Self-promoting New York City Comptroller John Liu and former Mayor Ed Koch are in a public snit over objections made by the former over the latter’s name being affixed to the Queensboro Bridge, the New York Observer’s Azi Paybarah today reports.

Liu, a Queens native, questioned the suitably of naming the East River span after Koch in a 5:31 a.m. email to New York City Council Members last week, reminding them of a perceived Asian sleight Koch made in 1983, when Liu was going out with cheerleaders, as Moe Green might say  (has anything good ever come of a 5:31 a.m. email?)

Koch in turn wrote that Liu ought to be “denounced.” Denounced! Yikes; sounds so Comintern.

Liu no doubt will have something more to say about that. He has something more to say about everything.

For the record, I have no problem with the city naming the Bridge “The Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge.”  Just as long as they leave The 59^th Street Bridge alone.

It was bound to happen, and so it did. Red-light cameras, those disquieting eyes in the sky imported to New York City from the Soviet Union two decades ago, have leapt the divide onto American highways.

The unlikely importer? Ridgeland, South Carolina (pop. 2,579). The town 20 miles north of the Georgia border has hidden cameras in its bushes along I 95, Associated Press reports. Pass Ridgeland traveling at excessive speed – who doesn’t? – and, presto-zappo, you can expect a hefty Ridgeland speeding ticket to greet you at your mailbox when you arrive home, along with a photo of your face and license plate traveling together at said speed. If you don’t like it, drive 1,500 miles back to the Ridgeland courthouse and protest.

It’s like shooting Buffalo from a train.

Ridgeland isn’t the very first town to do this — nor will it be the last. Cedar Rapids, Iowa wins that award. It began a test project with speed cameras last year. Officials from both towns swear up and down that their intent is to slow traffic while in the vicinity, which is about as laughable as saying cigarette taxes are about the health of smokers.

It’s all about revenue of course, and Cedar Rapids and Ridgeland are in the driver’s seat as far as collecting it for the foreseeable future. They’re going to make a fortune – until every revenue-starved town with highway frontage starts doing it and America’s thruways are subdued.

There’s probably some German word for why this is so maddening. If there’s an English one I don’t know it. The closest word I can think of is “bullsh*t,” but that doesn’t quite capture it.

It’s for when you’re doing something you know you’re  not supposed to do — something EVERYBODY does ALL THE TIME — and then some jackass comes along with a night stick and singles you out for punishment. Like when the “safety patrol” officer in grammar school, the kiss-ass kid in spectacles whose mother was PTA president, wrote you up for “skipping steps.” You just kinda wanted to pound him.

That word.

Some laws are supposed to have flexibility, aren’t they? Do we bust jay walkers in Times Square? Do we measure and weigh people at the DMV when they fudge their weight and height? Is there no such thing as a wink in this country any more?

Maybe not.  Maybe what we are witnessing is the beginning of no-fun America, where every ticketable offense gets enforced to suck dollars out of the populace.

I wonder if Ridgeland and Cedar Rapids are up to code on everything…

Every family I grew up with had something weird about it. One kid’s family might be Buddhists; another might not watch TV. One of my neighbors ate fish for Thanksgiving, and one family only ate food served on homemade pottery, which they made on a wheel in their basement.

My family was no exception. Our peculiarity became known at school every Halloween. We weren’t allowed to collect money for UNICEF.

I first learned of this in fourth grade after moving to the suburbs from New York City. I came home with my bright orange Trick-or-Treat-for-UNICEF box, and was shocked to see my kinder-than-kind father shake his head upon seeing it that night.

UNICEF, it was explained, gives money to communist countries. And the money props up their leaders, prolonging the misery under which millions of people are forced to live. We don’t support that. We don’t collect.

To a nine-year old that’s heady stuff.  I’m not sure I even understood it, or explained it well enough to my teacher the next day, because I returned home from school holding another bright orange box.

“Surely your parents don’t understand,” she said handing me the thing.  Surely you don’t understand my parents, I thought.

That box went back, too, with a new message: If you’d like me to collect money for Catholic Charities this Halloween, I’d be more than happy to. They’ll send it to nice countries with children in need.

Roars of laughter from my classmates — and genuinely funny looks from the teachers in the hallway. I could swear I heard them whispering to one another: “did you know the O’Reillys are kooks?”

As I got older, though, I began to see wisdom in this singular protest. Money given to tyrannical regimes does prolong suffering. And isn’t freeing people enslaved by tyrants the greater humanitarian goal? Besides, much of the money gets siphoned away into arms purchases. Why would we fund the arsenals of our enemies?

I was thinking of my Trick-or-Treat-for-UNICEF trauma when reading last night about another emerging situation in North Korea.  The Hermit Kingdom is reportedly having a food crisis again, with as much as a quarter of its population facing starvation beginning in May.

