“Simply put,” said  I.A.F.F. general president Harold Schaitberger, Mr. Clinton is “the kind of leader American workers need more of holding office today at every level of government.”Mr. Clinton, not to be outdone, had something more to say about those people holding office today. “I got tickled by watching Governor Perry announce [for] president,” Mr. Clinton said of the candidate from Texas, accentuating his Arkansas drawl for effect. “He’s a good-looking rascal.” The ballroom, filled with fire fighters from across the country and Canada, erupted in laughter, and Mr. Clinton grinned mischievously. He went on to call the anti-federal government rant by Mr. Perry—the longest serving governor his state’s history—“crazy.”

The rest of Mr. Clinton’s 35-minute speech was unremarkable. But the firemen were tickled to have the former president at their biannual event, and tried finding a suitable way to say thank you. They presented him with a particularly pedigreed golf club. “We were able to locate one of 12 clubs [legendary golfer] Bobby Jones had made, nine of which are in museums, three which are privately held,” said Mr. Schaitberger, counting the one being gifted among those three.

Mr. Clinton scratched his chin and offered an open-mouth smiled. He put on his glasses and inspected the head of the putter. Then, he bent over to try it out. “Wow,” Mr. Clinton muttered softly, sounding truly impressed.

By the time Mr. Clinton walked off with the rare and priceless putter, the fireman had also heard from City Council Speaker Christine Quinn—a leading mayoral candidate for mayor in 2013 who is credited with blocking Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to shutter firehouses. Local union leaders thanked her and she thanked them and there was a general air of good feeling in the room.

Later that morning, one of Ms. Quinn’s likely rivals, New York City Comptroller John Liu, had his turn. Mr. Liu, who holds a degree in mathematical physics from Binghamton University, told his blue-collar audience how much he learned the previous weekend when he had the chance to take part in a day of fireman’s training.

Mr Liu was wearing a dark suit and a tightly configured tie, and his pin-straight black hair was neatly brushed to the side. He recalled wearing “close to 100 pounds of gear as well as 300 tools that were necessary.” Then, he recalled, he entered the first room designed to simulate a real fire.

“You could see the smoke coming out,” recalled Mr. Liu, “and I was standing there, going, ‘Holy shit.’” The fireman applauded and laughed.

Reflecting back on the experience from the comfort of the podium, Mr. Liu said, “I don’t think people get it, that that’s what [you] fire fighters put up with.” The firemen then presented Mr. Liu with a honorary fireman’s helmet, which he gamely donned.

Consultant Mary Simon was Weprin's finance director up until a  month ago. She said she received the call on her cell phone Wednesday afternoon and alerted the State Troopers in the capital, along with Weprin's family and district office. Read More

“The newsroom stopped,” said one person inside the Wall Street Journal offices at the time, where the hearing was being broadcast on the televisions in the bullpen.

Outside, two NYPD cars were parked directly opposite of the building’s main entrance on Avenue of the Americas, while a CNN reporter filmed a report with Mr. Murdoch’s flagship building in the background. Inside, Mr. Murdoch’s operations tried to carry on: Fox News ran the London hearing live, and the Journal reporters—upon recovering—prepared a front-page story for the next morning.

But the pie-stained moment—which included Mr. Murdoch’s wife, Wendi Deng, slapping the assailant, and his son, James, complaining to the police—was, in many ways, tailor-made for Mr. Murdoch’s favorite local outlet, the tabloid he had twice bought and most closely resembles the embodiment of his life’s work: Turning dry dispassionate reports of government bodies into dramatic, personal narratives of powerful men and business elites behaving badly. And yet, if any Murdoch news outlet had something resembling an emotional desire to protect the 80-year-old Australian on what he called the “most humble” day of his life, it was the New York Post, the money-losing property that has long felt like a physical extension of its doting owner. The Post ran the story on page 35. Read More

“We’re going to conference the language of the amendments,” said Republican Senate Leader Dean Skelos after meeting privately with Governor Cuomo.

