While Mayor Bloomberg has been mayor, the NYPD has carried out over 5 million stop-and-frisks. Analysis by the ACLU of official police data found that over 86 percent of the stops were of black or Latino individuals. The analysis of police data also revealed that 88 percent of the stops did not result in an arrest or summons (and of course an even smaller proportion ever lead to a prosecution, or conviction). The number of innocent people stopped alone serves as ample riposte to Kelly's suggestion that any demographic is "understopped."

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This nation was founded on the principle that the government must never choose between religions or favor one over another. The World Trade Center site will forever hold a special place in our city, in our hearts. But we would be untrue to the best part of ourselves and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans if we said no to a mosque in lower Manhattan.

Let us not forget that Muslims were among those murdered on 9/11, and that our Muslim neighbors grieved with us as New Yorkers and as Americans. We would betray our values and play into our enemies’ hands if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else. In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists, and we should not stand for that.

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Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly spoke at a briefing Thursday.

Kelly says the two suspects had a pressure cooker bomb and five pipe bombs they wanted to set off.

They said Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (joh-KHAHR' tsahr-NEYE'-ehv) told Boston investigators from his hospital bed that he and his brother had discussed going to New York to detonate their remaining explosives. They said they decided it spontaneously.

Kelly had said a day earlier that the Boston Marathon bombing suspects were targeting New York, but was later briefed by federal officials.

Tsarnaev traveled to New York at least once last fall. There is a photo of the suspect in Times Square.

Tsarnaev's older brother, Tamerlan (TA'-mehr-luhn), died in a shootout with police.

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The National Journal cites an anonymous senior official in the group, who said senior members of the super PAC met to discuss possible responses to the failure of gun control legislation:

The Bloomberg group is mulling a variety of messages and methods for Arkansas. One approach would be to target reliable Democratic voters, including African Americans, with advertising that calls out Pryor for “opposing the president’s agenda,” the official said. Another would be to expand the campaign to suburban women and other moderates. The campaign might not be limited to the issue of guns.

“Money would not be an object,” the official said, adding that a decision on whether to target Pryor would come soon and that action against other Democrats is still possible.

Pryor is one of the more vulnerable Democrats up for reelection in 2014.

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One reason was the ambiguity of the legal situation: While public parks close by 12 p.m., Zuccotti Park was a public-private hybrid, owned by an investment firm, Brookfield Office Properties. Technically such “privately owned public properties” are accessible to the public twenty-four hours a day. Still, by our experience, the mere existence of such a law would have been of little relevance if the authorities decided they wanted to evict us anyway, but it allowed something of a fig leaf. But why did they even want a fig leaf?

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The first lady elevated the conversation Wednesday, during a rare return to her hometown of Chicago. In a city ravaged by violence, with more than 500 gun-related homicides last year alone, she spoke eloquently -- and apolitically -- transcending the partisan politics that seem to subvert her husband's efforts for reasonable gun control legislation.

But what was most unique was for whom, and to whom, Michelle spoke. Her words gave voice to an oft ignored (but disproportionately affected) victim of America's gun violence: the black mother.

The first lady spoke of Hadiya Pendleton, the slain 15-year-old student, gunned down just blocks from the Obama's Chicago home -- and only days after Pendleton had attended the president's second inauguration. With tears in her eyes, Michelle said, "Hadiya Pendleton was me and I was her." The first lady went on to add that Pendleton's family is "just like" her own.

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But now that the former congressman is hinting at a comeback, with an emotional tell-all interview in the New York Times Magazine and open talk that he's eyeing a run for mayor of New York City, can he recapture that glory on the left? And critically, was he even a good congressman to begin with? Good enough to run the nation's largest city?

Even among his Democratic compatriots, Weiner was always a bit of a divisive figure: a great communicator and powerful leader, but one who didn’t play well with others. “He operated as a lone ranger, giving a voice to the progressive movement, but not operating as a partner with a larger set of House members or progressives on the outside,” one senior strategist for an outside progressive group said, contrasting him with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who works closely with partners to advance her agenda.

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The ad, which began airing on Monday, was paid for by a group of left-leaning labor groups and other Democratic activists, which call themselves NYC Is Not for Sale 2013. The ad shows Quinn's picture amid a cloud of smoke, and says that “Virtually all of Christine Quinn’s decisions were made in rooms just like this, with her friends in the 1%.”

NY1 reports:

The ad also faults her for changing term limits, saying "She is always on the wrong side. On living wage."

Quinn's lawyer says she passed the measure, so she can't be on the wrong side. However, she delayed the vote and passed a watered-down version.

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“For decades, the NRA has done an admirable job of tracking to minute detail how members of Congress stand on gun bills. We’ve simply decided to do the same,” said the group's director, Mark Glaze.

The Washington Post reports:

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The 30-second ad is part of a $250,000 buy by labor groups and one animal rights group, and will run for three weeks. From the New York Times:

The coalition opposing Ms. Quinn is called NYC Is Not for Sale 2013 and appears to be a successor to a group that actively opposed Mr. Bloomberg’s 2009 re-election bid. It also includes an animal-rights group, NYClass, that has long fought with Ms. Quinn over horse-drawn carriages and other issues. But the coalition also includes Democrats who had previously been major donors to Ms. Quinn.

