It’s been fun watching the growing backlash against Mayor Bloomberg’s announcement that Hearst honcho Cathie Black would replace Joel Klein as NY chancellor of schools. I have sort of a love/hate relationship with the mayor myself — love the stance he took over the “Ground Zero mosque” controversy and wished for one moment that Obama had his balls in such situations.

But I have always hated his autocratic side, mostly as I stood shoulder-to-shoulder with my fellow Brooklynites in our losing battle against the Atlantic Yards development, which Mike helped grease the chute for. His attitude about that, as in most things, was “I know what’s best for the people of New York,” but in the appointment of Black that approach seems to be backfiring. First there are the teachers, who rightly wonder why the hell they have to be vetted and qualified to just teach kids math or history when this millionaire pal of the mayor’s can breeze into a job she knows nothing about, in a field in which she has no expertise (she sent her kids to private schools, as her parents did for her), all the while asking for their indulgence while she learns the ropes. Wouldn’t you be pissed?

Then there’s the general silence of the people in the media, the very folks who should be rushing to her defense, that has followed the shitstorm. That should tell you something right there. You know how when people are making odds on the Oscars they have to figure on the feelings of the Hollywood community: “Jeff Bridges is a good guy, he’s been doing an honorable  job in films big and small for years — let’s give him an Oscar!” The opposite might be true here. Not that I can find anyone who hates her, but there is a fair amount of resentment beneath the surface.

Bloomberg’s argument, when he isn’t busy acting offended that he even has to explain his actions, is that Black has done a bang-up job at Hearst. Really? She takes credit for bringing Oprah into the fold, though those in the know say that was really the work of Ellen Levine. And while she is proud of keeping Esquire afloat, have you tried reading it lately? Sure it’s not as bad as it has been since its glory days but it still seems like a shadow of its former self, an anonymous designed-by-committee men’s magazine rather than a beacon of intelligence and attitude.

Not entirely her fault, of course. But old media seems like a flotilla of Titanics these days and Black has done a middling, middle-management job of keeping her own sinking ship afloat. To call her a genius, or even an innovator, seems laughable. To call her chancellor of the schools seems, at this point like a long shot.

The Giants finally fulfilled my boyhood dream Monday night (even if I wish they had done it in SF, and I had been there to watch), a victory I have literally waited a lifetime for. And they did it the Frisco way, with a bunch of rookies, retreads, rejects and a little bit of reefer. I retired happily, hoping it wouldn’t take us another 56 years to get those rings.

Then I awoke to go vote, using New York State’s new confusing ballots, the paper kind that you fill out like a lunch order at Au Bon Pain and then run through what looks like a fax machine while some nice lady guarantees that your vote has been recorded. Personally, I liked the old lever system; when I pulled that big switch I always felt I was sentencing someone to death. (And yet there was George W, watching his team lose in Arlington…)

Pundits have already been projecting a Republican tidal wave for the midterms, and tonight’s returns seem to be bearing them out… sort of. As tired as I am of the kvetching about Obama I have heard from the hardly informed (and thanks to Barbara O’Dair for alerting me to What the Fuck Has Obama Done So Far?, a site that lists such modest accomplishments as “Cut prescription drug cost for Medicare recipients by 50%” that you can dismiss by clicking buttons that say “I’m not impressed” or “Big fucking deal, what else?”) I am looking forward to the tar pit that awaits the GOP as it takes control of the House.

Besides, it’s all cyclical. My birthday began early tonight when we went to see Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson on Broadway, a ridiculously enjoyable rock revisionist musical about our most genocidal president. His brand of self-pitying populism — or “emocracy” as one of his supporters labels it — is seen through the prism of Tea Party histrionics and it’s a timely reminder that perpetual upheaval has been the way of our government since its inception. Throwing the bums out invariably gets you new bums.

Let it unfurl, like the man said.

My wife and I threw a President’s Day costume party in San Francisco, many years ago, and many of the costumes were quite inventive. There were several assassinated Lincolns, as I recall, and at least one Castro; Susan West came as Nixon’s dog Checkers and the most inventive was Mark Schapiro, now of the Center for Investigative Reporting, who came as a The Grassy Knoll: a skull-cap of Astroturf, a small soldier or two shooting from the top.

There was one fellow who had made no attempt, but just stood in the hallway in his street clothes drinking my beer. “I’m Voter Apathy,” he said.

