"We're not going to back away from tactics that work," says @MikeBloomberg on stop&frisk.

— Mike Grynbaum (@grynbaum) May 18, 2012

It's your Friday morning fun time with Mayor Mike on the radio, and he's serving it up hot as usual today. And he's not doing any favors for the presumable next mayor, Chris Quinn, who wants to know about how banks treat poor neighborhoods before the City keeps its money there.

Harsh words from @MikeBloomberg on Quinn's banking bill: "city going into regulatory business of banking sets probably a new low for idiocy"

— Mike Grynbaum (@grynbaum) May 18, 2012

.@MikeBloomberg on @ChrisCQuinn's living wage bill: "Last time you had a big managed economy was the USSR and that didn't work out so well."

— Mike Grynbaum (@grynbaum) April 13, 2012

It's Friday, so it's the day that New York City Mike Bloomberg says tons of wild stuff! The living wage bill, if you haven't been tracking, provides a guaranteed minimum wage for people who work on some projects that have New York City subsidies. It will affect literally hundreds of people. Heh. Perhaps 500, and those workers would be guaranteed at least "$10 an hour with benefits, or $11.50 an hour without benefits." [...]

Earlier this month, Becca Simone’s music appreciation class at Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School in Brooklyn, NY, sat down to a test. It was four pages long. The test started with:

1. List three characteristics about the Bronx in the 1970s:

2. What type of music was popular during the 1970’s when the hip hop movement was beginning?

And once the students got through those (and the 28 questions following) they were met with the essay question:

Part 2. Write a brief (about 5-8 sentences) response about the hip hop movement. What about it do you find interesting? How has the music changed over the years (i.e., in terms of [...]

I have had an NYPD-issued press pass twice. In New York City, the press is "credentialed" by the police department, independently of the City, at its discretion. The process is slow and you have to go downtown for quite a while. Both times I have been very careful to play their game. You have to bring published clips, among their required materials, that prove you need to deal with things like "robbery scenes, fires, homicides, train wrecks, bombings, plane crashes, where there are established police or fire lines at the scene." Now I'm by no means a real reporter's reporter, but I succeeded both times by bringing past stories that [...]

Today would be a good day to take a pass on attending Occupy Wall Street's "General Assembly" at 7 p.m. (although the 6 p.m. meeting on "Organizing Effectively Without Hierarchy" sounds cool and the 2 p.m. Structure Working Group meeting is a blessed thing). Because tonight, you're going to find out who's a cynic and who's naive, and it's going to get heated consensus-style, as the group addresses Mayor Bloomberg's demand to come in and "clean up" Zuccotti Park, starting tomorrow. The park's landlord's letter to the NYPD, dated Tuesday, asking for help, is full of practical, liability-insurance-based complaints but also has plenty of nonsense, and it's the [...]

The discrimination case brought against Bloomberg LP, by 80+ lady-with-children-type workers, has been dismissed. (Fun footnote: Bloomberg's manner at his deposition was described as "testy and sarcastic.")

Mayor says one utility of stop & frisk is that it discourages gun possession, since NYers think they could be stopped by police.

— Mike Grynbaum (@grynbaum) May 11, 2012

"The number of guns that we've been finding has continued to go down, which says the program at this scale is doing a great job," says mayor

— Mike Grynbaum (@grynbaum) May 11, 2012

Mike Bloomberg's weekly Friday radio chit-chat time went short this week, but—like every Friday—he still managed to let a real doozy rip. (Previously: "usually when we roll up they frisk themselves.") Something something "attachment mayoring."

"I live in one place" says @MikeBloomberg, who owns homes in London, Bermuda, Vail, Westchester, Hamptons, and Upper East Side.

— Mike Grynbaum (@grynbaum) March 30, 2012

Big day for Mayor Mike, shooting his mouth and/or foot off. Charming or wacky? Scary or fun? It's so hard to decide with him.

What do you call a giant extrusion from your museum? If you're the Hirshhorn Museum, you announce that it shall be named the Bloomberg Balloon. The structure, which Diller Scofidio + Renfro will cause to be inflated from the museum with more than a million bucks from Bloomberg LP next year, is already generally referred to around D.C. as "The Bubble." But no more! Enjoy your "Bloomberg Balloon."