Asked if he was obligated to present the vote during business hours, instead of late at night when, presumably, less public attention would be paid to the issue, Skelos demurred.

“I’m not going to work under time constraints,” he said, predicting the 32-member GOP conference would be “lengthy.”

For weeks, Cuomo has met privately with a handful of Republican Senators who wanted to see greater protections for religiously affiliated organizations who do not want to recognize or do business with gay couples. Cuomo has said he has faced “no obstacles” with Republicans.

“If this passes, we will have Sodom and Gomorrah, literalized,” said Ginny Wynn, 80, a grandmother from Delmar, just a few miles outside of Albany. Mrs. Wynn, with a flop of Betty White hair and trembling voice, was standing outside the office of Republican State Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos, elbowing her way into the spotlight that had just been occupied by a younger, same-sex marriage supporter wearing a yarmulke.

The potential effect of Governor Andrew Cuomo’s push to legalize same-sex marriage in New York is hard to overstate, brimstone and fire aside.

While Mr. Skelos and his Republican delegation continue to demur on whether they’ll allow the bill to come to the floor, and advocates cast about for a 32nd vote, one of the measure’s most ardent opponents—State Senator Ruben Diaz Sr. of the Bronx—said passage was looking “inevitable,” and parties on both sides have begun to consider the potential consequences of the bill’s passage.

On the legal front, Mr. Cuomo is shepherding legislators into a thorny cluster of questions about religious freedom—namely, how to carve out protections for religious organizations that refuse to recognize or do business with same-sex couples while still guaranteeing those couples equal protection under the law. Those exemptions have been the subject of intense conversations between the governor and a handful of wavering Republicans who have not yet publicly pledged their votes.

The most conspicuous holdout is Republican State Senator Greg Ball of the Hudson Valley—a stocky 33-year-old who wears his dark brown cowboy boots to the chamber. “This is a perfect example of a social issue that is controlled by the extreme left and the extreme right,” he told reporters last week. “We’ve got to have a conversation in the middle: talk about real religious carve-outs. [The] governor sends down a bill that just skims the surface on religious carve-outs, still opens up religious organizations to lawsuits and fundamentally isn’t protecting individuals with religious objections.”

Mr. Ball cited the decision by Catholic adoption agencies in Massachusetts to shutter after that state legalized same-sex marriage, choosing to get out of the business of finding homes for developmentally challenged children rather than to place them in the hands of same-sex couples. “I’m not going to vote for something that is going to shut down Catholic adoption agencies or open up religious organizations … or even parents” to lawsuits, Mr. Ball said.

(On Friday, Mr. Ball was open to persuasion and soliciting advice from his Twitter followers: “So, if you were me, how would you vote on gay marriage? Yes or No?” Asked about the results on Monday, as he rushed passed protesters lining the hallways outside Mr. Skelos’s office, Mr. Ball told The Observer: “Oh, Jesus Christ. I think it was like a thousand to one [in favor], but they were contacting me from South America, Europe and everywhere else.”)

After initially resisting Mr. Ball’s objections, the governor has, in recent days, politely acknowledged his concerns.

“However the state defines marriage is the state’s business and it will not be imposed on a religion, and that is a very important point, and I am as equally concerned about that as I am about achieving marriage equality,” Mr. Cuomo told reporters last week. “I believe we can address their concerns, without going over the line, and being too far and discriminating against people. I believe we can accomplish that.”

But it’s not entirely clear whether—or how—the language of Mr. Cuomo’s bill is being modified.

Robin Fretwell Wilson, a law professor at Washington & Lee University who has helped draft exemptions in other states, has sent letters to both Mr. Cuomo and Mr. Ball suggesting how the exemptions might be strengthened. “In other jurisdictions where we’ve done this work, I’ve had a relationship with one person, like a member of the Legislature or the governor’s chief of staff or whoever,” she told The Observer. “In this case, I’ve just been sending letters to the Legislature and hoping somebody reads them.”

