Tag: andrew cuomo

“Complicated, but all bad.”

There’s just something so… anticipatory… about hearing that a state senator was wearing a wire.  Welcome to New York!

Almost a quarter of the state Senate’s Democratic conference was in the FBI’s cross hairs last year, according to a court filing unsealed Wednesday.

Last summer, federal investigators asked state Sen. Shirley Huntley to invite six Democratic colleagues to her Queens home and record their conversations. According to a sentencing memo written by Huntley’s lawyer, the former lawmaker told prosecutors — who had charged her with siphoning money from a nonprofit group for which she secured state money — that she “had knowledge of what she believed to be corruption involving [nine] public officials.”

Huntley, a grandmother and former PTA leader, taped them all.

Continue reading “Complicated, but all bad.”

Andrew Cuomo admits that he done [expletive deleted] UP with NY’s 10-round magazine ban.

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possession that he pushed through and signed into law earlier in the year are too flawed to exist, and need to be repealed.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 in the first place, you jumped-up, bed-hopping imbecile?

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: This [expletive deleted]-head wants to replace the aforementioned impractical law with one that would only make it illegal to load more than seven bullets into a magazine.  Just in case you were thinking that  I was being unkind by calling Andrew Cuomo an ‘imbecile.’

Andrew Cuomo tells local governments to consolidate.

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 districts rather than looking for relief from Albany.

(H/T: Instapundit) Translation: Andrew Cuomo has made all of the tentative, half-hearted attempts that he dared to rein in public sector unions. Any further shortfalls in revenue will simply have to be borne by the local authorities. If they don’t like that, well, they should have joined a public sector union. Continue reading Andrew Cuomo tells local governments to consolidate.

Andrew Cuomo freaks out over a little hostile media coverage.

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 Enterprise on Wednesday published a story on the subject of Fayette’s forced retirement.  And that’s when this story gets a little eyebrow-raising:

On Thursday, livid that an engineer in the Adirondacks was being portrayed as a victim of Mr. Cuomo’s penchant for control, a top aide to the governor, Howard B. Glaser, took to the airwaves. He read aloud Mr. Fayette’s disciplinary history, describing him as a troubled employee who had previously been penalized for having an improper relationship with a subordinate, misusing his work e-mail to send sexually explicit messages and using his state-assigned vehicle for personal errands.

Continue reading Andrew Cuomo freaks out over a little hostile media coverage.

“This is Senator Reverend Rubén Díaz, and this is what you should know.”

As you can see, I’ve stolen the new tagline for the site from New York State Senator Ruben Diaz Sr. (D), who in this particular case thinks that you should know that Andrew Cuomo (D) has nominated a substandard person (Jenny Rivera) for the State Court of Appeals, largely because she has a Hispanic last name.

I know nothing else about what’s going on here, really.  Can’t say that I’m worried about that, given that I don’t need to know more than: Explosions are pretty.

 

 

Andrew Cuomo’s alarming New York budget.

It’s ‘alarming’ mostly from the point of view of a partisan Republican, mind you – well, it’s probably alarming to a partisan Democrat, too, if for completely different reasons.  From the point of view of somebody living in New York it’s probably more like ‘a reassuring start.’  My RedState colleague Mark Impomeni breaks it down: 3% reduced state spending (including state worker layoffs), education/health care cuts, closing the budget gap without new taxes – and an end to the 2% extra surcharge on incomes over $200,000 (which also made it effectively a tax on small businesses).  And then there’s this recent quote that Mark found:

“The working families of New York cannot afford tax increases.  The answer is going to have to be that we’re going to have to reduce government spending,” [Cuomo] said.

That’s… unexpectedly sensible, coming from a Northeast Democrat.  It’s not even remotely perfect: the above is the most basic fiscal first aid that Governor Cuomo can apply to New York’s underlying budgetary problems.  Government spending should be cut more; the existing regulatory regime choking the state’s entrepreneurs must be, frankly, gutted; and taxes are too high.  It’s probably too much to expect that Cuomo will be able to fight his own party in curing New York, but at least he’s doing something to stabilize the patient…

Moe Lane

PS: Mark also notes – correctly – that a lot of this sounds a bit like what Chris Christie is doing in New Jersey.  I suggest that Governor Cuomo meditate on the words of Mark Twain (apparently we don’t know who said this first):

Immature writers borrow.  Mature writers steal.

