If you are a parent who has to fight off boredom reading to your young child, the humor in Stephen Colbert’s new children’s book is probably enough to do the trick. If you are just an adult Colbert fan, stick with his TV show. The Colbert Report segments previewing the book featuring author Maurice Sendak, who died Tuesday, and the actress and children’s writer Julie Andrews, were much funnier than I Am A Pole (And So Can You).

Colbert’s first foray into children’s literature follows a pole searching for his or her “true pole role” in the world. The rhyming 30-page book is full of double entendres: “I tried and failed at other things/ That I shouldn’t talk about. Like that summer with the phone poles/ Getting totally strung out.”

The book includes what may be Sendak’s last illustration. The final page has a large space for a child to draw a pole next to smaller ones by Sendak and Colbert.

Sendak, in addition to his appearance on Colbert’s show, is a big part of the marketing. His blurbs, “The sad thing is, I like it,” and “terribly supremely ordinary” are featured on the front and back covers.

Some parents, like me, will be put off by the “stripper pole” page with a bikini-clad dancer.

The drawings by Paul Hildebrand, who is falsely credited with inventing collages and founding Cubism on the book jacket, are engaging to children. Wisely the stripper page is opposite a drawing of the pole in a firehouse with a Dalmatian. Hildebrand could have added to the distraction with a fire truck.

My son, just over two, paid attention to  I Am A Pole from beginning to end on the first read although he did not stop and point out objects he recognized as he does with some other books. I was relieved that he didn’t seem to take notice of the stripper. I don’t want to ever have to explain what a “grind” is so it won’t be put in our regular rotation although, Mommy permitting, it’s worth an occasional read.

The jacket promises plenty of sequels, some of which are plausible if book sales justify it.  How the Pole Stole Christmas and Pole Learns About Copyright Infringement appear to be the least likely.

Follow Josh Rogers @JoshRogersNYC.

* A military man who thinks the nation’s biggest problem is that businesses are taxed too much.

*Two toddlers and an infant.

* A man wearing a Burberry raincoat, a Calvin Klein gray pin-stripe suit and a blue J Crew tie.

The suited man, Matthew Bolton, said many in the 99 percent dress in suits. His brief case with a large “Occupy” sticker showed he was with the crowd.

Bolton, 31, a political science professor at Pace University, not far from Wall Street, acknowledged the Occupy movement has not yet had an effect in Washington but added, “Politics doesn’t only happen in Congress. What Occupy has done is change the conversation for the media….

“I also hope it does make a change in Washington. It has already been a symbolic victory and symbolism is incredibly important.”

Throughout the crowd, drums of course were beating, but guitars, banjoes, saxophones and trumpets were also being played.

Police presence in the park was extremely light but it grew by a little later in the morning. Most in the crowd did not seem to notice police, who did not move on a few violating city law by smoking in the park.

The crowd stayed off the park’s plush lawn, which was closed but barely protected with low ropes a few inches off the ground.

The military man, Luis del Carpio, 43, a veteran of the first Gulf War, works in the Far East conditioning elite golfers. He said he had a business in this country but tax policy drove him overseas.

“I hope they change the tax laws so US small businesses can make money and hire people,” he said.

He’d like to see the Occupy movement shift a little to focus more on taxes than income inequality, but he supports their cause.

“If you are a corporation, you are hardly paying any taxes but if you are small business you are paying high costs.”

He said he ran a day care center in Texas but had to close it because of his taxes.

A mother of one of the toddlers said she came to support her friends in Occupy, and hadn’t thought about what she hoped to someday teach her 18-month old son about it.

“I’m  not the one to ask because I’m not a big occupier myself,” she said.

Except for a large jar of Skippy peanut butter, there was not much corporate support at Occupy’s free food table. Around noon, pasta and sauce was on the menu.

As one of the protesters put it, “The revolution must be fed.”

You can follow New York Press columnist Josh Rogers @JoshRogersNYC.