The ad, which shows a picture of Quinn surrounded by smoke, says that “Virtually all of Christine Quinn’s decisions were made in rooms just like this, with her friends in the 1%. She wants you to think that she’s a progressive, but on the issues New Yorkers care most about, she is always on the wrong side."

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It is not "difficult to call a woman good-looking in public," not in a world where women's looks are considered public property, to be commented on, uninvited, whether it's on the street, in a job interview, or in the press. Many people find it quite easy to do, many of them men, and many people who should know better, like Barack Obama.

This is hardly the first time Obama has been smarmily sexist under the guise of paying a compliment. In the same New York magazine story on Christine Quinn in which Mayor Michael Bloomberg was notoriously quoted saying, "Look at the ass on her," Obama got a pass for a more politely phrased brand of creepiness. According to the piece, Obama said to a Republican legislator, 32-year-old Nicole Malliotakis, that she didn't look a day over 23. Quinn promptly joked that Malliotakis should become a Democrat, and the president chimed in, “Come on, honey! I said you’re pretty! I said you look 23!”

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Chris Moody from Yahoo! News reports that West is hosting an online talk show for Pajamas Media, and in recent episodes has called NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg a "gnome," MSNBC Host Touré a "coward," and made fun of Fox News' Brit Hume for wearing a pink shirt. From Yahoo:

"Not a fan of salmon?" [co-host John] Phillips asked him after a brief rant about Hume’s clothing.

"Eating salmon," West replied. "Not watching, you know, a guy dressed in salmon."

West also described his reaction to seeing a Calvin Klein ad with a male model wearing only underwear. "I was like ewww, you know?" he said.

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I don't personally agree that this logic is a convincing justification for the American Police State, and when I hear such arguments, I inevitably find myself confused by the contradiction of police-state proponents proposing to curtail freedom in order to protect it. But whether or not you subscribe to the police-state tautology, you have to admit there is more than a bit of hypocrisy at work when those who forward the Big Brother logic simultaneously insist such logic shouldn't apply to them or the governmental agencies they oversee.

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This month, NYPD's controversial stop-and-frisk policy -- which entails officers regularly stopping predominantly black and Latino men and frisking them for weapons and drugs -- went on trial in federal Court. The class-action lawsuit, Floyd v. City of New York, challenges the NYPD policy on the basis that it violates the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause, and the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure. According to the Center for Constitutional Rights, the NYPD's own data show hundreds of thousands of unconstitutional stops in the past three years alone, and expert analysis of their data -- controlling for crime, neighborhood and patterns of police deployment -- has found that the mitigating factor in NYPD stops is race.

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Coal and nuclear power industries in the United States have seen better days. The main culprit, energy industry analysts say, is the low cost of domestic natural gas, coupled with carbon-reducing regulations imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency and the efforts of environmental groups.

Instead of paying the high costs to upgrade coal-fired plants and repair aged nuclear facilities to meet environmental regulations, power companies across the country have been making the switch to natural gas.

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Obama, flanked by grim-faced mothers who have lost their children to guns, said Washington must do something after the tragic mass shooting in Newtown, Conn., three months ago. He called out to the families of four children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School sitting in his audience.

"Shame on us if we've forgotten," Obama said. "I haven't forgotten those kids."

Obama's event comes as gun control legislation faces an uncertain future, even though more than 80 percent of people say in polling they support expanded background checks. Backed by a $12 million TV advertising campaign financed by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, gun control groups scheduled rallies around the country Thursday aimed at pressuring senators to back the effort.

Obama said the upcoming vote is the best chance in more than a decade to reduce gun violence. He encouraged Americans, especially gun owners, to press lawmakers home from a congressional spring break to "turn that heartbreak into something real."

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First, though, ABC's "This Week," the only one of the big three shows this morning to have another idiotic debate about budgets, began with George Stephanopoulos actually bragging -- bragging! -- that he had both Jim Messina and Karl Rove. Oh boy, two campaign strategists! When I am looking for well-considered and thoughtful commentary on national issues, I always turn to people who are good at managing political campaigns.

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On gun control:

Michael Bloomberg, who launched a $12 million ad blitz to push for gun control, promised that Congress would have a vote on an assault weapons ban. “We've been fighting since 2007 to get a vote. We are going to have a vote for sure on assault weapons and we're going to have a vote on background checks,” he said on "Meet the Press." Bloomberg added: “If we were to get background checks only, it wouldn't be as good as if we got both, but look, we demanded a plan and then we demanded a vote. We've got the plan, we're going to get the vote."

Wayne LaPierre later slammed Bloomberg's effort. "He can't spend enough of of his $27 billion to try to impose his will on the American public," LaPierre said on "Meet the Press." He added that Bloomberg is "so reckless in terms of his comments on this whole gun issue."

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The New York Times reports:

In a telling sign of how much the white-hot demands for gun control have been tempered by political reality, Mr. Bloomberg’s commercials make no mention of an assault weapons ban once sought by the White House and its allies, instead focusing on the more achievable goal of universal background checks.

“You don’t want to lose everything in the interest of getting the perfect,” Bloomberg told the Times. He added: “The N.R.A. has just had this field to itself," but "It’s time for another voice.”

Some of the senators targeted  by the ads are Democrats slated for tough reelection battles in 2014, like Kay Hagan N.C., Mary Landrieu, La., and Mark Pryor, Ark, or Republicans in swing states, like Pat Toomey, Pa., and Rob Portman, Wis.

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