THE "PORK" IN NEW YORK, Thoughts of an older American on Constitutional Government in the USA Options

[Livyjr]

THE NEW YORKER

"Profiles - The Humbling of Eliot Spitzer - The Governor’s rocky rookie season." (cont'd)

by Nick Paumgarten

December 10, 2007

While at Harvard, Spitzer met Silda Wall, a fellow-student, on a ski trip to Vermont.

Wall was from North Carolina and had recently been divorced, after a brief marriage to another law student.

She and Spitzer married three years later, in 1987.

They have three daughters, age twelve to seventeen.

Silda worked for many years as a corporate lawyer at Skadden, Arps, then, with some misgivings, gave up her practice to look after the family and her husband’s political career.

She brings a certain politesse to Team Spitzer.

When I met her, she was resolutely composed and on message, except perhaps when talking about the family’s midsummer hike up Mt. Marcy, the state’s tallest peak.

They ran out of water and, as she said, “we had not really thought out the food piece of this.”

They live in one of Bernard Spitzer’s buildings, on Fifth Avenue at Seventy-ninth Street, a half block from the home of Michael Bloomberg, in an enclave of what you might call self-capitalized crossover political talent.

For fourteen years, Spitzer went back and forth between public service and private practice.

He was a clerk to a federal district-court judge, Robert Sweet, and an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, where he helped bust up Gambino control of garment-industry trucking (Spitzer established a fake sewing shop in Chinatown, as a front).

In 1994, he ran for attorney general but came in last among the Democrats, then spent the next several years travelling around the state in a mini-van, cultivating support for another run.

Perhaps the most significant support came from his family.

The 1994 campaign had been funded in large part by a $4.3-million bank loan that Spitzer took out, using as collateral some apartments that he owned; he told the press that he was servicing the loan with his own income.

In 1998, a few days before Election Day, in a nasty race with the incumbent, Dennis Vacco, he admitted that he had been paying off the bank with a loan his father had given him on generous terms.

In effect, he’d received a $4.3-million campaign donation from his father, which is well in excess of family donation limits, and lied about it.

(The Board of Elections declined to investigate.)

Michael Goodwin, a columnist at the News, asked Spitzer why he’d lied, and Spitzer told him, according to Goodwin, “I had to”—a phrase that Spitzer’s detractors have lorded over him ever since, as a kind of shorthand for a streak of dishonesty and hypocrisy.

(Spitzer says that he doesn’t remember any such conversation.)

Nonetheless, after a hotly contested recount, Spitzer won.

To be continued ....

[Livyjr]

THE NEW YORKER

"Profiles - The Humbling of Eliot Spitzer - The Governor’s rocky rookie season." (cont'd)

by Nick Paumgarten

December 10, 2007

Spitzer’s tenure as a state attorney general may be the most heavily chronicled of any in America’s history.

He reimagined the office, inserting it into the void left by a general regulatory retreat by the federal government.

He regarded his activism as a logical and just extension of a new states’-rights movement, which had been conceived as an attempt to roll back oversight and advance a conservative, laissez-faire agenda, but which Spitzer interpreted as an invitation to state-led intercession and prosecutorially mandated policy change.

With great gusto, he went after big polluters, pharmaceutical companies, gun manufacturers, and, most notably, the financial industry, where various harmful and fraudulent practices had taken root—insincere equity research, shady market timing, bid rigging.

As many saw it, Spitzer’s modus operandi was to build a case against his targets, then push the most egregious allegations in the media, which put unbearable public pressure on the targets to settle.

And settle they almost invariably did.

Spitzer earned an impressive array of scalps, admirers, headlines, and plaudits for reform, as well as a coterie of powerful enemies, whose indignation toward his media manipulations, disproportionate tactics, and occasionally shallow understanding of their businesses tended to be drowned out by the widespread public disgust engendered by their greed.

Brooke Masters, in “Spoiling for a Fight,” her 2006 biography of Spitzer, meticulously recapitulates each prosecution—the regulatory turf battles, the legal dekes and dodges, the mutating rationales—creating a portrait of a righteous and far from infallible crusader employing every tactical advantage that his office makes available to him.

He does not always come off well.

(All the same, his parents have the book on the coffee table at their house in Rye.)

His detractors tend to complain that the press created Eliot Spitzer—that the Sheriff of Wall Street, to use one moniker, was a fantasy of the liberal, wealth-resenting media.

And so they take some satisfaction in the fact that the pendulum seems to have swung back on him, with so much force that you’d think it was spring-loaded.

To be continued ....

[Livyjr]

THE NEW YORKER

"Profiles - The Humbling of Eliot Spitzer - The Governor’s rocky rookie season." (cont'd)

by Nick Paumgarten

December 10, 2007

“Day One, everything changes,” Spitzer pronounced during his campaign for governor, as though he’d be taking over the Knicks, instead of one cog in a sprawling and intransigent political mechanism.

The extent to which he has delivered (or, more fairly, will be able to deliver) on this promise depends on whom you talk to and what your definition of “change” is.

As one lobbyist told me, “Day One, everything changes. Day Three Hundred, nothing moves.”

Tracking how Spitzer got into this mess requires forbearance in the face of squalid statehouse wranglings.

The feints and stalemates—combining arid political gamesmanship with fits of pique worthy of “Mean Girls”—tie into a web of purpose and allegiance that can be hopelessly complex, but it helps to know a couple of things.

First, 2008 is an election year.

The Republicans have a thin margin in the State Senate—which they have controlled for all but one of the past sixty-nine years—with seats in vulnerable, Democratic-trending districts.

The Democrats have held the majority in the Assembly since 1975.

If the Republicans lose the Senate, the Democrats will have a monopoly in the state government, and the power to gerrymander districts in their favor, at the congressional as well as the state level.

Also, Joe Bruno would no longer be majority leader.

The Republicans, therefore, are desperate, and in their desperation they have apparently settled on a sand-in-the-gears strategy.

It is not in their interest to help make Spitzer look good.

They seem to have resolved to depict him as angry and unstable.

(“The press somehow confuses intensity with anger,” Bill Taylor, his old roommate, told me. “I see him as a happy warrior.”)

The extent to which they can hurt him, while making it look as though he is hurting himself—and the state—will determine the survival of their party.

To float an analogy that they would not embrace: their predicament is not unlike that of the Sunnis in Iraq.

Second, the entrenched Democrats are uneasy, too.

Spitzer has made them so, both in his challenge to the status quo and in his mishandling of his relations with them.

The political system in Albany favors stasis.

The name of the game, of course, is the preservation of power, which means that whoever has it will rig the game to keep it.

Bruno and Sheldon Silver, the speaker of the Assembly, wield immense power over their conferences; they effectively decide if and when a bill comes to the floor and then tell everyone how to vote.

They dole out what are known as “lulus,” or payments to legislators for extra duties that can be, let’s say, undemanding.

They also disburse their party’s campaign funds, seeing to it that incumbents win more than ninety-five per cent of their races.

The institutions with the wherewithal to provide the money are the oft-maligned but never curtailed special interests.

The leaders excel at harnessing all these stakeholders.

In particular, Silver, who represents lower Manhattan, is determinedly stubborn and patient.

His modest manner disguises a canny parliamentary style.

The contingencies can get so intricate and self-annulling that very little gets done.

