PlanetAlbany

Live-blogging (or not) the Paterson death watch (updated)

News conference is scheduled for 3; you can watch it here. I'm going to watch it at home myself, but the circumstances recall past departures (although resignation is not officially on Paterson's agenda). I watched Eliot Spitzer's resignation two years ago on the TV in the LCA at the Capitol with a bunch of people. The League of Women Voters' Barbara Bartoletti groaned in protest as Silda Spitzer came out with her disgraced husband again, as Silda had two days before when the prostitution scandal broke. I'd watched that appearance jammed into Betty Flood's Capitol office, from where my grim looking face appeared in a New York Times photo. Spitzer then, like Paterson now, held his appearances in New York City. In 1974, I viewed President Nixon's resignation at the Catholic Worker Farm in Tivoli, where watchers let out an ironic cheer when a TV announcer said Gerald Ford favored cutting public spending in all areas except defense. Today, the governor is a bit late but we are told he should be appearing in a few minutes.

Uh, oh, the feed's gone dark. Maybe they cut it so as to cut off the reporters' kibitzing as they waited around. I hope/presume it will go back on when the governor shows up.

Web cast has disappeared, but I'm listening to governor now on WAMC 90.3 FM.

And so it's over -- as predicted he's not running for re-election. Says he's not resigning. But I actually missed most of what WAMC's Alan Chartock is now saying was a very strong speech. Chartock says, and I agree, that the political establishment was out to get Paterson, but he did err greatly in this David Johnson matter.

Times finally delivers

First came the rumors of an upcoming bombshell, then New York Times editors acting coy about it, then their first story which was a hit job not on Gov. Paterson but on his aide David Johnson, then the hostile profile on Paterson, after all of which the general consensus, even from a mostly anti-Paterson media, was that there wasn't much there there. But now the Times has delivered the real expose, again focusing on Johnson but this time linking Paterson to him in what could be seen as an attempted cover-up of domestic violence. This has forced the governor to suspend Johnson and ask Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to investigate. It all recalls Troopergate, which also involved Cuomo investigating state police, and also the end of Eliot Spitzer's gubernatorial career, which was the work of federal prosecutors but was revealed to the public by the Times.

I don't know if the sequence of stories shows the Times was setting Paterson up, or if he dug himself into this hole. But as someone who has defended Paterson here against the Times and other media coverage, I am constrained to admit this does not reflect well on him and is potentially very damaging.

Exporting New York fiscal policy

I've always had a soft spot for the CSEA, because it's the public-employee union most likely to represent low-paid workers who get their hands dirty. Its longtime president Danny Donohue fits the old-fashioned image of horny-handed son of toil, but now I see he's moving his game to the national stage, where he may become a major player in Democratic Party politics.  You don't have to be as alarmed at the fiscal implications of public-sector unionism as these people to wonder whether it's really a good idea to have the federal government manage its finances more on the New York (or California) model. I've often heard New York pols complain that unilke the feds, they can't just run deficits and print money. Maybe those tea-party deficit hawks have a point -- and I'm already getting grief from my close female relatives whenever I say something nice about Sarah Palin.

At Court of Appeals, dumb meets arrogant (updated)

As Jimmy Vielkind headlines the TU blog link to today's Court of Appeals ruling, "Judges rule judges should get raise."

The decision denounces the governor and Legislature for failing to give judges as high a salary as judges would like: "... they are treating judicial compensation ... as if it were merely another government program appropriation as opposed to compensation for members of a co-equal branch." Translation: We're the special interest you can't mess with.

"Judges," the ruling whines, "no longer earn salaries that are appropriate given the significance of their position in our tri-partite form of government and the role they play in ensuring the rights of all members of society." Translation: Our rights come first. Suggested slogan: This inappropriateness shall not stand.

Update/clarification: Here's Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver's pithy take (in full):

"Today’s decision by the Court of Appeals regarding judicial pay recognizes that the Legislature retains the constitutional and statutory power to determine judicial compensation. Further, the decision does not mandate any action by the Legislature at this time.
"I have said in the past and I continue to believe that judicial salaries in New York State should be increased. The Assembly will consider this matter when economic conditions improve."

 

The art of saying nothing

My congressman Scott Murphy sent me a four-paragraph letter last week, I guess in response to my e-mailing and calling his office last year to protest his votes against the Stupak amendment and health-care bill. (Murphy, a Democrat, was one of a tiny minority of representatives who voted against both Stupak and the final bill, in both cases voting the opposite way from bipartisan Republican Rep. Anh Cao.)

In graf one, he lets me know "how much I appreciate having the benefit of your views." He keeps buttering me up in graf two, saying "Listening to civically active citizens like you makes this task [in Congress] much easier." In graf three it's "Thank you again for contacting me, and I encourage you to call my office if you would like to discuss this issue further." The trouble is, at no point in the letter does he indicate what the issue is, or even that we do not see eye-to-eye on it, and I don't relish haranguing some staffer about this despite the congressman's invitation to do so. Graf four winds up thus: "Please do not hesitate to contact my office again if I can be of any further assistance."

