Mike Gianaris

In case you had any doubt, fedoras are so much back in style I spotted them on City Council members--and candidates for higher office--David Weprin and Jim Gennaro at the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Sunnyside yesterday.  read more »

Here's to the folks who work overtime to dispel the notion of a slow news day. (Like, say, today.)

Over the past month, the Queens Chronicle has collected every e mail and fax sent by Queens representatives at all levels of government: city, state and federal. The paper tabulated the total number of communications and [John] Liu came out ahead by a large margin.

The highly scientific results:

The Press Release Champs

City Council: John Liu (D Flushing), 37 e mails, 3 faxes

State Assembly: Mike Gianaris (D Astoria), 7 e mails, 4 faxes

State Senate: Malcolm Smith (D St. Albans), 10 e mails, 14 faxes

Federal Government: Sen. Hillary Clinton, 32 e mails

--releases collected between Nov. 21 and Dec. 21, 2006 by the Queens Chronicle

-- Azi Paybarah

Hillary got the broccoli omelet. No word on Gioia.  read more »

Based on this morning's news, you might think that after a brief, dark scare in Staten Island, the city's power grid is back to normal.

But just as we were preparing to start talking about this week's blackouts in the past tense, Mike Gianaris tells us that there are still "isolated pockets" of powerlessness in the western reaches of Queens.

This morning he is set to visit blacked-out butcher shops and fishmongers on 30th avenue who are still struggling to refrigerate their stores.

"A lot of the businesses are literally in danger of going out of business," said Gianaris, who added that all the areas exposed wires and shredded concrete gave it the look of a "war zone."

Next week Gianaris, and Councilmembers Eric Gioia and Peter Vallone Jr will announce a proposal calling on Con Ed to refund more than the $350 they have promised to affected residents. In addition, the lawmakers want three months of free electricity for everyone in the affected area.

Meanwhile, there is concern throughout the borough that the mini-heat wave expected in the coming days might wreak havoc on Con Ed's jury-rigged wiring.

The mayor's aides, we're guessing, are glued to the weather channel.

- Jason Horowitz

In the Observer, Jason Horowitz looks at Mike Bloomberg's coldly apolitical reaction to the blackout and Con Ed, and finds energy wonks to be the only people applauding.

Queens pols Eric Gioia, Mike Gianaris and Joe Crowley still can't seem to make sense of it. And -- as anyone who watched the Spitzer-Suozzi debate last night alredy knows -- the attorney general has declared himself "stunned" by the attempts of his "good friend Mike Bloomberg" to defend Con Ed CEO Kevin Burke.

Any guesses as to what are the next polls going to say about Bloomberg's approval ratings? And whether or not the anger against him will ultimately prove to be localized, like the blackout, within parts of Western Queens?

-- Josh Benson

It's not a stretch to suggest that if the blackouts affecting parts of Queens all week had taken place in Manhattan, they would have been treated with considerably more urgency by the administration. (To say nothing of the media.)

It took until yesterday for things to tip about the significance of what was happening, with the mayor finally deciding to make an appearance at the scene of the power outages.

Mike Gianaris, a proud son of Astoria who's been screaming about the blackouts for several days now, said this morning he was "shocked by how long it took people to get focused on the problem out here," and said he suspected that the mayor in particular may have been slow because he trusted Con Ed about the limited effects fo whatever went wrong.

(It turns out, as we now know, that the number of affected residents and customers is in the thousands, not the hundreds, and that it could take until the end of the weekend to get power back on for everyone.)

So now that this has finally become a major event, will there be any political consequences for the mayor?

Gianaris says it depends. "How much damage is done to him remains to be seen based on how this concludes."

-- Josh Benson