Ms. Wilson praised this year’s bill as “a vast improvement” over the bill that failed in 2009, but she said it still lacks the kind of protections that could insulate groups like the Salvation Army and Catholic Charities from being denied tax exemptions and state contracts.

In a detailed letter to Mr. Ball, she cited several cases where New York’s bill fails to offer the same kinds of protections for individual objectors and businesses that have been afforded in states like New Hampshire, Connectict and Vermont. And while opponents have seized on her critique as a reason not to pass the bill, Ms. Wilson said that properly-crafted exemptions could help advance it.

“Exemptions should actually lower the temperature of this debate, not torque it up,” she said. “I think if they put more robust exemptions in, it’s going to put them over the top.”

For now, the uncertainty over exemptions is buying Mr. Skelos some time to negotiate same-sex marriage, alongside a host of other end-of-session issues. “We don’t want to pass a bill and all [of a sudden] there’s a slew of litigation, you know, on a number of these exemptions, so we’re looking to tighten that up,” Mr. Skelos told reporters last week, after a couple of four-hour caucus meetings failed to determine whether Republicans will bring the bill for a vote.

Even with exemptions, the law could face substantial legal challenges. “There will likely be some court cases,” said Jason McGuire, a reverend and executive director of New Yorkers for Constitutional Freedoms, the leading opponents to same-sex marriage in New York. Standing outside Mr. Skelos’s office on Monday, Mr. McGuire, cherub-faced and slightly perspiring, said: “I can see some action occurring, probably no matter which way it goes at this point.”

But there’s some disagreement among the bill’s opponents about how to fight the next phase of the battle, should it come to pass. “The use of the courts to impose same-sex marriage is what the other side typically does,” said Brian Brown, the president of the National Organization for Marriage. “Our focus will be on reshaping the Legislature.” He said it would be “devastating to the Republican Party to have same-sex marriage pass in New York” with the tacit acceptance of Mr. Skelos’s caucus. “There will be primaries,” he promised. “There’s no doubt that any Republican who supports it will be primaried.”

For its Democratic supporters, passing the bill would mark a tremendous victory, at a time when President Barack Obama and the party continue to “evolve” on the issue. New York would become the sixth state to legalize same-sex marriage, but only the second to do so legislatively, and it would be the most populous by far—nearly doubling the number of citizens eligible for such a marriage.

“If the Legislature passes it, it just transforms everything,” said Michael Wald, an emeritus professor of law at Stanford, who said he had just been talking about the potential impact with a colleague when The Observer reached him on Monday. According to Mr. Wald, a victory in New York’s Legislature might prod the Supreme Court to defer on same-sex marriage, as cases from other states begin climbing their way up the appellate courts.

“To not give deference to the legislative determination that gay and nongay couples are married couples­—and to allow that to stand in terms of access to Social Security and all the things that the Defense of Marriage Act allows—would be very hard,” Mr. Wald said. “I just think it would put more pressure on the Court to say the federal government can’t make those distinctions.”

In Mr. Wald’s estimation, New York’s Legislature could have a more profound impact on the Court than even President Obama’s executive decision not to defend certain provisions of the Defense of Marriage Act.

And, after being defeated in referendums in California and Maine, a legislative victory in New York could breathe new life into the national movement to legalize same-sex marriage. “I hope other states will look at New York,” Mr. Cuomo said last week. “I believe this is the way of the future. I believe history 10 years from now will look back and say, ‘What took so long?’ I believe this is like interracial marriages. Some states outlawed interracial marriages as late as 1968. Nineteen sixty-eight sounds like a long time ago. It’s not that long ago. I have a car from 1968. It still works. I still drive it.”

“And,” he continued, “I think New York should be at the head of that parade for justice and equality and I believe it will be.”