This is 100% the fault of communist collectivism and the midget egomaniac, Kim Jong Il, whose personality-driven regime has turned 24 million of God’s creatures into automatons.  A satellite snapshot taken over the Korean Peninsula tells the whole story:  one half of the land mass is bustling and bright, the other half is all but dead.

But not dead dead. And that’s the issue. Does the world let things in North Korea gets so bad that people have no choice but to revolt and hang Kim upside down from a yard-high barstool, a la Mussolini? Or does the world feed his people and bail out the little prick again, knowing full well that he’ll probably pour the value of that magnanimity into his nuclear program?  Why should he spend money feeding his people when stupid Westerners are willing to step in and do it for him?

I moved back to the suburbs from the city three years ago with three children in tow. I was relieved to see them arrive home on Halloween Eve empty handed.  I don’t know that I have my parents’ strength.

As cynical as I am, I can think of no reason why I have to have my lights on tomorrow night from 8:30 – 9:30 p.m., so I suppose I’ll do this, even though I’m deeply suspect of political motives behind, well, just about anything .  For those of you who don’t know — I didn’t until an hour ago — Earth Hour has gotten pretty big around the globe in the past fews years, with many millions of people and companies participating.  Times Square will have signs go dark tomorrow night for example.

I can’t help wondering if this campaign, if ultimately  successful, could someday blow the National Grid.  Doesn’t power have to always be on somewhere for the thing to work?  Hopefully someone has thought of that.

Once my lights go out, though, I’m building a fire.  The people who started Earth Hour are probably the same people who want to ban wood-burning fireplaces, but hey, you can’t win ’em all.

Does this photo strike you as unusual, too? Looks like the Canadians are going to get it next.  What will be burned in effigy, hockey jerseys? Molsons?

Marcus Cederqvist

I received the note below from Marcus Cederqvist in response to a recent post on rent regulations.  Marc is an old friend and the former Executive Director of the New York City Board of Elections.  He is now Executive Director of the Manhattan Republican Party.  I can’t resist posting his remarks (below.)

I received an email a few days ago from a friend that he forwarded to a large group of people urging us to call the Governor’s office immediately and demand the renewal of rent regulations and repeal of all vacancy decontrols.  Further, the instruction was given to implore the Governor to tie the extension of rent regulations, albeit with the removal of vacancy decontrols, to the State FY12 budget due on April 1^st to leverage its urgency.

I do not live in a rent regulated apartment.  My wife and I moved into a one bedroom apartment last year and are very happy here.  I have lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan for my entire life, save four years in the tundra of western New York for college, and this is by far the nicest place I have lived as an adult.  In fact, it’s the first time I have lived in a doorman building since living with my parents.  Many of my neighbors in the building, however, most likely live in rent regulated units.

It is a typical 1960s era building that are fairly ubiquitous throughout the eastern part of the Upper East Side – about 20 stories high with approximately 200-250 units.  The garage downstairs is littered with late-model luxury cars, except on weekends, when it is virtually empty.  “Off to our house in the Hamptons” is a common refrain when we ask our neighbors what their plans are for the weekend.  They also seem to take a lot of vacations, regularly parading through the lobby in leisure attire with suitcases in tow and dashing into a Town Car to whisk them to the airport.

A majority of our new neighbors appear to be in their 60s or 70s, although that can be difficult to judge and I certainly wouldn’t be so rude as to ask in order to better ascertain an accurate survey.  During casual conversations in the lobby or elevator, we have learned that many of them have been here 20, 30 years or more, thereby adding to the likelihood that they are, in fact, in regulated units.  I don’t get the feeling that covering the rent is creating too much angst for them.  By contrast, my wife and I struggle to pay our rent and sacrifice many luxuries and indulgences to live here.  Nonetheless, we are extremely happy to be here.

Back to my friend – I replied to his email and told him that I support the renewal of rent regulations in New York City but felt that my wife and I were effectively subsidizing our neighbors and their vacations and second homes.  Within minutes, he sent a terse email back, with a robust “cc” list, accusing me of siding with landlords and the landlord lobby.  He further accused me of trying to push the middle class out of the city and jeopardizing the city’s tax base.