To be continued ....

[Livyjr]

THE NEW YORKER

"Profiles - The Humbling of Eliot Spitzer - The Governor’s rocky rookie season." (cont'd)

by Nick Paumgarten

December 10, 2007

Spitzer’s first hostile act as governor—a gentle one, by Spitzer standards—occurred in his inaugural speech.

“Like Rip Van Winkle,” he pronounced, “New York has slept through much of the past decade while the rest of the world has passed us by.”

The remark, evocative and accurate as it may have been, struck many present as indecorous, disrespectful not only of George Pataki, his predecessor, who was in attendance, but of Bruno and Silver, the presumably somnambulant collaborators, who were seated right behind Spitzer.

“That was a cheap shot,” Jack McEneny, a Democratic assemblyman, told me.

“Save it for the Bronx Democratic dinner.”

Of course, comportment was not high on Spitzer’s priority list.

To break the stagnant culture of Albany, he intended to do away with the rhetoric, as well as the practice, of accommodation.

He would relish the disjointing of noses.

“Any controversies largely come down to this once-in-a-lifetime effort to break the culture,” a senior aide told me, meaning not just that of the legislators but also that of their complements: the Albany press, the union leadership, the executive directors of the state agencies.

“You teach people lessons and force people to do it a different way.”

The disdain that Spitzer and his aides had for the niceties of the capitol caused early offense.

The legislative staffs complained that Spitzer’s team didn’t know their names or titles.

Deference had been replaced by indifference.

“It makes no sense to squander good will when it’s there for free,” one legislator said.

“The problem is arrogance.”

Spitzer is fond of saying that politics is like a sporting contest: you go out, play hard, and shake hands when it’s over.

He cites Theodore Roosevelt’s invocation of “the arena.”

Of course, for most of his colleagues, politics is not a game but a livelihood.

“Tip O’Neill said all politics is local,” McEneny said.

“In Albany, I say, all politics is personal.”

Pete Grannis, a former assemblyman from Manhattan who now heads Spitzer’s Department of Environmental Conservation, told me, “The leaders, by design or fatigue, have devolved into accommodation mode."

"Pataki sort of wore out.”

The legislators, he explained, “have a very parochial focus on survival."

"And fundraising is the third rail."

"I told the Governor, ‘The Legislature is like your in-laws.'"

"'You’re stuck with them.’ ”

To be continued .....

[Livyjr]

THE NEW YORKER

"Profiles - The Humbling of Eliot Spitzer - The Governor’s rocky rookie season." (cont'd)

by Nick Paumgarten

December 10, 2007

Right away, Spitzer got into a fight with the Democrats over the appointment of a successor to Alan Hevesi, the state comptroller, who had been forced to resign after pleading guilty to using state employees as chauffeurs for his ailing wife.

The Legislature was empowered to choose a successor.

Spitzer wanted someone he deemed qualified, rather than a machine hire.

But Silver prevailed, choosing one of his own assemblymen, Thomas DiNapoli, and Spitzer, furious, began paying recriminatory visits to the districts of some Democratic legislators who had voted with Silver (and who had supported Spitzer’s own campaign), questioning their integrity as well as their standing come primary time.

“The temper tantrum that occurred after the DiNapoli affair did almost irreparable harm to the relationship between the Governor and the Democrats in the Legislature,” McEneny said.

“There were a lot of hurt feelings.”

There are people on Spitzer’s team who consider the DiNapoli ruckus to have been one of their finest hours.

It is hard for them to see how anybody could object to their insisting on competence.

Spitzer, though, seems to realize that it was at least a short-term tactical error.

“Let’s face it—it was not a good beginning for my relationship with the Legislature,” he told me.

“I may have had the moral high ground, but having the moral high ground didn’t help with Albany relations.”

Meanwhile, Spitzer was working to overthrow the Republican majority in the Senate.

The Republicans’ margin has been slipping, and a few of its senior members, from districts that otherwise lean Democratic, are in their mid-seventies.

Historical inevitability hangs over Bruno, a former boxer who is seventy-eight years old and in his sixteenth term in the State Senate, as does a federal investigation into a consulting business that he runs out of his home.

(He has denied any wrongdoing.)

Spitzer sought to hasten things.

He or his staff made overtures to several Republican legislators, offering them jobs in his administration, which would come with higher salaries and better pensions, if they gave up their seats.

One Long Island Republican signed on to be his homeland-security chief, and Spitzer successfully campaigned for a Democrat to replace him.

This narrowed the Republican majority—and Bruno’s hold on power—to two seats.

Such incursions have long been all but proscribed in Albany; Bruno told me that Spitzer had been “bribing several of my members” and “dishonest.”

Once again, however, it was difficult for Spitzer and his aides to understand how, on the merits, there could be anything wrong with going after the opposition party.

Never one to hold his tongue, Bruno began publicly disparaging Spitzer, calling him a rich spoiled brat and a bully.

Spitzer, more measured in public, slipped up in private, as when, according to one person familiar with the exchange, he said to a legislator, in the course of calling attention to his own respect for decorum, “I could have called Bruno a senile piece of s***, but I never did.”

Amid these squalls, the two men, with Silver, were trying to forge a budget deal.

Early on, Spitzer had managed to pass some bills that Bruno had long advocated anyway; Spitzer’s job, as Bruno saw it, had been to “roll” Silver.

But then Spitzer, in an attempt to cut medical spending, took on 1199 S.E.I.U., the giant health-care-workers union, which is a longtime kingmaker and one of the Senate Republicans’ major backers.

(Big unions in bed with the Republicans? Only in New York, kids, only in New York.)

“We gored the ox of the patron of the Senate,” as one aide put it.

The union spent almost five million dollars—an extraordinary amount—on television advertisements attacking Spitzer, prompting him to counter with an ad blitz underwritten with his leftover campaign funds and five hundred thousand dollars of his own money.

Still, for the first time, his poll numbers started to fall.

To be continued ....

[Livyjr]

THE NEW YORKER

"Profiles - The Humbling of Eliot Spitzer - The Governor’s rocky rookie season." (cont'd)

by Nick Paumgarten

December 10, 2007

To some astonishment, the three men managed to come to an agreement on a budget by the April 1st deadline, but they did so in a closed-door session that gave rise to bitter complaints that Spitzer had condoned and participated in the kind of secrecy that he had promised to eliminate.

What’s more, he had compromised on several big items, including Medicaid spending and school funding, for which he was also criticized.

But this was just a prelude to the most insidious diversion from what the professionals like to call the business of governing: Troopergate, a.k.a. Choppergate, the Dirty Tricks Scandal, Eliot Mess, or, to some of Spitzer’s team, “the recent unpleasantness.”

It has given rise to a set of opposing interpretations, the merits of which are still contested.

What is uncontested is that it has been devastating to Eliot Spitzer.

Being on the receiving end of prosecutorial curiosity has exposed Spitzer to the kind of public rush to judgment that, as attorney general, he used to exploit, and he has handled it with the kind of cautious evasion that he used to deplore.

Troopergate, judging from subsequent investigations, began last spring with an inquiry, from several newspapers, into a fund-raising trip that Spitzer had made to California.

The papers wanted to know whether he had flown on the state plane.