It’s a parade that could make Mr. Cuomo a national champion for liberal groups—despite an austerity budget passed earlier this year that alienated a number of traditional Democratic allies—and could help advance whatever national aspirations Mr. Cuomo might harbor.

“[M]arriage equality is one of the most vital issues to much of the Democratic base nationwide, especially among activists who volunteer in Presidential primary campaigns,” wrote Ethan Geto, a prominent gay Democratic operative, in an email to The Observer. “Cuomo’s aggressive leadership in this struggle shows guts and an unequivocal commitment to fighting for progressive values.”

Mr. Geto also cited the steady increase in public support for same-sex marriage across the country. “If Governor Cuomo should decide to run for national office in the future, electoral support for marriage equality will no longer be a close call,” he wrote.

But that appeal might be limited to a small group that cares deeply about the issue. “While America’s views on gay marriage have evolved, he’s going to be defined by an issue that doesn’t register with people,” Republican consultant Rick Wilson told The Observer. “His first national exposure will be on an issue that nobody cares about … unless it affects you personally.”

“If it passes, he lives up to everyone’s expectations of a New York liberal,” Mr. Wilson said.

For now, advocates and legislators are left to watch and wait. Last week, Democratic State Senator Joseph Addabbo, who voted against the bill in 2009, stood in a hallway of the Capitol during what was scheduled to have been the session’s last full week.

There is “a lot of misinformation,” Mr. Addabbo said. “There’s a lot of fear of the unknown.” He said his job was “to get the message out there” and to try to be a voice of reason about the potential impact of the bill—such as it is.

“The world will still turn on the same axis; day comes before night, or what have you, and everything will be O.K.,” he said.

apaybarah@observer.com

City Councilman Eric Ulrich. (photo credit: william alatriste / new york city council)

Anthony Weiner’s Republican opponents would seem to have one obvious advantage should they choose to challenge the embattled congressman in 2012: their to-date failure to distribute compromising photos of themselves (or parts of themselves) over the Internet.

“Let me think,” joked Bob Turner, the 70-year-old businessman who ran against Mr. Weiner last year, when asked about any lewd photos he might possess or have sent to people who were, say, definitively not his wife. “I’m pretty sure I don’t.”

“No, of course not,” said 26-year-old Eric Ulrich, a city councilman from Queens and another rumored challenger, when asked if he had engaged in any inappropriate online banter.

Before a photo of his crotch rocketed around the country and was splattered across various tabloid covers, Mr. Weiner was expected to be a leading mayoral candidate in 2013, and his re-election to Congress was widely considered a given.

Now, facing an ethics investigation of his lewd messages to as many as six young women and a wall of public silence from his congressional colleagues, Mr. Weiner must first survive 2012.

“Look, my constituents have to make the determination,” Mr. Weiner said on Monday. “If they believe that this is something that means that they don’t want to vote for me, I’m going to work very hard to win back their trust and to try to persuade them that this is a personal failing of mine; that I’ve worked very hard for my constituents for a very long time, very long hours; and that nothing about this should reflect in any way on my official duties or on my oath of office.”

Last November, Mr. Turner captured more than 40 percent of the vote in the Queens and Brooklyn district, a relatively high number for an unknown challenger trying to unseat an established incumbent. And pundits suggest Mr. Weiner could face an even tougher challenge from someone who’s won and run before—like, say, Mr. Ulrich.

“He’s won in a big chunk of the district,” said Jerry Skurnik, a political consultant known for his number-crunching. According to Mr. Skurnik, 50,000 of the 56,000 voters in Mr. Ulrich’s City Council district also reside in Mr. Weiner’s congressional district, and, among the rumored challengers, Mr. Skurnik called Mr. Ulrich the “strongest.”

On Monday, just before Mr. Weiner’s tearful, 27-minute long press conference in midtown, Mr. Ulrich stepped outside of his Ozone Park office to discuss the possibility.

