Bloomberg And Palin, Together, At Last!

During his campaign for a third term, Mayor Bloomberg stifled a Freedom of Information Law request by withholding the release of photographs of himself with Sarah Palin until two weeks after the election, the Daily News reports.

Bloomberg posed with the former Vice Presidential candidate, former Alaska Governor, and current memoir promoter when she visited City Hall in October 2007 — long before she had been selected to run alongside Sen. John McCain. But when the tabloid filed a FOIL request to obtain the pictures in July, the Mayor's lawyer Anthony Crowell took far longer than the two weeks allowed by state law. Instead, the photos — which the paper asserts "might have been inconvenient for Bloomberg while he was running against Democrat Bill Thompson in a heavily Democratic city" — showed up four months later (and the city promises it will be able to turn over FOIL requests within a week!). The News has a photo gallery of the images here.

"There is simply no good reason for delaying disclosure," said Robert Freeman, of the Committee on Open Government. "Embarrassment is not one of the grounds." The paper then lists a number of other things that Bloomberg kept "under wraps until after the ballots were counted," including the fact that the NYPD was "quietly exempted" from budget cuts that hit almost every other agency, and the fact that the gap in the city's budget is $4.1 billion — not the $4.9 billion that Bloomberg claimed while he was on the campaign trail. Mayoral spokesman Stu Loeser had this to say: "These are enormous numbers of great concern. Whether you have to walk 1,000 miles or 1,200 miles, either way, it's a long walk," he said. "We've made no secret of the fact that we have a very conservative budget."