NADLER, CUOMO ATTACK DELAY IN SANDY AID
The House of Representatives’ failure to vote on a $60 billion Hurricane Sandy disaster aid bill last week prompted a number of angry responses by local elected officials representing the storm-ravaged city.

“This is a betrayal of the millions of Americans who are struggling after Sandy and a trivialization of the loss of more than 100 American lives,” said Congressman Jerrold Nadler. “Not taking up the $60 billion Sandy funding bill will mean that many Americans could remain homeless, the rebuilding of homes and businesses across the Northeast will be delayed, and the coastal infrastructure of the region will remain damaged and vulnerable to the next storm.”

He noted that agencies including the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers could not proceed with major repairs until funding is secured.

Local governors were similarly incensed. “This failure to come to the aid of Americans following a severe and devastating natural disaster is unprecedented,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo said in a joint statement with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. “The fact that days continue to go by while people suffer, families are out of their homes, and men and women remain jobless and struggling during these harsh winter months is a dereliction of duty.”

Mayor Michael Bloomberg expressed more patience about the delay. “You know, democracy is something that takes a while to come together and to get the results,” he said. “As long as it turns out that we get the monies that we think are appropriate for the federal government to send to a part of the country that’s had a major natural disaster, all’s well that ends well.”

The House cast a preliminary vote to direct funds to the National Flood Insurance Program on Friday, and has scheduled to vote on the remaining aid on Jan. 15, the first day of legislative business from the new 113th Congress.

FIRE FATALITIES DROP TO LOWEST NUMBER EVER
Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Fire Commissioner Salvatore Cassano announced last week that 2012 saw the fewest civilian fire deaths in New York City history. Fifty-eight people died in blazes, four fewer than the former record low of 62 deaths in 2010, and a 12 percent decline from the 66 deaths in 2011. It was the seventh consecutive year that fire-related deaths have numbered under 100, which has occurred only 12 times since the city began keeping records in 1916.

The top two causes of fire-related deaths last year were accidental electrical fires and smoking. Forty-three percent of those killed in a blaze were over the age of 70, and 79 percent of the fatal fires struck where there were no working smoke detectors.

Bloomberg and Cassano also announced that FDNY’s Emergency Medical Service set a new record last year for fastest average ambulance response time: The new record, 6:30, is down one second from 2011’s previous record.

“With a record low number of murders and shootings and the fewest fire deaths in our city’s history, 2012 was a historic year for public safety,” Bloomberg said. “The FDNY has consistently improved fire safety over the past decade and has continued to drive response times to historic lows. These achievements and the efforts by our firefighters, EMTs and paramedics to save lives—while putting theirs on the line—is the reason fewer New Yorkers died as a result of fire in 2012 than ever before.”

POLITICAL MEMORABILIA SHOW TO HOST ED POTTER AWARD
The American Political Items Collectors’ Big Apple Ed Potter Chapter is sponsoring its 25th annual Political Collectors Show on Sunday, Feb. 3. The show will run from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Sixth Street Community Synagogue, 325 E. Sixth St., and will feature over 10,000 political items for sale, including buttons, posters, mugs, bandannas, watches and clothing that cover the presidencies of George Washington to Barack Obama, as well as a special exhibition of political memorabilia from the 2012 election.

The show will also include the presentation of the fourth annual Ed Potter Memorial Awards, named after the political memorabilia collector, which are given to those involved in the political process who have used political items and artifacts in their campaigns. This year’s recipients are New York State Assemblyman and City Councilman Adam Clayton Powell and Manhattan Media’s own CEO and mayoral hopeful Tom Allon.

Admission is $3 for adults and free for children under 16. For more information, call 212-764-6330.

I’m not the only child of the Garden State who has lamented the bastardization of our diverse homeland, and I’ve made a tentative peace with it. I’ve always been proud of my NJ heritage, though not above making fun of the parts that deserve it. Newark, in the industrial areas, is indeed smelly. That doesn’t mean the entire state wreaks of garbage.

Now, I am just as heartbroken as Chris Christie that the Jersey shore of our collective youths has been decimated by Hurricane Sandy. For me, this is not the Jersey shore of some MTV producer’s making, but  one of gorgeous, uncrowded beaches  in towns with names like Avalon-by-the-Sea and Brighton, with surprise fireworks displays and artisanal ice cream stands. It’s made of memories of actually swimming in the ocean and avoiding the punishing sun on my super-fair skin at all costs.

