The Kennedy Conspiracy
• There’s more on the weekend’s big story, the foiled plot to blow up JFK. One angle: The fourth suspect, still at large, could be an Al Qaeda lieutenant with direct ties to bin Laden. [NYP]
• Another: The man who led the Feds to the plot was a twice-convicted drug dealer who successfully infiltrated the terror group after being muscled into serving as a government informant. [WNBC]
• Rudy Giuliani, seeking to diversify his stoicism-in-the-face-of-tragedy bona fides, stopped by to speak at Montoursville High School, which lost sixteen students aboard TWA 800. The campaign hilariously insists he just popped in for no reason. [amNY]
• Gun groups nationwide are casting Bloomberg as their No. 1 enemy, despite his concentration on illegal weapon sales. The NRA (whose site has a breaking-news ticker!) calls the mayor a “billionaire, Boston-grown evangelist for the nanny state.” Boston-grown — now that stings. [NYT]
• And OTB wants to put touch-screen terminals into city bars and accept “BlackBerry bets,” convinced it will find a new demographic there. We eagerly await the spectacle of drunken hipsters ironically losing their shirt on their ponies. [NYDN]
intel
State Comptroller Says the Horse Can’t Do
New State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli’s “Review of the Financial Plan of the City of New York” is not a fun read, but it’s as exuberant as a PDF from a .gov source can get. Tax collections are “far beyond the City’s expectations.” Surplus time all around! Plus, “conservative economic assumptions” lowball robust revenue forecasts for 2007. Our attention, however, was drawn to the travails of one city-related public authority floundering among all that splendor: the Off-Track Betting Corporation. Turns out the OTB’s on a bit of a cold streak owing to “significant fiscal stress” and “rising expenses.” By the end of 2006, it was down to $18 million in cash, which it swears will be enough to sustain operations in 2007. Notably, DiNapoli doesn’t endorse that assessment, instead citing unnamed officials. And so the OTB is left in the unenviable position of actually waiting for its own horse to come in.
Review of the Financial Plan of the City of New York [Office of the State Comptroller]