(H/T: Jammie Wearing Fools) Geez Louise. State Sen. Malcolm Smith and city Councilman Dan Halloran were arrested this morning on charges they were plotting to rig this year’s mayoral election through fraud and bribes. The pols allegedly formed an alliance built on cash payments and fraud to get Smith — one of the state’s top Democrats — placed on the GOP mayoral ballot, sources said. | Read More »
Last week the House voted on 6 different budget frameworks. Surprisingly, with so many budgets to choose from, Rep. Bill Owens couldn’t bring himself to support a single one. He’s a budget nihilist. Owens’ refusal to support any budget last week is a classic case of a Washington politician trying to have his cake and eat it too. By opposing everything and failing to offer | Read More »
Governor Cuomo did this epically, admitting that the restrictions on magazine possession that he pushed through and signed into law earlier in the year are too flawed to exist, and need to be repealed. “There is no such thing as a seven-bullet magazine. That doesn’t exist. So you really have no practical option.” – Andrew Cuomo So why the [expletive deleted] did you sign it | Read More »
Alternate title: Son, you’re on your own. The New York state budget currently under negotiation may be remembered years from now as the beginning of the end for many small towns, cities and school districts. Gov. Andrew Cuomo had tough words Friday for local officials facing fiscal crises and seeking more help from Albany, telling them they should consolidate services or whole governments and school | Read More »
New York City’s ban on select beverages larger than 16 ounces struck many of us as a progressive nanny state running its due course. It was a senseless blow to liberty, expanding government in a pointless way, that also happened to affect less-wealthy New Yorkers disproportionately.
But as the city now turns toward enforcement of the ban, new developments in city government point to a disturbing revelation: New York City’s health department knows nothing about science, about testing, or about how to use calibrated instrumentation to make accurate measurements in restaurants.
In expanding the nanny state, Mike Bloomberg reveals New Yorkers probably aren’t very safe under its growing umbrella.
Read More »Via Instapundit, I’m getting the impression that Andrew Cuomo is apparently very good at turning small PR problems into bigger PR problems. Short version: guy in the state government (Mike Fayette) talks to the press (the Adirondack Daily Enterprise) when he apparently wasn’t supposed to. Fayette gets in trouble for it. Rather than get fired, he retires. So far, so… whatever, man. Only the Daily | Read More »
So I hear (as did our own Dan McLaughlin, last week) that New York is the place to go for an exciting and remunerative career in the cigarette-smuggling trade: Last week, The Mackinac Center for Public Policy released a report chronicling the rate of cigarette smuggling in the United States, revealing what retailers in New York have long known: state-to-state smuggling has become a big | Read More »
I… don’t know what to say. Could former Rep. Anthony Weiner be preparing for a political comeback? The Democrat’s latest filing with the New York City Campaign Finance Board, published Tuesday, may send some subtle messages. His mayoral campaign committee, created ahead of his unsuccessful bid for the Democratic nomination in 2005, reported spending just one dollar shy of $37,000 in the last six months. | Read More »
To the best of my knowledge, accused bombmaker Aaron Greene is not linked in any formal way to last year’s plot by Occupy Wall Street activists to bomb a Columbus, Ohio bridge. Then again, it’s not entirely clear what Greene was (allegedly) planning to bomb: when the cops arrested him and his bourgeois moll Morgan Gliedman they had just gotten to the stage of putting | Read More »
How did I ever miss this? From the National Journal: After weeks in which control of the New York state Senate was uncertain, the group of breakaway Democratic senators has struck a deal with Republicans to share control, the groups announced Tuesday. The agreement means that the Independent Democratic Caucus will have formal recognition as a permanent third conference in the state Senate. Dean Skelos, | Read More »
Economist Paul Samuelson was once asked to explain how sin taxes worked. He offered up the following commentary.
“Sin Taxes” are so called because they are levied on those commodities, such as tobacco and alcohol, which are the objects of widespread disapproval. “Such taxes,” Paul Samuelson says, “are often tolerated because most people–including many cigarette smokers and moderate drinkers–feel that there is something vaguely immoral about tobacco and alcohol. They think these ”sin taxes“ stun two birds with one stone: the state gets revenue, and vice is made more expensive.”
This is absolutely what has not happened in New York since Mein Obama and Gropenfurher Bloomberg have decided they would levy exorbitant sin taxes on tobacco products in New York City. Newsday.com describes the destructively regressive nature of the sin taxes on tobacco below.
Read More »It’s interesting. If you look at these two ads from American Action Network – one for California, and one for New York – solely from the perspective of a national observer, it’s a headscratcher as to why a conservative-leaning group is targeting six Democratic Members of Congress (Tim Bishop, Lois Capps, John Garamendi, Jerry McNerney, Bill Owens, & Louise Slaughter) in two Blue States; particularly | Read More »
[Well, this is embarrassing: Jeffries of course won his nomination, because the Good Lord looks after fools, drunks, and the United States of America. Everybody have a good laugh at me; I somehow crossed wires on this one. Corrections and annotations below. - Moe Lane] Politicker has the background. Basically, it went down like this: over in NY-08 the choice for the Democratic nomination was | Read More »
Apparently nobody’s really sure at the moment: original reports had Rangel winning by 1,034 votes. However, what can be fairly described as tabulation “irregularities” have come to light, thus causing Rangel’s lead over contender Adriano Espaillat to shrink to 802 votes. With about 2,000 absentee/affidavit votes remaining, the primary election is still very much now in doubt. It’s also now going to the courts. Of | Read More »
A bunch of others, but NY’s is probably most of interest because there’s an excellent chance that the Democrats will be nominating both a profoundly corrupt scoundrel (Charlie Rangel) and a blatant anti-Semitic racist (Charles Barron) to Congress tonight. Speaking as an American, I’d rather that both lost; but if I’m overruled, well. No reason not to take advantage of the situation, right? Results for | Read More »
![[RS]](/t/img/logo-footer.jpg){kind=logo}