Rahm Emanuel (Getty Images)

Tonight brings the first presidential debate, moderated by the unflappable Jim Lehrer—but for those who have already determined whom they’re voting for, skip the partisan pandering and come gab with Oscar and Annette! The de la Rentas, along with Mercedes Bass and Mrs. Julio Mario Santo Domingo, are hosting opening night at Carnegie Hall. The new season kicks off with a performance of Carmina Burana featuring conductor Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Windy City Mayor Rahm Emanuel is the honorary chair for the evening, appropriate given the provenance of the musicians—and the fact that, long out of our nation’s capital, Mr. Emanuel no longer has to keep up appearances and look like he gives a hoot about the evening’s debate.

Carnegie Hall, 881 Seventh Avenue, pre-concert reception in the Rohatyn Room, 5:30pm, concert in Stern Auditorium, 7pm, post-concert gala dinner at the Waldorf Astoria, 301 Park Avenue, 8:30pm, tickets and information can be obtained by calling the Special Events office at (212) 903-9679.

Weiner's official Twitter-musings are here.

[h/t Reid Pillifant]

Chicago may not have elected Rahm Emanuel mayor quite yet, but that isn't stopping Bloomberg: Hizzoner talked about his support for the former White House chief of staff to Time this week in an interview that also covered Madoff, gun control, and Bloomberg's odd drinking habit.

"This is going to be a different Rahm Emanuel," Bloomberg said. "He's going to be a good mayor, and we'll work well together. Much better than when he was in the White House and I was a wise-ass who might run against his boss."

The mayor also mentioned lessons learned from December's snowstorm debacle ("I'm sorry that it happened"), public failure to recognize the Madoff phenomenon ("there's no free lunch"), and gun control ("If it takes you 33 bullets to kill a deer, you're not a sportsman"). He also talked about the way he drinks his beer: reportedly, Bloomberg likes his brew on the rocks.

"Incidentally, don't put it in and let it sit there," he said. "You have the ice, pour in a little beer, drink it. Pour in a little beer, drink it."

Interview in full below:

10 Questions with Mayor Michael Bloomberg

What lessons did you learn from the recent snowstorm that paralyzed New York City?

I'm sorry that it happened. Can we do it better? Yes. But we have done nine years of cleaning the snow. You don't define all the hard work that our sanitation department does based on one snowstorm.

Where will the economy be a year from now? Will the unemployment rate get better?

The economy will have improved, but it's not going to be better for everybody. The [gap] between the requirements of the workplace and the skill sets that our workforce has is growing, not declining.

Is there room for a candid, non-ideological big-city mayor to step onto the national stage and fix problems?

There's room for people like me to influence the dialogue, but I do not believe there is room for an independent candidate. In any case, I have 1,050 days from today left to go, and I've told the public I would fill out my term. I'm going to serve the four years.

I meant Rahm Emanuel.

He sent me an e-mail yesterday saying happy birthday. I wrote back and said, "I assume you don't need any help, but if you do, call." This is going to be a different Rahm Emanuel. He's going to be a good mayor, and we'll work well together. Much better than when he was in the White House and I was a wise-ass who might run against his boss.

Have bankers gotten an unfair rap in the past few years?

Yes. They get a very unfair rap. Not that they didn't speculate, but we had an expansion in this country that any rational person should have known was not sustainable. You can't have everybody making money in the stock market every day. But we all wanted the party to continue. How [else] can you explain the Bernie Madoff phenomenon?

How do you explain it, then?

Nobody cared. Everybody just thought, Where did Madoff get the idea? A cynic would say Social Security, [though] I would never say that. But it's exactly the same thing, isn't it? I also think people should have asked why he could outperform like that. There's no free lunch.

You've been outspoken lately on gun control. What are you trying to achieve?

Guns kill people. I'm not opposed to the Second Amendment. I'm not opposed to hunters. I don't understand why we have to sell magazines with 33 bullets. If it takes you 33 bullets to kill a deer, you're not a sportsman. And armor-piercing bullets - the last time I saw a deer with a bulletproof vest was a long time ago. Guns are one of the biggest killers in the country, and it's an easy problem to solve if we had the courage to [do so].

What can't the mayor of New York City say?

One of the measures of maturity of our city is that you can address social issues that are uncomfortable. It's just a matter of how you address them. Sometimes people will take offense. Sometimes they won't.

