It's interesting to think of the Times editorial on 12 years of Mayor Bloomberg in the context of all the talk about the possibility that Mr. Bloomberg might purchase the Times. The Times writes that "in perhaps his worst mistake — authorizing a police practice found unconstitutional by a federal court — Mr. Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly humiliated and alienated black and Hispanic communities by having stop-and-frisk turn into a generalized method of harassing law-abiding citizens." It ignores Mr. Bloomberg's accomplishments in fighting terrorism and says of Mr. Bloomberg, "his unscripted comments, especially about the poor, can range from thoughtless to heartless."
Is the Times' goal to annoy the mayor to the point where he decides to use his billions to buy the paper and replace the current Times team of editorial writers with the Bloomberg View crew, a number of whom are themselves veterans of the Times editorial page? If so, it's a risky maneuver, because Mr. Bloomberg may just as easily decide that he doesn't want to deposit a fraction of his billions in the pocket of the Ochs-Sulzberger family as a reward for calling him, in essence, a heartless racist, and that he'll instead let the Times look elsewhere in its search for a billionaire bailer-outer that would allow the Ochs-Sulzberger family to escape, Graham-style or Taylor-style, with both their capital and their reputation intact.