That character always shows up (or not, as it were) and pundits and pollsters say VA will have a big effect in this week’s elections too. In the wake of Jon Stewart & Stephen Colbert’s dueling rallies in DC this weekend, I heard at least one news commentator ask if those parody lovers (six billion by Colbert’s count) were the kind of folks who voted. You could ask the same of Onion readers, who skewered the Dems this week with the headline ,”If we’re gonna lose, let’s go down running away from every legislative accomplishment we’ve made.”

Of course! you’re saying. I like Comedy Central and the Onion and I voted in the last election, and probably for Obama. But have you given in this election cycle, money or time? Have you bought the line that Team Obama has made such a hash of defining its agenda, and yes trumpeting its accomplishments, that they don’t deserve to win? Or are you convinced that a little more radicalized GOP rivalry will energize the Obama administration and the Dems in general for the next two years, really help them get things done?

I’ve heard that argument from a few quasi Obama supporters, that more friction will help him focus his agenda or something. But an agenda is not legislation, and if you are of the camp that says his health care bill should have been more European, it’s worth remembering that the one that was passed — that will ultimately make it impossible for insurance companies to deny coverage to people who have been sick before — is the one that we could get passed in Congress. And that the Tea Party demagogues who are seen as  tipping this week’s race want to repeal the whole damn thing.

So if that’s you standing in the hallway, drinking free beer, and laughing at Jon Stewart’s jokes, how ’bout you put down your cold one long enough to pull a lever, fill in a fosdic or do whatever it takes this Tuesday to make sure the Republicans don’t drag this nation down any further than they have? Apathy is still for losers.

Anyone else getting addicted to HBO’s Boardwalk Empire? My original fear was that it would become too static, sort of like a TV version of a Kurt Andersen novel, but it has a slightly random and even dangerous feeling now that I kind of like (surprise).

Last night’s episode brought the Catholic themes to the surface, so to speak, starting with Nucky’s voluptuous mistress Lucy scratching his chest after sex. By the end of the show the repressed prohibition agent played by Michael Shannon (who was scary as the outsized schizophrenic son in the film of Revolutionary Road) is doing his own flesh-mortifaction, paying penance for his obsession with Margaret Schroeder (Kelly Macdonald), who may or not be Nucky’s true love.

Some of the dissension over the show has to do with Steve Buscemi’s bonafides as a leading man. Having seen him mostly play creeps in Coen Bros movies a lot of people seem to be having a hard time imagining him as a macher in 1920’s Atlantic City. Slightly rubber-lipped and bug-eyed, Buscemi can play psychos and losers with equal aplomb. But add a few million to his bank account, and the police and politicians at his beck and call, and it’s funny how irresistible he suddenly is to the women.

The mother/whore stuff familiar to anyone raised Catholic was on full display last night, too (along with quite a bit of frontal nudity, male and female) but we all know someone is going to pay for their  pleasure. The question with any good gangster story is who will pay last? And does hell really last an eternity?

“What was she thinking?”

That’s the question being asked around some water coolers this morning, or would be if people had jobs to go to or companies that weren’t too cheap to have water coolers, or water in them when employees gathered ’round. The she in question,of course, is Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who left a message for Anita Hill on her office voice mail, suggesting she apologize for all those nasty things she said about Clarence at his confirmation hearings.

You know, that stuff about the justice hassling Hill when they worked together at the Department of Education. Like the time he said he in her presence, “Who put this pubic hair on my can of Coke?” (an image that sent Coke sales into the toilet, so to speak, for years) It was big news at the time — much of the US stopped what it was doing to watch those hearings, and it arguably changed our understanding of sexual harassment in the workplace forever.

But Thomas was confirmed and has been just the sort of rubber stamp for Scalia people feared he would, so you would think he won, right? But we know from reports that he still broods about his “electronic lynching” and so, it seems, does Mrs. Thomas. She asked an apology of Anita Hill before, it seems, who said she has nothing to apologize for — just Speaking Truth to Power, as the title of her book put it. “Virginia Hill and I have never met,” she wrote. “And one can imagine that she is guided by her own romantic interest in her husband when she assumes that other women find him attractive as well.”

Meow. What is even weirder about Ginni Thomas’s action though is the attention it calls to her at the very moment when people are starting to question the propriety of a Supreme Court justice’s wife making a nice salary from undisclosed donors for calling the sitting president a tyrant and spouting other Tea Party nonsense. At 7:30 AM no less! Sounds like someone needs to switch to decaf. Or Coke zero.