Empty snark: so easy, even an editorialist can do it!

Yesterday, The Post-Star ran yet another editorial on school spending with its trademark temper-tantrum tone. This followed the previous day's only slightly less obnoxious editorial on school tax rises; the paper, which recently increased its newsstand price by 100%, objected to Hadley-Luzerne school district's (admittedly steep) 25% tax hike. Sunday's editorial lectured school board members to stick their neck on the line by cutting the fat but was, as always, woefully short on specifics. I guess the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial writing is no longer based on quality or persuasiveness but on empty snark.

Sunday's editorial took issue with the recent decision by the Glens Falls' school district (GFSD) to save three sports programs originally slated for extinction. Reportedly, the district's athletic director found $34,000 in other areas of the sports' budget to cut in order to save volleyball, golf and alpine skiing. The $34,000 represents less than 0.1% of the overall proposed $38.2 million budget, a budget which DECREASES overall spending.

More accurately, the editorial didn't take issue with preserving those three sports in and of itself, but rather with the concept that, in their opinion, it was so easy for the AD to rustle up $34,000 from other areas of the budget. His program must be dripping with excessive lard, the daily claimed.

So for his trouble, the athletic director is serenaded with such cutesy lines as:

All it took was the athletic director reaching into the special coffee can he keeps on top of the fridge for equipment, supplies, uniforms and fees, and pulling out a wad of cash. Oh yeah, that $34,000. I didn't hear you the first time.

and

It doesn't take a miracle to find fat to cut from budgets. It just takes diligence and courage. Unfortunately for taxpayers, those qualities among our elected officials are often in short supply.

And the editorial then proceeds to not offer any other specific examples of so-called fat in the GFSD budget. Is then the editorial board, by its own definition, lazy and gutless?

But given this harshness against perceived waste, I was astonished to see a column by Managing Editor Ken Tingley waxing eloquent on the virtues and vices Joe Bruno, the former state senate majority leader recently convicted of corruption. He paints the portrait of a good man who had a moment of madness, which is quite different than the very deliberate and systematic decision-making revealed in his trial.

[I realize the difference between an editorial (collective opinion of the editorial board) and a column (the personal opinion of the author). However, Tingley's previous columns have made it clear he shares the editorial board's harshness against perceived wasteful school and governmental spending.]

Perhaps more than any other politician in Albany, Joe Bruno represented the old-school machine politician doling out of public largesse and buying loyalty like some sort of Mafia don. He represented the politician who freely spent and allocated tens of millions of dollars of our money so as to advance his power, prestige and, given his corruption conviction, his personal business dealings. Bruno (who had a baseball stadium named after him) became the embodiment of Albany's decadence.

Regardless of what you think about GFSD spending or Joe Bruno's legacy, the paper's hypocrisy is stunning.

An honest and decent athletic director who very arguably 'wasted' $34,000 deserves to be tarred and feathered and drowned in a sea of snark, but an ethically-challenged convicted felon who wasted tens of millions of tax dollars and is one of the key contributors to the state's current fiscal crisis deserves a certain degree of sympathy.

Maybe The Post-Star's brain trust is so worried about creating ever more snarky insults that they've decided to abandon any sort of guiding principle.

Bruno, Cheney come out

I see that former New York Senate majority leader Joe Bruno has come out in favor of same sex marriage. Bruno, who describes himself as a "conservative Roman Catholic," refused to allow the same-sex marriage bill come to a vote when he was majority leader. Though he did allow passage of the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act in 2002. Bruno's comments came not long after former vice-president Dick Cheney also came out as being in favor of gay marriage.

While Bruno is in embroiled legal troubles and Cheney certainly ought to be, it's quite remarkable that these two conservatives are to the left of President Obama on this key civil rights issue.

More legalized corruption in NYS

If you support a progressive agenda, then support a progressive candidate.


Less than a month after stepping down as majority leader of New York's Senate and less than a week after retiring from the legislature, Joe Bruno parlayed his influence as the most powerful Republican in the state into a cushy new job. The Glens Falls native has been hired as chief executive of CMA Consulting Services, a company which provides information technology to many clients... including the state of New York.

I thought the legislature passed some rule a few years ago requiring that retired legislators wait a certain amount of time before becoming a lobbyist or taking a job that otherwise does business with the state. I guess I was wrong.

Maybe he needs the money to pay for lawyers related to the ongoing FBI investigation into his business dealings.

Joe Bruno has already diverted enough of our tax dollars toward gargantuan corporate welfare giveaways and grandiose projects like a baseball stadium named after himself, I guess he wants to start putting some of it directly in his own pocket.

