Wrong Queen, Wrong Year

From the People Who Brought You "Justice Arthur Kennedy"

With its customary attention to facts, the Democrat and Chronicle today ran the following picture and caption on page 3A of its print edition:


Only it's not Britain's Queen Elizabeth II.   It's her mother, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.

And it wasn't in 2010.   The Queen Mum died in 2002.

Gay Marriage Passes in New York

Does that make it a "hate crime" to play this?

Star Quality in Race for District Attorney

Taylor's Fundraising Tops $100,000

Former Prosecutor and County Attorney Bill Taylor is emerging rapidly as a force in this year's elections. By all accounts, Taylor not only possesses the vitality and charisma that the very best candidates project, but he's proven as well to be a formidable fund-raiser.

We've received an e-mail from a lawyer who attended a Taylor event last night. It came out that Taylor already has raised $100,000 for his campaign.

Raising that much so early, especially in a race of this type, represents an unusually strong start and an unusually capable candidate. This guy has momentum.

The Monroe County Democratic Committee has not yet announced its candidate.

Democrat, and Chronicle of Lies, to Cut 12 Jobs

Gannett's redlighting more employees nationwide.

UPDATE:   Text of leaked Gannett internal memo explaining the cuts.

He Sure Lost All of His Old Ones

And it happened long before his marriage conversion.

State Sen. Jim Alesi on new political friends, today at the State Capitol:

Move Along. Nothing to See Here.

Texas Economy Tops N.Y.
      --headline today

We should consider this a surprise?   Not only about Texas topping New York.   The report notes that North Carolina, Virginia and Georgia all have overtaken Michigan in economic size since 2000.

Let's see.   Texas, North Carolina, Virginia and Georgia are all right-to-work states with low personal and corporate taxes and a reasonable regulatory environment.   The precise opposite of New York.   Those states grow and ours declines.

Meanwhile, the State of New York convenes task force after task force, commission after commission, panel after panel, listening tour after listening tour, and appoints a succession of economic fix-it "czars," all tasked to figure out how to repair the State's broken economy.

New York already knows the answers.   It just doesn't want to hear them.

First Lady Breaks Silence on Weinergate

Acknowledgments to Blonde Sagacity.

Weekender

Alesi and the Marriage Gambit

The marriage issue most important to State Senator Jim Alesi is the marriage of Alesi to his senate seat in Albany.

What deal did he strike in that closed-door meeting with Governor Cuomo, following which the Senator endorsed the same-sex marriage bill?

The politics are interesting.   Well before his meeting with Cuomo, Alesi knew he wouldn't get Conservative endorsement for re-election.   The Conservative line gave him his margin of victory last year. From that perspective, he lost nothing in endorsing the Governor's marriage bill.

Following the furor over Alesi's sleazy lawsuit earlier this year, everyone in the Monroe County political world except Alesi and the remaining members of his staff wrote him off for re-election.   There no longer exists any relationship between the Senator and the Monroe County GOP.

If Alesi manages to win a Republican primary for renomination next year, will the Governor back him for re-election?   For Alesi will face a primary next year.   Will Democrats punt on the seat if he wins it?

Alternatively, having burned his bridges with the local GOP organization because of the lawsuit fiasco, will he run as a Democrat, with the Governor's backing for the party's nomination? Will rank-and-file Democrats accept damaged goods as their nominee?

For certain, Alesi will run as a Democrat if he can and if that's his only path to re-election.

By endorsing same-sex marriage he's won his "thumbs-up" in the editorial page of tomorrow's Democrat and Chronicle, and likely the paper's support for reelection despite his disgrace over the lawsuit.

With the Governor's support, the Democratic nomination and the support of the local paper, the Senator may have found a way around the problem he created for himself with that lawsuit.

If we had a quality daily newspaper in Rochester, it would be demanding to know what deal Alesi made with the Governor behind closed doors.   Dream on.

Whither Weiner?

Possibilities:

"Weiner-Spitzer" on CNN.

"WeinerWorld" on MSNBC.

Network evening news anchor.

Professor at the Kennedy School at Harvard, or at another formerly prestigious university.

Rochester School Superintendent.

Alesi "Doesn't Exist Politically"

... says Chairman Tom Cook

Quoted in this morning's Capitol Confidential in the Albany Times-Union.

Weiner: GOP Blowing It

House Speaker Boehner and Rep. Paul Ryan are saying Anthony Weiner should resign.

Why?   He stays, and he's the gift to Republicans who keeps on giving.   He blows out of the water Congressional Democrats' efforts to make points in any media cycle while he's still around.

That won't continue forever, but as long as he's in office it's an embarrassment to the Pelosi brigade.   They're thrown onto the defensive whenever his name will be invoked.

He goes, and it's to a multimillion dollar contract at MSNBC.

Republican leaders in Washington don't get this?   Maybe they should go too.

Can New York Fix Itself?

Sure.  There's a place that added 730,000 jobs in the last decade.  In 2008 it accounted for 70% of all new jobs created in the United States.

It's called Texas.

It has no state income tax, low corporate taxes, does just enough regulating to get the job done, cares for the environment without making a fetish of it, lets its legislature meet for a relatively short period just once every two years, keeps the executive branch slim and trim and is a right-to-work state where unions don't get to grab dues through governmental coercion.

Weekender

From Our Irondequoit Correspondent

Many rank-and-file activists among both Republicans and Democrats are furious over the cross-endorsement deal their respective parties struck for this year's town elections.

Democratic leaders agreed to endorse Republican Supervisor Mary Joyce D'Aurizio in exchange for GOP endorsement of Democratic Council members Stephanie Aldersley and John Perticone.

Apparently the window just opened for getting signatures on nominating petitions for town offices in the November election. Some stalwarts in both parties are said to be bucking their leaders and to be circulating petitions for candidates of their own party, rather than going along with the cross-endorsement.

Will there be major party primaries in Irondequoit this year? We'll know in about a month, when nominating petitions are due.

Rich Tyson Running for East District Seat of Rochester City Council

I am happy to announce that I am running for the East District seat of Rochester City Council.

To learn more please visit

http://www.richtyson.com/home/

More from Sean Hanna

This is his Memorial Day speech and I really liked the message:

In 1776, Thomas Jefferson and the founding fathers decided something absolutely remarkable. They declared, "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal..." It was a self-evident truth. It needed no explanation or elaboration.

Now, fast forward just one generation.

In a real memorial speech at Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln observed: "Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth to this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal..." What had been a self evident truth in 1776 was reduced to a mere proposition in just 87 years. Lincoln's next sentence was even more telling. "Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure."

Lincoln didn't know whether democracy would work.

And neither do we.

Our nation is 233 years old. In terms of world history, that's a blink of the eye. Democracy is still an experiment, and we do not know how it will end.

What we do know is that hundreds of thousands of young men and women have died so that we could participate in this experiment. They died fighting on farms in Herkimer, New York. They died in the deserts of Afghanistan, in the hills of Korea, beneath the waters of the South Pacific, and on the frozen Aleutian Islands of Alaska.

Most of them 17, 18, 19 year old kids.

They died in fear so that we could live in freedom.

We owe them much more than a parade, and a speech like this one. In truth, we can never repay our debt to them. But we can nurture our liberties, strengthen them, and hand them to the next generation stronger than when we received them.

And we can pray.

Heavenly Father, hold our fallen soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines in your loving embrace, as perpetual reward for their service on earth.

-Assemblyman Sean T. Hanna

May 30, 2011