The Bloomberg Assesment: No Third Term

Mike Lupica is not always our favorite columnist, but Sunday he really hit one out-skewering the mayor on the Yankee Stadium assessment scam with a column titled: "It's a Wonderful Lie." In his piece he ridicules Bloomerg as the Harry Potter of big city mayors-the kind of wizard we need, supposedly, to get us out from under.

Yet, if he capable of such wizardry, he doesn't appear to be applying it for the good of city tax payers-not if this stadium deal is any true measure. As Lupica points out: "So one of these days Bloomberg and the people who work for him - or used to work for him when he was trying to get the deal done on the financing of the new Yankee Stadium - need to explain something to the citizens of New York, and to the Congress, in a way those of us who aren't financial wizards can understand: How more than two years ago the appraised value of the land around the new stadium, land the Yankees need to build the richest baseball stadium ever built, suddenly and magically went from $27 million to $204 million because that made the deal work best for the New York Yankees."

What Lupica sees clearly, is just how much this giveaway tells us about the mayor's real resume: working assiduously to aggrandize his wealth cohort: "Because if the city just hands over the bonds at a time like this, it will tell you everything about the way Bloomberg's New York actually works for the rich and the powerful." And why the assessment of the city's voters should be to reduce the Bloomberg rating into junk bond status.