This sort of legalized influence peddling is precisely what helps make Albany home the most dysfunctional state legislature in the country.

Update: I neglected to mention that the other key figure in this company is the wife of the late state Sen. Ron Stafford, one of the most influential North Country legislators of the last half century and probably the only person in state history who delivered more pork than Bruno himself.

A corrupt capital sinks even lower

Jim Tedisco is the head of a tiny group of Republicans in New York state's Assembly so he doesn't have much to do. As a result, he often picks a fake issue to get all grandstand about. It's a great way to get himself in front of TV cameras that would normally ignore a minority leader, especially one as hostile to rational thought as him. The general rule of thumb in New York state politics is that when Tedisco gets all hysterical in favor of something, it's probably a terrible idea.

But the law of averages states that even someone as sleazy as Tedisco is going to be right once in a while. And the minority leader was right to call for Gov. Eliot Spitzer's resignation for his apparent involvement in an interstate prostitution ring. And there are also questions about the legality of how the Democratic governor paid for the high priced hookers.

When you make ethics the centerpiece of your campaign, your own ethics must be above reproach. A former prosecutor and state attorney general who busted a prostitution ring himself has even less excuse to not know better.

When Spitzer resigns, Lt. Gov. David Paterson, a widely respected former state senator, will become the first blind governor in US history.

Tedisco even threatened to launch impeachment proceedings against Spitzer if the governor did not resign within 48 hours. If Spitzer's actions are impeachable, it makes you wonder about the future of Tedisco's buddy and fellow Republican Joe Bruno. The Senate majority leader, a sworn enemy of Spitzer, is under FBI investigation himself for allegedly shady business dealings.

Perversely, when Paterson becomes governor, the lieutenant governor position will not be filled permanently as per the state constitution. The ethically challenged Bruno will double as acting lieutenant governor... and thus acting governor when Paterson is out of state.

Then again, when you have a rigged and gerrymandered electoral system that eliminates accountability, this desperate state of affairs is what you get. New Yorkers thought that after decades of permanent gridlock, a capital held hostage by lobbyists and one on-time budget in the last quarter century, things couldn't get any lower....

Are there any adults in the room?

In the decade I've been following them, politics in Albany have always been petty, childish and having little to do with the public interest. But things have reached a new low in recent weeks.

Not along ago, a(nother) spat erupted between Democratic Gov. Eliot Spitzer and Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno, the state's top Republican. Leaked documents accused Bruno jaunting around the state on state aircraft to fly to posh fundraisers, throwing in the token "state business" related appearance.

Bruno was gifted the opportunity to change the subject. Someone in Spitzer's office allegedly used the State Police to spy on Bruno thus creating the documents that were eventually leaked. Ever the crafty politician, Bruno used this blunder to transform himself into an underdog man of the people victim fighting against the spoiled brat elitist governor who he likened to a "third world dictator".

He demanded approximately 142 investigations into the affair in order to drag it out as long as possible.

But the tables have turned again. A nasty, threatening phone call was placed to Spitzer's father, who is 83 years old and has the early stages of Alzheimer's disease.

The Albany Times-Union reported: In the message, left on Bernard Spitzer's office voice mail Aug. 6, the caller said he would be subpoenaed to appear before the Senate committee and, "If you resist the subpoena you will be arrested and brought to Albany." The caller referred to the governor as a "phony, psycho, piece of (expletive)" and said, "You will be forced to tell the truth and the fact that your son's a pathological liar will be known to all." Bernard Spitzer hired a private investigations firm, Kroll Associates, to find out who made the call. The firm concluded that Stone controls the phone used by the call.

The call was traced to the apartment of Roger Stone, a top Republican political consultant.

Stone has resigned, 'voluntarily' according to the paper. But he vehemently denied placing the call. He claims someone broke into his apartment to place the call in order to set him up. He adds that the man who owns the building in which the apartment is located is a Spitzer fundraiser.

Now Senate Democrats are calling for an investigation.

Meanwhile, the public's business remains ignored.

This is par for the course for the most dysfunctional state legislature in the nation, but it's ugly even by Albany's virtually non-existent standards.


Update: Apparently, Stone has a long history of sleaze consistent with what he's accused of here. He was part of Richard Nixon's Dirty Tricks Brigade. He was also part of the mob that shut down the 2000 recount in Miami-Dade county.

Practicing for his day job

I was amused to read this piece about NY Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno.

Bruno and Governor Eliot Spitzer have been engaged in a war throughout much of the summer that has been nasty even by Albany's standards.

The Albany Times-Union claimed that documents showed that Bruno had been flying on state aircraft for trips that had a negligible amount of state business. Bruno charged back that the information in said documents were obtained because Spitzer had used the state police to spy on him. The independent state attorney general concluded that neither side did anything illegal but that both acted dubiously.

