'It was time, I felt, for an Agonizing Reappraisal of the whole scene.'

My colleague Steve Couzzo took to the pages of yesterday's Sunday Post (in the brand new Post Script section) to offer the definitive account of Bloombergism -- the "independent" form of governance wholly preoccupied with busybodying even as core responsibilities (infrastructure, power, civil services) suffer -- in all its messy infamy:

The city's still in sound shape, and Bloomberg is entitled to a share of the credit. Crime is at record lows and the town is more bustling and cosmopolitan than ever.

But are we having fun yet? Not enough for the mayor, who wants us to take our medicine and be happy about it. He's left the Republicans and the Democrats behind to forge a new kind of political philosophy: Benign Billionaire Knows Best.

For him, our waistlines, our sex lives, even the behavior of our pets are fair game for improvement. Just as rezoning will produce a more sleekly contoured New York, so will tinkering with our everyday habits yield a bountiful future where no one need be fat -- or even, God forbid, stuck in traffic.

In Mayor Mike's ideal metropolis, the town would be cleansed, not only of cigarette smoke, but of a lengthy hit list of real and presumed urban evils -- among them, dogs that bark too loud and fast-food restaurants that fail to warn you of every calorie.

If you read one piece today, read this one.

Extra Credit: Anyone know where the hed for this post comes from?

The $25 Cigarette

New York Post columnist Steve Dunleavy, now pushing 80, is still being carded for a pack of smokes:

May 30, 2007 -- IT may not make the Guinness Book of Records, but I believe I paid the highest price in the world to smoke a single cigarette - $25, to be exact.

Up front, I have to say I deplore the evil habit of smoking. But there are so many souls out there, enslaved to the sinister cigarette, they will understand.

Now, back to the exorbitant price I paid for my sin of smoking.

I recently got my bill from a very charming boutique hotel in downtown L.A. called the Hilton Checkers.

On the 21st line of charges was the notation: "Smoking in the room: $200."

Yes, I had been told it was a nonsmoking hotel, but like most desperadoes in the grip of nicotine, I've gotten away with it before in nonsmoking rooms. (Wrong, I know.)

Over a period of four nights, I smoked two cigarettes a night, defying the prohibition. Total, eight cigarettes. Hence, my extra charge of $200 amounted to $25 a cigarette.

Listen, I'm not whining. I broke the announced rules, and I'll swallow (or inhale) the fine.

Back home now. For me it's an hour trip on the Long Island Rail Road to work. I stop at a Hudson News in Penn Station. Marlboro Lights, I ask, and this very sweet, polite young lady asks: "Can I see your ID?"

Digging through a thick wallet can be exhausting, so I leave the newsstand on the east side of the concourse and find another, on the west side. Again, politely, I'm asked, "Can I see your ID?"

I go upstairs to the Amtrak concourse, again request my fix, and again I'm asked for ID.

I finally produce a NYPD-issued press card, and I think the clerk was intimidated (something I hoped would happen), and she sold me a pack of smokes, although the press card did not state my birthdate.

Here I am, with more lines on my face than the San Andreas fault. I'm racing into my eighth decade seven months away, and these lovely ladies want to card me.

All right, I surrender on all counts. They've banned smoking at bars, hit us with giant taxes, but why declare war on us poor, wayward souls?

The Middle East's Fading Anti-Americanism

For those interested in formulating an opinion on what America's doing right now in Iraq, Amir Taheri's writing is indispensable. In his latest for the Post, Taheri apprises of how political parties are developing in Afghanistan and Iraq. Most interesting: leftist groups are allying, and rejecting their ingrained anti-Americanism.

Here are a few nuggets:

* In Iraq, two rival Communist parties, along with Social Democrats and other center-left groups, supported the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and continue to play a significant role in the new pluralist system. They are resolutely opposed to a premature withdrawal of American and allied forces, as demanded by the U.S. Congress. ...

BEFORE the U.S.-led inter ventions in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003, much of the Middle Eastern Left shared the views of its U.S. and European counterparts with regard to America.

"We looked to the Left in the West and imitated it," says Awad Nasir, one of Iraq's best-known poets and a life-long Communist. "We heard from the United States and Western Europe that being Left meant being anti-American. So we were anti-American. And then we saw Americans coming from the other side of the world to save us from Saddam Hussein - something that our leftist friends and the Soviet Union would never contemplate." ...

IRAQ'S parties of the Left were shocked when the new So cialist government in Spain decided to withdraw from the U.S.-led coalition in 2004. "We had hoped that with a party of the Left in power in Madrid we would get more support against the Islamofascists, not a withdrawal," says Aziz al-Haj, the veteran Iraqi communist leader.

Tareq al-Hashemi, vice president of Iraq, has also gambled his impeccable progressive record on the success of the pluralist experiment in his country. "Our enemy is al Qaeda, not the United States," he says.

Jumblatt, the Lebanese leader, says he realized that his life-long anti-Americanism had been misplaced when he saw "long lines of people, waiting to vote in Iraq, in the first free election in an Arab country. ...