Frankly, I don’t really care about landlords and don’t see how my line of questioning would be viewed as advocating on their behalf.  Although many landlords are honest businesspeople who have the best interests of their customers in mind, many do not.  Those who own buildings with regulated apartments knew when they invested in the property that the rents were regulated and that was certainly factored into their cost of purchase.  Recent news articles even imply that landlords actually want the rent regulations renewed because, in the current economic environment, these not only guarantee that rents will not recede but that they will actually increase by action of the City’s Rent Guidelines Board.  A considerable majority of New Yorkers, like me, are neither landlords nor the beneficiaries of rent control and rent stabilization.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I have lived in two rent stabilized apartments in my lifetime.  I even received what is known as a “preferential rent” at both of these apartments.  For those who are unfamiliar with this term, a “preferential rent” means that the rent I was charged under the lease was actually less than the landlord was allowed to charge legally.  Although this might justifiably lead one to conclude that I was somehow gaming the system, the more pedestrian truth is that the landlord was not able to find a renter who deemed the unit worthy the rent he was allowed to charge.  The market collectively determined that the apartment was overpriced and they had to cut the rent.

I dutifully clicked “reply all” to my friend’s email to assure everyone that I did not believe that rent regulations should be allowed to expire.  Such a scenario is not realistic and would be incredibly destructive, chaotic, and cruel.  I continued that I believe rent regulations in Manhattan have created an environment dividing the “haves” from the “have-nots,” in this case those who have a great deal that they really don’t need on an apartment versus those who do not.  The second category is considerably larger but those in the first have considerably more at stake, thereby explaining their hysteria.  The only way to be in the first category is to have had the incredible fortune of good timing by moving into a regulated apartment many years ago or inheriting it from a family member who did.  Need proof of how good a deal it can be?  A friend recently confessed that her mother actually turns away business regularly so that she can stay under the income limit for decontrol.  Her mother lives alone in a huge two bedroom apartment that she has rented for several decades just steps from Central Park and overlooking one of the world’s most well known museums on Fifth Avenue in Carnegie Hill.  I doubt that lawmakers decades ago intended to retard economic activity with rent regulations but they clearly did in this case.  It’s hard to argue with Adam Smith’s theory that people act in their own best self interest.

The only rent stabilized apartments that my wife and I would be able to get are small studios or one bedrooms in walk-up buildings that actually turn over more than once every other generation.  When we are blessed with our first child this summer, there will be no available stock of affordable regulated larger apartments for us to choose from.  Anyone who has one, regardless of their circumstance, is well aware of the folly in ever giving up such an apartment – thereby creating a situation completely unique to New York City.  In most of the country, people move to smaller homes when they age and fewer people are living there because they can’t afford the larger home – here people in regulated units tend to stay because they can’t afford to leave.

In my email response I concluded by asking how my neighbors’ spending their money in Bermuda and the Hamptons helps the City’s tax revenue collection.  This was again followed swiftly by a response from my friend, albeit to a much smaller “cc” list, with the unsolicited public policy pronouncement that: MCIs (major capital improvement adjustments) should not be counted towards decontrol; that the minimum rent for decontrol should be raised to $3,000 a month; and that the income limit for decontrol should be raised to $300,000 and unearned and retirement income should not be included in such a calculation.

And there’s the rub – I seem to have touched a nerve.  My friend is 67 years old and raised a family in his current home – a gorgeous three bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side with views to die for.  The kids moved out long ago but he keeps himself busy with a successful law practice and investments on the side.  He also owns a condominium in Miami and a weekend house in Pennsylvania – and a beautiful Mercedes-Benz.  I clearly wasn’t going to persuade him to change his views.

I again hit “reply all” and wrote: “Here’s a simple proposal – anyone who has a rent regulated apartment cannot own property anywhere else.  That way we city taxpayers are not subsidizing a select few to bring their wealth elsewhere.  If they can afford to pay rent and buy property elsewhere then they can just as well buy something here and don’t need the subsidy.  That seems fair…”

He did not respond to that email, nor have I heard from him since.

I remember cringing at Al D’Amato’s television spots in his 1998 race against challenger Chuck Schumer. “Too liberal; too long” they blared, over and over and over again.

The ads rang maddeningly off-key to my ear, and, it seems, to the ears of a majority of voting New Yorkers who ousted D’Amato from the US Senate that year and elected  Schumer instead (Remember those “Who’s the Putzhead Now?” buttons?)

Don’t get me wrong. I thought Schumer was too liberal — and for far too long for that matter. I still do. But that drum had been beaten to death in  every Republican campaign between 1988 and then, and everyone was sick of it. The world had moved on.  The message had not.  It had become, as James Carville might put it, “yesterday.”

The exact same thing is happening with the public service unions today. They’re messaging has slipped into yesterday. The absolute brick wall the New York unions have run into with their call for a “‘Millionaire’s’ Tax” in New York demonstrates it. They have thrown everything they have at  it and they have failed.  Utterly.

The rhetorical equivalent of “too liberal; too long” for the unions has always included some variation of the words:

“Kids”;

“Greedy millionaires”;

“Our values”;

“Fairness”, and

“The middle class.”