Actually, Scott, you didn't provide any assistance. At least this communication from him wasn't full of last year's phony fighting spirit, but it does include this formidable cliche: "As a Member of Congress, I have to make tough decisions every day." Maybe he'll end up backing Obama's new health-care proposal, since its abortion language follows the Senate bill rather than the more restrictive Stupak language of the House measure, and the president's plan would ladle some more gravy New York's way. But I bet any "tough decision" Murphy makes will be designed to appease powerful interest groups and come out of a close reading of opinion polls.  

Budget balancing on left and right

If you left out politics, it really wouldn't be hard to balance the state budget on the Chinese menu formula, picking items from columns A, B and C. On the left, labor-friendly groups including New Yorkers for Fiscal Fairness came out with their plan today, which includes things like a temporary tax increase on incomes over $1 million per year. Actually, they'd do better to make it a permanent increase, along with making permanent last year's income tax hikes and adding another bracket at $750,000 to raise more revenue.

On the right, the Empire Center for New York State Policy has a plan including declaration of a state of emergency which (they say) would let the Legislature impose a public-sector wage freeze. The Empire Center also would abolish the stem cell research initiative, reduce the blated judiciary budget and eliminate the loophole allowing middle class baby boomers to put their parents on Medicaid and still inherit their assets.

In the center (call in column C) is Gov. Paterson, who has proposed necessary reductions in the bloated education budget while going too far in other areas, such as park closures -- and could improve his proposal by picking up items from columns A and B. And then there are legislators and other politicians, none of whom have put forward any remotely realistic budget outline.

Whoop fails to grow

I think even The New York Times is embarrassed about its latest nonexpose of Gov. Paterson, which got a Page 1 above-the-fold splash this morning but is now buried way down in the nonheadlined part of its Web site. Terry O'Neill, commenting on my prior post "big whoop," says "it sure looks like the Times waited until today to let the other shoe drop!" Seems to me a very lightweight piece of footwear. Here's the response by the governor's spokesman Peter Kauffmann (who keeps up his obsessive references to Planet Albany). The conventional wisdom is that Paterson damages himself by responding to negative media coverage, but I don't see any good options for him.

Meanwhile, no one else in Albany has proposed how to balance the budget (apart from the fiscally conservative Empire Center, which put out a plan including a public-sector wage freeze). The governor has to act like a grown-up, while undeclared opponent Andrew Cuomo and his media cheerleaders can obsess about politics and trivia.

Times story: big whoop

So this is it? The big Times story is a hit job not on Gov. Paterson but on his aide David Johnson, and mostly involves ancient history? And it not only took forever to appear, but required six Times reporters to produce.

Local angles

A week ago, TU columnist Fred LeBrun was denouncing Gov. Paterson for not saying which state parks were going to close as a result of his budget cuts. Seemed to me the guv was wise to leave this to the professionals, but now LeBrun has found out which local parks may close, which doesn't improve his mood. In neither column does he propose any alternative cuts or revenue raisers that could save the parks.

Blogger Daniel Van Riper wants to stave off proposed cuts to Albany's South End Improvement Corporation (a worthy goal), but unlike LeBrun he does come up with something that would save more state money -- axing Mayor Jerry Jennings' long planned downtown convention center. Back in the TU, Paul Bray thinks Jerry has already given up on the convention center, and he proposes other kinds of development that could go on the bus station site. But could the city get the state and other funding needed for alternative development, or is it more likely to get it by sticking with the convention center (which I believe is still LeBrun's position)? The key thing is to get a lot more use and pedestrian traffic out of that prime site, which could mean condos, stores, jobs, tax payments, etc.

Also in Sunday's TU was an editorial complaining about the lack of psychiatrists in juvenile detention facilities, which says: "Some of the mental health treatment for juvenile offenders consists of group therapy sessions run by staff members at various facilities who have no real qualifications." The TU editors are no doubt models of sanity, but do they imagine the usual model of mental health treatment these days is a psychiatrist sitting behind a patient on a couch?

More NYT editors pontificate on Paterson

New York Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt has weighed in on the rumors about the expose on Gov. Paterson the paper is supposedly preparing. The column contains this graf quoting Times Executive Editor Bill Keller: "He said Paterson’s adversaries 'are doing their best to flush out any negative material we might be looking into, and, in the absence of that, they are letting innuendo do their dirty work for them. The governor and his supporters are trying to neutralize any negative material that may come out by portraying it in advance as an unsavory muckraking exercise. Gawker and the Drudge Report and The New York Post are wallowing in all of this because that’s what they do.'”

While this makes a change from the Times' sneering tone earlier in the week -- or rather directs the snottiness toward media outlets lower in the food chain instead of the governor -- it still manages to tar Paterson with "negative material."

Here's how the two Times pooh-bahs end the piece: "Keller is right when he says, 'The only honorable thing I know to do in such a situation is to finish our reporting as expeditiously as possible and tell readers what we’ve learned.'" Jeez, I know there have been some layoffs and all, but this is their idea of "reporting as expeditiously as possible"? My eyes glaze over.