Bloomberg, again threatening vaguely to make that presidential run that the American people are decidedly not calling for, told MIT last night that he doesn't even need to be president, because all of his autocratic desires are fulfilled by running America's most populous city as his private fiefdom.

“I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh biggest army in the world. I have my own State Department, much to Foggy Bottom’s annoyance. We have the United Nations in New York, and so we have an entree into the diplomatic world that Washington does not have,” Mayor Bloomberg said.

I'm not entirely sure what he means by having his own "State Department." The city's independent nonprofit tourism agency, maybe? But he didn't mention that his army also comes with its own international (and questionably legal) intelligence-gathering apparatus, just like the CIA and FBI, except without any sort of oversight, congressional or otherwise.

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Queens City Councilman Peter Vallone tested this line today, claiming the protests were actually making New Yorkers more vulnerable to terrorism!

"This is costing a lot of money, at a time when we are being warned that we may face revenge attacks from al-Qaida because of our recent drone strike,” said Councilman Peter Vallone of Queens.

Vallone, chair of the Public Safety Committee, said he'll be asking for an accounting at the end of it all.

"We're going to spend hundreds of thousands, maybe even $1 million on this that we don't have. Because of these protests, we might even wind up shutting down schools and firehouses because this is costing a lot of money." Vallone said.

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The request, filed in federal court in Manhattan, is based on reporting by The Associated Press, which revealed a clandestine police unit that monitored all aspects of daily life in Muslim neighborhoods. Documents showed that plainclothes officers were being dispatched to eavesdrop inside businesses. Restaurants that serve Muslims were identified and photographed. Hundreds of mosques were investigated. Dozens were infiltrated.

Police also maintained a list of 28 countries that, along with "American Black Muslim," were labeled "ancestries of interest."

"Based on this evidence, there is reason to believe that the NYPD retains records of surveillance of public places that are not limited to information pertaining to 'potential unlawful activity or terrorism,'" lawyers told U.S. District Judge Charles Haight.

A spokesman for the New York Police Department didn't immediately respond to a message seeking comment.

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Let's start with Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is at the moment clearly struggling with his natural impulse to throw every protester in jail without charges for the crime in interrupting the business of the city's truly important people. His impassioned plea to the people currently participating in the Occupy Wall Street protest: The banks are our friends!

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No, OK, that really was a cheap joke. "Margaret" is most definitely a time capsule from George W. Bush's America, and a promiscuous and overcrowded one at that, which is both what makes it fascinating and what makes it almost guaranteed to attract no audience. It's got not one but two tear-jerker excerpts from live opera, shot on the state of the Metropolitan Opera House; a running in-joke about the New York theater world; small supporting roles for Matt Damon and Mark Ruffalo and Matthew Broderick and Jean Reno and Kieran Culkin and Rosemarie DeWitt; literary exegesis about Shakespeare and Gerard Manley Hopkins; heated high-school debates about American foreign policy and the Arab world; and wonderful parts for the underappreciated actresses J. Smith-Cameron (Lonergan's wife) and Jeannie Berlin (Elaine May's daughter). Oh, and have I mentioned that none of the people in the movie is named Margaret?

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The documents describe in extraordinary detail a secret program intended to catalog life inside Muslim neighborhoods as people immigrated, got jobs, became citizens and started businesses. The documents undercut the NYPD's claim that its officers only follow leads when investigating terrorism.

It started with one group, Moroccans, but the documents show police intended to build intelligence files on other ethnicities.

Undercover officers snapped photographs of restaurants frequented by Moroccans, including one that was noted for serving "religious Muslims." Police documented where Moroccans bought groceries, which hotels they visited and where they prayed. While visiting an apartment used by new Moroccan immigrants, an officer noted in his reports that he saw two Qurans and a calendar from a nearby mosque.

It was called the Moroccan Initiative.