You have been made fun of recently for the way you drink beer. So, for the record, you like ice in your beer?

Yeah. Incidentally, don't put it in and let it sit there. You have the ice, pour in a little beer, drink it. Pour in a little beer, drink it.

Reader question: You've been so successful in business. What's the point of doing one of the all-time hard-to-please-everyone jobs? (Gerardo Valero, Mexico City)

Because it's an all-time hard-to-please-everyone job. It's a great challenge, and it's the world I'm going to leave my kids. They will do a lot better if the world is better than if they inherit [all of] my money.

Emanuel left his D.C. job in September. He officially announced his candidacy in the race for Chicago City Hall on Saturday. 

The ad begins by emphasizing Emanuel's roots Windy City roots. 

"Chicago is a great city with great people and I want my children to feel as passionate about this city as I did growing up," Emanuel says amid footage of him shaking hands in the streets. 

The title of Emanuel's ad is "Tough," which is appropriate given Emanuel's reputation as an enforcer and the blunt assessment of Chicago's future that he offers in the commercial.

"We face big challenges from our schools our streets to our businesses," Emanuel says. 

Emanuel ends the ad with a comment that, in the words of Mediaite's Rachel Sklar, "smartly appeals to city status anxiety" in Chicago.  

"I think we're at  a crossroads, we've got to decide whether we're gonna continue to be a great city or become a second tier city," he says.

Emanuel's campaign commercial makes its television debut tomorrow. It will be interesting to see whether playing into the local inferiority complex backfires or brings him votes. 

Watch video of Emanuel's campaign ad below.

Someone threw an egg at Rahm Emanuel while he was out campaigning for Mayor in Chicago. Emanuel left his gig as White House Chief of Staff in September to make his mayoral bid.

The flying ovum missed Emanuel and struck a local cameraman. Emanuel kept his cool as he watched the projectile whiz by.

"Don't worry about it," said Emanuel when someone informed him that someone threw an egg at him.

Reports about the attempted egging didn't reveal the identity of the cameraman or the perpetrator. The egg-throwing occurred in the Little Village neighborhood.

Mayor Bloomberg should keep his guard up. Last month, the New York Times reported that "egging confrontations" in the five boroughs "have led to at least 24 serious injuries or deaths since 1984."

In a moment of Carl Paladino, Mel Gibson and Tea Party madness, we are living in angry times. A patron outside a Brooklyn bar last week kills a man whose little dog is tied too close to his little dog. An 82-year-old theater producer on the Queen Mary 2 doesn't like being told by a man at her dinner table to shut up or to hear him say there are too many Jews onboard, so she tells him to fuck himself and ends up locked in her cabin. "She tends to get belligerent," a passenger told the Post.

Last week, demonstrators angry about a gay student's suicide at Rutgers (where, ironically, a Civility Project for teaching courtesy and respect was in progress) had to be physically separated from other students. This week, anti-gay attacks were reported in Chelsea and the West Village. Congress is a war zone. Anti-Muslim militias are on the rise around the country. Sarah Palin is, too, of course, and likens herself and her fans to fiercely protective "mama grizzlies."

Never mind that she doesn't say what's actually threatening her children. The anger gives everyone a reason to get worked up and bare some teeth. YouTube is a national archive of celebrity tantrums and meltdown, from Bill O'Reilly to Christian Bale and Michael Cera.

You'd think that in an age when everything can go viral, the famous would practice some self-control. Yet rage seems to work for all the cable pundits these days. The angrier you are on a reality show, the higher your ratings, even if you're Gordon Ramsay and your vitriol has been linked to two suicides.

So where is all this anger coming from? It could be the economy, or perhaps it's the tinderbox of the world right now. Yelling gives people a voice and a sense of control, even when they have none. Thomas Friedman of The Times suggests the Tea Party is more a tea kettle because it's about spouting off steam more than anything else. If not blood, people want revenge. Perhaps that's why Angry Birds, which gives power to the injured and wingless, has become such a popular video game right now. It recently inspired a Times Magazine columnist to gleefully declare, "I hate everything!"

I'm only slightly more selective than that in my hatred.

Let's see. Street fairs that give nothing back to the city but traffic jams and fried dough. Idling Fresh Direct trucks blocking streets in Manhattan, where markets and gourmet shops are within walking distance. Texting pedestrians you have to step around on sidewalks. The ones coming at you with umbrellas. Loudmouth parties at expensive restaurants. Impossibly arrogant doormen like the ones at the Rose Bar at the Gramercy Park Hotel. Slow drivers in the left lane.

