Mayor Michael Bloomberg used his first public appearance since announcing switching from the Republican Party to being an independent, a press conference celebrating the alleged success of his 311 program, to showcase his policy creativity to the media.

Bloomberg's aware that his leaving the Republican Party would confirm to the media, his current constituents and potential presidential voters, that he's pursuing an independent Presidential candidacy, despite saying wink, wink, I'm not running, and knew the world would be watching his first appearance after making public his official political independence. This is why Bloomberg is using a press conference honoring 311, a program that he is particularly but unjustifiably proud of, as the location of his personal Presidential Debutante Ball.

Bloomberg hoped touting 311 success would perpetuate the myth that he's a non-partisan problem solver. But the emperor has no clothes. 311 is useless.  read more »

Politics, politics, blah blah blah. Who cares? I am sick as a dog (or would that be a bitch) and I see no end to this nasty flu.

Which is why I ended up at MySpace. I lost the ability to blog in this haze of kids' flu formula (yes, I am a weenie) and albuterol. Trolling for "friends" on the biggest site on the planet seemed like the most sesible thing to do.

It seems though, there's no getting around this net-working-world if you don't have a MySpace. Heck, if Obama has one, then so should we.

I haven't checked if any of our local politicians has a MySpace profile. If you know of any, post the link to the pages in the comments pages.

I actually have been looking for the right coding recipe to customize the profile pages on our site to resemble the MySpace layout. I just haven't found an efficient way to do it.

Tack one more to the redesign To-Do list.

While I dream up a Daily Gotham MySpace, add me to your friends' list over there. Or I'll pout until my lips turn blue.

The New York Times had a deeply disturbing article in Sunday's Arts section. The article describes several exhibitions on Moses, and flowing from them, an effort to rehabilitate his name, which has since Robert Caro's The Power Broker never quite recovered.

“It could be that ‘The Power Broker’ was a reflection of its time: New York was in trouble and had been in decline for 15 years. Now, for a whole host of reasons, New York is entering a new time, a time of optimism, growth and revival that hasn’t been seen in half a century. And that causes us to look at our infrastructure.”

“A lot of big projects are on the table again, and it kind of suggests a Moses era without Moses,” added [Kenneth T. Jackson, a historian of New York City at Columbia who co-edited the exhibition catalog].

It's true enough that we have a new Moses era, but that requires us to precisely not forget his legacy. And that legacy is mixed. Robert Moses destroyed the South Bronx and built the Cross-Bronx Expressway. He built hundreds of playgrounds in Manhattan, only one of which – according to The Powerbroker, it was decorated with little brass monkeys playing – was north of 125th Street. Robert Moses segregated previously integrated neighborhoods. The parkways leading out to the open air, the ones he built while starving mass transit, feature pretty little bridges built so low that no buses can use them, cutting off the poor (read: the black) from this bounty. Robert Moses' racism permeates literally all he has done. Along the way, he engaged in staggering acts of corruption that would be impossible today, the best efforts of Joe Bruno and Efrain Gonzalez notwithstanding.  read more »

The lamestream media are predictably dismissive of today's announcement of a Presidential bid by John Edwards (or so it seems to me), perhaps because they've already decided that Hillary and Obama are the only games in town. My private theory to explain this is simple: journos are lazy, and 'Is the country ready for a black/female President?' stories are so simple they practically write themselves. Hence, they have more time to spend on expense reports and cocktail party chit-chat.

The real news, of course, is that Hillary labors under the widespread perception that she can't win/stands for nothing/will say whatever you want to hear/polarizes (one which I share), and that sheer politeness is all that is keeping the subterranean chatter about Obama's thin résumé quiet, for the moment.

By a simple process of elimination, that leaves Edwards as the guy to beat. Clark never quite caught on with the rank and file (for reasons which elude many), Kerry had his chance (and has that unfortunate foot-in-mouth problem), Gore seems sincere about not running, Vilsack is in fourth place in his native Iowa, and Mark Warner, ah, Mark Warner. Biden and Dodd are lovely Senators; Richardson may be laboring under too-high expectations.  read more »

So Time Magazine has named me, and you, and the guy in the next cube over, as person of the year. In fact, we beat out whatshisname, the President of Iran - and we're not even building nukes.

It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It's not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution.

Money quote coming, wait for it...  read more »