De Blasio And Family Respond To Bloomberg's "Racist" Statement

 

How much Bloomberg has helped de Blasio's campaign with his "racist" statement remains to be seen.

Certainly the story has eaten up all the oxygen in the campaign today.

De Blasio's opponents all responded to Bloomberg's comments by defending de Blasio. 

While that's a nice and the right thing for them to do, it doesn't help them make any moves against de Blasio.

Someone on Twitter (can't remember who) said these Bloomberg comments are like the anti-endorsement the de Blasio campaign could have only been fantasizing about.

They've been running a "Bloomberg Divides This City" campaign and what does Bloomberg manage to do but underscore that campaign theme with divisive comments made about de Blasio and his family.

Three days until the primary.

Almost all the primary news today will revolve around Bloomberg's comments.

A large part of tomorrow's campaign news will still be about Bloomberg's comments.

We have just had two days of the Jewish holidays where campaign news was a bit muted.

This leaves Monday for Thompson and Quinn to try and break through the news cycle one last time.

Bloomberg did de Blasio a huge favor with the interview.

New York Magazine did de Blasio a huge favor too.

The interview with Chris Smith was conducted on August 6.

New York Magazine waited until the weekend before the primary to publish it.

Maximum damage, Democratic Primary edition.

Bloomberg: People Living In Housing Projects Need To Be Fingerprinted

As he gets closer to the end of his reign of error, he gets more and more authoritarian:

In a bid to boost security at public housing complexes, Mayor Michael Bloomberg this morning suggested fingerprinting residents so they can access their homes.

“What we really should have is fingerprinting to get in. And of course there’s an allegation that some of these apartments aren’t occupied by the people who originally have the lease,” said Mr. Bloomberg during his weekly radio sit-down with WOR’s John Gambling.

The mayor noted that, while New York City Housing Authority building house about five percent of the city’s population, they account for about 20 percent of city crime.

“We’ve just gotta find some ways to keep bringing crime down there,” he said, arguing that most people who live in the buildings want more police protection.

Needless to say, this proposal hasn't gone over so well:

The fingerprinting idea left some reeling, including two mayoral candidates who simultaneously released statements condemning the comment.

“Disrespectful. Disgraceful. No other words apply,” former Comptroller Bill Thompson said in a statement. “Just like stop and frisk, this is another direct act of treating minorities like criminals. Mayor Bloomberg wants to make New Yorkers feel like prisoners in their own homes. When I’m mayor, I’ll keep NYCHA residents safe without taking away their dignity. I’ll increase police presence and install security cameras that should have been installed years ago to safeguard residents.”

“The Mayor’s comments that New Yorkers who enter public housing should be fingerprinted is outrageous and insulting and shows just how out of touch this administration has become,” Public Advocate Bill de Blasio piled on. “Once again, Mayor Bloomberg has resorted to presuming innocent people are guilty simply because they happen to live in certain areas, and in doing so he is stigmatizing entire communities.”

...

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn also slammed the fingerprinting idea.

“It’s a completely ludicrous and outrageous notion that NYCHA residents and their guests should have to be fingerprinted to gain access to their own homes and to visit family and friends,” she said in a statement. “Rather than go after law abiding citizens who live in public housing, the City needs to provide residents with the security systems they have been promised for years.”

 Four and a half months until this petty little man leaves office.

How much more damage will he do in that time?

Bloomberg: We're Lucky The CityTime Crooks Ripped Us Off!

Yeah, he said it:

New York City is lucky it got ripped off hundreds of millions of dollars in the CityTime scandal, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said this morning.

Mr. Bloomberg’s argument was that because the fraudsters agreed to pay the city back $500 million after being hounded by federal prosecutors and the city’s Department of Investigation, the project of modernizing the municipal payroll system ended up being a bargain.

“That whole system cost us something like only a 100 million dollars and it should have been many times that,” he said. “We were lucky because of the fraud. And in the end it turned out, because of the recovery, we saved a lot of money.”

The mayor arrived at this topic after defending the city’s much-maligned 911 system, which has been barraged with reports of dysfunction and shutdowns. Mr. Bloomberg compared the two cases and maintained the system was working just fine.