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Thankfully, all of these lessons and narratives are extremely predictable. One of two things will happen tonight, and pundits will draw one or more of the following lessons, depending.

If Bob Turner wins today...

... it means

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Polls show Republican Bob Turner slightly leading, so obviously any result other than a Turner victory means ACORN paid homeless people to vote 100 times under false names. "Will [close polls] tempt some locals to resort to the kind of voter fraud that Kings County and Brooklyn are infamous for?" asks former Fulton County, Georgia Republican Party head Hans A. von Spakovsky, who is apparently unaware that "Kings County and Brooklyn" is redundant.

Spakovsky suspects imminent voter fraud because some people listed on the registration rolls have moved or died:

A source within the Turner camp tells me the campaign sent a letter and campaign literature to all the voters on the permanent list maintained by the Board of Elections who are automatically mailed absentee ballots. They have received hundreds of pieces of returned mail marked “address unknown” or “return to sender” and at least five marked “deceased.”

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Turner has the support of former Mayor Ed Koch, who endorsed the Republican to send a bullshit message to Obama about not "throwing Israel under the bus." Hilariously, Weprin is actually an Orthodox Jew, while Turner is... not. But the "pro Israel" crowd lately sees right-wing Christians as more loyal to Zionism than liberal Jews, because liberal Jews sometimes offer the opinion that endless occupation of Palestine is perhaps unsustainable. (Not that Weprin is actually remotely left-wing on Israel -- his primary crime is being a Democrat.)

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A Change.org petition started by comedian Kevin Bartini to christen Carlin's boyhood block on West 121st Street "George Carlin Way" has already amassed nearly 3,000 signatures -- and the support of Carlin's daughter Kelly. "I feel it's very important to protect his legacy and keep the torch lit and to keep the conversation going the next 40 years and I'm very proud and honored to do it," she told ABC News this week.

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He accidentally said the national debt was "4 trillion" instead of $14 trillion. Yesterday he pulled out of a debate with his Republican challenger at the last minute. Weprin blamed Hurricane Irene. His opponent, Republican Bob Turner, mocked him.

Anthony Weiner enjoyed being a shouty liberal on your television but his (very oddly shaped) congressional district was a lot whiter and a bit older than a lot of the rest of New York City. NY-9 is reliably Democratic -- Obama won it with 55 percent of the vote -- but its largely Jewish and Italian neighborhoods also largely voted for independent Mayor Michael Bloomberg over his Democratic challengers.

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It’s been ten short years. Everyone remembers. Some, though, want to commemorate the tragedy by building a mosque on Ground Zero. President Obama thinks that’s a good idea. And so does Congressional candidate David Weprin.

[Weprin video: "I support the right of the mosque to build."]

Bob Turner says no. He knows Obama and Weprin are wrong. September 13th, send a message.

Put aside the outright falsehood in the ad (the proposed Islamic center is not "on" Ground Zero, but blocks away), and focus on a more interesting question: Why is the Turner campaign harping on such an old issue at this particular moment? Even Park51's developer recently acknowledged that the project -- a generous term, as it's more of an idea at this point -- is at least five years away from any sort of construction; in real world terms, that means it may well never be built.

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Lawyers for the maid, Guinean immigrant Nafissatou Diallo, wrote in the lawsuit that Strauss-Kahn "intentionally, brutally and violently sexually assaulted Ms. Diallo and in the process humiliated, degraded, violated and robbed Ms. Diallo of her dignity as a woman."

The lawsuit says Strauss-Kahn injured her shoulder, bruised her vagina, tore her pantyhose and violently grabbed the back of her head during the attack.

The lawsuit, filed in state court in the Bronx, accuses Strauss-Kahn of acting like a common criminal afterward, fleeing the midtown Manhattan hotel so quickly that he left behind traces of his semen, along with bloody tissues.

"In his haste to flee the scene of a crime, he rushed out of the hotel with toothpaste smeared on the outside of his mouth and was looking over his shoulders," the lawsuit said.