The Governor and the leaders are allowed to use the plane and two state helicopters if the purpose of the trip is state business, but using them for personal or fund-raising purposes is a breach, albeit a time-honored one.

(Mario Cuomo, for example, had an Air Cuomo scandal, involving numerous flights that his wife and kids took when he was governor.)

Spitzer hadn’t used the plane on that trip, but Darren Dopp, his communications director, decided to look at additional flights, including those made by the lieutenant governor, David Paterson, and Joseph Bruno, because, he told investigators, of continued interest from reporters, which he anticipated would lead to follow-up Freedom of Information requests.

He didn’t have the kind of information about Bruno’s day-by-day schedule and appointments that he did about Spitzer’s and Paterson’s, so Dopp—and here’s the rub—asked the state police to collect whatever they had.

So, rather than just pulling records, they were, in some cases, creating them retroactively and, at the same time, learning a lot about what Bruno was up to.

The police delivered reports to Dopp that suggested that Bruno’s flights might be improper, if not necessarily illegal.

For example, there was an overnight trip, with a fund-raiser in the evening and a bit of state business in the morning, requiring separate round-trip helicopter flights (at thousands of dollars a flight).

Dopp took the information to Spitzer and top members of his staff, and they decided to sit on it; as Spitzer and his staff knew, the laws governing the use of the plane were lax.

But then James Odato, a reporter at the Albany Times Union, made a Freedom of Information request for the travel records, and Dopp, again after consulting with Spitzer and his top staff, furnished the information to Odato.

It isn’t clear to what extent Odato’s inquiry was self-generated.

Odato had done stories on government travel before, but e-mails released by investigators suggest that Dopp may have been shopping the story around.

It’s hard not to suspect, anyway, that Dopp was looking to hurt Bruno, and that he wouldn’t have done so without his boss’s blessing.

Whether that constituted “a desire to run state government as a dictatorship,” as Bruno would later assert, or merely an instance of hardball politics is now a matter of interpretation.

(It could be both.)

Nonetheless, the plan, if it was one, backfired.

It tarnished Spitzer’s image, among the many citizens who had not yet questioned it, as an upright avatar of fair play, and transformed Bruno from the heavy into the victim.

To be continued ....

[Livyjr]

THE NEW YORKER

"Profiles - The Humbling of Eliot Spitzer - The Governor’s rocky rookie season." (cont'd)

by Nick Paumgarten

December 10, 2007

When the Times Union story about Bruno’s trips ran, on July 1st, Bruno reared up.

“I told the Governor directly I have dealt with bullies and rogues and thugs most of my life, O.K.?” he said.

“I grew up in the toughest part of Glens Falls, next to the boxcars, where kids would come up to you when you weighed ninety pounds and they weighed a hundred and twenty and just punch you right in the mouth just because you were Italian, O.K.?"

". . . So swing away.”

(Glens Falls isn’t the Bronx, but it would have to do.)

Within days, Bruno managed to alchemize the allegations into a story about a surveillance campaign and an abuse of power.

Andrew Cuomo, Spitzer’s successor in the attorney general’s office—a fellow-Democrat but no dear friend—opened an investigation.

Spitzer’s lawyers, taking a cautious legal stance, and perhaps worried that Cuomo was out to get them, decided not to let Spitzer’s staffers talk to Cuomo’s investigators.

Their meagre coöperation—Spitzer subsequently said they had “fully cooperated”—seemed to harden Cuomo’s stance.

(Cuomo, out of both temperament and ambition, seems to have modelled his approach to state prosecuting on Spitzer’s.)

Cuomo issued his report after three weeks, and it was harsh.

Although it absolved the Spitzer team of any illegality, it excoriated them for essentially deploying the state police in a political hit.

Dopp was put on unpaid leave (he has since gone to work at a lobbying firm), and Spitzer published a self-flagellating Op-Ed piece in the Times, “An Apology from Albany,” in which he said, “What members of my administration did was wrong—no ifs, ands or buts.”

Still, he had said that the mistakes were his staff’s, and that he himself had known nothing about any attempt to smear Bruno.

Since then, Troopergate has settled into a tense legal standoff involving unanswered subpoenas and claims of executive privilege.

The Albany County district attorney took up the case, as did the Commission of Public Integrity and the Senate.

The Albany D.A.’s report, released in September—on the same day that Spitzer announced his driver’s-license initiative—was mild enough in its conclusions to prompt Bruno to dismiss it as a whitewash.

The Republicans, and the majority of New Yorkers polled, want Spitzer to testify under oath about who knew and did what when, but Spitzer has yet to do so because, he says, he hasn’t been asked to:

“I’d love to."

"Wish I had when this first came up.”

He regards the case as “a ridiculous detour,” the aftermath of which may have been handled poorly, at least to judge by the results.

When I asked him, for example, if it was a mistake for his lawyers not to have allowed his aides to talk to Cuomo, he said, “It certainly didn’t play out wisely."

"No question about that.”

During the summer, in the absence of any actual legislative work, the saga occasionally turned surreal.

There was an improbably sourced but entertaining report in the Post that Spitzer aides were holding secret meetings in black Town Cars, riding around the outskirts of Albany, to avoid using e-mail or the phone.

One night, an anonymous caller left a threatening recorded message for Spitzer’s father, who is eighty-three and suffering from Parkinson’s.

Referring to the old campaign-finance allegations, the caller said, in part, “You will be arrested and brought to Albany."

"And there is not a goddam thing your phony, psycho, piece-of-s*** son can do about it.”

A private investigator traced the call to Roger Stone, a Republican political consultant and former Lee Atwater associate who had been hired by the Senate Republicans.

Stone denied making the call and cited as an alibi his attendance at the play “Frost/Nixon.”

(Stone got his start working for Nixon, and appeared in the New York Observer after the call, showing off a Nixon tattoo between his shoulder blades.)

But then it emerged that he’d been at the play on a different night.

He still denies making the call, claiming that the voice in the message is that of an impersonator.

“It was shocking for two reasons,” Spitzer told me.

“One, that they would do it."

"And, two, how bizarrely obvious they were in what they did.”

He added, “Imagine if I had done that.”

In a way, Troopergate has become a sort of Rorschach test: each constituency sees in it what it wants to see.

For the Spitzer team, it’s both no big deal and a symbol of monumental pushback.

For the Republicans, it’s both a dastardly conspiracy to destroy them and a cudgel for their self-preservation.

For the press, it’s the best evidence yet of incompatibility, and a source of new scoops.

As a veteran of bygone Albany wars explained to me, “Eliot’s gotten down in the mud with these guys, and they know how to fight in the mud."

"They’re not there because they’re nice guys."

"They’re there because they’re great tactical politicians.”

To be continued ...

[Livyjr]

THE NEW YORKER

"Profiles - The Humbling of Eliot Spitzer - The Governor’s rocky rookie season." (cont'd)

by Nick Paumgarten

December 10, 2007

As for Cuomo, he may as well have announced his candidacy for governor in 2010.

Cuomo, the son of the former governor Mario Cuomo, who was a Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Clinton Administration, ran unsuccessfully for governor five years ago.

It can be dangerous to ascribe envy or covetousness to a man without being able to know his mind, but people do so to Cuomo all the time; they also surmise that it rankled him that Spitzer declined to endorse him in the attorney general’s race until after the primary.

