If a city councilman, or lady, falls in the woods, can anyone hear?
Does anyone care?
With apologies to folks who lack mental acuity, it’s stupid season at the City Council — the 51 elected geeks and slackers who maintain scarcely the brain activity to change a light bulb, let alone micromanage every waking and sleeping moment of the citizens of this city. But they try.
Did you know the council banned chain stores from leaking free air conditioning to the masses in summer? That a member tried to limit the number of hours kids must spend on homework? And the council worked like greasy-palmed pornographers to put the kibosh on selling used undergarments — thongs were a no-no, but bras were OK?
The latest inanity to emerge from council chambers this week tops even the move to eradicate bed bugs from soiled, used mattresses that dummies buy on the street or on eBay (the return of DDT was not discussed): double parking.
The guys and gals who rake in a minimum of $112,500 per year of taxpayer money decided that motorists who nail cars to curbs and turn thoroughfares into obstacle courses — slobbering fools who stop to talk on cellphones, or “run in for a sec” to CVS — should not to be shot on sight. Or fined. Or even get a good, old-fashioned, New York-style tongue lashing.
They want to make double parking as legal as a council member’s extortionate pay.
Traffic agents are “going around playing gotcha with people,” said Brooklyn Councilman Vincent Gentile. This may be the first time even the council’s lefty chuckleheads complained that city workers were doing their jobs — keeping streets open while generating revenue by writing $115 tickets.
The proposal doesn’t address exactly how long one may double-park. Or under what circumstances (to snatch a low-foam cappuccino?). Gentile and Co., including Councilman Peter Vallone of Queens, probably never experienced double parking on, say, my block, when a truck gets stuck. It’s brutal. It’s ugly.
It may be for naught, because Mayor Bloomberg is not looking kindly on the boneheaded bill.
And so, the council has become a workfare program for individuals with little to do, as much of their work goes down the circular file.
The group has required tour-bus operators to make tourists listen to their spiels on head phones instead of loudspeakers — but the law doesn’t take effect for five years.
After frisky debate, Vallone’s 2008 measure to limit the time schoolkids have to spend on homework got lost in the council cesspool. “We can’t go for bike rides. We can’t go to the park. We can’t go to the museum, and that’s not fair,” he groused.
My favorite was the forgotten ban on reselling undergarments. Council members panted like hormone-crazed schoolboys while discussing skivvies, from granny panties to crotchless underwear.
A bill that passed was Local Law No. 38, banning chain stores from opening doors in summer, to “conserve energy, reduce peak power demands during hot-weather periods and limit environmental pollution and local contributions to global warming,” wrote the council. Nothing about the energy that could be saved by shutting lights on council offices.
Has the New York brain trust sucked up to Al Gore and licked climate change? We’ll soon find out. The city Department of Consumer Affairs this summer starts ticketing the 94 stores covered by the law.
I wonder — will someone take on the “gotcha” police, and stop agents from writing tickets?
Save the planet. Cork the hot air from City Hall.
Tip & the iceberg
Global warming has claimed its first victim. After 40 years, the Al-Tipper Gore marriage is a polar bear felled by heat stroke.
Al went from senator to veep to presidential loser to Nobel-winning global warrior to, finally, the toast of Hollywood’s lefty, fuel-burning Gulfstream-flying elite.
Tipper went from rock-music foe to mental-illness chieftain, announcing in 1999 as Al ran for president that she once caught a teeny bit of depression, but got better.
It didn’t help her mood when, months later, onstage at the Democratic convention, Al ferociously kissed her in a sneak attack that reeked of passion. Or desperation.
As the pair heads to the human recycling bin, let’s hope Al and Tip find what they’re looking for. A less polluting and less hypocritical method of trotting the globe for him. Tonsils for her.
Fergie a Crown Royal pain
Sarah Ferguson, the cow who signs her children’s books “THE Duchess of York,” told Oprah she was hammered — “not in my right place” — when she tried to wrest 750K from an undercover journalist in exchange for access to ex-hubby Prince Andrew.
She also told O that she needed a chunk of change to help “a friend.” Good grief!
Tired excuses from a grand dame who insists on chauffeur-driven limos and first-class flights, and who beds down in a suite at New York’s posh Mark Hotel, despite a pauper’s lack of coin.
When I’m not in my happy place, I hit the gym. Work and sweat don’t exist in Fergie’s “right place.”
Lori, tell America ‘gracias’
Lori Berenson won’t denounce the terrorists with whom she conspired to blow up the Peru Congress building. Freed after 15 years in a Peruvian lockup, and told to sit tight another five years, the fire-breathing radical now has a full-court press under way to get her shipped home to New York. Lima says good riddance. New York isn’t so sure.
Berenson presents herself as a sickly shadow of her former self — a wife and mother, roles she achieved behind bars (though she’s leaving her hub). Once she’s in our faces, I hope she understands the breaks she enjoyed. She was originally sentenced to life in prison, but President Bill Clinton helped her get a new trial, reducing her stretch to 20 years, then 15. I also hope she appreciates her own country, which treats treasonous scum more gently than Peru does.
I won’t count on it.
‘Officials’ misconduct
Heads should roll. Instead, it’s business as usual at the Department of Education.
The school system may have exposed your kids to felons and convicted sex offenders — a rapist, a pedophile and at least one drug pusher — who worked as sports referees, despite being flagged as “unemployable” by the DOE.
As The Post revealed, no one in authority checked if scores of guys hired to work city games were suited to associate with children, until someone happened to notice that a ref was on the state’s sex-offender registry.
Even so, it took more than a year for the DOE’s sports division to remove degenerates from its roster of eligible refs. Then the scandal was kept under wraps by the special commissioner of investigation until we spilled the beans.
It’s scary. It’s butt-covering.
Typical.