“I don’t want to talk political stuff in my office,” said Mr. Ulrich. “We don’t need any conflict of interest rulings against me.”
Mr. Ulrich said he had been fielding questions “from both sides of the aisle” about the possibility of challenging for the seat, which would pit Mr. Weiner against something like a right-leaning version of his former self.

The similarities between the two are so striking as to be comical.

In 1992, at the tender age of 27, Mr. Weiner won a six-way Democratic primary and four-way general election to become the youngest person ever to serve on New York’s City Council.

In 2009, the ambitious Mr. Ulrich won a five-way special election to become the new youngest councilman, at age 24.

Both enjoy a spirited debate.The ability to strike at the moral nerve center of a debate had been a hallmark of Mr. Weiner, who became a YouTube sensation when he dressed down fellow New York congressman Peter King on the floor of the House and parlayed his sharp tongue into minor celebrity status on cable news shows.

Prior to attending seminary, Mr. Ulrich said he trained as a member of his school’s debate team—a fact even his aides were not aware of. Neither were his opponents, who, during the 2009 special election, found themselves eviscerated by the neophyte, to the delight of a crowded room of voters.

“Eric, you are a Republican party official,” one of his opponents, Mike Riccato, said, while reading off of a small notepad.

“But what experience do you have to lead this community in these fiscally challenging times?”

“It’s manna from heaven. Thank you, Mike,” Mr. Ulrich replied, buttoning his coat. “My experience has been in civics, in communities, has been with people, my whole life.”

With the microphone in his right hand, he continued.

“I wasn’t always a politician,” he said, enthusiastically waving his left hand. “And by the way, being a politician is not a bad thing. I was studying for the priesthood at one time. So I’ll have you know! My dear friend! That there is a lot more to being a city councilman than being a businessman.”

He spoke above the crowd, which was already applauding.

“Politics is not a business,” said Mr. Ulrich. Pointing to the crowd. “These are not your employees!”

Mr. Ulrich went on, leaving his opponents stunned, and the audience electrified.

(About the priesthood: Mr. Ulrich studied for the seminary, but ultimately decided not to continue, and, after winning his Council seat, he got married.)

Both men enjoy the lure of social media, occasionally to their peril.

Mr. Weiner’s transgressions are, by now, well-documented; yesterday he admitted that he “panicked” when he mistakenly posted a private photo of his underpants to his Twitter feed, and deleted all his photos, before lying to cover it up in a series of interviews over several days.

Mr. Ulrich deleted one of his own posts last week, when he said he was responding to a barrage of vulgar messages from bike zealots.

After a woman was hit by a van in his district, a young female constituent tweeted that Mr. Ulrich should support bike lanes to help “calm” traffic.

Mr. Ulrich said he was offended the advocates would use this tragic accident to advance their agenda, and he told them as much, using the hashtag “#getalife.” When The Observer and another outlet picked up the story, Mr. Ulrich released a statement, backing up his position.

“First of all, I can say with certitude that my Twitter account, to my knowledge, has not been hacked,” Mr. Ulrich said, tauntingly echoing the awkward phrasing in Mr. Weiner’s initial nondenial.

“With that said,” Mr. Ulrich’s statement continued, “I cannot believe that anyone would use a tragic incident like the one that occurred on Friday to advance their own agenda. To suggest that a bike lane would have prevented this from happening is simply absurd.”

Both Mr. Weiner and Mr. Ulrich plan to keep using social media. In Mr. Weiner’s case, admittedly, “not in the same way.”

As for Mr. Ulrich, it’s a work in progress.

“If the voters of the Ninth District want to make sure the seat is held by a politician who sends inappropriate tweets to young, female constituents, Eric Ulrich is worth a look,” said Aaron Pasternak, a transit advocate and bike lane booster.

Mr. Ulrich said he had heard about polling already being conducted in the district, and that he had heard his name was among those being mentioned. (A spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee said the organization was not polling in the district. Mr. Turner said he was also considering whether to run against Mr. Weiner.)
For now, the councilman said he was focused on fighting the ongoing budget battle in the City Council.