As an Albany lobbyist told me, “We all expected Cuomo to do something like this, but thought he’d maybe wait two and a half years.”

In October, while on the plane with Spitzer, I asked him whether he still talked to Cuomo.

“Of course."

"He’s my lawyer,” he said, with a mischievous grin.

I asked if their conversations were therefore privileged.

“Yes, even the expletives are privileged,” he said.

“That was a joke,” Spitzer’s aide said.

“No, it wasn’t,” Spitzer said.

To be continued .....

[Livyjr]

THE NEW YORKER

"Profiles - The Humbling of Eliot Spitzer - The Governor’s rocky rookie season." (cont'd)

by Nick Paumgarten

December 10, 2007

Bruno went on, “He is the biggest disappointment that I’ve had in thirty-one years of serving in political life, because I liked him on a personal level."

"He fooled me."

"And I’m pretty good with people, I have a good intuition with people."

"He fooled me, he hoodwinked me."

"And I’m embarrassed."

"He told me I was going to be his partner."

" . . . ‘We’re going to get all kinds of productive and constructive things done.'"

"'Shelly Silver’s a problem; he’s not my kind of guy.'"

"'I’ll deal with Shelly.’ ”

Bruno, who called Silver “the biggest wimp on this earth” (Silver has adopted a sticks-and-stones approach to Bruno’s provocations), mentioned the series of bills that he had favored and that Spitzer had got passed.

“Then what does he do?"

"Now that he’s on a roll, suddenly he’s a hero, he worked miracles—what did he do?"

"In my mind, his ego took over, his temperament took over, he started believing all his own press clips that he walked on water, that he was the savior of all mankind.”

I asked him when they started yelling at each other.

“When he said, ‘I’m taking Bruno out as leader and we’re taking over the majority,’ ” he replied.

He recalled an incident involving the Senate minority leader, Malcolm Smith (“the wimp that he is”), who had been echoing Spitzer’s predictions of a Democratic takeover and whom Bruno had then pilloried.

Spitzer called Bruno into his office.

“So I went in,” Bruno said.

“He’s sitting there like this.”

He pantomimed Spitzer’s expression—chin thrust forward, eyes glaring—in a manner that made it clear that he does not like Spitzer’s face.

“Christ . . . So I said something like ‘What’s up?’"

"He comes out of his chair, practically: ‘I’ll tell you! You abused Senator Smith on the floor of the chamber!’ ”

He gave Spitzer a whiny voice.

“ ‘Malcolm Smith’—that’s when I said, ‘Malcolm Smith’s got his head so far up your ass he can’t even see straight.’"

"He went crazy—screaming and shouting."

"Closest I’ve ever come to seeing something like that is a seven-year-old kid having a tantrum."

“He’s a bully,” Bruno said.

“A spoiled brat having a tantrum because he’s not getting his way.”

As for the dishonesty part, he cited Spitzer’s campaign-finance troubles, and the fact that Spitzer had gone after his members after he’d promised him that the two of them would be partners.

“All this time he’s cooking up how to bury me with the state police,” he said.

“If proven, it would have been criminal."

"I could’ve been in jail!”

What, then, would the Governor have to do in order for there to be peace between them?

“We have to get him to just tell the truth, and I’ve given you instance after instance where he doesn’t tell the truth,” he said.

“Sorry, I feel strongly about this, and the fact that I got a huge pain in my ass doesn’t help."

"I should keep this pain all the time.”

He got up and limped over to the reception, in a new annex whose construction owed a lot to funds corralled by Joe Bruno.

Along the way, one of the caterers told him that he looked great, and he beamed.

To be continued ....

[Livyjr]

THE NEW YORKER

"Profiles - The Humbling of Eliot Spitzer - The Governor’s rocky rookie season." (cont'd)

by Nick Paumgarten

December 10, 2007

“Maligning Albany is a very old game,” the novelist William Kennedy wrote in the introduction to “O Albany!” his 1983 book of essays about his home town.

Nonetheless, he does not refrain from playing it.

Calling the town “a pinnacle of porkhead bossism,” he writes, “Wickedness has been our lot for more years than any man alive can remember.”

Several things about Albany strike the downstate newcomer.

Near the capitol building, at least, it seems to be one of the last American towns, outside the District of Columbia, where most of the men wear suits.

It can feel like a city full of detectives and bodyguards.

The capitol is a stunning Romanesque-Renaissance-Second Empire mashup, a monument to a more grandiose era of New York governorships, when the second floor’s principal occupant routinely went on to big things on the national stage.

It was completed under Teddy Roosevelt, at a cost of twenty-five million dollars, and was widely considered to be a boondoggle.

The cavernous waiting room outside the executive chamber is known as the War Room; the builders ran out of money to put up a tower but built a vaulted ceiling that was painted with bloody images of hand-to-hand combat through the ages, which seem to suit the place.

Across the street from the capitol is Empire Plaza, also known as Rockefeller’s Folly, a sprawling waste of modernist architecture that reflects a period of gubernatorial supreme command.

Beneath it run a series of tunnels and concourses connecting the various government buildings, and from January to June, when the Legislature is in session and the budget is in play, the political professionals take to the catacombs, a race of disingenuous horse-trading troglodytes haunting the fast-food pavilions.

To be continued ...

[Livyjr]

THE NEW YORKER

"Profiles - The Humbling of Eliot Spitzer - The Governor’s rocky rookie season." (cont'd)

by Nick Paumgarten

December 10, 2007

When I was in Albany, earlier this fall, the legislators had returned to town for a special session.

After they’d dispersed at the end of the regular session, in June, with work undone, Spitzer had gone on a kind of taunting tour of the members’ districts, where he delivered a PowerPoint presentation whose theme was “Where’s Waldo?”

Weeks later, he, Bruno, and Silver reached a tentative agreement on a raft of big initiatives, each dear to one man or the other.

(For Spitzer, it was campaign-finance reform; for Bruno, it was Mayor Bloomberg’s congestion-pricing plan; for both Bruno and Silver, it was property-tax relief for seniors and a pay raise for legislators.)

The special session would not include a debate or a vote on any of these initiatives; instead, the Senate Republicans wanted to make a stand on the driver’s-license issue.

On Monday afternoon, a bell rang feebly throughout the halls of the capitol, summoning the senators to their chamber.

They convened at 3 P.M.—a starting time fit for a session musician.

The Republicans wandering in and out of the Senate chamber were fairly exuberant at the ammunition Spitzer had given them.

As Fredric Dicker, the Post’s longtime Albany editor and the press corps’s most persistent Spitzer scourge, noted on his radio show the following morning, “It’s been years since I’ve seen the kind of glee on the part of Republicans that we saw here yesterday.”

The problem for Spitzer, and for the citizens of New York, is that the actual substance of state governance (the policy) and the application of it (the politics) are numbing.

Health-care-reimbursement formulas, county-government structure, development-agency debt structure: these are not the things that capture a citizen’s—or an editor’s—imagination.

One of the advantages to having them disputed and decided in an arcane company town, a hundred and sixty miles from the state’s media center, is that voters don’t need to muddle their minds with the details.

A disadvantage is that all manner of fainthearted, small-minded, cynical, greedy transactions occur out of sight.