And, of course, the criminally inept. The other day, after my Long Island Railroad train was canceled, the next train to arrive an hour later was listed on the wrong track. I missed it and ended up delayed two hours.

I complained to a station employee. Instead of being defensive, she was apologetic and conciliatory. It didn't get me home on time, but it made me feel better.

It also made me think that there's hope, even in these mad-as-hell times.

Look at Pete Rouse, Rahm Emanuel's successor. He's known for his gentle cool, not his bluster. "He puts out fires," Tom Daschle told The Times. "He reduces friction."

But does he hold doors open for people without expecting a thank-you?

It turns out Rahmbo, as he's known, is actually no bully! Now that he's leaving the West Wing, the truth is coming out. He's more of a little Lahm! A Bahmbi, if you will. If you saw Andy Samberg's foul-mouthed take on the former chief of staff (below), you got the wrong idea. This is not a guy who'd "strap his children to the front end of a steam locomotive," or who'd walk up to you in a locker room, "naked as a jaybird," and poke a finger in your chest, as Rep. Eric Massa put it. 

Not that he doens't poke. He pokes! Brooks' column, "The Soft Side," compares Emanuel to "an urban cowboy" with a herd of cattle, noting that, "Every head in the herd gets a poke every day." This is America, of course, and there's nothing homoerotic about a cowboy riding the range or even poking things. But what to make of Brooks' mention of showing up at Emanuel's office "wearing my asbestos underwear"? Or his assertion that "any smart pat of butter would spot him at 100 yards and flee," because "he's not one of these butter-wouldn't-melt-in-his-mouth guys."

That's some pretty hot stuff for a family newspaper.

It goes on. "From the moment kids are asked to subdue their passions in order to get straight As..." Brooks continues, edging closer, it seems, to a touchy-feely personal confession of his own, "people have an incentive to suppress their passions and prune their souls." No prune juice for David Brooks, who concludes, "He is a full human being, rich and fertile"—yes, fertile—"from the inside out." 

Somehow the columnist neglects to mention Emanuel's training as a ballet dancer, but he's only got so much space, and a whole lot of heart to fill it with.

I don't doubt for a second that Rahm Emanuel is a sweetie-pie. And props to Brooks for being man enough to say so. Still, there was something appealing about the bad-ass chief of staff, the guy spouted expletives, was missing a finger, volunteered in the IDF and inspired fear in the hearts of Republicans and wayward Dems alike. Here he is, in all his glory:

Emanuel looked at it, checked it out for a second, and then opened the wrapping paper — old copies of the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times — to find that inside was a dead fish.

"This is a dead fish," he said to his staffers. 

What could Rahm make of this enigmatic gesture? Is it some sort of "Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes" scenario involving one of his enemies? 

Apparently not. The fish was an Asian Carp, the bloodthirsty monster that's been terrorizing Chicago waterways for years. And this Asian Carp, tucked into the Windy City's rival newspapers, was very much dead. Perhaps there was some meaning in the gift, after all. 

"In Chicago," Gibbs said, "this is how friends say goodbye."

Russian spies have infiltrated, among other places, Yonkers. [NYT]

Watching the Kagan hearings at the Harvard Club is a dull affair. Probably. [NYT]

New York Fed probing Wall Street's connection to BP. [Reuters]

Con Ed cracks down on "nonessential" appliances in certain neighborhoods. [NYT]

Larry David was filming on Great Jones Street last night. [DNAinfo]

Monday was the last day of the "rubber room" for disciplined teachers. [NYT]

New owners, "new Papaya King." [NYM]

FIFA president apologizes to England and Mexico. [AP]

Rahm Emanuel's favorite ice cream flavor: yellow. [NYP]

Pitcher loses perfect game on faulty call. [NYT]

Homeless dentistry scheme nets $5.7 million. [NYDN]

Sweating, hoodied Zuckerburg discusses privacy. [BusinessInsider] 

Rahm Emanuel subpoenaed in Blago trial. [HuffPo]

Over 8,000 MTA employees made six figures last year. [NYT]

Simon and Schuster publisher to leave the company. [NYT]

Joe Biden yuks it up at the Brooklyn Bridge. [NYP]

Curious about all those terrariums you've been seeing lately? [NYT]