That’s why, though I want to support any effort to raise money for the victims of Sandy in both my former home and my current one, New York, I physically cringed when I read a PR email imploring me to “Jersey up the holidays!” in support of fundraising campaigns.

“‘A Very Jersey Xmas‘ calls on everyone who has ever lived in New Jersey, has family in New Jersey, enjoyed a turn on the New Jersey Turnpike, watched Jersey Shore, The Sopranos or Real Housewives of New Jersey, OR who just wants an excuse to party in leopard print to dedicate this holiday giving season to hurricane relief, Jersey-style.”

It goes on to suggest fundraising levels ($10 is a Snooki) and “Jersey garb,” which apparently means velour tracksuits.

This, I cannot support.

I know that every subset of our country endures its own grossly exaggerated stereotyping. People from San Francisco are annoyingly liberal; people from Texas are drawling hicks; people from Connecticut are rich snobs, etc. My best friend once had someone ask her at a party in New Orleans if she knew Tony Soprano. Like she thought he was a real person, and also that my friend, a college-age girl from a random small-town suburb, would be pals with him. This shit happens all the time.

Still, I fight against it. Jersey isn’t a verb, and when people apply the term to mean “dress slutty and act drunk!” it’s insulting to everyone, not just those from Jersey. No one needs a geographic excuse to be drunk and slutty! Have at it, I say! Just don’t pretend that “it’s a Jersey thing.” It’s not. Wearing leopard print spandex and attacking your frenemies over lunch in front of a realty-TV crew isn’t “Jersey style,” it’s just tacky. Tacky you can find all over this great country, not just in NJ.

If people want to party like d-bags and raise money for Hurricane Sandy relief, that’s great. Just please don’t do it in the name of my home state. This is coming to you from a through-and-through “Jersey girl” (born in New Brunswick, lived in the state for 22 years) who has never known a press-on nail, a spray tan, or a Bruce Springsteen concert. If anyone wants to make a reality show about the traffic-sense superiority of jug handles, 24-hour diners, and singing in high school barbershop choirs, though, give me a call.

Via Wiki Commons.

I first heard that “Isaac may cause some devastation” over a week ago and it was startling. My son, like most toddlers, is capable of creating a little mayhem, but I was certain he was not planning anything to concern the national media.

Storm predictions indicate his name won’t become synonymous with massive death and destruction—this year. So “Isaac” will almost stay in the rotation of Atlantic tropical storm and hurricane names, and get another crack at weather infamy sometime in 2018, when my son will be 8.

Katrina vanden Heuvel, publisher and editor of The Nation, wrote soon after her namesake hurricane of 2005 that “it has been eerie hearing and reading my name all over the news.”

At the end of the year, Time asked her about any “personal consequences” to being an outspoken liberal commentator, and the only thing she mentioned was the “very personal and mean way” Rush Limbaugh called the deadly event “Hurricane Katrina vanden Heuvel.” The cruel nickname persists to this day in the rightwing blogosphere.

And although “Barry” Obama could suffer the same fate next year, conservative leaders are also vulnerable. Chris Christie and Karl Rove escaped making big hurricane news this year, but their names will be back in the hopper with my son in 2018. William Kristol lives with the daunting double whammy of a possible Hurricane William this year and then Bill in 2015.

The United Nations’ all-powerful and historically sexist naming body (female hurricane names were used exclusively until 1979), the World Meteorological Organization, tends to like short names, but nevertheless Paul Ryan. John Boehner, and Mitt Romney are safe from being connected with devastation, at least until a hurricane starting with P, J or M is so catastrophic that the name is retired and replaced.

As for the name Katrina, nameberry.com, a popular site for expectant parents, says simply “the hurricane blew this one out of the realm of possibility.” The name’s popularity dropped precipitously starting in 2006 but surprisingly it wasn’t until last year that it fell out of the top 1,000 of female US names, according to the Social Security Administration

To quote many politicians, it doesn’t have to be this way. Hurricanes and tropical storms do need names since they move rapidly and are often active simultaneously, but there’s no reason to connect them to hundreds of millions of real people.

The World Meteorological gods could opt for things like Greek letters, alpha, beta, etc., but the better choice would be to take fictional villains. Hollywood, comics and other pop culture sources provide an endless supply. Spider-Man alone is a gold mine of names, my favorites being Boomerang, Hammerhead, Jackal and Carnage. Simon is a real name that should be used since Simons already share with the villains of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Underdog (Legree and Bar Sinister). Underdog also gives us Riff Raff.

