via the New York Post

Just as the buzz about his presidential prospects was subsiding, Mayor Bloomberg yesterday declared his intention to speak out forcefully on "the big challenges we face as a nation."

The mayor flatly denied that he has any intention of becoming a White House candidate himself.

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via City Hall News

CH: Recently you requested that the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board hammer out some rules about personal versus public the use of the city car. They haven’t done that. What’s your approach to making those distinctions?

BG: If I’m in the city, in the five boroughs, I have to have what they call my package. And the package is security and a driver. The Speaker of the City Council has a full contingent of police, so they drive. And Bill Thompson and I don’t. So we never take the car outside of the city. We have a problem coming up in August—there’s a big senior picnic out in Sunken Meadow, which is in Long Island. And after that I’m going out to Long Island for the weekend. And so I’m now going to rent a car somewhere in Long Island, where my car will take me to rent the car and drive out.

via the Daily Politics

Gov. Eliot Spitzer continued to insist he has "cooperated fully" with the state Ethics Commission's ongoing investigation of Troopergate in spite of a report this morning that his administration has been clashing with the commission over the release of emails sent from private accounts.

"All I can tell you is I have cooperated fully, turned over everything they've asked (for)," Spitzer said. "Anything they've wanted,

via the Politico

"I'd like to see Hillary Clinton be president. It would be nice to see a woman be the actual president and ... this is a way for us to have Bill Clinton be president again, and he did a great job during his term," says the rapper 50 Cent, perhaps a bit off the campaign's message.

via the New York Sun

The speaker of the Assembly, Sheldon Silver, will stand opposed to putting the state pension fund under the control of a board — regardless of the results of investigations into the state comptroller's office, he said.

(more)

via the New York Times

This year Mr. Giuliani is no longer just the former mayor who led New York in the wake of the attacks, but a leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. So when the city announced that Mr. Giuliani would speak next month at the sixth anniversary of the attacks, some relatives of people who died on Sept. 11 said they were dismayed, some because they feared his presence might inject politics into the event and others because they had been critical of him in the past.

via the New York Times

Acknowledging his problems navigating the turbulent waters of Albany, Gov. Eliot Spitzer in recent weeks has reached out to a diverse group of prominent figures for advice in putting his scandal-marred administration back on course.

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via The Albany Project

With the Roger Stone story slowly wrapping up (hint: more to come), it's time for the Festivus-like Airing of Grievances. Today's edition concerns our friends at the MSM blogs; and let me start out with the observation that y'all are lame.

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via New York Magazine

Everyone agrees that, whatever else happened, the bizarre late-night phone call to Eliot Spitzer's dad was made on the evening of August 6, a bit before 10 p.m. Bernard Spitzer's lawyers says it came from Roger Stone, a Republican consultant; Stone says Democratic operatives broke into his Central Park South apartment and used his phone to frame him. He couldn't have made the call, Stone said in a statement posted to his Website, because "[o]n the night this call was allegedly made, I was at the theater catching the play NIXON and FROST [sic]." We'll ignore the ironies that Nixon is modern politics' greatest dirty trickster, that Stone worked for Nixon, and that the fulcrum of Frost/Nixon is a (fictional) bizarre late-night phone call. We'll just note this: August 6, 2007, was a Monday. And like many Broadway shows, the play, which closed this weekend, took that night off. "We were completely dark on Mondays," a rep from its management company told us.

via the New York Times

Lawyers representing Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s father, Bernard Spitzer, say a prominent political consultant who has been working for State Senate Republicans threatened the elder Mr. Spitzer this month in an anonymous, invective-laced phone message.

via Spin Cycle

Then there's the 'nothin' to see, show's over' counter-offensive attempt by the Democrats. In today's e-mail we receive a compendium of editorial comments of the 'let's get back to work' variety -- reminding some of us of Kissinger droning on behalf of Nixon, 'We must put Watergate behind us...' But okay, they've got to try.

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One veteran Dem, somewhat optimistically from the party's side, spoke privately of how strained the Bruno comeback has been in all this, saying: "Only Eliot Spitzer could have given Joe Bruno the high ground. And Joe, God bless him, is giving it back!" More in a while....

via the New York Daily News

Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno has been screaming for everybody and his brother to investigate the scandal swirling around Albany. Now, the state Ethics Commission has taken a look - and it has shot Bruno right out of the sky.

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via the New York Sun

Smokers have already been banned from New York bars and restaurants, and soon they could be prohibited from lighting up in cars carrying minors, an idea giving added fuel to critics who say the city has become a nanny state.

A City Council member of Queens who is chairman of the council's Environmental Protection Committee, James Gennaro, said he is planning to introduce the smoking bill next week.

via Huffington Post

Karl Rove, President Bush's close friend and chief political strategist, plans to leave the White House at the end of August, joining a lengthening line of senior officials heading for the exits in the final 1 1/2 years of the administration.

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via the New York Daily News

Aides to Gov. Spitzer stopped answering questions from Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's investigators after realizing that they, and not Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno, were in the cross hairs, sources familiar with the probe told the Daily News.

When Acting State Police Superintendent Preston Felton and Spitzer homeland security adviser Bill Howard showed up voluntarily for questioning, "They weren't expecting it was going to go in the direction that it would take," a high-ranking state official told the Daily News.