Autocrat Bloomberg's Golden Rule: He who's got the gold makes the rules

According to a story in today's New York Times, Mayor Bloomberg "cajoled" five of his impossibly wealthy peers to help him foot the cost of the midyear Regents examination.

The mayor put $30 million of his own philanthropic stash — along with $30 million more from that liberal Croesus George Soros to fund a program which will supposedly keep minority students from leaving school. Times writer Michael Powell adds: "This same mayor runs a police department that stops and frisks record numbers of black and Latino men — half a million each year, sometimes at gunpoint."

HERE is, too, the question of Mr. Bloomberg’s billions and the thin membrane between philanthropy and mayoral advantage. Patricia E. Harris, for instance, wears a broad hat as chairwoman and chief executive of the mayor’s $1.75 billion charity. And she dons a perhaps more modest chapeau as his first deputy mayor.