Bane, Batman’s nemesis, is another good one, although that one should wait for whenever Romney leaves active politics, perhaps as late as 2021. That would get Bill Kristol off the hook.

Josh Rogers is a NYPress.com columnist. Follow him @joshrogersnyc.

Why Cuomo, Bloomberg and even Christie should be talking that day

The plan for this year’s 9/11 commemoration sounds an awful lot like last year’s, especially since word came down that no public officials will deliver remarks. No speeches, especially anything deemed “political,” shall mar the reading of the names of those lost on that terrible day.

This news has been cheered, especially by some newspaper editorial boards that should know better. Newsday, in particular, says the reading of the names has an “elegant simplicity.” That’s in line with Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who last year told NY1 that the families of the dead “don’t need political lectures,” as if any speaker would aim to annoy the crowd.

The reading of the names, which at this stage seems to do little to put a still-raw historical act into present-day context, is considered sacrosanct. But our elected officials have been silenced again. Not to mention—although someone should—our poets, academics and religious leaders, probably in order of importance.

The no-speakers stand seems tremendously popular. But it’s also ridiculous.

For eons, and in cultures of all sorts, leaders have been expected to draw conclusions and share them with the people they are elected to serve. It’s one of the responsibilities of leadership, to find words in impossibly difficult situations, to give voice to our common experience.
Sure, it’s hard. And yes, leaders mostly fail to meet the challenge. The exceptions, though, create historical moments. What if someone had told Abraham Lincoln not to give the Gettysburg Address because nobody wanted to hear him tackle a hot-button issue? Can you picture Franklin Roosevelt, during World War II, being given a list of names of deceased soldiers to read and told to say nothing else?
Sixty-seven years after FDR’s death, though, our politicians are terrified of politics, or at least being deemed “political” by the dumbed-down culture that confuses the words “politics” and “partisan.” Ours is a world with little interest in the common good or even the slightest healthy debate about what that might mean. The civics class belongs to another age, not ours. We love our cell phones, not our post office. We outsource wars or figure someone else can volunteer. Somewhere along the line, the Me Decade became a new Me Century. “Don’t be political” is pretty much our only rallying cry.

It’s been this way for a while now, so it is unsurprising to see us privatizing our grief, too, and wrongly insisting that 9/11 events belong only to the deeply affected families. The reading of the names has been a powerful and valuable tradition and should continue if others want it to, but when do our leaders lead and take the ceremonies on that awful anniversary to another level? Never?

The irony is that we have a couple of politicians around who might be able to speak a memorable phrase or two. Gov. Andrew Cuomo gives good speech. Bloomberg has a talent for telling people what they don’t want to hear. That might help inspire something substantial. Give, gulp, Gov. Chris Christie a chance to say a few words. Maybe he won’t even call anyone an idiot during his turn on the dais.
Throw in a few others, knowing that picking and choosing is an admittedly messy business. Then let the speakers dare to give us a slightly new way of thinking of that horrific moment and this anxious one.

The point isn’t the quality, year to year, of the speeches. It is that in decrying politics of all kinds in any sensitive situation, we create a content-free culture. No wonder we wind up with political campaigns about peripheral issues.

There is no getting around the need for politics or political speech. Banning it is a lousy way to commemorate anything in a democracy.

Christopher Moore is a writer living in Manhattan. He is available by email at ccmnj@aol.com and on Twitter @cmoorenyc.

The Jersey Shore may have gained planetary recognition thanks to the infamous MTV reality show, but the world has yet to hear about Jersey’s latest trashy celeb. I am referring of course to Governor Chris Christie, whose latest stunt involved a testosterone-filled altercation with a passerby.

Gov. Christie, who was casually enjoying an ice cream cone along the Jersey Shore on Thursday, apparently lost his temper after a man made a negative comment about his stance on education.

Christie, who was surrounded by his family and what appear to be bodyguards, called out the unfortunate passerby, screaming “You’re a real big shot running your mouth off.”

“Just take care of the teachers,” the man replied. Christie, who did not want to see this insolence go unpunished, turned around and aggressively walked towards the man, shouting “Keep walking away! Real good, keep walking…”

Someone recorded the scene and the video was made available on TMZ the next day.

This is not the first time that Christie’s explosive temperament makes headlines. A week earlier, the New Jersey Governor had insulted a reporter by calling him an “idiot” after being asked an off-topic question.