Most of the legislators and their staffs live in Albany during the session, owing to its distance from their home districts, which engenders a hothouse atmosphere, reflected in what Spitzer one afternoon called the Bear Mountain Bridge Rule, a precept named for a Hudson River crossing an hour north of Manhattan: what goes on north of the Bear Mountain Bridge stays north of the Bear Mountain Bridge.

(Unfortunately for two legislators who got caught up in staffer sex scandals a few years ago—and fortunately for tabloid readers downstate—this imperative turned out to be a porous one.)

This winter, a contentious budget season looms.

Wall Street, which furnishes up to twenty per cent of the state’s tax revenues, has had a rough year, thanks to the subprime-mortgage mess, so unpopular cuts will make for spirited scapegoating.

The legislative elections, next fall, will heighten the gamesmanship and the battle over public perception.

In Albany, I met with Paul Francis, the budget director, who was attempting to reconcile the seeming impossibility and absolute necessity of getting a budget done.

“One of the things I learned in business is the importance of having a coherent message about what you stand for,” Francis said.

On the second floor of the capitol, I met with Dennis Whalen, Spitzer’s deputy health secretary, who also served under Pataki.

“Albany’s acting how you would expect it to act: the organism is marshalling its antibodies,” he said.

Of the Spitzer agenda, he added, “Is it a virus?"

"It may be the cure.”

Bruce Gyory, Spitzer’s new special aide, recently urged the Governor to read a biography he’d found, at the Strand, of Charles Evans Hughes, a governor who, a hundred years ago, went to Albany and, despite many early setbacks, managed to pass the Moreland Act, which he used to go after corruption.

“Here’s a guy who came in on a wave of reform."

"He challenged the status quo, and the status quo didn’t like it."

"He ran into problems,” Gyory told me.

“It’s so much easier to be a go-along, get-along governor than it is to confront.”

But, he added, “the power of the chief executive is the power to persuade."

"I have told him, the operative word in bully pulpit is ‘pulpit.’ ”

To be continued ...

[Livyjr]

THE NEW YORKER

"Profiles - The Humbling of Eliot Spitzer - The Governor’s rocky rookie season." (cont'd)

by Nick Paumgarten

December 10, 2007

Al Smith, whom Spitzer often cites, was actually voted out after his first two years, but won again two years later, and went on to transform the office.

But, like other New York governors who found their footing, he thrived.

“The notion that you’re doomed if you don’t get it done in your first year is an ahistorical analysis,” Gyory said.

Executive-branch history is strewn with lousy first years.

People often compare Spitzer with Rudy Giuliani, for his aggressive tenure as a prosecutor and for his combative, enemy-strewn governing style.

But there are other useful analogues: Michael Bloomberg, whose billionaire’s scorn for political ritual and collaborative capital in his first two years earned him abysmal public-approval ratings; Bill Clinton, whose ill-advised or poorly handled initiatives (gays in the military, health care) derailed his first-term agenda and handed Congress to the Republicans; and Teddy Roosevelt, another hard charger, whose confrontational ways as governor so infuriated the powers that be in New York that they had him drafted as President William McKinley’s running mate, just to get rid of him.

Each instance casts Spitzer’s prospects in a rosy light, predicting renewal and some measure of historical vindication.

But there are counterexamples.

In October, the Times summoned the ghost of William Sulzer, a first-year governor from Manhattan, who, in 1913, was impeached and removed from office, after too zealously attacking the corrupt Tammany Hall Democratic machine.

Like Spitzer, Sulzer said, “I am a fighter,” and tried to appeal directly to the voters, rather than to their representatives.

“If I could tell you some things I know about Albany conditions, it would make you want to come out with a rope in your hands,” Sulzer said.

His disregard for the nuances laid him low.

Another analogue is President Bush, who is very different from Spitzer in most ways—temperament, ideology, fluency, firepower—but who also has the courage of his convictions, naysayers be damned.

It is a comparison that Spitzer inadvertently invited, in an address he gave in August, two weeks after the release of the Cuomo report, at the Chautauqua Institution, in western New York.

Spitzer invoked Reinhold Niebuhr, who “understood that the exercise of power can be shocking and, at times, corrupting."

"But he also understood that power is absolutely necessary to fight the battles that must be fought."

"The trick is to fight these battles with humility and constant introspection, knowing that there is no monopoly on virtue.”

He was talking about Bush, he emphasized, not himself.

“President Bush didn’t understand that humility has to be more than just a talking point,” he said, before going on to enumerate his own accomplishments.

It was a remarkable exercise in expiation by indirection.

To be continued ...

[Livyjr]

THE NEW YORKER

"Profiles - The Humbling of Eliot Spitzer - The Governor’s rocky rookie season." (cont'd)

by Nick Paumgarten

December 10, 2007

In late October, Spitzer’s press office sent out a release saying that Spitzer was preparing a major surprise announcement at an appearance at N.Y.U., on the driver’s-license issue.

Might Spitzer be dropping the plan?

Suggesting such a thing to the reporters who regularly cover him inspired a no-chance-in-hell double take.

Still, by that point opposition had crescendoed.

Lou Dobbs, on CNN, had been assailing Spitzer on a nightly basis.

(“How about a spoiled rich-kid brat who is treating New York residents as if he thinks they’re his rich father’s tenants, instead of citizens? . . . He may be what he calls a steamroller, but I think he’s a weak-kneed, spineless steamroller.”)

And county clerks around the state, the ones responsible for issuing driver’s licenses, were threatening civil disobedience.

Broader discontent had spread to his own party.

“We’re hoping for a change of direction,” McEneny, one of the Assembly’s recalcitrant Democrats, said.

“It’s getting real late.”

It turns out, however, that the surprise was merely the announcement that Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism expert, had endorsed Spitzer’s plan.

Afterward, I rode along with Spitzer and Rich Baum, the secretary to the Governor, on their way to a lunch with Brooklyn Democrats in Williamsburg.

“Clarke was hugely important,” Spitzer said.

“He indisputably puts to rest the notion that at the security level this is not the right thing to do.”

But it was too late.

The plan’s indisputability, in whatever platonic realm Spitzer had deemed it so, was very much in dispute in the arena.

Baum said, “We didn’t make an emotional argument, because we didn’t have an emotional argument."

"It’s a cerebral issue.”

“Every issue where we’re a minority is a cerebral issue,” Spitzer said to Baum.

I asked if they’d anticipated this much emotion.

“Remember that Monty Python skit?"

"‘Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,’ ” Spitzer said.

He hadn’t watched Lou Dobbs, but he’d seen some transcripts.

“I ignore it."

"Honestly, I ignore it."

"If there was a serious intellectual response to him, I would think about it very deeply."

"If it is essentially an ad-hominem attack, I don’t care.”

One night, Spitzer’s office arranged for us to meet for a drink rather than talk in his office.

This surprised me, since Spitzer is not an after-work-drink kind of guy.

That weekend, he had gone down to Washington, D.C., and cut a deal with Michael Chertoff, the Secretary of Homeland Security, in which, once again without telling anyone, Spitzer had back-pedalled on his license proposal: now the license that illegal immigrants could get would, in effect, be a limited one—for example, you couldn’t use it to get on a plane—and New York would comply with the Bush Administration’s plan for a federal Real I.D., an enhanced form of identification that has prompted misgivings among liberals and libertarians alike.

