Will the position of "Public Advocate" finally be eliminated? The recent compensation commission glossed over this. How do you increase the salary of a position that, well, doesn't do much? (The same applies to borough presidents.) If you're the compensation commission, you just simply ignore these minor facts, look at the current salaries, and raise them all proportionately.

In today's NY Post is "Betsy's Car $$: Scramble to Pay Auto Bills." The Public Advocate position is just about done.

NEW YORK POST LINK

Arizona dedicated its $500,000 9-11 Memorial last month. It hasn't escaped the Little Green Footballs crowd that there are some anti-American statements on the memorial.

One LGF poster today even went so far as to say this:

"Some facts:

"The memorial is in fact shaped in a crescent if you take into account where the names end and the single piece of iron for the rest of the sculpture begins, its a perfect crescent.

"The hole where the sun is allowed to shine on the piece from the WTC is in the exact position that the star would be on the Islam Crescent.

Here's a real Hevesi scandal. On October 20, 2006, Diane and Arthur N. Abbey donated $50,000 to Alan Hevesi's campaign. Arthur Abbey (chairman of the board of trustees for New York Law) suddenly decides at the last minute to give $50,000 to a crook?

"I made a mistake," Alan Hevesi tells us of "Driving Mrs. Hevesi." Yes, the NYS Comptroller stealing $83,000 (the figure is certainly more) is not good. But Alan Hevesi is a career Albany politician. This is like Al Capone getting nabbed for tax evasion. There is much more to Alan Hevesi's political career than "one mistake."

Ben Smith has reported that Hevesi is now running attack ads against Chris Callaghan. He would do himself and his party well by going away quietly. Hevesi has no shame.

New York City has many tall buildings. Is there really no law at all against climbing up or jumping off tall buildings?

A BASE jumper who tried to jump off of the Empire State Building made the front page ofthe Daily News ("Holy Chute!"). In his defense this week, his lawyer argued that there's no law against what the BASE jumper was planning to do (from the NY Times article):

"Mr. Heller said that his client, Mr. Corliss, had made more than 1,000 jumps around the world, without hurting anyone. Besides, the lawyer said, there is no law against jumping off a building in New York State."

We were all wondering what the New York Times would do. Wonder no more.

Hevesi has reached that "Nixon moment," that time when even your friends tell you to pack it in. Wow!:

But one of the main jobs of the comptroller is to make sure people who handle taxpayers’ money understand the very clear line between their personal expenditures and the public treasury. There is no way Mr. Hevesi can fulfill that vital role anymore.

Kevin Walsh's "Forgotten New York" website is now a book. Forget those double-decker tour buses and their "entertainers"! (See prior post.) Read a book and walk NYC yourself!

Francis Marrone has written wonderfully on New York himself, and he reviews Walsh's book in today's New York Sun:

Kevin Walsh started his Web site,"Forgotten New York," in March 1999. It rapidly became one of the most popular New York City-related Web sites, with a core viewership of fanatical devotees who, like Mr. Walsh himself, see and live in another New York, a city with a past, and a city of parts, where the small, the local, and the authentic exist in as great abundance as you please.

What's gotten into George Soros? Why does this holocaust survivor seemingly hate Jews, hate Israel, and hate America?

We all know about Soros' famed hatred of George W. Bush. But how many know that he provided money for the legal defense of Lynne Stewart? Lynne Stewart, the woman who received 28 months for treasonous acts?

Soros also supports the Human Rights Watch. (See my prior posts on that.)

This is from Hillel Halkin's "Tsuris From Soros" in today's New York Sun:

Mr. Soros has not been renowned in the past for his devotion to Jewish causes. He has in fact avoided them like the plague. Until recently he has let it be known that Jewish solidarity was based on "tribal loyalties" that he considered himself to be above and that Jews and Israel were responsible, by virtue of their self-centeredness, for much of the world's anti-Semitism    

Before we left New York City, my wife suggested that we take one of those $50, hop-on/hop-off bus tours. I could spot the tour guide's errors for a mere $100! I declined. [Years ago, I did give my "Big Apple" work to Apple Tours--for free.]