A lawyer for Strauss-Kahn didn't immediately respond to phone message seeking comment on the lawsuit Monday.

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The tapes also established that housekeeper Nafissatou Diallo recounted the attack to the man during their first conversation, a day after the alleged attack -- showing, her lawyer said, that her focus was on what had happened to her, not on the former International Monetary Fund leader's wealth or stature.

"Information has been put out there about Ms. Diallo that now I know was false. She never was scheming to take DSK's money, and that's a fact," said her attorney, Kenneth Thompson, referring to Strauss-Kahn by his initials. Diallo herself didn't speak to reporters, and the Manhattan District Attorney's office declined to comment on the meeting.

The marathon session marked the 32-year-old's first meeting with prosecutors since they said July 1 they had doubts about her credibility because she hadn't been truthful about her background or what she did right after the May 14 encounter. Strauss-Kahn denies the charges, and his lawyers are calling for the case to be dismissed.

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Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr.'s office refused repeated attempts to discuss the case, which has grown shaky in recent weeks after questions about the credibility of the maid, who claims Strauss-Kahn forced her to perform oral sex.

Hotel housekeeper Nafissatou Diallo's interviews aired on ABC's "Good Morning America" and in a Newsweek cover story.

"I want justice," Diallo told ABC News. "I want him to go to jail."

With her interviews, the 32-year-old Guinean immigrant, prosecutors' star witness, ripped off the veil of privacy that authorities had kept around her. Prosecutors have provided her with housing and paid her daily expenses to keep her from the media maelstrom.

She defied prosecutors' conventional wisdom about accusers speaking publicly before trial -- it's generally seen as providing defense lawyers material to mine for contradictions and questions. Her move could widen a rift between prosecutors and their key witness, who hasn't spoken with them since late June while her lawyer called for a special prosecutor after the district attorney's office said it had developed doubts about her trustworthiness.

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While the practice was originally blamed on a few overzealous reporters, it's clear, now, that it was more or less standard operating procedure for reporters. The victims of News of the World hacking now include multiple murdered teenaged girls (News of the World reporters even deleted old messages in order to make room for new ones to spy on) and the families of victims of the 7/7 terrorist attacks. The paper also bribed cops, and Scotland Yard is still contacting additional potential victims of phone hacking with the cooperation of a private investigator retained by News of the World to perform the hackings.

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Sounds fantastic, doesn't it? He sounds like Howard Dean echoing Paul Wellstone lines. Hell, he sounds like his father, Mario Cuomo, the great liberal lion.

But there's just one problem with all the hullaballoo: When Andrew Cuomo's record is evaluated as a whole, it's clear that his tolerance on social issues combined with his lockstep corporatism on economic issues makes him not some proud representative of the "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," but rather what is typically called a standard-issue Northeastern Republican.

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Investigators have come to believe that the woman lied about some of her activities in the hours around the alleged attack and about her own background, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press on Thursday. The official is familiar with the case but spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss matters not yet made public in court.

Prosecutors think she lied about details on her application for asylum in the U.S., including saying she had been raped in her native Guinea, the official told the AP.

"She actually recounted the entire story to prosecutors and later said it was false," the official said.

Prosecutors haven't necessarily reached a new conclusion about the allegations against Strauss-Kahn and have not decided whether to downgrade the charges, the official said.

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After Giuliani left his (second) wife in 2001 by announcing his infidelity at a press conference, he moved in with his good friends Howard Koeppel and Mark Hsiao, a gay couple who've been together since 1991. They were so close, these three, that Koeppel asked if Giuliani would perform their wedding ceremony. Giuliani said he would, once gay marriage became legal in New York.

Then Giuliani ran for president. And he decided that marriage is between a man and a woman (followed by two more women). His sudden change of heart propelled him to a distant third-place finish in the Florida Republican primary, followed by his exit from the race.

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