SKIMMING through the Middle Eastern press these days can produce unexpected results. It's not rare to see a virulently anti-American article by an American or Western European leftist - and, alongside it on the same page, a pro-American article from an Arab, Iranian or Afghan progressive figure.

We're winning.

ROC Lobster

What to do when the restaurant you've created starts collapsing thanks to its untenable, workers-exploiting business model? There's always hope you'll receive the same good fortune as the Noho eatery Colors, which The New York Times recently treated to an advertorial guised as hard news.

Pulling on New Yorkers' 9/11 heartstrings, Metro reporter Emily Vasquez retold Colors' faux-bio: Post-9/11, surviving Windows of the World workers banded together to create a restaurant that would set a new standard for workers -- ownership would take the form of a employee co-op, wages far surpassed the industry average and staffers' ethnic culinary traditions made up the menu.

But somehow, Vasquez reported, business failed to hold steady after the original media-generated fanfare died down. Workers are worried and confused, she said.

What the Times didn't report is that by month's end, former Colors workers are expected to sue its management, alleging this supposed model of workers' rights is actually, in one former co-op-board director's words, "one of the most abusive in the city."

In today's Post, I tell that story:

Colombia-born Orlando Godoy, 54, had been a floor captain at Windows. He joined up with ROC [which runs Colors] post-9/11, and stuck with it even after most other Windows workers left, because Jayaraman was offering a chance for him to realize his lifelong dream: to become a "co-owner" in a new restaurant venture.

Then came a demand to sign a contract in which workers/owners would agree to certain conditions: "paying monthly dues," "attending protests (at least one per campaign)," "supporting workers [at other restaurants] in any dispute with employers," "testifying in favor of worker legislation" and "holding my elected representatives accountable to his/her responsibilities."

Nonplussed - what did any of this have to do with running a restaurant? - Godoy refused to sign; he was subsequently forced out of ROC altogether.

The problem, he said in a recent interview, is that being a part of ROC and its offspring Colors requires a total embrace of Jayaraman's radicalism - even including trips to D.C. to protest the Iraq War.

"Saru thinks of herself as a workers' Che Guevara, but she's really a Stalin," says Behzad Pasdar.

Indeed, Pasdar charges, Jayaraman used ex-Windows staffers as a "golden goose." "She dragged them around town to [raise money from] foundations. But she wouldn't even pay them as promised."

Read it all.

Earlier: Restaurant Revolutionaries

UPDATE: The blog of Kreitzman Mortensen & Borden picks up on the story, adding its own example of labor-related hypocrisy.

So Creative, That Daily News

"Saving Gotham's Golden Goose," headline, New York Post editorial, Jan 23

"Saving N.Y.'s Golden Goose," headline, Daily News editorial, Jan 28

Lupica the Lunatic

Mike Lupica has never been much of a sports columnist. I believe the first letter I ever wrote to a newspaper was as an 11-year-old, writing Mr. Lupica to let him know how incredible I thought it was that he could at once be so consistently unoriginal and so consistently wrong. Rare is the day an original thought arrives in his head, and, should he suffer the folly of expressing himself in those infrequent moments, unfailingly it proves false.

Which makes it all the more confounding why The Daily News would think Lupica should expand his repertoire to international politics. The day President Bush announced his new strategy for Iraq, Lupica penned a column [warning: don't click that link] that made Maureen Dowd look like Aristotle, arguing Bush's plan was flawed because instead of withdrawing the troops, he was sending more, and that means more war. And, you know, more death.

Today, he's back in the front of the book, arguing ... well, it's not quite clear what he's attempting to argue. No matter. Whatever Lupica lacks in logical argument he certainly makes up for in distempered passion. The piece is all over the place, jumping from one angry bromide to another with all the felicity of a DailyKos blogger. And like DailyKos, the only common thread tying these otherwise scattered thoughts together is a seething hatred for George Bush.

Take this typically penetrating Lupica insight:

Sen. McCain served this country bravely and proudly. If he thinks continuing to align himself with this President, on this war, is some kind of brilliant move toward higher office, he should ask a distinguished soldier like Gen. Colin Powell how that worked out for him.

Eh, what's that? Which "higher" office was it again that Powell ran for after leaving the Bush administration?

Or this:

One year ago George W. Bush talked about working with the Congress when it was still controlled, all of it, by his own party. Last night he talked about reaching out to Congress again. Yet when he makes the unilateral decision to send more troops to Iraq, when he sends a number that wouldn't have been enough back in the summer of 2003, when we still had a fighting chance over there, he doesn't want to hear from anybody. Then his outgoing vice president, Cheney, goes on television and says that you can't run a war by committee.

Here Lupica comes closest to actually advancing an argument. While difficult to decipher, I'm pretty sure he's suggesting Bush wasn't being earnest in his previous attempts at bipartisanship because he's now sending more troops, despite the current "surge" not being satisfactory had it hypothetically occurred three years ago. Yet Democrats were the ones recommending a surge, right up until the point where Bush started agreeing. So for Bush taking the Democrats up on their advice, but not realizing their advice would also switch, he's obviously ... ah, my head's starting to hurt.

To boil this all down into one bite-sized concluding blog sentence: With writing like this, Mike Lupica is the best thing that ever happened to The New York Post.