Nevermind!

It's interesting that the LA Times (via Liz) is able to do a better job at exposing the hypocrisy of the mayor's volte-face than our local media: "For a long time, Mayor Michael Bloomberg seemed to despise the very notion of changing a voter-approved law that restricts elected officeholders to two terms in office.When a bill reached his desk in 2002 that would have extended the terms for some officials, he vetoed it. He said the proposed law was wrong because elected officials shouldn't be changing rules to benefit themselves politically."

Funny that we didn't read this in the News or the Post this morning-which means that the fight against this usurpation of the popular will must be fought against the media as well as the self-serving political class; don't expect fair and balanced when the Billionaire Boys Club circles the wagons in its own interest.

And we guess you're not gonna see much of this either: "In 2006, Bloomberg scoffed at the notion that an individual could be truly irreplaceable."My experience in business has been, whenever we've had somebody who was irreplaceable, their successor invariably did a better job, and I think change is good," he said. "Yes, you throw out an occasional good person, but you also throw out a lot of people who have just gotten stale and take it for granted, haven't had any new ideas, so on balance I've always been a believer in term limits."

Exacerbating the situation is the fact that Mayor Mike will apparently ask for legislation that would only extend the terms of current office holders. As Crain's Insider reports this morning, this isn't sitting well with extension supporter Oliver Koppell: "Councilman Oliver Koppell, who opposes term limits, says extending them only for Mayor Bloomberg and the current crop of elected officials—as proposed yesterday by longtime term limits proponent Ron Lauder—“would make this thing look so self-serving that I think it would be on the borderline of offensive.” Koppell, who recently asked the council’s law office to draft a bill extending term limits, says an extension for just one person would violate the bill’s principle. “This is not being done solely for the sake of having Bloomberg for another four years."

Maybe Ollie missed the memo on this: Earth to Koppell; it's all about the royal coronation-nothing else factors into this arrogant display of political onanism. The city council is merely a sideshow to the imperial rein. We'll give Common Cause the final word here: "Chris Kelley, associate director of the government watchdog group Common Cause New York, accused Bloomberg of attempting to subvert the will of the voters."If there's a discussion that needs to be had about term limits, the mayor has had years in office during which we could have had a public discussion," he said. "We are now faced with a situation where we are looking at economic crisis and massive turnover at City Hall ... and to make an end-run around the voters' choice is just incredibly disappointing."