Who's up and who's down this week

Break out the trumpet, this member of the Mariachi Hall of Fame is going to play the school world’s biggest stage: the New York City Department of Education. Sure, sometimes the stage lights get hot – case in point, the Daily News dredged up an old retaliation lawsuit. But hey, Carranza is just happy to be here. Since de Blasio’s first pick bailed, the understudy gets to leave his Houston problems behind and earn top billing on Broadway.

All the way back in January, he said he wouldn’t run for governor after seriously mulling the possibility. But now he is back in, and he has the backing of a growing number of GOP officials to boot. One of them, Suffolk County GOP Chairman John LaValle, claimed that the momentum is behind Molinaro. And he just got the endorsements from at least seven other county chairs. All this without even needing to campaign.

Four years ago, Mayor Bill de Blasio played a key role in getting the Working Families Party to back Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s first re-election bid. This time, however, the mayor has a close ally – and a celebrity at that – on the verge of challenging the governor. Cuomo can try to downplay it, but the “Sex and the City” star dominated the headlines – without even having to officially announce or even do an interview.

After months of speculation, New York City’s new nightlife mayor has been revealed. Palitz drank only Manhattans for months in a superstitious bid to earn the job, which seems like perfect ritual for the city’s, weird, alcohol-soaked nightlife. Her credentials to straddle the line between government and merriment? She once ran the city’s loudest bar, and topped the list of noise complaints to 311.

Everything in New York has a price, even air. The owner of Grand Central Terminal just sold the structure’s air rights for a hefty sum to JP Morgan Chase so the bank can build a new headquarters in Midtown East. Penson gets a $240 million payday while JP Morgan gets to build a shiny new building on prime real estate. Perhaps the only losers here are the New Yorkers who had hoped to continue to feel the warmth of sunlight on their skin as yet more skyscrapers get built.

President Donald Trump just imposed his new tariffs on steel and aluminum, setting the country up for a possible trade war. And it already has its first casualty: Trump’s top economic adviser. Cohn stayed on after the president’s divisive remarks on the Charlottesville white nationalist rally that left a protester dead, but he drew the line at tariffs, which he has long argued against. Now, after failing to sway the fickle president, Cohn is out of a job, although the door is apparently open if he ever wants to return.

One of the advantages of being an elected official in New York is that it’s relatively easy to find celebrities to sign onto campaigns and causes and add some pizzazz to press conferences. But it doesn’t always go as smoothly as expected for every celebrity – as actor Danny Glover knows all too well after getting shouted down at an Airbnb rally in Albany this week.

Is it ever a good week to be the widow of an allegedly corrupt lawmaker? Well, it’s not a great week to be the spouse of late Assemblyman Bill Nojay, anyway. In 2016, her husband killed himself instead of facing fraud charges. This week, Cuomo vetoed a bill that would have given the dead state legislator’s spouse a $27,000 pension payout while a federal public corruption investigation into Nojay’s dealings continues. The decision was really just a technical issue, the governor’s office insisted, saying it would be unconstitutional to sign the law as is.

Ah, the old “11th hour B.S.” That moment when your buddy agrees to give you billions of dollars for a tunnel and then turns around vows to veto an entire $1 trillion congressional spending package if it includes the tunnel. We’ve all been there. Sorry guys. It seems New York natives Pete, Chuck and Donnie are having a little tiff that could shut down the federal government – and the bridge and tunnel crowd are stuck in the middle. But it could just be more political bombast to get a better deal for the Donald – they hope!

There’s no stopping bad weather – and when it makes the power go out, there’s no stopping elected officials from attacking utilities that don’t get the lights back on quickly enough. Over the past week, both Gov. Andrew Cuomo and County Executive George Latimer blasted McAvoy’s Con Ed and Taylor’s NYSEG for lingering outages in Westchester, with Cuomo calling for a probe and Latimer calling on the execs to resign.