PlanetAlbany

Bishop Hubbard and the lector's prayer (updated)

Gary Mercure, a defrocked Roman Catholic priest currently facing child rape and other charges in Massachusetts, was pastor of St. Mary's Church in Glens Falls when I and my then young children were members. He was one of what turned out to be a cluster of problem priests in the parish. I remember chatting with another one who was later exposed as a child molester, the Rev. Mark Haight, at a parish picnic in the parking lot of St. Mary's School. The Diocese of Albany paid almost $1 million to settle a lawsuit brought against him by a man who had been sexually abused from the age of 12. I remember another priest, Edward Leroux, who seemed like a nice old duffer until he was permanently barred from ministry by Albany Bishop Howard Hubbard because of past abuse.
I last saw Mercure a couple of years ago at a press conference in Albany on local economic issues, that was put on by some ACORN-type group. I was planning to introduce myself afterward and chat about Glens Falls, but he left before the event ended. I thought that was odd, and he did leave a shifty, slightly creepy impression, but I forgot about it until his particular scandal broke not long after.
My two children (I also have a non-Catholic stepson) are now grown. My daughter continues to express her outrage about the scandal, and my son does not go to church.
My wife is a Presbyterian, and these days I go by myself on Sundays to another Catholic church, closer to Albany. The bulletin said they needed lectors, and I almost became one, but something bothered me about a prayer the lector reads every week, the one asking that Pope Benedict and Bishop Hubbard "continue to be given wisdom and discernment." Prayer for anyone is a good thing, but the implication of this one, that this bishop has been given wisdom and discernment, seems false.  Hubbard has been bishop for over 30 years. A great many of his colleagues also exercised very poor judgment in handling the scandal, e.g. by reassigning guilty priests. It seems to me a pity that you don't hear of any bishops resigning to do penance somewhere, in a Haitian mission, perhaps, or at least in the kind of small church that Robert DeNiro wound up in at the end of "True Confessions." But I don't demand that. I would like a little humility. I would like the words "continue to be" taken out of the lector's prayer in the Diocese of Albany.

Update in February 2011: The Mercure verdict is in. And I haven't heard that phrase in the lector's prayer lately.

 

In defense of unions, goo-goos, snark

A critic writes: "Is there a reason that republican blogs tend to be
so snarky?  The election has at least served to expand conservatives
objects of complaints from democrats, liberals, the media and gays, it
now includes other republicans.  Some things never change though,
apparently in Republican land, disagreement with orthodoxy, no matter
how trivial is is an excuse to denigrate anyone or group, even the
Goo-goos at the  League of Women Voters."
This blog's first posting, on Friday evening, did include a reference to "Goo-goos like the League of Women Voters," and was critical of both parties and the public-sector unions. But I'm not toeing any line, and belong to no party. The goo-goos are often right, although the state of Albany's political culture shows they are rarely effective. Unions can and do protect workers. I helped organize one 25 years ago to represent most of the employees at the Glens Falls daily newspaper, was elected its first chairman and helped negotiate its first contract.
Today, in debating the budget crunch, the public-sector unions are sometimes right, especially about income taxes. That debate can't be conducted in a warm fog of fuzzy-minded miasma, which a little civilized snark can help dissolve.

Bell-ringing bleg

A grisly saga from Tatiana Zarnowski in The Gazette today about Saratoga Springs, where "Sewage overflow in the Salvation Army building on Friday shut down all charitable services until further notice.
"Blockage in the sewage line on Thanksgiving Day caused pumps in the building to overheat and shut off after a full day of holiday events that drew about 200 participants. The pumps turned back on early Friday morning, but the blockage resulted in sewage spewing from the building’s toilets and sinks and seeping into drywall, through the floors and into the ceiling below.
"... The organization won’t find out until at least Monday where the blockage is or how much of the resulting damage will be covered by insurance. ... Ceiling tiles, wood trim and drywall will have to be torn out and replaced.
"In the meantime, none of the organization’s programs can be held at the building.
"The Salvation Army offers showers and assistance to people needing shelter, serves breakfast six days a week, holds Sunday school and church services, an after-school program, a food pantry, a free clothing room and hosts Boy Scout meetings every Monday.
"... The sewage accident hits the Salvation Army in the middle of its kettle fundraiser, the main fundraiser of the year, and during preparations for its annual holiday food basket giveaway."
Lt. Roger Miller told the Gazette: “This has been a horrendous year for money coming in, because it just hasn’t, and at the same time, demands on services are extremely high.”

