Via the New York Times:

The Senate on Wednesday turned aside the latest attempt by gun advocates to expand the rights of gun owners, narrowly voting down a provision that would have allowed gun owners with valid permits from one state to carry concealed weapons in other states.

The Amendment passed by 58 to 42, just two votes shy of a filibuster. Both New York Senators voted against the amendment, which aligns them with the Bloomberg administration; the mayor has been, frankly a fierce critic of the Amendment, leading a bipartisan group of mayors to in the now-successful defeat of the amendment in the Senate.

To quote the mayor via Ben Smith,

Saying that you will bring down crime by giving more people guns is just absurd, that’s the nicest way to put it. And, you know, only somebody who doesn’t- who plays- foot loose and fancy free with the facts and has an agenda would have the nerve to say something like that.

In the newest issue of Vanity Fair, the most awesome magazine in the world, we find this, in Michael Wolff's article about Politico.

Likewise, there is Ben Smith. Smith is 32, lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two children (with a third about to be born), and is, too, a total dweeb. His blog, which he started at The New York Observer, then moved to the Daily News, and then to Politico, is another new journalism model. It has a sense of extreme autodidacticism, a kind of focus and relentlessness and unavoidability that, through sheer immediacy and constancy, forces everybody to acknowledge it—and to deal with and talk to Smith. Smith ends up being the only one as interested in what his sources are doing as they themselves are. He’s made himself his subjects’ soulmate. During the campaign, there was hardly anyone in a senior position with any of the candidates who wasn’t one of Smith’s I.M. buddies.

So let me break a lance for my friend Ben. I haven't seen him since I ran into him at City Hall for the big Joe Mesi press conference last year, when he walked up and gave me a hug. That's the secret to Ben's success, other than the fact that he has the best sources in blogdom and a gift for hitting his points exactly; the guy's genuinely nice.

In semi-related news, do you know who reads Vanity Fair these days, religiously? New York Progressive bloggers, that's who; unbearably sophisticated bunch that we are.