Children playing in New York City in the 1970s. Photo courtesy of Wiki Commons.

The city was less safe then, but parents were also less protective

By Josh Rogers

The name Etan Patz conjures up so much for so many in New York City.

If you’re under 30, it is likely to draw a blank stare, but for many others it’s different, particularly if you were growing up in the city around 1979, when Patz, a 6-year-old Soho boy, disappeared on his first solo trip to school.

“Mom used to say, ‘You’ll end up like Etan Patz and no one will ever see you again’ when I walked too far ahead in NYC as a kid,’” @AlexSalta wrote on Twitter last week. “It worked.”

Patz was a trending topic this week and last as investigators went back to a Soho basement to dig for clues with a new suspect in the case. It’s the kind of story that grips you every time it resurfaces, although it probably didn’t change behaviors as much as people think.

Peggy Schneider, naturally, was thinking about Patz this week, since she was in middle school in Manhattan when the boy disappeared—but then again she thinks about Patz and his parents a lot.

“I can still see his smiling face; I have probably thought about it once a month for my entire life,” she said in a phone interview.

Her friend was Patz’ babysitter, so she had a personal connection, but even that was not enough to change her habits. She still traveled the city on her own as a young teen.

So did I and most of my friends. The city was less safe in the ’80s, yet many parents then were much less protective than they are now.

Columnist Lenore Skenazy got a lot of mileage a few years ago when she wrote about letting her 9-year-old son ride the subway alone, and has since expanded the column into a movement to promote raising “Free-Range Kids.” Her column would never have drawn the uproar 30 years ago that it did in 2008.

I was a few years older than Skenazy’s son when I began riding the subway with a friend, but around the 3rd grade, I began walking to school alone—of course, that simply involved crossing a street that my parents could see from our window. My friends and I would play ball after school with other neighborhood kids, and we managed to do it without refs or adult supervision.

Still, I didn’t have to cross any streets to get to the concrete “field,” and I know things will be different when my son reaches the age when we have to start making these impossible decisions. There is a lot to be said for letting kids figure it out for themselves, but the rub is deciding when to do it and how much to let go.

Schneider’s youngest sister, Zoe, 40, is a year older than Patz would be today. She doesn’t remember being reigned in much growing up, but somewhere between then and now, city parents began tightening the leashes for better and, perhaps, for worse.

She may be more tapped into this generation of New Yorkers than anyone; she is the organizer of Magic Garden, a large monthly party for people who grew up in the city, giving them a chance to meet people who don’t ask “what was that like?”

She used to come home late at night from babysitting gigs when she was young, but her immediate neighborhood in Tudor City was shielded from cars. Now in Harlem, she said “it is really scary” to think about her children someday walking by themselves near so much traffic.

“Babysitting at age 9 is crazy, but it was what it was,” she said. “It all worked out and everyone made it through.”

Not that parents didn’t worry quietly. Mine are fuzzy about how Patz affected their thinking, but my mother does remember me taking the train to high school in the Bronx. It wasn’t all that long after Patz disappeared.

“I always say I spent four years looking out the window,” she told me.

The highpoint of Rick Santorum’s presidential campaign was his quasi-victory speech in Iowa the night of the caucus. Although it would be weeks before Santorum was declared the winner of that race, he was still the undisputed winner that night. If the Obama campaign folks were not a little nervous listening to him speak, they should have been.

Santorum spoke of his grandfather, a coal miner, and his powerful calloused hands, connecting them to the campaign. It was an image that subtly but effectively went to the heart of Obama’s vulnerability: connecting with Midwestern, blue collar, middle class workers.

Had Santorum won the nomination, the Democrats certainly had plenty of ammunition to cast him as an extreme, right wing ideologue. Many Dems were hoping he won the nomination, but they had the same hope about Ronald Reagan, who was able to deflect these attacks with his folksy manner.

Santorum’s views on gays, birth control and other issues may very well have doomed him, but he also could connect better with some battleground voters than Mitt Romney.

