Reasons to Avoid New York City

-- Incoming mayor Bill de Blasio, seizing upon his predecessor's ability to do many things right quietly while doing everything else wrong loudly, pledges to open his term with an assault on the carriage rides in Central Park. "We are going to get rid of horse carriages, period," he said at a news conference. There are a number of problems with Mayor de Blasio's pledge, aside from it being an extremely unpopular idea for many New Yorkers and visitors.

Chief among them is that it's not up entirely up to him. I don't know whether outlawing horse carriages would require legislation from the city council or be possible with a mayoral diktat. But even if he can do it all on his own, it'll still fall to the decision of some judge someplace, because this is America, and when you pass rules people don't like, they avail themselves of the surplus of lawyers we have in our fair land and put your behind in court. So he can pledge all he wants; there's no guarantee he'll do what he said. This is a dumb thing politicians often do, but I can understand that, given some of the "by-products" of the animals in question, the mayor is extremely jealous of their ability to produce it while doing something useful and wants them out of public view post-haste.

-- Kathy Griffin is threatening to be her usual classy self during CNN's New Year's Eve coverage. I am not certain who CNN's target demo is if Anderson Cooper is trying to drum up interest in his broadcast by suggesting that a 53-year-old woman will appear on the program topless. But we can only hope that New York City police and other anti-terrorism forces on duty will shut her down before she can do any serious damage.