September 10, 2014 | 2:26am
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Police Commissioner Bill Bratton and Mayor de Blasio Photo: Gabriella Bass
Size matters, top cop Bill Bratton says. Except when he says size doesn’t matter.
The commissioner’s latest observation that New York needs to hire at
least 1,000 more cops contrasts with his earlier statements that 35,000
were enough. Those who fault him for flip-flopping have a point, but
only up to a point.
They forget that timing matters, too, and it’s now Bratton’s time to
challenge his boss. Think of it as payback for the Al Sharpton fiasco.
When Mayor de Blasio foolishly invited Sharpton to a City Hall
discussion of police tactics and seated himself between Bratton and
Sharpton, the rabble-rousing rev used the promotion to humiliate his
host and demonize cops. His hectoring reportedly infuriated the mayor,
who believed he could count on Sharpton to be a team player. Silly man.
For his part, Bratton hid his fury, but is now getting even. The last
thing de Blasio wants is to spend more money on hiring cops, which
would be an admission that public safety is in jeopardy.
And the cost of those cops, more than $100 million a year, would be
money he couldn’t spend on his leftist splurges, though it would
probably buy him some peace with police unions.
The sense that the mayor and his police commissioner are in a tense
dance is bolstered by the likelihood that Bratton didn’t give his boss a
heads-up that he was going to use Monday’s City Council testimony to
switch sides on the hiring issue. Nor can it be lost on City Hall that
Bratton said additional cops were necessary because the entire
department would be taken off the beat for re-training, a direct result
of Sharpton’s agitation after the Eric Garner death on Staten Island.
Such are the strains of a marriage born of mutual convenience. Payback is expensive, but cheaper than divorce.
Bratton and de Blasio got hitched because the mayor’s anti-NYPD
campaign last year raised fears he would be soft on crime and the city
would revert to the mayhem of the David Dinkins era.
To counter those fears, de Blasio made a show of soliciting advice
from Bratton, a cop’s cop and a successful commissioner in Boston, New
York and Los Angeles.
For his part, Bratton wanted the Gotham job again badly enough to
criticize Michael Bloomberg and Ray Kelly, despite record-low crime
rates. His hiring, then, gave both him and de Blasio something they
wanted.
But the tension keeps surfacing. During an earlier dust-up, two
friends of Bratton separately told me they believed he would be gone in a
year because he and de Blasio have such fundamentally different ideas
about policing and because of de Blasio’s political debts to Sharpton.
They might still be proven right, but I wouldn’t underestimate
Bratton’s improved skills at political in-fighting. He dared Rudy
Giuliani to fire him, and Rudy took him up on the challenge.
It was a misreading of his standing that Bratton is not likely to
repeat. He’ll soon turn 67 and another firing or resignation in New York
would be an unfortunate way to end his career.
Indeed, in a casual conversation just before de Blasio hired him,
Bratton joked to me that “I should have worked for Bloomberg” because
Bloomy gave Kelly free rein at the NYPD.
No commissioner worth the job would want it any other way, so my bet
is that Bratton is both more patient and more confident in his ability
to bend de Blasio his way. After all, pushing for more cops against the
mayor’s wish is a pretty bold move for somebody who serves at the
mayor’s pleasure.
Still, crime is the one thing that binds them. If it goes up appreciably, neither will survive in his job.
If they can keep crime down, and so far, they mostly have, they could
stay together for four years, even though love has nothing to do with
it.
Let victis inspire response to Isis
With President Obama set to outline a plan for more attacks against
the Islamic State, two dead Americans deserve to be a big part of
tonight’s speech. In fact, journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff
might be alive if they had been of almost any other nationality.
Remember, their executioners stressed that they were being beheaded
as retaliation for limited bombing runs the United States carried out
against the terror group.
Foley was subject to torture and mock executions before he was
slaughtered, former hostages told intelligence officials. They said
American prisoners were always treated more harshly than Europeans.
Sotloff’s murder confirms the point, and comes with an added twist.
He was Jewish and had dual US-Israeli citizenship — facts not made
public until his death because of fears he would be killed by his Muslim
captors.
A friend of his wrote in The Times of Israel that after Sotloff’s
kidnapping, “friends and associates raced to systematically remove any
reference online to his Israeli and Jewish roots. The US and Israeli
media agreed to cooperate in concealing this information, in order not
to further jeopardize his life.”
The assumption — that being American would make him safer — proved to
be more than false. He and Foley were singled out for death because of
it.
As such, the gruesome murders served as a declaration of war against
America. The failure of Obama to understand that — and to go golfing
instead of responding — is helping to push his poll numbers to the
basement.
A Washington Post-ABC poll finds that a majority of the country, 52
percent, now calls his presidency a failure. The poll finds that 59
percent view the Islamic State as a very serious threat, and 71 percent
favor airstrikes.
We’ll know Wednesday night whether Obama is as wise as the people he supposedly leads.
Standing tall on this 9/11
With Thursday marking the 13th anniversary of the terror attack that
changed history, the memorial service will serve as a fresh reminder of
that awful day —and show how far New York has come in rebuilding the
site.
The memorial and museum are finished, and the Freedom Tower is almost
complete. Delays, disputes and overruns are legendary, and much of the
surrounding area remains under construction.
But kower Manhattan continues to grow with housing, shops, offices,
families and parks. All of that is a vital part of the comeback of a
city the terrorists tried to destroy, but couldn’t because New Yorkers
wouldn’t let them.
Trump record is Taj and go
You know times are tough when even the legal bookies are going bust.
Trump Entertainment Resorts filed for bankruptcy Tuesday, and its Taj
Mahal could be the fifth Atlantic City casino to close this year.
In court filings, the company says it has liabilities of up to $500 million and assets of no more than $50,000.
Wow. Anybody who could dig a casino into a hole that deep definitely belongs in a government job.
The
article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New
York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column,
"The Borowitz Report." 
Republican Super PAC defended the broadcast, on Saturday morning, of an
attack ad highly critical of Hillary Clinton’s newborn granddaughter,
Charlotte, who was born on Friday.
n
a positive development for the U.S.-led campaign of air strikes in
Syria, a new poll indicates strong, broad-based support for the mission
among people who have yet to read a news article about Syria.
wo
days after voting against the Paycheck Fairness Act, a law that would
help women to obtain equal pay, the four female Republicans in the
United States Senate co-sponsored a bill that would slash their salaries
to seventy-one per cent of what their male colleagues earn.
resident
Obama has had two sleepless nights since learning that Rush Limbaugh
praised his speech about Iraq and Syria this week, a White House source
confirmed on Saturday.