#rsrh The NYT screams like a stuck pig…

…and it’s surprisingly sweet music, too:

Gov. Andrew Cuomo has rightly argued that painful spending cuts will be needed to close New York’s projected $10 billion deficit. The hard truth is that it is impossible to cut spending deeply without cutting the state’s huge outlays for education and health care. That means that New York’s most vulnerable citizens — schoolchildren, the elderly, the poor, the sick — will feel a disproportionate amount of the pain.

Governor Cuomo has vowed to make the tough decisions and not to be swayed by special-interest pleadings. But he is refusing to impose any new taxes or even continue a current surcharge on New York’s wealthiest and least vulnerable citizens.

And you wondered where the “Somebody does something: women, minorities hardest hit” cliche headline of the Old Grey Lady came from.

Anyway, I was going to bore my readers at this point with yet another tedious explanation of why it’s a bad idea to encourage small businesses and wealthy individuals to continue to bail out of a high-tax, high-regulation state – but, hell, if you haven’t figured that out already then you probably won’t, ever.  Unfortunately for the NY GOP, Governor Cuomo has: obviously, I’d rather that it was a Republican initiating fiscal sanity in NY, but I’ll take what I can get…

Andrew Cuomo (D CAND, NY-GOV) lied about voting for Bloomberg.

Given that Mayor Bloomberg has wandered up and down the map in his quest to be loved for who he truly is*, this may not be very surprising. How can a legacy politician whose most marketable skill is his last name be expected to keep up with the political peregrinations of a rank opportunist and party-switcher? – still, you’d expect better than a room-temperature IQ performance here. Andrew Cuomo is supposed to be someone special. And not in the mean sense of the term.

“Have I voted for the mayor? Yes,” Cuomo said.

Actually, he didn’t. The Cuomo campaign had to issue a clarification, saying he was only registered to vote in New York City in 2005 when he endorsed Democrat Fernando Ferrer.

Translation: “Has he voted for the mayor? No.” Personally, if I had ever voted for Bloomberg the shame and anguish at my lack of judgment would have been burned into my soul, but that sort of thing apparently weighs lightly on the consciences of Democrats. No wonder Carl Palladino‘s surging.

Moe Lane

*A quest made utterly futile by the fact that he’s, well, Mayor Bloomberg – and thus inherently unlovable.

Crossposted to RedState.

‘ZOUNDS! AG Cuomo (D) running for Governor!

Imagine my shock.

Andrew Cuomo, following in the footsteps of dad Mario and two scandal-scarred predecessors, announced his long-expected campaign for governor by promising a crackdown on corruption.

“I don’t work for the lobbyists,” Cuomo told his supporters Saturday afternoon in lower Manhattan. “I don’t work for the politicians. I don’t work for special interests. I work for the people of New York. Period.”

The real question, of course, is what Cuomo’s hidden catastrophic flaw is. Being a Democratic Northeastern Attorney General, he has to have one: it merely waits to be seen whether it’s hookers (Eliot Spitzer), lying about his military record (Dick Blumenthal), or just having the political instincts of a tasered marmoset (Martha Coakley).  Then again, there’s ordinary, vanilla civil corruption – but it turns out that Rhode Island AG (and gubernatorial candidate) Patrick Lynch may have that one sewn up (via Anchor Rising).

And here we all thought that state Attorney Generals were attractive candidates for larger office.  At this rate, I wouldn’t be surprised if it came out that Cuomo was running guns to Quebecois separatists.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Another Democratic bite at the Big Apple?

So, it’s reported that they’re trying to ease out Gov David Paterson of NY:

Democratic Party officials are putting pressure on New York Gov. David A. Paterson to resign from office as additional details emerge about his alleged effort to intervene in a domestic-violence case involving a senior aide.

The state Democratic chairman, Jay Jacobs, headed to Albany Tuesday morning to meet with Mr. Paterson and encourage him to step aside, according to a source. Mr. Jacobs declined to comment, as did the Paterson administration.

(Via AoSHQ) For those keeping track, this would mean that if Paterson resigns (and people are trying to get him to go) New York would have its third governor in two years, and its first completely unelected governor since… well, I think since William Tryon, Royal Governor of New York.  And next January, NY would have had four governors in three years.

The question is whether it’d be a fourth Democratic governor.  I understand that AG Cuomo is eager for the job (in a suitably deniable fashion), but at some point we have to ask: just how many politicians will NY Democrats get to cycle through before the electorate gets tired of the game?  We started this particular run with a crusading district attorney, and look what happened to him.

Moe Lane

PS: Yes, yes, yes: Cuomo’s a shoo-in over, say, Rick Lazio.  He’s at Martha Coakley-levels of inevitability at this point, in fact.

*And one who needed a court decision to be seated.

Crossposted to RedState.