Blogoland

I was never a big stadium/Olympics proponent -- I stand by my opinion that no multi-billion dollar enterprise should get free money from the public -- but one of the more interesting things to come out of this debacle was the utter political miscalculation and naievete by the mayor and his underlings. They thought they could circumvent the state on a deal of this magnitude? Whoops! You'd think somebody would have figured that out before last summer -- you know, that they'd need Sheldon Silver and Joe Bruno to get approval for the money.

And another interesting sidelight. Reading today's postmortem in the NYT, it seems like Bloomberg doesn't even really understand how to deal with people on a personal-political level. But I went to the guy's grandkids bris! I called him about his dead brother! Yeah, well, politics is a funny, ego-driven, often personal thing. And it wasn't about the money or pork or whatever. Because it was clear that Bloomberg was willing to give away the store for Lower Manhattan. Silver had clearly already thought this through: "They think they can go around me? The Assembly Speaker? From Lower Manhattan? Well, we'll see about that." And he waited. Fascinating.