If all this wasn't bad enough, I happen to know that Miller's wife, Lt. Patty Miller, injured her leg Wednesday morning, because I did my first shift as a volunteer bell ringer that evening at Wal-Mart. Patty showed up on crutches with her daughter at the beginning and end of my shift, to deliver and pick up the kettle. She hadn't gotten to a doctor yet, her daughter told me.

So if you want to help out, The Salvation Army's local address is P.O. Box 652, 27 Woodlawn Ave., Saratoga Springs, NY 12866. The phone number is 518-584-1640.

The Kaz

The Times Union is reporting today that former Schenectady Police Chief Greg Kaczmarek will cop a plea Tuesday and be sentenced to two years in prison. (The hometown Gazette, where the business model is to keep those layoffs coming faster, missed the story.)
According to the TU, Kaczmarek and his wife Lisa "are expected to admit their roles in a drug ring that supplied Schenectady streets with cocaine and heroin, according to several people familiar with the terms of their plea-bargain negotiations."

Each will reportedly plead guilty to third-degree criminal possession of a controlled substance, and Lisa will get a six-month sentence in county jail.

"Kaczmarek, 56, and his 48-year-old wife, could have faced up to 25 years in prison if convicted at trial of the top count in the indictment, conspiracy. Instead, with time off for good behavior, Kaczmarek could be out in 16 months and his wife could be released in just four months."
If the story is true, then the deal is a disgrace and a scandal, and I write that as a longtime defender of the Schenectady police force.

Kaczmarek, who allegedly decided to deal hard drugs as his post-retirement career, would get substantially less prison time than four officers prosecuted by the U.S. attorney's office when he was chief. Two of those men, Michael Hamilton and Nicola Messere, were in my view decent people and in some ways outstanding police officers. Hamilton made more arrests than anyone else on the force, and Messere once went into a burning building to rescue its inhabitants before the fire department arrived. They got too close to drug-addicted informants in the Wild West world of turn-of-the century Schenectady, where crime had spiraled upward and before the Metroplex Authority had done much to revive the downtown economy. And the U.S. attorney's office was as merciless to them as it was in 2006 to Mohammed Hossain and Yassin Aref, two nonterrorist Muslims who were prosecuted and convicted on weak evidence deriving from an FBI sting, and are now serving long prison terms.

I met Kaczmarek when he was chief, and he seemed a likable enough rough-and-ready guy, with an eccentric belief in the medical efficacy of magnets. When he was appointed to the top job in 1996, there were rumors about his past drug use. But there was a widespread assumption that if the rumors, which he denied, were true, they weren't that relevant, because he had moved on from a period of youthful indiscretion. I certainly couldn't have imagined that his life would play out the way it did.

The Schenectady Police Department has been plagued by scandal for many years, some of it real and some overblown. The Kaczmarek scandal is the worst of the lot, and it does not at all sound like this plea bargain  will do it justice.

