Wow, you go, Mayor Bloomberg!

[mountain_hiker]

Bloomberg to Give $250,000 to Planned ParenthoodMayor Michael R. Bloomberg, responding to the controversy over a breast cancer advocacy group that cut off most of its grants to Planned Parenthood for breast cancer screening, said on Thursday that he would make up a large part of the missing money.

Mr. Bloomberg, a billionaire with a long-term

Comments

[roseofjuly]

That's the stance I take with Bloomberg, honestly. I have mixed views about him - his platforms on social issues are pretty awesome, but he totally ruins it by pandering to rich businessmen and basically creating NYC as a play place for them, at the expense of poor and working-class people. NYC's service expansion is also primarily tourist-oriented IMO. And I'm not sure that he follows up on his "awesome social view" - for example, when the marriage debate was really ramping up in NYC I don't remember him loudly/vocally supporting same-sex marriage and throwing his back behind it. The mayor of NYC may be the single most important mayor in the State of New York.

And he's definitely anti-union. The transit workers fucking hate him; he's a big part of the reason they struck at the end of 2005 and shut the city down for like three days straight. Everyone rides the subways and buses here; if the transit workers are on strike, everybody suffers and it draws a lot of attention. (I wasn't living in New York at the time, but I was watching it closely because I'm from here and my dad has worked in transit his entire life and used to drive NYC buses for almost 20 years.)

I will say, though, that as a student of public health I do really love his attention to public health and his commitment to health campaigns in the city - even if I think they're misguided (the social marketing for sugar-sweetened drinks in the city is pretty horrible IMO).