If the Senate gets their way, in just a few years we'll end up having to gut education, Medicaid, and public assistance. In just a few months, we'll have to lay off state employees.
The worst news from Albany is that things are exactly what they seem. With the obvious exception of a virtuous minority, the people who serve are there out of greed, and greed of the most depressingly base nature.
If one wants to keep one's readers informed, one must continue to plow through the garbage, pointing out the most noisome tidbits. At the same time, one should think of ways to effect change.
The ability of City Council members to funnel money to community groups in their district is what the nuns in my Catholic grammar school used to call a near occasion of sin.
In New York, everybody's ethnic. Even the most clannish New Yorker rubs up against so many different people of so many levels of accomplishment, it's almost impossible to miss the fact that every group is a mixture of overachievers and stupendous embarrassments.
Just as it began, the New York state Senate debacle of 2009 comes to an end and David Paterson, one of the Empire State's biggest punching bags, has come out on top.
"All politics is local," the late Speaker of the House Tip O'Neil opined famously. And New Yorkers have been getting a large dose of the maxim in rec...
The leadership stalemate of 1965 occurred at the start of the session, when bill expiration deadlines weren't looming. Pedro Espada's defection (facilitated by Hiram Monserrate) flushed months of hard-fought negotiations and legislative footwork down the toilet.
If someone actually wrote the screenplay of the Albany debacle, no one would believe that such events could actually take place in an advanced democracy in 2009.
For months now, gay rights advocates in New York have been pulling strings, marshaling forces, and lobbying moderate state senators to make 2009 the y...
There's been a great deal of speculation about why the leaders of the coup in Albany would foist all this misery and disarray on their fellow New Yorkers. Pick the reasons you think are right!