In short, he had abandoned his supporters on the license proposal and also handed the Bush Administration a political gift.

And his opponents weren’t sated.

If anything, they were emboldened.

We met at E.A.T., a gourmet food shop on Madison Avenue, around the corner from his apartment.

A pair of black Suburbans pulled up, and he bounced out of the first one, fresh from an appearance on “Hardball,” where he had parried Chris Matthews’s barrage of moderately hostile license-debate recapitulations with generously uninterrupted on-message clarifications.

We found a table in the back, where he learned, with some disappointment, that E.A.T. didn’t serve Scotch.

(I had suggested Bemelmans Bar, at the Carlyle, but Spitzer had frowned: not his scene.)

He ordered a glass of white wine.

Talking again about the license plan’s merits, he said, “If we can get the public to focus—forget the rhetoric on both sides—focus on this as just rational policy.”

I asked him if at this point he was just playing for a draw.

“If I knew what I was playing for, it’d solve a big problem,” he said.

He received a message on his BlackBerry: a text of remarks that Mayor Bloomberg had made, moments earlier, on CNN, in which he had condemned Spitzer’s license policy.

The Governor betrayed no disappointment or annoyance.

“Here’s the reality: reform is a messy process."

"I went up to Albany with the avowed purpose of changing the way things were done."

"Some of the folks there don’t want us to do that."

"They’re pushing back, holding on for power,” Spitzer said.

“But you know what?"

"It takes time, and there’s enormous pushback."

"And so anybody who thought it was going to be pretty—and I’ll say something now that I probably shouldn’t."

"It’s not because I’ve had two sips of wine."

"Editorial boards desperately want reform but yet desperately don’t want the discomfort of seeing people fighting."

"And so there is a sort of a schizophrenia."

"They see us fighting and they say, ‘Can’t you guys get along?’"

"Well, the answer is, you know, maybe not.”

He had another sip of wine.

“None of this is personal to me."

"In other words, no matter what has been said, I like Joe Bruno."

"I mean, it’s a crazy thing for me to say."

"I was on the phone with him last week."

"We had a great chat."

"We had the most wonderful chat we’ve had in the years I’ve known him.”

(A spokesman for Bruno said of the call, “It was about a personal matter; it had nothing to do with the business of governing.”)

“Joe’s trying to hold on to power,” Spitzer said.

“That’s fine."

"I would do the same thing if I was in his position."

"The media says, Oh, Spitzer, you went to Albany, you were going to change everything."

"It’s October."

"What’s happened?"

"My attitude is, Guys, I’m playing for the long game."

". . . I’m patient."

"I don’t look it."

"I don’t act it."

"You know what?"

"I’m disciplined to know this isn’t a one-inning game."

"And I’m learning that."

"I’m learning that.”

Spitzer had taken to likening the job of governor to “three-dimensional chess.”

To be continued ...

[Livyjr]

THE NEW YORKER

"Profiles - The Humbling of Eliot Spitzer - The Governor’s rocky rookie season." (cont'd)

by Nick Paumgarten

December 10, 2007

He went on, “I feel sometimes like I’m sinking into quicksand and subjected to the very significant—and sometimes appropriate—critiques of editorial pages about missteps, which I read, and, like any normal person, mutter under my breath and resent, but then take seriously."

"And trust me."

"Don’t take any of this to suggest that I don’t think we’ve made mistakes."

"My attitude is I will never deny we made mistakes.”

He is ever mindful of the example of George W. Bush, who infamously, at a 2004 press conference on the Iraq war, couldn’t think of any mistakes he’d made.

(“That made me cringe,” he’d told me.)

“Will you discuss the mistakes?” I asked.

“No."

"I learned that lesson the hard way."

"I was with an editorial board one time, and they said, Did you make a mistake doing this or that?"

"I said, Yeah, I should have done it this way."

"And I thought I was showing them that I had some capacity to be introspective—which I may or may not have, but I thought at least I’d fooled them on the issue."

"And, the next day, screaming headlines, ‘Spitzer Admits Mistake.’"

"So I’ve learned.”

He went on, “We have a long time horizon, so I don’t worry about the ups and downs.”

By November, Spitzer had begun to entertain private doubts about the feasibility of the license plan.

The first inkling came when, shortly after the Chertoff compromise, he had a sit-down with the “specialty media”—editors of Hispanic, Irish, Indian, and Chinese newspapers, among others—who told him that a lower-tier license would be a “scarlet letter.”

And if they would not sign up for it, then it became even harder to justify.

“It was a remarkably successful political maneuver that left me standing in the middle with enemies on both sides,” he reflected later.

“I had a tsunami coming from one side and a hurricane coming from the other, and it was not a healthy situation to be in.”

On November 6th, Spitzer gathered his core staff at his farm in Columbia County, to talk about a number of pressing issues.

The last item on the agenda was the driver’s-license policy.

He asked his staff, “What’s the move?”

Some said stick it out.

Others said let it go: it clearly was impeding their ability to get other things done.

Spitzer emerged still committed.

On a subsequent trip to Puerto Rico, he made a few philosophical comments about the nature of policymaking that indicated to reporters that he might be wavering.

He told me that his words were misconstrued, but admitted, “The fact that I made those comments reflected that I was going through internal evaluations”—a rare acknowledgment of the existence of the unconscious."

He spent a day at the beach with his wife, their first day off together in months, and mulled it over some more.

It was, according to his staff, a wrenching process, although he was loath to admit it (“Look, I don’t torture myself over decisions,” he told me), not only because he felt that he was right, in policy terms, but because, according to the laws of dinner-table family argument, being right about being right is as important as being right.

Political expediency, for better or worse, is not a principle he holds dear.

However, on conference calls with his core staff over the weekend, he discerned that the mood had shifted: there was something approaching a bag-it consensus.

Also, a few days hence, the Democratic candidates for President would be debating in Las Vegas.

Hillary Clinton’s equivocations on the subject of Spitzer’s plan, in the previous debate, had wounded her campaign.

On Tuesday morning, Baum, the secretary to the Governor, spoke with a representative from Clinton’s campaign, who asked what the Governor’s latest thinking was on the license issue.

Baum said that the Governor had already changed his mind.

Spitzer’s staff had been surprised that the Clinton campaign hadn’t called earlier.

His communications director, Christine Anderson, told her counterpart on the Clinton campaign, Howard Wolfson, “You’re going to get blamed for it.”

Apparently, it was a misconception that the Clinton camp could live with.

That afternoon, Spitzer called Clinton to let her know his decision and flew down to Washington, in the state plane, to announce his retreat, on terms that might flatter him.

He continued to defend the policy, on the merits, and then assailed the federal government for failing to act on immigration and also criticized his opponents for their hysterical rhetoric:

“The consequence of this fearmongering is paralysis.”

He had exhibited a new grasp of that old political talent: extracting oneself from an intractable position.

That is, he had caved.

Two days later, I visited him in his office.

The night before, he’d gone to a Bruce Springsteen concert in Albany with his old friends Bill Taylor and Cliff Sloan, and he’d been heartened by Springsteen’s encore, a number about immigrants called “American Land.”

“I thought he was going to add a line like ‘Don’t they all need driver’s licenses?’ ” he said.

“But somehow it wasn’t there.”