“I rebuffed a lot of the talk because I don’t want to put a target on my back,” he told The Observer on Monday.

A call to his cell phone Tuesday morning went straight to voice mail. Minutes later, he sent a text message.

“If the seat opens up, I might consider running,” he wrote. “Right now, the people need someone who can restore their trust and faith in government.”

apaybarah@observer.com

"This mayor loves to brag how devoted he is to the numbers," said Mr. de Blasio. "This is the fastest growing borough, and this borough needs more fire protection, not less. And the numbers show it."

The crowd of more than 200 cheered. They had rallied in front of the 105-year-old, redbrick building that houses one of 20 fire companies slated to close as part of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's proposed budget cuts.

"The mayor is saying to some parts of this city, 'You're going to be less safe,' and somehow, you're supposed to grin and bear it," said Mr. de Blasio. "That's not right and that's not how a democracy works. That's not the city government doing its job."

Over the past two years, Mr. de Blasio has tried to make the most of his own job as the city's public advocate--a loosely defined, barely funded perch that seems to exist primarily as a bullhorn for citizen complaints.

"My view at this moment is, this is exactly what the office was meant to do," he told The Observer in a phone call late on Friday afternoon.

In recent weeks, Mr. de Blasio has emerged as the most visible critic of Mr. Bloomberg among those who might be jockeying to replace him. City Council Speaker Quinn has generally shunned protests in favor of direct negotiations with Mr. Bloomberg. City Comptroller John Liu has taken a more wonky approach to his job, issuing a steady stream of reports, and Congressman Anthony Weiner has mostly stuck to the impact of federal cuts as they relate to the city.

"I think this mayor in particular understands relative silence as assent," said Mr. de Blasio. "A lot of times that has not been the case, although that's how he likes to interpret it. So, I think it's really important and for the record to show that people are not comfortable with these choices and it will have a very big impact on their lives."

"You know," Mr. de Blasio continued, unprompted, "most people who have become mayor have come up from the grass roots and through a variety of offices and have a natural understanding of what some of these actions do to people and mean for people. I don't think this mayor has that."

By his own account, Mr. de Blasio does.

One year after managing Hillary Clinton's Senate campaign in 2000, Mr. de Blasio was knocking on doors in Park Slope, campaigning to become their councilman. ("Don't forget the school board," he noted, of his pre-Council public service. "One of the finest unpaid offices around.")

For eight years on the City Council, Mr. de Blasio demonstrated a penchant for gathering loud swaths of the city to voice their displeasure with decisions being made inside City Hall. In 2003, the first time Mr. Bloomberg proposed a major round of firehouse closures, Mr. de Blasio threw his 6-foot-5 frame to the forefront of the debate.

He got arrested protesting the cuts, along with his neighbor, the actor Steve Buscemi. ("He lives about five or six blocks away from me," said Mr. de Blasio. "We bonded when we got arrested together.")

This year, Mr. de Blasio is finding less arresting ways to voice his opposition. He helped organize a march across the Brooklyn Bridge this week to protest firehouse closures. Already, he's visited a number of them, appearing with defiant Council members, angry union members and outraged residents.

Then there are the schools, where Mr. Bloomberg's budget proposes laying off 4,100 teachers. Mr. de Blasio set up a phone line where anyone with an opinion can leave a voice message about the mayor's proposed cuts, then hear it posted on Mr. de Blasio's website. Last week, he staged a Parent Day of Action at schools across all five boroughs.

All of which appears to have gotten underneath the administration's skin.

Earlier this month, Mr. de Blasio and Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson engaged in a protracted argument on Twitter, with Mr. Wolfson saying the public advocate "remained silent in the face of massive ed cuts" in the state budget.

The two are old friends, dating back to their days working on Ms. Clinton's Senate race, when Mr. de Blasio served as the campaign manager and Mr. Wolfson was the spokesman.