Anyway, Spitzer called Bruno to apologize for his part of the scandal. Bruno says he accepted the governor's apology about the improper use of the state police, but the Senator left some doubt about whether he trusted Spitzer's sincerity. The Senator said that when the Governor called him, Bruno was on his tractor on his horse farm outside Troy.

"I'd hate to tell you what I was doing with that tractor," Bruno said. "Trying to hook it up to a manure spreader."

I guess he's really does bring his work home with him.

Full disclosure: apparently Bruno is distantly related to me and, as I'm sure readers of this blog will agree, I also share his talent for manure spreading.

The mean streets of Glens Falls

I think it's about time for New York's Republican Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno to bow out with whatever grace he has left.

I wrote earlier about his refusal to talk to The Times-Union on a story that revealed some dubious travel practices of his, only later to whine that the Albany paper didn't tell his side of the story. He also acted like he was in more danger than a GI in Baghdad. Late last year, it was revealed that Bruno was the subject of an FBI investigation into his outside earnings.

In the latest twist, Bruno claims that his archrival, Democratic Gov. Eliot Spitzer is spying on him. The state's top Republican compared Spitzer to a "Third World dictator."

It's been such a rough eight months that even having his very own taxpayer-financed ballpark named after him probably doesn't lift his spirits very much.

But despite the travails, the majority leader hasn't lost his pugnacity.

“I grew up in the toughest part of Glens Falls, next to the boxcars, where kids would come up to you when you weighed 90 pounds and they weighed 120 and just punch you right in the mouth just because you were Italian, O.K., or just because you lived next to the boxcars, or just because they felt like it,” he said. "That’s how I grew up, O.K.? So swing away.”

As a current resident of Glens Falls, I nearly wet myself laughing at this description. I know Glens Falls is less hardscrabble than it was in the '30s and '40s when the majority leader grew up. But give me a break? Did he grow up on South Street's bar alley?

Bruno is not the first politician to exaggerate the dangers of this relatively placid area for political reasons.

Businessman Bill Brown waged a campaign a few years ago trying to get the city to 'clean up' Ridge Street, which tried to convince people was more dangerous than East L.A. He is running for political office for the third time this year. And while I appreciate the work he does for the Boxcar Derby, he has never gotten my vote. And unless his opponent is named George W. Bush, he never will.

In 1996, the late-Congressman Jerry Solomon, berated Rhode Island Rep. Patrick Kennedy during a debate on a gun control bill in one of his more (but not by any stretch his only) infamous comments.

Our local loudmouth dared the nephew of the assassinated John and Robert Kennedy to "step outside," adding, "My wife lives alone five days a week in a rural area in upstate New York. She has a right to defend herself when I'm not there, son. And don't you ever forget it."

I used to bike by their house all the time. They lived in a swanky residential suburb, about a mile away from one of the busiest intersections between New York City and Montreal.

I must've missed the boxcars.


Full disclosure: apparently Bruno is distantly related to me, though I must declare unambiguously: I am not nor have I ever been a passenger on a state aircraft. I also have never been shot at by Mrs. Solomon.

"No comment... now stop refusing to tell my side!"

Glens Falls' Post-Star managing editor Ken Tingley had a good column blasting NY Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno.

A few days ago, the Albany Times-Union ran a piece detailing how Bruno allegedly used taxpayer-funded aircraft to attend political fundraisers. Additionally, the Albany paper obtained documents where Bruno had asserted the aircraft were used for official state business.

Essentially, Bruno was committing the same offense that forced the resignation of then-state comptroller Alan Hevesi. Bruno had demanded Hevesi quit.

Bruno refused to comment for the Times-Union article but later held a press conference to answer the allegations.

"Since I have been leader I was told by the State Police that there were so many threats on my life that they could not cover them," said Bruno.

I know Albany's a morass but to listen to his rant, you'd think the politico was in more danger than a GI in Baghdad.

Anyway, Tingley rightly lambastes Bruno. During his temper tantrum, the crybaby senator insisted he was going to cancel his subscription to the T-U and encouraged everyone else to do the same.

I'm sure Hearst Newspapers is quaking in its boots!

Tingley also called Bruno on what is a huge pet peeve of mine. Bruno consciously refused to provide a comment for the T-U article only later to snivel that... the paper only provided one side of the story.

I think anyone who does this should be publicly tarred and feathered. How is a media outlet supposed to provide your side of the story if you refuse to give it to them?


[Full disclosure: apparently Bruno is distantly related to me, though I've never received a ride in state aircraft nor have I received any of the other perks that have gotten him into trouble.]