Her last day is April 13th.

A statement from Weinshall, wife of Senator Chuck Schumer, is after the jump.

-- Azi Paybarah

STATEMENT FROM DOT COMMISSIONER IRIS WEINSHALL

"It has been an honor and a privilege to spend more than 2 decades serving the city of New York. During the last seven years we have taken great strides towards making our streets safer for pedestrians, cyclists and motorists, rehabilitating our historic and iconic bridges, bringing our famed Staten Island Ferry into the 21st century and balancing the many demands on the public space we all share.

I would like to thank the 4,500 men and women who work tirelessly to keep this city moving, and I would like to thank my friend and mentor Mayor Michael Bloomberg for his innovative spirit and unwavering support. I look forward to the challenges that lie ahead and to continuing to serve the city and the people of New York in my new role at CUNY.

The Mayor's statement after the jump.

- Matthew Schuerman

STATEMENT BY MAYOR MICHAEL R. BLOOMBERG ON THE RESIGNATION OF DOT COMMISSIONER IRIS WEINSHALL

"When I became Mayor, the people of New York were already very fortunate to have an innovative thinker like Iris Weinshall leading the Department of Transportation, and I was fortunate that she agreed to stay on and serve for what has now been an extraordinary seven year tenure. Iris tried new ways to solve problems that had plagued New York City for decades, and she worked with local communities to mitigate dangerous conditions, resulting in the lowest pedestrian fatality rate in recorded history and infrastructure changes and improvements in all five boroughs.

"Iris is a tested leader and our loss is CUNY's gain. Whether through the challenges the City faced during and after September 11th, two blackouts or a transit strike that threatened to paralyze us, Iris Weinshall brought her leadership skills to bear and saw the Department through these difficult times. New York is a better place for her efforts.

"Iris always embraced the idea of planning now for the future, overseeing a $5 billion capital plan. As a result, the City has two new ferry terminals and three new ferry boats, vastly improved and safer bridges and tunnels, and improvements in traffic flow including the innovative Thru Streets program that have yielded less congestion. She has also led the City to take additional steps to better protect cyclists and pedestrians. Iris oversaw a revamping of technology at the Department, increasing its efficiency and effectiveness. She fought in Albany to win legislative approval to have more red light cameras installed on City streets and was a key member of planning and coordinating for some of New York City's premiere signature events, including the Thanksgiving Day Parade and the New York Marathon.

"As Iris undertakes her new challenges as Vice Chancellor for Facilities Planning, Construction and Management at CUNY, I know she will continue to serve the people of this City and the students of CUNY with the same vigor, determination and most importantly, innovative leadership that she brought to the Department of Transportation. On behalf of all New Yorkers, I thank Iris for her dedication and professionalism, and I am personally appreciative of her friendship over the years and have enjoyed our warm relationship. I wish her well in her new position."

The chair was created by a $2.1 million gift the Spitzers gave to the school, where Bernard graduated in 1943.

School spokesman Ellis Simon said the position was created for the purpose of attracting scholars in the field of international politics.

The first Spitzer Chair is Dr. Randall C. Forsberg, a nonproliferation specialist who was appointed by Bill Clinton to the Advisory Committee of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

-- Azi Paybarah

The First Lady of Zambia delivers the keynote address and receives the International AIDS Trust and World Vision New York's 2006 award at Tavern on the Green.

CUNY hosts a conference on the Spellings Commission report on higher education at John Jay College.

Baruch College hosts conference titled "An Avian Flu Pandemic: How Would Business Respond?"

The Assembly holds a hearing on the consolidation of the health industry and its impact at 250 Broadway.

Assemblyman Karim Camara and day care providers protest the closing of day care centers at the Adam Clayton Powell State Office Building.

100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care and the mother of Timothy Stansbury (fatally shot by police in 2004) light a candle at the site where Sean Bell was shot by police.

The wake for Sean Bell will be held at Community Church of Christ in Jamaica.

John Bolton speaks at the New York Synagogue.

Marty Golden hosts the Christmas tree lighting ceremony in McKinley in Brooklyn.

—Nicole Brydson

At 8:30, the Consul General of Mexico and CUNY co-sponsor a conference on Mexican immigrants in New York at Baruch College.

At 9 a.m. the federal funding cuts and their impact on the future of public housing is discussed at the Lighthouse International Conference Center on 59th St.

At 9:30 am, Eliot Spitzer campaigns with Congressman Dan Maffei in Rochester.

At 12:30 p.m., Spitzer visits his headquarters in Syracuse.

At 6 p.m., Jane Fonda speaks speaks at The Children of Armenia Fund's annual "Save a Generation Awards Dinner;" at Cipriani on 42nd St.

And Happy Hour starts at 7 p.m., when Hillary Clinton and John Spencer debate.

-- Azi Paybarah

NOTE: Due to an idiotic administrative error, these events were posted this morning instead of yesterday. We apologize.