During the concert, he had checked his BlackBerry and learned that, at the debate in Vegas, Clinton, as expected, had said she was opposed to his discarded plan.

Referring to his turnaround, he said, “The problem that people have attributed to me is one of hubris, arrogance, unwillingness to shift, listen, and respond."

"But I did it because we are responding."

"We are listening."

". . . Look, I may not appear to listen, but I do.”

Plus, he went on, “you’ve excised a cancer that had been fundamentally debilitating to our ability to move the agenda.”

Within days, the furor went into remission.

The Post, moving on, ran a story about Spitzer’s appearance at a private fund-raiser in Greenwich Village.

A witness told the Post Spitzer had declared that if the Democrats took the State Senate legalizing gay marriage would be one of his highest priorities.

Spitzer denied it (he said he’d merely complimented the Assembly on its passage of a gay-marriage bill), but, sure enough, the Republicans picked up the gay-marriage drumbeat.

By last week, Spitzer seemed to have settled into a lumps-taking, amends-making phase—one as unfamiliar as it is likely to be short-lived.

After meeting with a gathering of Democratic assemblymen, whom he’d asked for another chance, he told me, “It’s like I am merely an object being moved, subject to poking, pushing, like an unknown in a science lab."

"Everyone’s trying to push at you, figure out ‘What is it?’ ”

“When I was a prosecutor, we had a much greater opportunity to reflect on every decision,” he had said earlier.

“The pace of decision-making and the range of decision-making was slower."

"And much more under control."

"You are, by and large, the actor who determines pace, timing, substance, et cetera."

"You control the pace of the game."

"In this job, a great deal comes at you, and so you’re thrust into positions where you’re reacting."

"And just the scale, obviously, makes it more likely that you’re going to have decisions that go awry."

“I don’t believe that at age forty-eight that you become, overnight, a transformed person,” he said.

“But is there a different sense of how we have to work with folks?"

"Yes.”

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12...n?currentPage=1

[Livyjr]

"Higher education plan gains support"

By MICHAEL GORMLEY, Associated Press

Last updated: 6:02 p.m., Monday, December 17, 2007

ALBANY -- A wide-ranging plan to make New York higher education among the best in the world and an engine for jobs gained some early support Monday by business and education reformers as well as the groups that would benefit from the massive spending plan.

"We need a system that rises above the average, that competes at the top national level," said Kenneth Adams of the state Business Council.

"We need a superior state system to regain the ground we've lost to other states."

The report presented to Gov. Eliot Spitzer Monday by the state Commission on Higher Education calls for 2,000 more full-time faculty at the State University of New York and City University of New York, a $3 billion research fund, the recruitment of 250 top scholars over five years, several programs to make public and private college more affordable, and a "educational partnership zones" in low-income neighborhoods in which colleges would help high schools prepare students for higher education.

Under its many proposals, SUNY and CUNY schools would be able to set their own tuition levels based on the demand for entrance and their needs.

The commission also supports regular, predictable increases in tuition that supporters say help families and colleges plan better.

The commission also calls for cooperative ventures between public and private colleges.

The report ( http://www.ny.gov/governor/ ), doesn't say how billions of dollars should be raised to pay for the hiring and programs to develop research that translates into jobs and what Spitzer has called an "innovation economy."

B. Jason Brooks of the Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability said the report focuses attention on the state's entire education system and shows a need to better prepare New Yorkers for college.

He said the commission also included several accountability measures that should improve performance in colleges.

Several measures are aimed at providing more autonomy to SUNY campuses, especially the university research centers in Buffalo, Binghamton, Albany Stony Brook.

"What I see here is a promising architecture," said Carl Hayden, the former schools chancellor chosen this year by Spitzer to be chairman of the SUNY Board of Trustees.

"It is an opportunity you can be sure we will seize."

The recommendations will now go to Spitzer, who said he will include many of them in his state of the state speech and executive budget proposal in January.

He said this "bold, comprehensive and necessary" plan differs from previous higher education initiatives by governors George Pataki and Mario Cuomo.

"There is both an economic and a societal imperative," Spitzer said.

"I think we are in a different stage than we were 15 or 20 years ago."

"We see the out-migration of jobs, and we are reacting."

Assemblywoman Deborah Glick said her chamber will hold hearings on the recommendations before taking action.

She supported the call for more funds for SUNY and CUNY, but said she opposes the ideas of different tuition at different campuses and regular tuition increases.

The university worker unions and SUNY and CUNY officials supported the recommendations.

[Livyjr]

"Board prepares to take over NY horse racing"

By MICHAEL GORMLEY, Associated Press

Last updated: 5:22 p.m., Monday, December 17, 2007

ALBANY -- A board appointed by former Gov. George Pataki is preparing to take over New York's thoroughbred racing on Jan. 1 if closed-door negotiations between Gov. Eliot Spitzer and legislative leaders drag on past a Dec. 31 deadline.

The Non-Profit Racing Association Oversight Board authorized its chairwoman Monday to start negotiating to continue racing at Aqueduct in January, followed potentially by the Belmont and Saratoga race tracks.

If NYRA can't or won't continue to run racing after its franchise expires at the end of the year, then board Chairwoman Carole Stone is authorized to negotiate with others, including NYRA's competitors.

They are Capital Play, Empire Racing, and Excelsior Racing.

The interim agreement would stay in place until Spitzer and the Legislature agree on a new operator of the tracks for as long as the next 30 years.

Spitzer and NYRA already have a formal proposal to do that as part of a deal that includes NYRA relinquishing a claim it owns the race tracks.

Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno welcomed the board's action, but called for immediate public negotiations to resolve the issue and avoid uncertainty in an industry that employs 40,000 people statewide.

"What's more time sensitive than this?" Bruno said.

"I'm here and I've been here."

"It puzzles me why the governor is fiddling."

"I think he's reading too much about Nero."

Bruno would support having NYRA run the tracks, but he wants to award some lucrative pieces -- including selling the simulcast images of races and running video slot machines -- to other groups.

Spitzer and Bruno also disagree on how to reconstitute NYRA's board, which has been in place despite years of state and federal investigations into mismanagement and a pending bankruptcy court case.

State officials, including Spitzer, contend that the state owns the track and NYRA ceases to exist as a legal entity on Jan. 1.

But forcing the issue could mean a court would decide NYRA owns the property -- worth more than $1 billion -- on which it's run racing and paid taxes since 1955.

NYRA says it will seek to enforce its ownership claim if its franchise isn't continued.

NYRA isn't taking up an offer for what amounts to an extension, saying it is confident Spitzer and the Legislature will agree to awarding the franchise now.

NYRA President Charles Hayward told the industry magazine, Blood-Horse, on Saturday that NYRA had several conditions for any temporary arrangement.

Chief among them was to make sure any interim management deal wouldn't threaten NYRA's land claim.

"NYRA's attorneys are reviewing the resolution adopted today by the Non-Profit Racing Oversight Board to determine an appropriate course of action," NYRA said in a prepared statement Monday.

Stone, the oversight board chairwoman, is the former budget director in Pataki's Republican administration.

Spitzer, a Democrat, said negotiations with legislative leaders continue and could lead to awarding a franchise by Dec. 31.

But he said there are other ways to make sure New York racing would continue even without an agreement by the deadline.

