"On the third day, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg tried on empathy. Sort of." So suggests Michael Powell in (you guessed it) the Times.Mr. Powell goes on to opine:

Our mayor comes with great reluctance to I feel your pain moments, calling to mind a Park Avenue dowager donning a sack cloth. But there he was Tuesday, standing in one of those emergency management headquarters in Downtown Brooklyn, speaking of sanitation workers laboring round the clock, of blood shortages and esprit de corps, and, finally, this: The fact remains that many New Yorkers are suffering serious hardships.Implicit in this sentence was the acknowledgment Hizzoners first since that howling blizzard descended on the city that a snowpack acceptable on a Himalayan trail is quite a bit less so on Marlborough Road in Brooklyn two days after a storm.

And he concludes:

Perhaps the true comfort to be derived from the mayors performance Tuesday was that in the end, the man remained true to himself. He can do humble but for only so long perhaps 20 minutes. His conciliatory summary went well enough. Then reporters took to tossing their impertinent questions and the mayor nearly twitched with the effort to keep his eyes from rolling sarcastically.Mr. Mayor, a reporter demanded, do you regret the response to the snowstorm? Mr. Bloombergs look went deadpan.You know, I regret everything in this world, he said. Its another way of saying whatever.

When the Times goes pay-as-you-read, I'll swing for the "City" section over "Editorial" every time. Reporting live from the still-snowed-in Bronx ...Update:On the fourth day of Christmas friends in Brooklyn report being Times-less. So, as a public service (and in partial reparation for perceived slights):

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg admitted on Wednesday that his administrations response to the blizzard that buried New York this week had been inadequate, and he pledged to hold himself and others accountable as the city continued to work its way to normalcy.Speaking at a hardware depot in Hunts Point, the Bronx, the mayor said he was extremely dissatisfied with the performance of the citys emergency management system. He said the reaction to the snow as it accumulated was a lot worse than after other recent snowstorms and was not as efficient as the city has a right to expect.

The rest is here.And then there's this:

This week, as Mr. Bloomberg conceded that the citys response to the blizzard had been inadequate, many theories, in both shouts and whispers, have been offered to explain the shortcomings: the Sanitation Department had undergone staffing cuts; the ferocity of the snowfall and the power of the accompanying winds had presented extraordinary challenges to the citys snow plows; angry sanitation workers had sabotaged the efforts; city residents had ignored common sense and wound up stranding their cars in streets across the five boroughs.On Wednesday, the mayor and his commissioners pledged to get at the truth. Once the streets have been cleared, they said, all aspects of the response will be analyzed, and changes, if necessary, will be made.I could stand here and list maybe 10 or 12 items and say this is what my problem was or thats what my problem was, John J. Doherty, the sanitation commissioner, said at a news conference with Mr. Bloomberg. The mayor has pointed out there will be a postmortem on this storm. Im not here to make excuses right now.Any post-mortem, then, seems destined to scrutinize the citys decision not to declare a snow emergency, the transit agencys delay in invoking a full-scale emergency plan, and the seemingly late and limited bid for outside help.

Looks like The Bronx is now the command-center. Score one for the outer-boroughs!