Albany's binary logic

The recent special session has been widely and accurately described as an example of dysfunctional state government, and as a tactical win for Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos, R-Rockville Centre. That's because Skelos, in what are probably the waning weeks of the Republican majority, avoided offending the special interests by going along with any budget cuts, but offered to bring Gov. David Paterson's budget-cutting bill to the floor for a vote. Paterson turned down the offer, nobody voted on anything, and everyone left town without accomplishing anything.
Skelos was widely criticized for cynicism, and there is some justice to the charge. Republicans, especially in the Senate, have become every bit as resistant to spending restraint and in hock to unions and other special interests as Democrats, and there are no fiscal conservatives in Albany. But Paterson was equally cynical and cowardly in not calling Skelos' bluff. He should have let the measure be put to a vote, and if, as is probable, it went down, he should have kept the Legislature in session until it did something.
That is what happened in Washington when the financial crisis broke. The original bailout bill was defeated in the House of Representatives, with Republicans and Democrats on both sides of the vote. Then it was porked up in the Senate, and the new version made it through the House.
Larding up anything is not what New York needs, but it could use some democracy. Reformers periodically pay lip service to that, but that's all. As both Paterson and Senate Minority Leader Malcolm Smith, D-Queens, made clear, they could not conceive of anything other than the usual pattern of the leaders stitching up a deal in advance, to be rubber-stamped on the floors of both houses. Albany never sees meaningful bipartisan alliances outside the leaders' control.

Lyndon Johnson reportedly said Gerald Ford was so dumb he couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time. Albany can't handle government and democracy together, which is why last year's supposed budget reform act has turned out to be a dead letter. All it can do is govern badly and undemocratically.

Reasons to be cheerful

If the world economy is collapsing and dragging New York state's budget down with it, there is nonetheless a bright side to this black hole: We won't have to pay attention to Chief Judge Judith Kaye caterwauling about how little she and her colleagues are paid.
The state will still have to come up with money it can ill afford to defend against the lawsuits brought by Kaye and other judges, who claim they have a constitutional right to pay themselves big raises. It's as if bloggers said the First Amendment gives them the right to decree their own public subsidy. Judges are now paid now about three times the salary of the average New Yorker.
Nor is the judges' conduct unusual by Albany standards. Top legislative staffers make sure to pad their pay and pensions on the way out to more lucrative careers as lobbyists. Jealous legislators, aching for raises of their own, are offended at the very suggestion that they should buy their own lunches. The bipartisan outrage against David Grandeau, who was forced out as head of the lobbying commission by a fraudulent "reform" measure last year, can be explained by his making it more difficult for lobbyists to subsidize the lifestyle of politicians.
When Kaye retired last week, editorial writers phoned in the usual banal blather about her supposedly stellar record, echoing the bromides attorneys lavish on each other at annual Law Days and other exercises in self-congratulation. Goo-goos like the League of Women Voters, whose legislative director, Barbara Bartoletti, works for no salary, nevertheless have lined up to support the establishment position that the judges must get theirs.

In a column this week, Thomas Sowell said that no matter how much compensation auto executives received, it had very little impact on the cost of a car or Detroit's troubles. Maybe so, although it does seem that Wall Street and corporate leaders were looking out for No. 1 at the expense of their companies and other responsibilities. In New York, the public-sector response to private-sector greed has often been to subsidize it and demand a piece of the action, to the extent that the costs to the actual public become insupportable.

Good people get sucked into the systemic corruption, through no fault of their own. After 9/11, many New York City firefighters worked so much overtime that they were more or less forced into retirement, because their pensions were based on those earnings, and they would never work so much overtime again. The public-sector unions had demanded a system of pension-padding, and the politicians gave them this and much more, falsely telling taxpayers that they would not be on the hook. The unions bought and now own the entire state Legislature.

Meanwhile, the AP's Heidi Vogt reported this week, starvation threatens Afghanistan, where the United States has been fighting a war for the past seven years. "The crisis is nationwide," she reported. Aid groups say the food shortage is the worst since the Soviets left in 1989, and in some places lawmakers are worried that "desperation will make people easy recruits for the Taliban."

A Siena Research Institute poll in May showed strong public opposition to judicial raises. Does anyone think the public would be more supportive now? Does anyone think the state or country or world can afford the cynical conventional wisdom of Planet Albany? No matter what the courts do with the lawsuits filed by Kaye and the other judges, it is now impossible to take their arguments seriously, and high time to demand public service from public servants.