PlanetAlbany

Mark Steyn's speech

So has international pundit Mark Steyn, who is about to speak at the Conservative Party conference in suburban Albany County, boned up on New York state politics? Will he make any good local jokes?

Well the attempt to live-blog this failed with the wireless connection, but Steyn has now finished his speech, in which he did make some jokes about Amtrak and high-speed rail (the "bullet train" must be "the fault of Sarah Palin"), with a long riff on "bovine flatulence" taxes. Getting more serious in denouncing bureaucratic overreach, he said: "In such a world there is no law." Then it was back to a joke about how hardware stores in California are prohibited from offering free coffee. "George III wouldn't have done this to you," Steyn said, adding that the British monarch would be "the small-government candidate" these days, while comparing Michelle Obama (paraphrasing her: "Don't let them eat cake") to Queen Marie Antoinette.

New York needs privatization, he said, before it ends up like Greece, and it needs a Conservative party with integrity that stays to the right and "keeps the Republican Party honest." 

(I'm now sitting outside the ballroom with a restored wireless connection, near where Carl Paladino has spent about 20 minutes greeting well-wishers including Jennifer Whalen, a Republican who narrowly lost in November to Democratic Assemblyman Bob Reilly.)

Paladino shows up for lunch, Steyn speech

Carl Paladino, former Republican and Conservative gubernatorial candidate, has just shown up at the Conservative Party Political Action Committee meeting in Colonie, as has luncheon speaker Mark Steyn (the writer and sometime substitute host for Rush Limbaugh).  Both are at the head table with Mike Long, Kathy Gallagher et al.

At Conservative confab

Here at the Holiday Inn on Wolf Road in the Albany County suburb of Colonie, the New York State Conservative Party is hearing from speakers including Betsy McCaughey, whom I just caught the end of. She was -- unsurprisingly -- opposing "Obamacare," and said it's not the case that there is no alternative. Congress could, for example, retain the provision of last year's law letting adult children up to 26 stay on their parents' health insurance plan. But, she noted, "There is no tooth fairy," and requiring insurers to cover more people longer will result in imore expensive premiums for consumers.

Now Kathleen Gallagher, director of pro-life activities for the New York State Catholic Conference, is speaking. She says about a third of the state's stem cell research program is going to embryo-killing research, and that's a good place to cut (along with full Medicaid abortion coverage, which New York is one of only four states to provide). Gallagher said the Reproductive Health Act, whic is supported by state Democratic leaders, would among other things require all hospitals, including Catholic ones, to perform abortions. She said she is worried about pro-abortion legislation potentially being inserted into the budget process or the Medicaid task force report.

Political prisoners

Senate Republicans are trying to overturn last year's state law that counts prisoners at their home addresses for electoral purposes (mostly in NYC and other heavily Democratic cities), and not where the prisons are located (mostly in GOP districts upstate). They seem to me to have a pretty good case, and it's also a potential win-win politically. They can tie the issue to redistricting reform, and if that means the reform goes nowhere, it won't break their hearts.

Hog wild

"The RSC Goes Hog Wild", says the headline on The New Republic article by Jonathan Chait. It's about how the "ultra-conservative Republican Study Committee released a series of proposed spending cuts" that amount to "budget cutting as culture war".

So how could we translate that plan to Albany to help plug the $10 billion budget gap? Obvious targets would include defunding Medicaid abortion (fully paid for by New York because the feds can't pay anything under the Hyde Amendment), and embryonic stem cell research, and the Health Department-funded "I Am Gay" billboards currently ticking off some Capital Region blacks while not expressing any health message. You could go beyond that to abolishing the Empire State Stem Cell Board and defunding Planned Parenthood.

If that's too overtly ideological, how about cutting or at least examining the funding of groups like the Parent Network of the Capital Region, which according to its Web site is "one of thirteen special education parent technical assistance centers throughout the state, funded by a grant from the New York State Education Department." It's not just the direct state funding which costs taxpayers, but the work these centers do in pushing more students into expensive special ed --by no means always to their benefit.

Weiner, King move beyond rancor

In contrast to yesterday's seating squabble in the New York State Senate, senators and congressmen at tonight's State of the Union in Washington are sitting together without regard to party. That had been widely anticipated, but I was somewhat startled -- and pleased -- to see two New York congressmen, Democrat Anthony Weiner and Republican Peter King, seated side by side. That's the same Weiner who became famous last July with a blistering attack on the House floor on King specifically and other Republicans for blocking a bill to provide health benefits to 9/11 responders. A compromise version of that bill wound up passing, with the support of Weiner and King, in the lame-duck session, and now here are these two sitting together on that same floor while President Obama speaks. This isn't just symbolism, but productive bipartisanship which Albany needs to emulate.

