PlanetAlbany

The redaction report (updated)

While we still don't know how much income Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver derives from a large Manhattan law firm where he has been of counsel for many years, or how much money it has enabled him to accumulate, he and his teacher wife do own about 68 different stocks, including many famous blue chips, along with several retirement and bond funds. That's according to his recently filed financial disclosure form. Under the law, the Legislative Ethics Commission redacts all the numbers before making the forms available to the public, and we don't know Silver's law clients, either. 

Sen. Malcolm Smith, meanwhile, the putative majority leader, filed an even more illegible and illiterate form this year than last, for example spelling defunct "DEFunkeD". The new Assembly Republican leader, Brian Kolb, works as a banker, and has some kind of complicated interest in a company, Refraction Technologies, which only comes into play if it is sold for over $4 million.

John Sampson, the other Democratic leader in the Senate, is a lawyer for two New York City firms with a practice including "real estate, criminal, commercial, litigation, estate proceedings," which seems like a fertile area for conflicts of interest. Republican leader Dean Skelos has income from his own and another law firm, and putative President Pro Tem Pedro Espada is CEO of Soundview HealthCare in the Bronx.

Sampson is chairman of the Senate Ethics Committee, where he has opposed requiring public officials to reveal their private clients. Still, the Senate ethics disclosure bills would be a significant step forward. Of course they haven't passed yet, and even if they did are part of a package that radically differs from the Assembly's, which means even if the Senate somehow gets its act together and starts functioning, don't hold your breath for a new ethics law.

The Assembly ethics bill did pass that house, and it too has disclosure provisions that would be a major step forward if they ever saw the light of enacted day. They would, according to an Assembly press release earlier this month, "require increased financial disclosure by all public officials by ending the practice of redacting categories of value on legislative ethics disclosure forms, adding an additional category of value to better identify higher level financial interests, and require better descriptions of outside employment including information about the subject matters undertaken with respect to law practice and detailed information about consulting arrangements."

Update: I asked Dan Weiller, Silver's chief spokesman, if he would release to me the information on Silver's income and interests that would have to be publicly released if the Assembly bill became law. He declined to answer the question directly, but did not suggest anything would be released until a new law would require it. "Speaker Silver complies with all ethics and disclosure laws," Weiller said.

Albany street food

There are not a lot of restaurants and bars in the near vicinity of the the Capitol, especially at night, although El Mariachi has a couple of outposts for Mexican. For winter lunches, people plod with resignation to the Sodexo (formerly Sodexho!) facilities in the Concourse.

But in the good old summertime, the park on the west side, between the Capitol and the Al Smith Building, provides the best eating from street vendors. I got the jerk chicken plate today from my longtime favorite, Roy's Caribbean-American, which has a cart on the southeast side of the park (and a home base on Henry Johnson Boulevard). The dish (with rice, beans, yellow cabbage and other vegetables) was hotter than ever, but fortunately I could get an Italian ice from a nearby vendor. On the park's north side is The Big Fat Greek Truck, which I think won a Metroland poll (get the spinach pie); and, for a hamburger or other traditional fare, there's Michele's Charcoal Pit, which has excellent fries (regular and sweet potato) with some of the skin left on.

GOP is nuts if it doesn't endorse Aubertine

The Republican Party in the 23rd Congressional District is apparently pressing ahead with its search for a socially liberal candidate to run against pro-life, pro-voucher, anti-gay marriage North Country Democratic Sen. Darrel Aubertine. That's a good way for the Republicans to suffer one more embarrassing defeat, and it's particularly stupid because of the GOP's urgent need to win back the state Senate, the chances of which which would be greatly increased if Aubertine went to Washington. If Aubertine runs and they cross-endorse him, as suggested here on June 4, they would gain credibility with their conservative base, avoid another disastrous loss and position themselves to pick up his Senate seat and control of the whole Senate. Or, they could persist in unprincipled stupidity by picking some socially liberal Assembly member to be the latest Republican loser.

East of Albany (update with Grant and Updike)

We saw "A Prairie Home Companion" at Tanglewood Saturday night, with 66-year-old Garrison Keillor on stage for more than three-and-a-half hours, including an 80-minute encore after the radio show ended which included some of the best music. That's when he and Heather Masse teamed up for numbers like Don't Get Around Much Anymore and, with Arlo Guthrie, Angel Band ("Bear me away on your snow-white wings to my immortal home"). The packed house sang pretty damn good too.

Bob Dylan also knows how to keep on keeping on. Leonard Cohen, at 73, put out a good double album last year recorded at a London concert. At 78, Clint Eastwood released "Gran Torino," which I reckon is his best movie. And Albany has 80-plus bluesman Ernie Williams. Three years ago, the movie of "A Prairie Home Companion" was all about mortality, and it turned out to be Robert Altman's last film. My new unoriginal ambition is to live long and die with my boots on.

Update: U.S. Grant still dead. His body was displayed at the Capitol in Albany in 1885, on its way down from Mount McGregor in Saratoga County, where the dying Grant completed the war memoir which posthumously restored the fortunes of his family. Massachusetts resident John Updike, who shared the Dutch-WASP heritage of Albany's founders, had a couple of posthumous books published this year, one being "Endpoint." That's also the title of a sequence of poems in the book, including this last one, "Fine Point 12/22/08". (Updike died of cancer on 1/27/09.)

Why go to Sunday school, though surlily,
and not believe a bit of what was taught?
The desert shepherds in their scratchy robes
undoubtedly existed, and Israel's defeats --
the Temple in its sacredness destroyed
by Babylon and Rome. Yet Jews kept faith
and passed the prayers, the crabbed rites,
from table to table as Christians mocked.