[Livyjr]

"Spitzer confirms new subpoena, won't discuss details"

Associated Press

Last updated: 3:02 p.m., Monday, December 17, 2007

ALBANY -- Gov. Eliot Spitzer confirmed Monday his administration has received another subpoena from the Albany County district attorney, but refused to say what the prosecutor is seeking.

"That, you'll have to ask them," Spitzer said of the office of District Attorney P. David Soares.

"I have answered all these questions at length and we are cooperating fully."

Soares, however, has refused to comment on the investigation into events surrounding two Spitzer aides accused of misusing state police to compile Senate Republican leader Joseph Bruno's travel records.

Bruno called their actions political espionage.

Spitzer, who answered reporters' questions as he left a news conference, didn't respond when asked if he would instruct his attorneys to publicly release information about what the subpoena covers.

Spitzer acknowledged that when he was a prosecutor, he wouldn't release information about subpoenas.

The state Public Integrity Commission continues to investigate the case and how it was handled within the administration.

Republicans have claimed that responsibility for the plot went higher than the two aides initially blamed.

The issue has since gridlocked Albany, with Spitzer and Bruno not speaking about state issues for months at a time, according to Bruno.

The subpoena was first reported Monday by the New York Daily News.

In September, Soares found no crime in the case and said there was no evidence of a plot behind gathering data about Bruno's use of state resources on trips that mixed meetings with lobbyists and political activities.

In July, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo issued a report that no crime was committed, but the aides acted improperly in a plan intended to discredit Bruno.

But since Soares' initial findings, questions have been raised about the testimony of witnesses to his investigators and others probing the incident.

[Livyjr]

"Mental health providers overbilled taxpayers $1.3 million"

Associated Press

Last updated: 12:53 p.m., Monday, December 17, 2007

ALBANY -- New York Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli says he found some psychiatrists and other medical providers overcharged the state by more than $1.3 million for treatments.

In one case, a psychiatrist billed Medicaid eight times for more than 24 hours of treatment on given days and appears to have billed the government health care program for treatment he never provided, according to DiNapoli.

Those charges cost Medicaid $436,000.

The audit released Monday says the state could have avoided the overpayments with additional fiscal controls in the claims process.

The payments were made from August 1999 through October 2006.

The Health Department has made changes as a result of the audit.

[Livyjr]

"N.Y. farms said facing economic hardship"

By WILLIAM KATES, Associated Press

Last updated: 3:32 a.m., Wednesday, December 19, 2007

ITHACA, N.Y. -- Congress' failure to ensure that there are enough migrant workers in the nation's labor force could eventually cost New York agriculture hundreds of millions of dollars in lost crops and hundreds of thousands of acres in lost farmland, analysts say.

"Our country is reaping what Congress has sown," said Craig Regelbrugge, a vice president of the American Nursery and Landscape Association and co-chairman of the Agriculture Coalition for Immigration Reform, a national coalition of more than 300 agricultural producer associations.

The federal government's failure to deal with immigration reform -- particularly ensuring there are enough legal migrant farm workers for agricultural states like New York -- "constitutes nothing short of a national emergency," Regelbrugge said Tuesday during an agribusiness conference at Cornell University.

The annual conference also took up other farm issues -- soaring fuel costs, collapsed housing prices and the impact of biofuel on livestock feed costs.

But access to migrant labor is critical for agriculture, which differs from other economic sectors in that most farm work is seasonal.

In the 1990s, the American economy created more jobs than it had domestic workers, leaving agriculture even more reliant on an illegal labor force.

Nationwide, there are about 1.6 million full-time farm workers, said Regelbrugge.

About 80 percent of those workers are foreign born -- and nearly seven out of ten are working illegally, he said.

Despite repeated attempts, Congress and the Bush administration have been unable to come up with a long-term strategy on immigration reform and the current temporary worker program is "hobbled by bureaucracy, excessive and burdensome paperwork and restrictive wages," Regelbrugge said.

"The situation in agriculture is bad and deteriorating and agriculture needs relief," he said.

Data collected by the Farm Credit Association of New York indicates that failing to develop a functional immigration worker program could cripple operations on over 800 New York farms and put sales of approximately $700 million of agricultural products at risk, said Regelbrugge.

Without enough workers, as much as 750,000 acres of farmland could be converted to less labor-intensive -- and less profitable -- crops, while as many as 16,000 jobs that depend on the farm sector could be lost, he said.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported there were approximately 35,000 farms in New York in 2006, down about 600 from 2005.

Those farms produced roughly $3.7 billion in products on about 7.5 million acres.

Reports from around the state indicated that labor supplies were sufficient this year, said Thomas Maloney, a senior extension associate in applied economics at Cornell who studies agriculture-immigration issues in New York.

Maloney said he knew of no reports of measurable economic losses due to labor shortages.

But he said surveys showed the lack of reform has led to anxiety among growers, who worry that they will not have enough workers for future harvests.

"As a result of immigration enforcement activities, New York's farm managers are beginning to make choices they would not otherwise make," Maloney said.

Such choices include holding off expansion plans, exploring alternative labor pools, and switching to less labor-intensive crops.

Maloney said Cornell researchers are trying to come up with an exact number of unauthorized immigrant farm workers in New York.

In a survey last year of 105 Hispanic dairy farm workers, Maloney found nearly two-thirds were in the U.S. illegally.

If the federal government cannot resolve the larger issue of immigration reform, it should at least come up with a separate worker program for agriculture, Maloney and Regelbrugge said.

[Livyjr]

"Court: Agencies must prove privacy exemptions in info requests"

By VALERIE BAUMAN, Associated Press

Last updated: 4:22 p.m., Tuesday, December 18, 2007

ALBANY -- A government agency trying to withhold information from the public on privacy grounds has the burden of proving release of the records would create an "unwarranted invasion of personal privacy," the state's highest court ruled Tuesday.

The Court of Appeals decision came in the case of Data Tree LLC, a commercial online provider of public land records that sought a huge volume of data from the Suffolk County Clerk through a Freedom of Information Law request in 2004.

The court reversed a prior Appellate Division decision supporting the clerk's refusal to turn over the records because of privacy concerns and the sheer difficulty of producing the records in the form requested by Data Tree.

The case will be sent back to the trial-level Supreme Court for reconsideration.

In one part of its ruling, the high court struck down the Appellate Division's decision that it was up to Data Tree to prove disclosing the information would not run afoul of the FOIL's privacy exemption and said that's the responsibility of the clerk's office.

Data Tree had asked for electronic images of various public land records dating back to 1983.

After the county clerk did not respond to the request within the law's required five-day period, the company appealed to the county attorney, who rejected the request.

The county argued that complying would require rewriting and reformatting the data and constitute an unwarranted invasion of privacy.

It also noted the commercial nature of Data Tree's business and said the information requested was available for copying or downloading from computer terminals at the clerk's office.

The Court of Appeals decided that the FOIL has a fundamental "presumption of access to the records, and an agency (in this case the clerk) carries the burden of demonstrating that the exemption applies to the FOIL request."

The court also ruled that Data Tree's commercial motive for seeking the records was an irrelevant and improper basis for the courts to deny the request.

Officials in the Suffolk County Clerk's office said they are reviewing the decision.

Data Tree officials said they could not comment on pending litigation.