Senate back to ballistic

The four (white) members of the new Independent Democratic Caucus were sitting in a row at the back of the New York State Senate chamber today, next to Republican Sen. Kemp Hannon. The seat assignment, made by the Republican majority, apparently upset the regular Democratic minority conference. Democratic Deputy Leader Sen. Neil Breslin raised a point of order, supported by Sen. Daniel Squadron and -- in incendiary mode -- Sen. Eric Adams.

Adams, himself an African-American, suggested the Republicans were discriminating against regular Democrats in their office and seating assignments, and asked whether Sen. Velmanette Montgomery was targeted "because she's African-American" and Sen. Suzi Oppenheimer "because she's a woman." Adams said Sen. Jeff Klein, leader of the IDC, had lied about the situation, that Republicans and the IDC were engaged in "the dismantling of dignity and respect to each one of us," and "I'm ashamed of my four [IDC] colleagues."

Sen. Tom Libous, responding to Adams for the Republicans, said: "I take offense at a lot of what you said," and claimed "We've given you more space than you gave us" two years ago when Democrats took over the majority. "I resent the racist remarks," Libous said.

In what may be a sign of the burgeoning alliance between the Democratic Cuomo administration and the Republican-controlled Senate, Lt. Gov. Robert Duffy, who was chairing the proceedings, sided with the GOP majority on the point of order. Whispering him advice was Jack Casey, Joe Bruno's onetime Senate parliamentarian and Rensselaer County Republican leader

 

What kind of reform?

If the state Senate Republicans aim to back away from redistricting reform, they ought to latch onto their Democratic colleague Ruben Diaz's call for full disclosure of legislators' outside incomes. Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver has been all over the place on both issues, while Gov. Andrew Cuomo is officially in favor of both.

Health panel votes for Shah (updated)

Dr. Nirav Ramesh Shah, that is, the 38-year-old health commissioner designee, who just got a unanimous positive recommendation from the New York State Senate Health Committee. He's the first of Gov. Andrew Cuomo's nominees to come up for Senate action, and today's love-fest indicates the newly Republican-controlled Senate may indeed be looking to ally with the new Democratic governor (which is the widely expected upcoming budget scenario).

Shah said he wants both to save the state money and improve health care delivery, focusing on "quality, safety, access, prevention," and on providing treatment at home and in the community as opposed to more expensive institutional care. He said health care, unlike other sectors of the economy, still has not taken anything like full advantage of the efficiencies made possible by massive advances in computer technology.

Update: The Senate confirmed him unanimously around 3:35 p.m.

Tedisco's point

Watching Liz Benjamin's YNN show last night, I was struck that it was her lone Republican guest, Assemblyman Jim Tedisco, who made a sort of lefty (and accurate) analysis of President Obama's speech at the Schenectady General Electric plant. While Tedisco, like Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and Rep. Paul Tonko before him, made the requisite noises about the positive side of GE adding green energy jobs in the electric city, he was the only one to contrast the few hundred jobs added with the 40,000 or so GE has cut there since World War II. Bring in 10,000 or 15,000 jobs, the assemblyman noted, and you'd help offset the potential layoffs that may or may not be in the works from the new Cuomo administration.

Obama took the occasion to announce the appointment of GE CEO Jeff Immelt as chairman of a new Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. While the only visible opponents of Obama in the Capital Region were a few antiwar demonstrators, the Immelt appointment has drawn some criticism from what remains of the left on the national stage. Critics on the right have drawn attention to GE sopping up a lot of stimulus pork.

Immelt is an improvement over his most famous recent predecessor, Jack Welch, a golf buddy of President Clinton whose fans included Don Imus. Welch loathed Schenectady and seemed uninterested in manufacturing, especially in the United States. There has been an influx of high-tech jobs into the Capital Region, and Schenectady is a better place for them than Luther Forest in Saratoga County, where massive state subsidies induced AMD (now Global Foundries) to build a computer chip plant. While GE's past pollution of the area is well known, its reinvestment in the Schenectady plant makes for much better environmental and urban policy than chopping down trees and building roads so commuters can drive to an office park in Malta -- no matter how LEED certified the buildings there may be.