"Mayor-for-Life 'Papa Doc' B

The video above is a beautifully presented piece about the schools under Mayor Bloomberg who has now served nearly two terms. All his ads are expensive, polished productions, free of peeve.

Um, say -- is that school bus in the background at 23 seconds by any chance from Jofaz, which was entangled in that corruption scandal involving city school bus contractors? Just asking.

Either way, likely campaign challenger William C. Thompson Jr. today is going after the potentially creaky premise that Bloomberg (who denounced the idea of extending term limits for himself before doing exactly that) has worked academic miracles. Thompson accuses Schools Chancellor Joel Klein of fudging graduation numbers. Rates were a target four years ago of Bloomberg opponent Fernando Ferrer.

Wayne Barrett, who consistently zigs when others zag, this week concentrates elsewhere -- raising the question of how the billionaire mayor has managed to politically sidestep his administration's biggest scandal, involving the death of two firefighters at the former Deutsche Bank building, where huge and significant irregularities have been discovered in the inspection and handling of a post-9/11 demolition job involving sensitive toxic materials. The full story is here. An excerpt is below the 'continued' click.

Deadly mismanagement cost one mayor his job. Yankel Rosenbaum's murder in a Crown Heights race riot mishandled by the NYPD finished David Dinkins in 1993, when the media refused to give a culpable administration a pass simply because its breakdowns were two-year-old news.

But we are now in an era when media moguls get together to reverse two public referendums in an undisguised effort to keep one of their own in office, a time when the mayor may be the biggest new ad buyer in town. The question now is whether the press will hold accountable a mayor who has refused to hold any of his own appointees accountable for an avoidable disaster.

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