“When was the last time you heard a complaint about the basic accounting system for the municipal workforce that has something like two thirds of all municipal workers on it? None one. Not one complaint,” he said, latter adding, “It certainly works and this 9/11 system certainly works as well. Will there be glitches? Computer systems all the time have glitches. Nothing’s perfect.”

A little 4 year old girl died during one of those 911 system "glitches".

Bloomberg's response?

Oh, well - what can you do?  Nothing's perfect...shit happens...

I'm sure he believes his own b.s. here that the CityTime fraud was awesome because it ended up saving the city money and the new 911 system is working swimmingly despite the half dozen crashes a day it's been having and the dead 4 year old who just might have been saved had the system worked like it was supposed to work.

He's clearly delusional and divorced from reality at this point in his life and I wouldn't be surprised to see him diagnosed with some kind of disorder or dementia in the coming years.

Crazy Things Mayor Bloomberg Says

A commenter in an early thread wrote the following:

The mental stability of the mayor should become an issue. Recent comments should be interpreted as not only delusional, but, the possibility of mental incapacity as these comments can no longer be excused.

The commenter is talking about this kind of stuff:

 Mayor Bloomberg yesterday put his foot in his mouth by suggesting homeless shelters are bursting at the seams because anyone can get a bed — even the filthy rich.

“You can arrive in your private jet at Kennedy Airport, take a private limousine and go straight to the shelter system, walk in the door, and we’ve got to give you shelter,” the billionaire mayor fumed on his weekly WOR radio show.

“That’s what the law is. I didn’t write the law.”

Or this:

"I got in trouble every time I say this. But I would do anything to have better quality teachers, even if it meant bigger class size, even if it meant them standing rather than sitting. That's what really makes a difference.”

Or this:

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — It’s a jaw-dropping prescription for fixing city schools.
“Professor” Michael Bloomberg said Thursday he would accomplish more with less by slashing the teaching staff in half — and that’s just the beginning, reports CBS 2’s Marcia Kramer.

He looked like he was from another planet when he dressed as a hippie for a political show, but the mayor’s blueprint for fixing city schools have some asking “what was he smoking?”

“Education is very much, I’ve always thought, just like the real estate business. Real estate business, there are three things that matter: location, location, location is the old joke,” Bloomberg said. “Well in education, it is: quality of teacher, quality of teacher, quality of teacher. And I would, if I had the ability - which nobody does really – to just design a system and say, ‘ex cathedra, this is what we’re going to do,’ you would cut the number of teachers in half, but you would double the compensation of them and you would weed out all the bad ones and just have good teachers. And double the class size with a better teacher is a good deal for the students.”

That’s right. The mayor told people at a Massachusetts Institute of Technology conference it would be far better to run city schools with way fewer people. And, by the way, on the billionaire’s perfect planet that would mean cramming more kids into each classroom.

Or this:

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has a solution to the nation's immigration problem: Let immigrants come to the United States... "as long as they agree to live in Detroit."

Bloomberg, the mayor of America's largest city, believes the federal government has an immigration problem and that Detroit has a people problem — "half the population has left; you've got to do something about that" — so why not flash some of that American ingenuity and kill two birds with one stone?

"If I were the federal government, assuming we could wave a magic wand and pull everybody together, you pass a law letting immigrants come in as long as they agree to go to Detroit and live there for five to 10 years, start businesses, take jobs or whatever," Bloomberg said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press."

"You would populate Detroit overnight because half the world wants to come here," Bloomberg said of the continued appeal of living within the United States, yet implying perhaps Detroit is not the most desirable new home town.

Or how about this:

Mayor Bloomberg’s recent criticism of President Obama for allowing the debt reduction Supercommittee to fail led many political tea leaf watchers to believe he’s eyeing a potential White House bid. To the dismay of those who hope he’ll mount presidential campaign, Mayor Bloomberg began his speech last night by discussing why City Hall is just fine by him.

“I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world. I have my own State Department, much to Foggy Bottom’s annoyance. We have the United Nations in New York, and so we have an entree into the diplomatic world that Washington does not have,” Mayor Bloomberg said.

When I listen to Michael Bloomberg talk, I feel like the crew members on the U.S.S. Caine:




Maybe it's time to go over Admiral Halsey and have a talk?