"You are our advocate," Mr. Wolfson wrote. "Needed your advocacy in Albany at budget time--perhaps your advocacy then could have helped averted [sic] cuts."

The two met for lunch at Nobu and the bickering ceased, if not the debate.

"Bill has been my friend for more than a decade," Mr. Wolfson told The Observer in an email. "And we agreed to continue to disagree. I think he would have more credibility now if he had been vocal in fighting state cuts."

The administration's position is--more or less--that the person to blame for the city's deep cuts is Governor Andrew Cuomo, who greatly decreased funding to New York City as part of an austere state budget that sought to close a $10 billion deficit. 

Mr. Bloomberg called the cuts to New York City "an outrage," and liberal activists descended on Albany in protest.

Mr. de Blasio was not among them.

"I think a lot of what the governor has done was really important and necessary, showing that we could exercise restraint and think about the concerns of taxpayers while at the same time fulfilling the obligations of the government," said Mr. de Blasio.

"I didn't want the outcome we got," he said on Tuesday. "Wish we had gotten more. But the bottom line is the governor had to balance an extremely difficult budget and that was in everybody's interest, including the future of New York City. So, I just think Wolfson's response misses that larger point."

Mr. de Blasio and Mr. Cuomo are longtime allies. Before he worked for Ms. Clinton, Mr. de Blasio served under Mr. Cuomo in the Department of Housing and Urban Development during the Clinton administration, and the public advocate aggressively promoted Mr. Cuomo's campaign for governor last year.

"You're not going to see Bill de Blasio running around saying, 'Hey look, why don't you send us some more money, Mr. Governor,'" said Hank Sheinkopf, the longtime Democratic strategist who worked on Mr. Bloomberg's most recent re-election campaign and was speaking from a beach on Memorial Day.

"The politics of this is: Albany, the governor, have decided we're not getting the kind of money we used to get," said Mr. Sheinkopf. "Therefore you got to cut someplace. And the best thing to do, if you're going to help your political allies, is to blame Mike Bloomberg, even though he's not responsible."

But, in Mr. de Blasio's view, the cuts forced onto the city could be handled more sensitively.

"I laid out a series of alternative cuts I thought made a lot more sense," he said. Those include reductions in teacher recruitment efforts--about $25 million--and scaling back outside consultants and technological work, some of which is "futuristic, but not as important as a classroom teacher."

Mr. de Blasio suggested there were "less essential pieces" that could be trimmed from the budget before laying off teachers, calling the fight "somewhat ideological."

"It's not that the mayor and his people couldn't find the money in the city budget; it was a choice," Mr. de Blasio said. "And we have to portray it as such. It's not about fiscal responsibility. It's about philosophy."

Whether Mr. de Blasio's noisemaking will have any tangible effect on the city's budget is a matter of some disagreement.

Mark Green, the city's first public advocate--who frequently tangled with Mayor Rudy Giuliani over budget cuts and has subsequently run for office against both Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. de Blasio--said all the haranguing by Mr. de Blasio is late, and not entirely substantive.

"A public advocate should ideally either analytically expose bad policies or propose thoughtful alternatives," said Mr. Green. "Protest letters and rallies taste great but are not very filling."

apaybarah@observer.com

Take last month, when she referred to the City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, as "ma'am" at a press conference, prompting a testy reply: "You can call me Speaker." Ms. Quinn was still smarting from a series of Daily News articles questioning the city's business with a building Ms. Quinn later moved into. (She eventually apologized.)

Or last year, when Ms. Einhorn asked Mayor Bloomberg about some recent events in Venezuela. "I don't understand your question," Mr. Bloomberg said. "What on Earth do we have to do with Hugo Chavez?"

"Well," Ms. Einhorn deadpanned, "like you, he wanted to extend term limits."But she might be best known for getting John Liu's mother to rebut his own "sweatshop" claims during his comptroller campaign.