Well, screw that noise! The Daily Transom—who didn't go to no frickin' college, much less no filthy j-school—would like to hereby throw open its digital pages to those young reporters who find themselves unable or unwilling to take part in the ludicrously expensive and/or ludicrously time-wasting and ultimately intensely stupid system called "higher learning."

(Does anyone else remember when diversity was supposed to cover more ground than just ethnicity? Even The New York Times at least made an effort to encompass sexual orientation in its plans—and then immediately, after the preamble, dropped that idea from its report on newsroom diversity.)

College drop-outs and never-applieds are invited to pitch or send, for consideration, stories to The Daily Transom at csicha@observer.com. Written is fine; if not, a good pitch—since you don't have no prof to tell you—is about three sentences long, contains the nugget of news obtained or sought, shows flair, and has nothing to do with any of the following:

· Celebrity poker
· Food-eating competitions
· Ryan Adams
· MisShapes
· Janice Dickinson
· Stunt karaoke
· The Museum of Sex
· Speed-dating
· "9/11"
· MySpace
· A strange coincidence.

Email any questions. Proof of non-attendance is required. Pay is somewhere between "a pittance" and "sure better than a day's work digging ditches." Opportunities for advancement not un-possible.
— Choire Sicha

-Matthew Schuerman

(via No Land Grab)

A spokeswoman for Senate Republicans, Lisa Black, blamed the hold-up on a technicality: Wiesenfeld's name, she said, was sent too late on Friday for the chairman of the higher education committee, Kenneth LaValle of Long Island, to schedule a meeting on it. And since the appointment wasn't taken up by the committee, it wasn't passed on to the senate for a vote.

Pataki had reportedly been reluctant to reappoint Wiesenfeld because of opposition from the CUNY faculty union.

Now, because of the last-second nomination, Wiesenfeld's appointment will have to wait for the next time the senate is called into session -- which likely won't be until Pataki is gone and, by the looks of things, a Democrat named Eliot Spitzer is running the show.

All of which either means that the Pataki folks were guilty of a innocent-but-clumsy bureaucratic error that could potentially cost Wiesenfeld his trusteeship, or that the hold-up was a deliberate way of sinking the reappointment without appearing to do so.

Theories?

Update: State Senator Liz Krueger has more on Pataki's appointments over at Room 8.

-- Azi Paybarah

- Max Abelson

As any fool knows, there is a "moral hazard" in our society's imbalance. When the elite make the big decisions, say to go to war, and are immunized from the second-heaviest duty of citizenship—getting the knock on the door that Cindy Sheehan got, and David Grossman—there's something very undemocratic about that, and wrong.

And because we know it's wrong, this issue is gnawing at our public life. In Fahrenheit 911, Michael Moore went after congressmen for not having kids at risk. Last night on Charlie Rose, the usually-equable Richard Holbrooke spat at the neocon militarist Bill Kristol, who wants us to take on Iran and Syria, that unlike Holbrooke, Kristol had never been shot at. In his latest column for the Israel Policy Forum, M.J. Rosenberg goes after neocon hawk Charles Krauthammer over Krauthammer's urging Israel to go even harder at Lebanon.

Readers of this blog know that I often look at the American power structure in religious and tribal terms: I think that the new establishment is basically affluent WASPs and affluent Jews, working happily together. (Just thumb through the Almanac of American Politics.) So: let's look at the composition of the American armed forces in religious terms.

Watch out, here come the statistics! Non-geeks are encouraged to jump over the next two paragraphs.

You'd expect there to be 21,000 or so Episcopalians in uniform. There are only 9,600. You'd expect 33,000+ Presbyterians. There are 13,000. Lutherans, you'd expect 58,000. There are 35,000. Methodists? 83,000 expected. 44,000 in fact. Jews: 16,000 would be predicted by the CUNY percentage—there are 3,973 Jews in the military. Indeed, there are more Buddhists in the military, 4400, than there are Jews!

As I say, it's rough (and a little unfair to the Protestants; I haven't factored in the 53,000 Protestants the military calls nondemoninational) but that's my Establishment pool. Note that Episcopalians and Presbyterians (who I think of as the more affluent) are sharply underrepresented, showing up at about 40 percent of expected numbers; and Jews at about 25 percent.

By the way, Muslims are also underrepresented, by about half. You'd expect 6270. The military says it has 3,459 in uniform.

Compare these numbers to Catholics, Baptists and Mormons. You'd expect 307,000 Catholics in uniform; there are 291,000. Underrepresented; but close. Baptists should weigh in at 204,000. There are 219,000 of them. (I imagine that other evangelicals and Pentecostals, whom I don't have the patience to even try and sort out in these conflicting tables, are even more overrepresented). And then there are Mormons. You'd expect 16,000. There are nearly 18,000.

What does this all add up to? Just what we knew: the privileged make out bigtime. What's the answer? What Charlie Rangel has always said: a draft. Then maybe our leadership might show a little more imagination about how to deal with the so-called clash of civilizations.