We mocked, but took. The timbrel creed of praise
gives spirit to the daily; blood tinges lips.
The tongue reposes in papyrus pleas,
saying, Surely -- magnificent, that "surely" --
goodness and mercy shall follow me all
the days of my life, my life, forever.

New York's Brave New World

So now the state will be the first in the nation to use public funds to pay women for donating eggs to create human embryos (i.e. their children) to be killed in the course of medical research. And the sole opponent of that policy on the Empire State Stem Cell Board Ethics Committee, the Rev. Thomas Berg, is mischaracterized by The New York Times as being someone "who opposes stem cell research," when in reality he supports the many types of it that do not involve killing human embryos.

Parker and Paterson (updated)

So indicted Sen. Kevin Parker thinks his fellow Democrat and former legislative leader David Paterson is a "coke-snorting, staff-banging governor," which doesn't seem likely to improve his or the Senate's image. (Parker was the first senator to noisily confront the opposition at Tuesday's bizarre session.)

Paterson's confessions last year, right after he became governor, of drug use and marital infidelity would seem to inoculate him against such attacks (which is why he came clean). But there was one loose end that was never satisfactorily explained, i.e. why he spent 13 nights in Albany hotel rooms in 14-plus months as lieutenant governor, on the state's dime, instead of staying at his nearby home in Guilderland. Still, I don't know if anyone really wants to see all that dredged up again to slime the governor, who has been coming across as more of a class act than his former colleagues in the Senate.

Update: Parker has apologized.

Senate holds two three-minute fake sessions (updated)

First the Democrats, then the Republicans, held Senate "sessions" and adjourned sine die between 3:04 p.m. and 3:16 p.m., by my count, not actually doing anything at either one of them. Still, at least they weren't talking over each other this time, and both events were carried on the live Web feed.

The people's mayor

I came across this May 20 You Tube video of a rally for three workers fired for union organizing at the Albany Airport Holiday Inn Express. Albany Mayor Jerry Jennings is there with Sen. Neil Breslin and Assemblyman Bob Reilly, and it's Jerry who is seen comforting one of the fired workers, former breakfast hostess Becky Wallis, when she gets a little emotional after speaking. The mayor is also the  only pol whose speech is part of the union video. It can't hurt his re-election campaign, which I do not mean cynically.

Critics (including me) often complain about the costs inflicted on state taxpayers by the public-sector unions which have bought the state Legislature. But there is also a cost to not having a union contract, which is borne mainly by the unprotected workers as well as by the rest of us who must live in a morally coarsened society where people can be tossed aside for demanding dignity.

Paterson talks tough

Gov. Paterson came across as impressively tough and bipartisan at the late-afternoon news conference, directing his fire at the entire Senate including his fellow Democrats, whose "mumbo-jumbo" legal arguments about supposed constitutional problems with the special session he subjected to scornful mockery. It's sure hard to see the down side of Paterson taking on the senators and threatening to stop their pay and expenses. The populace is not going to rise up in defense of do-nothing politicians' per-diems, and I see the Senate Dems are backing off their no-show plan. The only problem is, that with Democrats for the first time this year in full charge of all branches of government, there's a lot of liberal baggage on their Senate to-do list, everything from public employee pension sweeteners, repealing vacancy decontrol, farmworkers rights, prevailing wages for IDA projects, gay marriage, Planned Parenthood-style sex education, and every possible facilitation of every kind of abortion. Maybe passing those bills would be democratic as well as Democratic, but that doesn't make them in the public interest. I know local governments want their sales-tax extenders and some other housekeeping stuff (and NYC Mayor Bloomberg wants to keep control of the public schools), but from a conservative perspective there's a lot to be said for continued paralysis. 

I got a Democratic senator to confirm today that former Senate Minority Leader Marty Connor, who was ousted from that role by David Paterson a few years ago, has indeed been hired as a Senate Democratic lawyer in this most recent crisis, which explains why he has been hanging around the chamber in prominent positions. My source was the man who ousted Connor from the Senate last year by winning a Democratic primary in his Brooklyn-Manhattan district, Daniel Squadron.

In yesterday's dueling Kabuki sessions, you couldn't help notice from the balcony the prominence of the throng of reporters on the floor who were holding up recording devices to get the words of wisdom of Sen. George Winner and his sidekick Jack Casey. Reporters used to just sit in the back and take notes, but  a whole bunch of them were jammed between Winner and Casey and trailing off behind, looking like the papier-mache tail of a large dragon in a Chinese New Year parade.

Two parties continue to cover themselves in glory

OK, so I did get to Senate Democratic press conference, whose theme was there's notime for arbitration as the Republicans are now proposing, we're going home despite the governor's call for daily sessions, but will deign to come back if Paterson brings in the Assembly, too (thus removing potential legal obstacles as described in my last post). But while the governor may have screwed up, it's still mainly the Republicans' fault in the view of Senate Democrats. The GOP's reform package is "not reform at all" according to Sen. Jeff Klein (although it's drawn guarded praise from independent goo-goo groups) and conference leader Sen. John Sampson's refrain to questions was, "Go talk to the other side of the aisle."

As for the Republicans, their reasons for not showing up today are apparently connected to the statement of their leader, Sen. Dean Skelos, that "what happened in the Senate chamber yesterday was a disgrace and we want to avoid a repeat of what occurred," and not showing up for work can at least accomplish that limited objective. The Republicans did file a lawsuit today against Angelo Aponte, secretary of the Senate, and it includes this pithy description of Sen. George Winner's reaction yesterday to his confrontation with a sergeant-at-arms who barred him from ascending to the podium: "Petitioner Winner, in order to avoid an unseemly confrontation, then stood in front of the rostrum and presided over the session." Am now off to Paterson news conference, which I trust will avoid unseemliness.