Not to be missed is Douglas Feiden's Sunday Daily News article, "Tall Tales & Ticket Sales: Tourists pay big, but get sham history." Central Park is biggest than Liechtenstein? All the city's guns are stored in the Arsenal in Central Park? Irish immigrants formed the NYPD after they built Central Park?  Central Park workers are required to sleep in the park 10 days a year? Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote the poem on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty? Bad history, all of that!

Sidney Zion's Daily News article on the autism bill pending in Congress has been re-printed in other newspapers. (See previous post.)

Now is the time for Mayor Bloomberg--who has always been interested in public health, and whose undergraduate college of Johns Hopkins is a leader in autism research--to act.

Mayor Bloomberg has still not said or done a word.

A research study in Cornell (and a Slate article) both this week suggest a link between television and autism. That's wrong!! See Time Magazine, "A Bizarre Study Suggests that Watching TV Causes Autism":

Wait a minute! I can't find it! No editorial at all? It must be here somewhere...

The Sunday New York Times endorsements are here. I particularly enjoyed this line about Congressman Peter King (also in the title to this post): ... ... "(The Times was also in Mr. King’s cross hairs, for writing — treasonously, he says — about a secret terrorist-surveillance program.) We do not support Mr. King, but not because he wants us in jail. Our decision has to do with temperament, effectiveness and differences on issues from taxes and Iraq to abortion and immigration." ... ... NEW YORK TIMES ENDORSEMENT LINKS: ... Eliot Spitzer for Governor: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/22/opinion/22sun2.html

The President of Iran said today that Israel will be destroyed, and that he plans to build a nuclear weapon.

In a civilized world, no one would stand for this. Countries across the world--France, Russia, Germany, and all the rest, especially the NATO powers--would put an immediate stop to this madness.

Human Rights Watch (the Village Voice's "Best of New York"), did you listen to this? Is there some part of the "we're going to build a nuclear device and we'll finish the job Hitler started and kill all the Jews" that someone doesn't understand?

From the AP:

Mayor Michael Bloomberg can do more than anyone else in the world to help cure autism now. Right now!

My nephew is severely autistic; he's 14 years old, and he can't speak to me, and he's 6'1" and almost 300 pounds. I corrected the Oxford English Dictionary and found the first English citation of the word "autism," in the August 1912 New York Hospitals Bulletin.

Sidney Zion writes strongly about autism in today's Daily News, "Texas Tyrant Stiffs Autistic Families":

It comes down now that a guy named Joe from Texas is blocking the Congress of the United States from helping to combat autism.

Republican Rep. Joe Barton, by dint of his chairmanship of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, has thus far been able to keep from the House floor a bill that unanimously passed the Senate and would deliver $900 million for research into this disease, which afflicts some 1.5 million Americans.

This week's issue of the Village Voice presents the "Best of NYC." Not to be missed is the love letter to Christine Quinn, urging her to run for mayor. The best local media show is NY1's "In the Papers"?  The best reform in a city of skells is the NYC Campaign Finance Board? The issue is mostly devoid of politics and heavy on clublife. Websites are surprisingly rarely mentioned (no best political blog?).

Most disturbing is best human rights watchers--Human Rights Watch:

Amnesty International has the name and reputation, but Human Rights Watch pours out more vital information from its Fifth Avenue offices than any other major watchdog keeping an eye on us humans. What we like most is HRW's ability to call 'em as it sees 'em. Take executive director Kenneth Roth, a former federal prosecutor. Roth's dad escaped from Nazi Germany in 1938, but that didn't stop Roth from taking Israel to task in August. In typically direct, lucid language, based on solid, on-the-ground reporting, one HRW report noted: "The pattern of attacks [by Israeli forces] in more than 20 cases investigated by Human Rights Watch researchers in Lebanon indicates that the failures cannot be dismissed as mere accidents and cannot be blamed on wrongful Hezbollah practices. In some cases, these attacks constitute war crimes." Whew!

What's up with Councilman Miguel Martinez? Is he a crook or is he just really, really bad at campaign finance?

From today's CFB press release:

October 17, 2006—The Campaign Finance Board today found in breach of certification and assessed penalties against the 2003 Manhattan (District 10) City Council campaign of Miguel Martinez for materially misrepresenting that the campaign received cash contributions in the manner described and documented by the campaign.

The CFB assessed a $10,000 penalty and breach of certification.