We demand that Bloomberg LP also announce that no funding for the structure was derived from participation in any bubbles before we start calling it a balloon.

So Mike Bloomberg's eviction of Occupy Wall Street has actually resulted in a large protest this morning that is actually occupying Wall Street. You just know there's a team of mayoral advisors, familiar with the First Amendment, who are sitting in an office right now with their arms crossed, being all "la la la, told you so." More good pics here. Arrests are already taking place.

Photo by CBC superfox David Common.

This is a neat bit: Mayor Bloomberg gets to respond to the letter sent by four officials who represent downtown Manhattan and agree that Occupy Wall Street is a Menace 2 Society in the Hood. But the letter has three claims: drumming is too loud at night (that's already fixed), there's public urination (likely not that fixed, but then, welcome to New York), and there are too many police barricades. WHY WON'T OCCUPY WALL STREET TAKE DOWN THEIR POLICE BARRICADES? So Bloomberg's response? “It’s an occupation of a growing, vibrant residential neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, and it’s really hurting small businesses and families." With police barricades. [...]

ANGRILY SHAKING MY HEAD. (From Rebecca Mead's subscriber-only Talk of the Town today on Diana Taylor, who is Mike Bloomberg's human companion.) Good grief, go back to undermining unions, Wilbur Ross, before we send in all the mannish professional women who don't care about showing you their legs.

Just after that one significant law passed on Friday night, Mayor Bloomberg and City Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn met up downtown to make another important announcement: A balanced, on-time budget for Fiscal Year 2012. Details of that budget are still emerging, but the official press release boasts, “We saved … libraries.” But “saved” is relative. While no sources are sure of actual numbers yet, the agreement should prevent branch closures and lay-offs, though service is still likely to drop from six to five days.

Make no mistake, this was a much better outcome than many library supporters were expecting. But this year's wrangling also represents [...]

Mike Bloomberg's "passion for flying and owning helicopters puts him in a rarefied circle, occupied by the likes of Clint Eastwood, Harrison Ford and Gisele Bündchen." ——I personally don't find that particular circle terribly rarefied!

Enjoy the optics of your next mayor, Christine Quinn. (The New Yorker, subscription-only.)

Here is the iPhone app that lets you see (iTunes link) the Department of Health sanitation ratings around you, or in your neighborhood, or by name. The City, in announcing their app, very carefully suggests some data in praise of the grades—salmonella is down! Eating out is up!—but doesn't go so far as to suggest causation. As you can't. But yay! Total information awareness nannystate! FEAR THE B GRADES, ALL THOSE EGGS ARE SLIGHTLY WARM.

What’s next for the Occupy Wall Street movement as it regroups after its eviction from Zuccotti Park? A small but energetic group of New York City education activists hope the Occupiers will channel their rage toward Mayor Mike Bloomberg by taking a closer look at his local school reform record.

Last Friday at noon, some two-dozen of these protestors, many of them black and Latino parents with kids in the public schools, crowded the sidewalk on the east side of Zuccotti Park. Pack the book bags of our kids! Not the pockets of the rich!, they chanted. They mostly failed to attract the attention of the hard-core Occupiers—the tent-dwellers—who were [...]

It's been quite a morning for Occupy Wall Street, which didn't find out until nearly this morning's deadline that the City was going to back down from evicting the protest for "cleaning." Here's how it all went down for them (and some others too).

I get all suspicious when I hear about a "growing outcry," in the classic Times parlance. This particular "outcry" is said to have led to the cancelation of Mike Bloomberg's weekly radio chatfest, and is over the resignation of deputy mayor Stephen Goldsmith, who is at least five different kinds of schmuck. (This is snowstorm removal failure dude!) The mayor's office said he was leaving to pursue private sector work; but when Goldsmith resigned, he himself cited his recent arrest, which has now been made public. This "hiding" of a "crucial detail" (more Times parlance) has "engulfed his administration in controversy" and has "roiled New York’s political [...]