But Santorum seldom came back to that powerful hands image before dropping out of the race Tuesday. Reagan’s wife Nancy was famously able to maintain the stare of awe as she heard her husband give the same stump speech over and over again. Santorum, no movie star, was apparently not able to deliver lines repeatedly.

The Obama campaign leaders, who would undoubtedly be confident regardless, should be a little relieved that the race will be a little more predictable without Santorum.

With unemployment high and seven months to go to the election, Romney certainly has a chance, but Santorum never said he is fond of playing “sport” or talking about car racing with Nascar owners.

Cautiously surprised as Mets initially defy budgets and predictions

By Josh Rogers

It looks like the baseball season is going to last more than a week for me. The season does go at least six months for all teams, but it’s tough to root for a “small-market” ball club once it gets to the point where the postseason appears to be a fantasy.

I used to root for a big market club, but then something changed. Not to me—to it. I didn’t switch teams, my team switched on me. The New York Mets still play in the largest market in Major League Baseball, but since the owners’ finances have been jeopardized by their dealings with Bernie Madoff, they’ve shown me and other Met fans what it’s like to root for a team in a small city, where big-money cable contracts are not possible.

The Mets entered the season with universal predictions of doom, but have defied them for now, coming out strong with three straight wins against a good team, the Atlanta Braves.

The pitching is exceeding expectations so far, and the new crop of young, homegrown players have started out well. Meaningful baseball for most of April appears assured.

If they can somehow make it to August, training camp for the football Giants will be in full swing. I’m constantly and pleasantly reminded of that by my toddler, who on an almost daily basis says, “J.P.P., Osi, Eli won the Super Bowl.”

By the summer, I’ll be able to push the Mets out of my mind if their cost-cutting ways catch up with them.

Does a true fan stay interested even when his team has no hope of going further? Maybe, but I have logged more than enough losing seasons with too many teams, and I just don’t have the time or motivation anymore. I also used to follow the Knicks (I still check in for things like Linsanity) and Rangers (perhaps they’d win me back with a trip to the Stanley Cup finals), as well as college basketball and football. I’m not sure where I found the time.

Back to the Mets. Unlike most fans, I was OK with them not re-signing Jose Reyes. As rare a talent as he is, he is typically not able to play a full season and is probably not worth the large contract he got with the Marlins. The problem is that the team had no ability or interest in using the Reyes savings to improve the team. The owners appear to have escaped the worst of the Madoff fallout, but they are not likely to convince fans that things have changed until they make a smart, budget-hurting baseball move.

Their predecessors brought me my first pain as a sports fan when they traded “The Franchise,” Tom Seaver, during a contract squabble.

The plight of Met fans now highlights the fundamental problem with baseball today: A majority of teams are made to be perennial longshots because they can’t compete with richer teams. It’s certainly possible for a low-budget team to win it all, but the field is not level.

The solution is obvious. If teams shared more revenue like the savvy, socialist billionaires who own NFL teams, it would generate broader fan interest and probably more revenue. Baseball owners would be wise to have a salary floor to insure small city teams didn’t pocket the riches from clubs like the Yankees.

Unfortunately, there is little chance owners would ever go for this, since they have always focused on artificial ways to limit how much they spend on players.

So Met fans are left to root for the team becoming a big market club again and for small joys this season, like, perhaps Wednesday night, when a recovered Johan Santana takes on the Nats’ ace, Stephen Strasburg.

Let’s go Mets. August isn’t that far away.

Josh Rogers, contributing editor at Manhattan Media, is a lifelong New Yorker. Follow him @JoshRogersNYC.

NYS Senator Daniel Squadron.

By Josh Rogers

No Virginia, there is no way to move the fireworks. On Monday, a short while after Brooklyn politicians rallied to bring the July 4^th fireworks back to the East River, Macy’s said it would stay on the Hudson this year.

“Macy’s Fireworks will take place on the Hudson River with barges positioned between 18th and 48th Streets providing 2 miles of public viewing space,” Macy’s spokesperson Orlando Veras wrote in an email to reporters.