So, with Ms. Einhorn taking over the bureau chief duties from Adam Libserg-who departed to edit City Hall News and The Capitol-expect the vitriolic ink to flow!

Or not.

"My first act as bureau chief was to kill the [Sunday] column," said Ms. Einhorn, speaking from the press trailer parked inside City Hall Park. Prior to its death, the column had been one of the largest arrows in the bureau chief's quiver, an opportunity to take some opinionated shots at the mayor and the Council.The column was started by the paper's one-time bureau chief, Kirsten Danis, and then passed to Mr. Lisberg, who filed his parting shot online earlier this month. (In an inglorious end, the final column did not run in the paper.)

"Frankly, I think it's complicated to do a column when you're trying to do objective, balanced news reporting," she explained. "A good column is a point of view."

In her reporting, Ms.  Einhorn strives to go deep.

Unable to pull a sufficient amount of details from her own mother about her family's escape from the Holocaust, Ms. Einhorn took a year off from her reporting job in Philadelphia, flew to Poland, learned the language, and discovered a fraught relationship between her relatives and those who had helped them escape.

Her account, The Pages in Between, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2008, and This American Life dedicated an entire episode to the tale.  "Stories are a lot more complicated than at first blush," said Ms. Einhorn, who speaks in a high-pitched, clipped manner and with unmistakable directness.

"In theory, even people who are doing bad things, they may not see them as bad things and may have some elaborate explanation in their own mind as to why this isn't a bad thing, necessarily," she said. "And I think a good news story can kind of reach for that too."

"During your next election," insisted a woman's recorded voice, "when you are choosing which consultant to help you with your campaign mail, remember that Jim Spencer and the Campaign Network have no business calling themselves progressives when they're currently representing a Tea Party candidate!"

The robo-call referenced the heated special election in New York's 26th district-- way out west, near Buffalo, where Mr. Spencer was working for the third-party spoiler, Jack Davis--but the area code indicated Boston. For weeks, Mr. Davis, had endured withering attacks from national Republicans who branded the former Democrat a Tea Party traitor, but the call, strangely, said nothing of Mr. Davis's policies. The electronic woman only mentioned his campaign adviser.

"A negative call that targets a political consultant???" wondered Albany reporter Liz Benjamin on Twitter, as the political chattering classes tried to make sense of it. "[C]uriouser and curiouser. Check out where that number's listed. Weird."

In fact, the call had gone out to every member of the state legislatures in North Carolina, Massachusetts and New York, along with political operatives and reporters in New York City.

"The only reason I got involved is because I like Jack Davis," said Steve Kramer, a robo-call specialist based in New York, who told The Transom he orchestrated the call out of disdain for Mr. Spencer.

"I saw him operate in a certain way with the Jack Davis campaign, and spoke with enough of his former clients to get a real profile of this guy," said Mr. Kramer. "I'm so glad he's old and that he'll die or be out of the business soon, because he's a real scumbag."

Mr. Kramer--cherub-faced and prone to wearing shiny dress shirts--boasts a client list with 59 members of Congress and countless governors and state legislators. Generously, he declined to unleash his call in the 26th District, out of concern it might damage the candidate instead of Mr. Spencer.

"I want to hurt his business," said Mr. Kramer, who gloated, "I also hit 3,500 people in his Boston neighborhood."

Mr. Kramer said he would have liked to see Mr. Davis elected to Congress, but fears Mr. Spencer and his aides led a good candidate astray.

"Jim Spencer is a total prick, and Curtis Ellis [the campaign manager] is a whiny little bitch," said Mr. Kramer.

Mr. Spencer, for his part, said Mr. Kramer is just "disgruntled" over his short-lived stint working for the Davis campaign, and added, "This is some kind of weird, personal vendetta."

Mr. Ellis declined to respond directly, but said it had been a weird race.

"This campaign is like an acid trip," he said.--Azi Paybarah