his being a great governor for New York and that everything would change on "day 1."

Day 1 came and so did the issues. He started off by pissing off the assembly with his "commission" to pick the new Comptroller after Comp. Hevesi's "WifeGate" err "Chauffergate" thing happened.

Then there was Troopergate. Then the Driver's License for undocumented people-gate. He managed to help pass the Same-Sex marriage bill somewhere in there, but overall it's been one disapointment after another.

And now the "Emporer's Club"-gate. Come on! What is wrong with these people? Hypocrisy does these pols in every time.

So God, enough is enough. Gov. Spitzer has been a miserable failure so let's give Lt. Gov. Patterson a whirl. Please help Gov. Spitzer realize that the longer he waits to resign, the more misery he's putting the people of New York though.

Amen.

I'm a good person. I am nice to people. I help my friends and family with whatever they need that's in my power to do. I give my seat on the subway to senior citizens (some of whom are much younger than John McCain) and pregnant woman all the time. I give money to and volunteer for good causes. I never cuss. I am nice to animals and I religiously recycle. I call my brother on his birthday, after 1PM as he works at night. I buy rounds of drinks not expecting that a drink will be bought for me. I don't treat people who have been less fortunate in life than me like I'm better than they are, because I know I was just lucky and I'm no better than than for having this luck. I usually clean my plate and eat my veggies. I play music at home and on my iPod low enough that other people can't hear it. But, despite being a good person, I have bad thoughts about John McCain. Sometimes, very bad thoughts.

I want bad things to happen to Sen. McCain. I don't think he's completely evil (he's no Satan or Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld; he's slightly below President Bush on the Evil-Scale, maybe the same level as Tony Blaire)(Nor is he as evil as Dr. Evil; he's semi-evil, the margarine of evil, the Diet Coke of Evil, just one calorie, not evil enough), but I do think he's terribly wrong about a lot of things. For instance, I worry about Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, the voice of liberal reason on the court; he is very very old, like he makes McCain look middleaged, old (Stevens is 16 years older!). He must be waiting for a Democrat so he can retire (he probably is kicking himself for not retiring when Mr. Clinton was president (Clinton was probably too conservative for his tastes)). Sen. McCain will appoint some god awful conservative like Scalia to replace one of the greatest liberal thinkers in American Jurisprudential History. And Justice Ginsburg is no spring chicken either and is a cancer survivor. I worry about her, too. Scalia, not so much.

So, I have bad thoughts. Some are only slightly bad, like I hope he badly loses his train of thought during a debate with the Democratic Nominee and starts rambling on and on until the moderator interupts. And then maybe he will fall asleep during the next debate.

Perhaps he can badly lose his temper (we all know he "flies off the handle"), and start screaming at staffers when he's on camera and doesn't know it, creating the "Macaca" moment of the campaign that gets a zillion hits on YouTube.

Maybe he can have a mild stroke while campaigning. He could collapse in mid-stump speech and be rushed to the hospital. Not a bad stroke, you know, no paralysis or anthing. Mild enough that he'd be on camera the next morning cracking jokes the way Reagan did the day after he was shot a bunch of times.

Am I going to a bad place after I die for these thoughts God? I just can't help myself. I think about how America's uninsured need health insurance. I want the tax cuts for the rich to expire so tax relief can go to people who really need it. I want the world to respect us again. I want as many of our boys and girls in Iraq to come home as possible. These things won't happen under McCain, and thus, I think bad thoughts.

I have to admit that, while I don't wish for it, I wouldn't mind if he dropped dead a week before the election. I realize that's a horrible thing to say, but I really wouldn't. But I know that gay people need rights. We really do. So do transgendered people. No go with John McCain, so I wish him ill and wouldn't care if he dropped dead.

So God, I guess I'm praying as hard as I know how that John McCain loses in November and that I not be destined for fire and brimestone for thinking the things I have been thinking; anything you can do to help would be greatly appreciated.

And, God, if you do decide to strike Sen. McCain down, can you please take Ralph Nader, too? he's really outstayed his welcome on this planet and hardly anyone would miss him.

Amen.