Fire in the A-Hole

We  have already commented on the crackpot idea of the mayor's to go after a pension benefits of both police and firefighters-and now the NY post chimes in with more abuse of the tone deaf Bloomberg: "If Mayor Bloomberg hopes to wrest from Albany the pension-reform goals he seeks and the city sorely needs, he should stop trying to pick the pockets of retired firefighters and cops. As has been amply documented in The Post for months now, New York's public-pension liabilities have brought the city to the brink of bankruptcy. Change is mandatory. But targeting retired firefighters and cops is no way to go."

Of course it isn't, but the mayor remains clueless to the need to treat public safety differently then less vital areas of government service. And what could be more dastardly then going after current retirees who served with the expectation that their benefits would be in place for their retirement: "But he swiftly trained his sights on current retirees -- folks who served the city honorably, in the full expectation that the cash would be there when they retired."

And the Christmas "bonus" canard is exactly what union leaders characterized as a, "lie," since it is certainly nothing like those excoriated bonuses that the Wall Streeters and lawyers get around the holidays: "So while the mayor almost sneeringly dismisses the payment as a "Christmas bonus" -- it's distributed at year's end -- it's anything but a bonus. It is, de facto, a negotiated benefit."

What all of this underscores quite nicely is the fact that the mayor has been stripped of his veneer of fiscal experise-and is forced to grasp at straws like charging for EMS service because he allowed his budget to bloat for nine years, even with his additional taxes and confiscatory regulations. Once again, stealing the pensioners' money dramatizes the extent to which the Master of the House isn't the lover he thinks he is.