State Sen. Daniel Squadron, whose Downtown Manhattan-Brooklyn district straddles the East River, and Brooklyn Council Member Stephen Levin rallied April 2 in an effort to convince Macy’s to move the riverside display back east after a three-year stint on the Hudson.

They were joined in a press release by several Manhattan legislators including U.S Rep. Carolyn Maloney, East Side Assembly member Brian Kavanagh and Council member Margaret Chin who represents Lower Manhattan’s West and East sides. Assembly member Micah Kellner of the Upper East Side voiced his support on Twitter.

In the release, the pols disparaged the merits of the Hudson because it shuts out Brooklyn and Queens and drives people to New Jersey, but in response to tweets posted by West Side Spirit and Our Town, Squadron clarified and said he wanted the display to be on both rivers.

When asked if Macy’s would consider that, Veras did not respond, but he did hold out hope for East River fans in future years.

The fireworks “will not be a permanent fixture in any one location,” Veras wrote. “Exclusively limiting the show to any particular area would greatly hinder the creative freedom that has made it the nation’s best and largest Independence Day display.”

—Tom Allon, President and CEO
—Josh Rogers, Our Town contributing editor

To read our OTTY profiles click on a recipients name below:

East Sider of the Year, Carolyn Maloney

Bravest and Finest, Lt. Jason Rigoli

Bravest and Finest, Officer Chris Helms

Culture Club, Emily Rafferty

Culture Club, Motoatsu Sakuri

Educator, Jennifer Raab

Educator, Merryl Tisch

Educator, Matthew Goldstein

Community Builder, Matthew Bauer

Community Builder, Oscar Fernandez

Community Builder, Nancy Ploeger

Neighborhood Civic Association, Elaine Walsh

Health Care Pro, Daryl Wilkerson

Health Care Pro, Mary Cahill

Health Care Pro, Constance Peterson

Charity, Thomas Williams

Real Estate Royalty, Louise Sunshine

Real Estate Royalty, Debra Fechter

Real Estate Royalty, Joseph Mattone and Scott DeMatteis

Entrepreneur, David Brooks

Illustration courtesy of Wiki Commons.

By Josh Rogers
John Edwards’ name resurfaced in the news last week with a report that he was a client of the Upper East Side’s “Millionaire Madam” during his 2008 presidential campaign. Regardless of the truth in the allegation, there was a better reason to bring him up again.
It’s hard to remember, but before the first caucus four years ago, Edwards appeared to have a plausible chance to win the Democratic nomination over the two better-financed candidates, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
All three had roughly similar plans to provide health insurance to more Americans, but Edwards talked about a strategic maneuver he planned to pull in the face of certain Congressional roadblocks. His idea was to introduce a bill to end health coverage for Congress, thus challenging opponents to vote for their health care while denying it to others.
With the two-year anniversary of the passage of President Obama’s health care law coinciding with the Supreme Court debating its legality, congressional opponents have had a chance to revive their “rationing medicine” criticism. It’s as if they believe we live in a country where doctors, not insurance companies, decide on the best treatment for patients.
It may work that way under Congress’s gold-plated health plan, but it is not typical in the United States, where medications, tests and doctor referrals are often held up for approval by insurance companies.
When Republican opponents debated “Obamacare” two years ago, they clung to fantasies about what health care is like for many people with insurance. It was so easy for them to say that Obama’s plan would “lead to rationing” that it sounded like a misstatement borne out of genuine ignorance.
Rationing has been going on for a long time. Bureaucrats do make medical decisions. Those decrees are just not the ones we usually hear about because they are made in the private sector.
It still has not sunk in that Obama’s plan was an outgrowth of what used to be conservative mainstream thinking. The Clintons probably could have gotten a similar plan passed almost 20 years ago, but they rejected Republican counter-proposals. Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich were not only for Obamacare before they were against it, they were for it before Obama was.
In more recent years, Republican health care plans have become less reality-based.  When Rudy Giuliani ran for president four years ago, he repeatedly said that he would let individuals shop for the best health insurance at the lowest price. While it’s possible to imagine companies getting into bidding wars to insure young people who have no health problems, the free market is not so kind to people with red flags in their medical records.