And on television and radio it always come wrapped in a faux-warm female voiceover.

Over the past three months, that messaging — which made legislators leap to attention for a decade — has been systematically ignored not just in New York, but in state after state.  It has been employed tens of thousands of times at a cost of tens of millions of dollars on television, radio, internet, print, phone bank, and rally-sign communications to zero effect. The ads have become as ineffective today as Al D’Amato’s were in 1998.

The public employee unions have got to be worried. Yesterday has arrived.

Fast Tube by Casper

The Obama Administration has done a good job muzzling gaffe-prone Vice President Joe Biden lately. But there is an entire menu of Bidenisms and Biden statements available online for political exploitation. And God only knows what he might say tonight or tomorrow.

The video above features then Senator Biden promising an impeachment vote if a President were to engage in miltary action without the prior approval of Congress.  It’s making its rounds today for obvious reasons.

I’ve been wondering of late if Biden will remain President Obama’s ticket mate in 2012.  I personally like Biden — I get a genuine kick out of him — but I don’t see what he adds to the ticket.  His home state of Delaware is not a swing-state, and whatever gravitas he was supposed to have added to the Obama ’08 ticket has been milked dry.

The reason to keep Biden, I would argue, is to keep the ticket stable — to show no sign of political concern. But President Obama will need to win swing Midwestern states like Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Indiana to get re-elected.  It might make more sense to bring out of retirement Indiana Governor Evan Bayh, or, if there is a problem with female voters, to go with a Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington State.  Even a pro-oil Democratic governor like Montana’s Brian Schweitzer could be interesting.

Vice President Biden is an affable man, but the Administration cannot let him out in public. Is that really the ticket mate Mr. Obama needs?

Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers suffer from a mentally debilitating malady.  It is a disease that makes you think you don’t have it.  Hardly anyone talks about it anymore. It’s called rentregulitus and it turns otherwise rational people into blithering idiots for life.

There seems to be no defense against rentregulitus.  It is contracted through rent-controlled and rent-stabilized apartment leases.  Once you have one, you become subject to lifelong bouts of pretzel-twisting logic that hopelessly seeks to rationalize the artificial financial advantage you have been given over other New Yorkers.  There is no rational reason, of course, which must make this condition excruciatingly taxing on one’s mental faculties – like being locked in a room with a square peg and a round hole forever.

I have seem perfectly reasonable people beset by rentregulitus.  It’s brutal to watch.  The same thing happens every time. Stage One: They acknowledge they got lucky, like any normal person would.  Stage Two: They begin to complain about their landlord. Stage Three: They join their local tenant association.  Stage Four: They are packed onto buses to the state capital in the full throes of militant rentregulitus where they threaten legislators with political death if they don’t keep the fix alive.

It doesn’t matter their politics. I have been subjected to the shouts of ardent market-force advocates who explain with straight faces that “this is different.” A conservative Republican friend once feigned gayness in an attempt to keep a Fifth Avenue pad in which he was staying.  He went to court swearing to be the lover of the recently deceased tenant, his former business partner.

There is a tangential disease, too. It is called rentregulationconstituentitous.  The onset of that occurs when someone – Democratic or Republican — is elected to public office in a district with a large number of rent-regulated tenants.  The same symptoms apply: Utter irrationality within weeks.  Previously clear-thinking officials will throw all other principles under the bus to accommodate this beast.

I have worked for people suffering from rentregulationconstituentitous. It’s not pretty.  They are handed talking points by the leaders of groups called things like “People With Rentregulitus for More” and “Entitled Rentregulitus Tenants for Further  Entitelement.” Within a remarkable short period of time they not only digest these talking points, they begin to believe them so as not to feel like sell-outs. In short, they are robbed of their ideological souls.

I have observed two other things of note about rentregulitus over the years.  The whiter and richer you are, the deeper the case.  And sufferers are somehow rendered incapable of realizing that their otherwise rational neighbors – the ones without rent-stabilized apartments — not so secretly hate them.

Self-interest can be mentally ruinous.

In times of crisis, especially when troops are in the field, I tend to think American pundits should temper their remarks to give the Commander in Chief as much of a break as possible.  I have tried hard to do that on this site.

But the mixed messages consistently coming out of the White House are becoming truly bewildering.  It is impossible not to take note them.

President Obama said this morning that U.S. military involvement in Libya would be ratcheted down within days.  Then, in another interview, he re-defined our “exit strategy”. And now, Secretary of Defense Gates — on the very same day — is saying there can be no timeline on our military campaign.

What on earth is going on with this administration? Do they need Rahm Emmanuel and David Axelrod back?  Whatever they need to do, they should do it.   Because this is getting ridiculous.