Mayor Bloomberg was to meet with families of Sept. 11 victims today upset that this year’s commemoration ceremony won’t take place at the World Trade Center site.
The city says the site, now under construction, is just too dangerous.
“It’s not safe,” Bloomberg told reporters yesterday according to the Associated Press. “We’re not going to put anybody’s life in jeopardy. We’ve had too much tragedy on that site. We’re just not going to do it.”
The families are threatening to go to court.
We’ll see how it’s resolved.

Yesterday evening, Gov. Eliot Spitzer posted on the Think Progress blog, http://thinkprogress.org. It’s titled “Humility Has to Be More than Just a Talking Point,” and in it, he says that his administration forgot the need for humility.

Yesterday morning, he writes, “I delivered a speech at the Chautauqua Institution in which I reflected on my first seven months as Governor of New York and outlined a type of politics that I believe we need in order to change the status quo in New York and in our country.”

Read it “here.”:www.thinkprogress.org/p

I’ve just come back from midtown Manhattan where buses from the Bronx were still bringing passengers into New York City. Some were so full that people were standing in the doors wells, looking out the buses’ front windows.

Flooding from the early morning storm stalled the Metro-North railroad, crippled the subway system and submerged roads throughout Westchester. As with any fierce storm, beware any parkway with a river in its name. This morning, the Bronx River Parkway was impassable.

All morning, with no subway line unaffected by the storm, lines of people walked to their jobs if they could. A lot of hot people dressed for air-conditioned offices and of course as soon as the rain stopped, it quickly became steamy.

It struck me that a lot of men especially don’t dress for the weather. We really need to change our attitudes about what is appropriate. Suits on 90 degree days in August look ridiculous when your shirt is so wet it sticks to your body.

Women may have to put up with the whims of fashion but at least they can wear something cool and bring a sweater.

Time magazine called them “Al Gore’s foot soldiers,” people who have been trained to give the same presentation he gives in his movie “An Inconvenient Truth.”

The goal is to challenge governments and others to do something about global warming.

I hope to write about a woman from Westchester who has become a presenter for The Climate Project in an upcoming column.

In the meantime, here are a few things it suggests you can do to cut the amount of carbon dioxide produced each year. They are not new, but worth remembering. There are more “here.”:www.theclimateproject.

Change a light

Replacing one regular light bulb with a compact fluorescent light bulb will save 150 pounds of carbon dioxide a year.

Drive less

Walk, bike, carpool or take mass transit more often. You’ll save one pound of carbon dioxide for every mile you don’t drive!

Recycle more

You can save 2.400 pounds of carbon dioxide per year by recycling just half of your household waste.

Check your tires

Keeping your tires inflated properly can improve gas mileage by more than 3%.

Every gallon of gasoline saved keeps 20 pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere!

About 100 women are meeting in New York City this weekend, beginning tonight. An organization called The White House Project will be training them to enter politics.

What keeps women out of political positions?

Many are worried that they will not be able to balance families and political demands, says the founder of The White House Project, Marie C. Wilson.

And they are concerned that they will have to compromise too much on what they believe.

The group and its goals are the topic of my column tomorrow.

You might be surprised how under-represented women remain in political jobs.

Vice President Dick Cheney and Sen. Hillary Clinton are going at it over Clinton’s request for briefings on contingency plans for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

Cheney, on the “Larry King Show” said: “What we don’t do is we don’t get into the business of sharing operational plans — we never have — with the Congress.”

He said he agreed with a letter sent to Clinton from an undersecretary of defense, Eric Edelman.

“Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam,” Edelman wrote.

Clinton responded today to Cheney: “I have never requested operational plans,” she wrote. “My request — which has been honored — is to be briefed on redeployment planning to protect the safety of our troops in what will be a dangerous and complicated series of events.”

And she said she was writing to President Bush asking that he set the record straight about his administration’s position on congressional oversight of the war.

“After four years of mismanagement and mistakes by the Bush Administration in Iraq, I believe it is not only important, but imperative that Congress actively oversee the administration’s Iraq policy,” she wrote.

Read the letters “here.”:http://clinton.senate.gov/features/gates.cfm

A group of Sept. 11 families want to continue observing the anniversary of the attacks at Ground Zero.

The families filed for a request for a permit today with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The Port Authority owns the property.

New York City officials have said that the site is no longer safe because construction has begun there. It plans to move the commemoration to a nearby plaza.

“Listen, we’ve had enough tragedy on that site,” the Associate Press quoted Mayor Michael Bloomberg. “Our first priority, No. 1, is to make sure that everybody’s safe, and nothing’s going to get us off that.”

But some of the famlies want to stage their own ceremony at the site. They are asking for a moratorium on construction work on Sept. 11.