Brian Lehrer

Call it a rich stash of New York radio history. Or call it a bunch of old office crud.

In either case, on Thursday, June 12, from 11 in the morning until 2 in the afternoon, WNYC employees will be holding a "stoop sale" in anticipation of their imminent move to new headquarters.  read more »

Twenty percent of state revenue comes from Wall Street, Comptroller Tom DiNapoli told Brian Lehrer during an appearance on WNYC this morning.

“That’s corporate profits and that’s personal income taxes from the people who work there—and much of that is paid out from the personal bonuses,” he said. Budget projections until recently “follow[ed] a couple of years of really record bonuses."  read more »

I got scooped on posting my own video of Michael Bloomberg (yet again) blowing off steam over another 2008 question.

At a press conference this morning, I asked Bloomberg about the upcoming book from Doug Schoen, the pollster employed by Bloomberg during his two mayoral campaigns. The book's title seems to fit Bloomberg's message perfectly: “Declaring Independence: The Beginning of the End of the Two-Party System.”

Although he called it a ridiculous question today, the mayor was more forthright when Brian Lehrer asked him about it earlier. "I don’t think that either national party stands for anything," Bloomberg said in that interview, which you can see here.

My ridiculous hunch (to go with my ridiculous question) is that a Huffington Post story about Bloomberg's use of a tutor for national and international issues was a signal of sorts that it's okay to ask him about policy now -- and that we should probably stop wasting our time seeking new sound bites of him beating up on the national parties.

Two media outlets trying to book the two candidates running in a Feb. 7 special election for state Senate in Nassau are going to have to make due with just one.

Brian Lehrer's show this morning will only feature Democrat Craig Johnson because Maureen O'Connell is too busy to participate, her campaign spokesman Mike Arens told me yesterday. That's the same reason she's also declined to participate in a joint televised appearance with Johnson at ABC this Friday. (A person working at ABC said they only reached out to both campaigns about that event yesterday.)

When I asked Arens whether there was any duck-y aspect to what O'Connell was doing, he denied it strongly.

"She and her opponent have been on two televised new debates and three different newspaper editorial boards," he said.

He said that it was simply a matter of the campaign choosing to focus on getting O'Connell to meet or make personal contact with as many voters as possible in the district. So instead of doing debates, he said, O'Connell will be meeting with "senior citizens groups, walking door to door, [and joining] volunteers doing a train station in the morning."

-- Azi Paybarah

Observer Real Estate reporter Michael Calderone writes about the legacy of Jane Jacobs in today's paper, and Brian Lehrer had an interesting discussion of Jacobs' enduring influence on planning this morning on WNYC. —Nicole Brydson  read more »

Brian Lehrer spoke to Bill Weld this morning on WNYC about his policy proposals for New York State.

You can listen to the show here.

WNYC's Brian Lehrer got our nightmare pitch recently: Fire Island is the Thinking Person's Hamptons. Kill. Kill. Related: More Boys Needed For House of Slags in Kismet. World's Dirtiest Human Soup Needs More Victims. More Homos Needed To Pack Into Overly Fussy House. We Were In New York Magazine and We Love Us!

The Politicker doesn't know much about the arrest, reported in the Post, of the Amsterdam News's top editor for allegedly stealing from the paper. But a reader reminds me that the ex-editor and his boss had a very odd public fight about the Mike's absence from the Harlem debates race on the Brian Lehrer Show not long ago, which we covered here.  read more »

The Politicker isn't going to ease into the 2006 races over the course of this month, so expect relatively light posting for a little while.

Other people are in more of a hurry, like the operative, who shall remain nameless, who woke me up yesterday (OK, yesterday afternoon) with a voicemail that began: "Wake up motherfucker! 2006 begins now!"  read more »

Alternately, Brian Lehrer has some very fun graphics on his blog from Kate Ascher's new book on how stuff in New York City works.

A couple of readers recommend listening to this morning's Brian Lehrer show (listen here), in which host and write-in fav Lehrer asked Amsterdam News publisher Wilbert Tatum about Mike's refusal to debate in Harlem.

Tatum, to the surprise of many, backed the Mayor, and seemed to telegraph an endorsement.  read more »

Then Am News executive editor Jamal Watson called into the show -- to argue with his boss and press the Mayor to debate.

Suddenly, those deeply-conflicted-yet-somehow-fascinating Log Cabin Republicans are running for office all over the place. Patrick Murphy is campaigning for City Council on the East Side, and now Brian Lehrer's blog reports that Jeff Cook, a former national Log Cabin official, is considering a primary challenge to Sue Kelly in Westchester.

According to Alarming News, he would run against the House GOP's big-spending ways, making it a test of social conservatism against fiscal conservatism.  read more »

Now, Log Cabin candidacies make a certain kind of sense. A gay Republican can defuse some Democrats' instinctive dislike of the GOP.

Less clear is how this works among, er, Republicans. Particularly GOP primary voters. But we'll see.