Health insurance has become so expensive it can often be an overriding factor in families’ job decisions. I left my full-time job a few years ago to take care of my infant son.  It’s something I wanted to do, but it was also something my wife would have wanted to do. The difference was that I worked for a small company with a health plan that would have cost me many thousands of dollars more to add my wife and son. She works for a large corporation which can bargain for better rates—it costs her an extra $10 a week to cover me.

Ours is by no means a hard-luck story. We were fortunate to have options and were able to pick one we liked. For too many others, health costs forces people to make choices they hate and live in fear

That’s the real-world health system Obamacare is trying to change.

Josh Rogers, contributing editor at Manhattan Media, is a lifelong New Yorker. Follow him at @JoshRogersNYC.

Josh Rogers, contributing editor at Manhattan Media, is a lifelong New Yorker. Follow him @JoshRogersNYC.

Affirmative action’s defenders and attackers finally agree on something: The policy probably won’t be around too much longer.

Last week’s decision by the Supreme Court to revisit the issue clearly puts it in peril. Even if the court ends up retaining the legality of affirmative action for now, using race as a factor in school admissions was never seen as a permanent solution; there are fairer ways to add diversity.

Current affirmative action plans typically benefit the most advantaged in a group, including those who are also members of a minority most of us would like to be in—the 1 percent.

Large racial disparities, of course, persist everywhere. In New York City, even though over 75 percent of the students at the top-ranked public high schools are minorities, there are still deeply troubling numbers. Less than 4 percent of the students are black or Hispanic at Stuyvesant High School, where the black population is a hair over 1 percent. At my alma mater, Bronx Science, 10 percent of the students are black or Hispanic. Compare this to the 72 percent of the city’s public school students who are Hispanic or black, roughly the same percentage of Asians at the two specialized schools.

The city Department of Education has made only half-hearted attempts to diversify Stuyvesant and Bronx Science and the numbers have moved in the wrong direction. The Specialized School Institute does recruit “disadvantaged” middle school students of all races to help them pass the admission test, but the city has also expanded the number of specialized schools.

Adding five schools was undoubtedly done with the best of intentions and has had mostly positive effects—but it also allows officials to downplay the problem at specialized schools, since the new schools have broader diversity. Higher scores are needed to enroll at the top two schools, but the DOE tries to maintain the fiction it has not set up a two-tier system by not publicizing the scores. This was made clear in the emails the agency sent this paper last year when our reporter Megan Bungeroth [then Finnegan] looked into the problem.

One fair way to add more diversity at Stuyvesant and Bronx Science would be to give the best students at every middle school an added chance to attend, similar to a state college admission plan in Texas.

Coincidentally, the Supreme Court is now reviewing a different part of the Texas system. The undisputed part of the law grants college admission to the top 10 percent of high school graduates in Texas, thus opening doors to the best students in schools with large numbers of minorities.

Affirmative action supporters acknowledge that the non-racial component of the plan is working, but they argue it is not as effective as using race. The same argument is also made when income is used. But if diversity were the only goal, strict quotas would work even better than affirmative action. Fairness can’t be ignored, which is why you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who favors legalizing racial quotas.

Although affirmative action is going to end sooner or later, academia, for the most part, is not ready to give up. The energy used on these battles would be better spent on figuring out what causes racial disparity so it can be ended.

Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University, wrote on the Huffington Post, “It would be an enormous step backward to force our admissions offices to retreat to a homogeneity that stifles creative, broad-based education.”

He won’t have to. There are other paths to diversity.

Josh Rogers, contributing editor at Manhattan Media, is a lifelong New Yorker. Follow him @JoshRogersNYC.