While part of the public appreciates Christie for his honesty and outspokenness, many see this latest stunt as taking it a step too far: A poll held by nj.com found that over 80% of respondents thought Christie’s tirades made New Jersey look bad. A similar poll has yet to be held for Snooki.

NJ Gov. Chris Christie topped this week's s "Losers" picks.

This week brought us the retirement of a venerable Assembly majority leader, compromises on living wage and NYU’s expansion plan, remembrances for the Titantic and a mixed bag for Grace Meng’s campaign team. It also showed that Friday the 13^th isn’t so unlucky for everyone: while it was a horror for our losers, it was a monster week for our winners.

Stuart Appelbaum – It’s not often that Kathy Wylde and the Partnership for New York City don’t get their way. But that was the case when Council Speaker Christine Quinn sided with labor over the Partnership on a proposed alteration that would have weakened the living wage bill, causing the Partnership to pull its support. Perhaps even more surprising is that RWDSU President Stuart Appelbaum’s union was the one who pulled off the victory. Without as much political power as some of the city’s bigger unions, RWDSU often has to rely on Appelbaum’s very, very loud vocal chords to get things done, which brings its fair share of detractors. But you certainly have to give him credit one this one.

Charlie Rangel – The 81-year-old Congressman made a return to the public eye this week after a long back-ache-induced absence, and he was in fine form, holding court with reporters, teasing David Dinkins, high-fiving Keith Wright and attempting to quell suspicions that he is in too poor shape to run against his first real challenger in years, State Sen. Adriano Espaillat. He largely succeeded and spoke graciously of his challenger, while political insiders noted the presence at his presser of key Dominican-American ally Assemblyman Guillermo Linares, who is officially “still deciding” whether to support Rangel or not, but surely is not so opposed to the idea that he would absent himself from Rangel’s public event.

Eric Schneiderman – It takes guts to pick up a political time-bomb like stop-and-frisk and say to the world, “Let’s see what makes this thing tick.” That’s what Attorney General Eric Schneiderman did this week in announcing his plan to review the controversial NYPD policy. And seeing as how there’s a good chance Ray Kelly will stay on as commissioner beyond Bloomberg’s time in office, it’s not like Schneiderman is doing this flippantly. In addition, the AG opened an office to review wrongful convictions, and busted a shady Brooklyn charter school operator. Class dismissed!

Nathan Smith – Grace Meng’s congressional campaign had a tough start with labor, with her Democratic opponents landing all the labor support. But things seem to be turning around, as Meng got the Hotel Trades Council this week and is set to get the backing of UFCW Local 1500 as well. We put Nathan Smith, the Red Horse Strategies operative who is in charge of lining up support for Meng, on the losers list a couple weeks ago when Meng’s campaign was struggling with labor, so it’s only fair that he’s now a Winner. And beyond the labor world, Meng has racked up a slew of support from elected officials, though the Queens Democratic Party nod also certainly doesn’t hurt there.

To see this full list of this week’s political winners and losers click here.

Bloomberg proposed the No. 7 extension in 2010 as a plan to help ease commuter traffic into Manhattan after New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie canceled the Trans-Hudson Passenger Rail Tunnel, also known as the ARC Tunnel, a long-planned rail line, back in 2010.

“I can’t see this happening in our lifetime,” Lhota said. “The expense of it is beyond anything that we’re doing.” His remarks came this morning at a Building Congress Breakfast forum in lower Manhattan.

But Lhota said another proposal, Amtrak’s Gateway Tunnel, is more viable. That federal project, estimated to cost around $13.5 billion, would increase capacity for NJ Transit and Amtrak trains entering Manhattan. Last month, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said the project is “absolutely critical.”

Lhota said he had discussed the matter with the mayor and told him the No. 7 extension, which is expected to cost in the billions of dollars but still significantly less than the Gateway project, wasn’t a realistic option.

“I’ve had discussions with the mayor and with other folks from City Hall,” Lhota said. “I think the mayor understands.”

But at a press conference today, Bloomberg said he still hoped the No. 7 extension would be built, and that the key difficulty would be securing funding for it.

“I don’t know, we can keep trying,” Bloomberg said. “It would be great if it happened.”

“Getting a way to have people come in and out of the city with mass transit is obviously the way to go,” Bloomberg added. “I am sure what Joe is referring to is it’s very hard to see the funding for that come right now. If somebody could provide the funding, I can tell you, Joe Lhota could build it.”