So the first special election of the new year has come and gone and like so many elections nowadays, it’s too close to call. With all the regular votes counted across 10 upstate New York counties Democrat Scott Murphy leads Republican Jim Tedisco by 59 votes out of the almost 145 thousand cast. We should have a winner, with any luck, in a few weeks…or months.
In the meantime there are a few things we now know that we could only guess at before the voters spoke:

In claiming that this would …

What happens this coming Tuesday in towns like Claverack and Surprise and Truthville is going to set insider Washington abuzz. That’s when voters in those and a few hundred other towns and villages in the 20th Congressional district of New York decide whether a Republican or Democrat replaces Kirsten Gillibrand as their Congressperson.
Special elections always give Beltway insiders something to talk about outside the proper campaign season and this one is especially rich, coming just 10 weeks (really!) after Barack Obama took office with sky-high public approval ratings. Everybody is …

Monday we asked a question: Would those who blamed Wall Street’s big drop over the last two months on the new man in the White House give Barack Obama credit if the markets soared on news of the Administration’s bank rescue plan? Turns out in the case of the New York Post, of course not.
The Post is often vilified by liberals and applauded by conservatives for what it does print and does say but rarely does anyone notice about what’s missing. Today is a perfect case in point. While virtually …

For what it’s worth here are a few of my random thoughts and favorite stories on this chilly Monday:
It’s almost doomsday! With the MTA being forced to vote on it’s doomsday budget loaded with big fare hikes and bigger service cuts the responsibility for this rests squarely on the shoulders of Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith who has perfected the art (long-practiced in Albany) of fiddling while Rome burns. He has had an astonishingly inept three months leading the Senate.
While Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Governor David Paterson long ago …

At the risk of sounding like a broken record (kids: a long time ago people listened to music on things called records and sometimes they got scratched and skipped and played the same little section of a song over and over and over and…oh never mind) Republicans just don’t get it.
The kerfuffle over Barack Obama’s “Tonight Show” appearance is so incredibly telling — and sad if you were hoping for a reasonably adept opposition to push back on Barack occasionally. The usual suspects and brothers in arms — The New …

The latest Get Real video is a history lesson that Albany’s Democrats seem never to have learned. Turns out their self-destructive behavior now is eerily similar to what happened in 1913 — the last year (other than one year during the Depression) that the party controlled all three levers of power in state government. Could they be sowing the seeds of their own destruction again?

Get Real: Dem History Forgotten from Jay DeDapper on Vimeo.

When the stimulus plan was being debated earlier this year it was all about money and speed as in: How much money can Washington spend how fast? Now we know the answer. Not much not very.
The Wall Street Journal reports this morning that at least some of those “shovel-ready” projects we heard so much about aren’t so ready for a shovel after all. The problems run the gamut from local opposition to specific projects to lengthy bidding and contracting processes required by law.
That should be no surprise to anyone who …

From the moment she was appointed Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has been discounted. The papers — especially the New York Post but others as well — have consistently called into question her election prospects in 2010. But this morning’s New York Times has a piece that inadvertently makes the case that Gillibrand is on her way to winning in 2010 as the next Chuck Schumer.
The Times notes that many of Hillary Clinton’s inner and not-so-inner circle of advisers, fundraisers, and hangers-on have gone to work for Senator Gillibrand. The paper also …

So let’s just put this up front: Nobody really knows what the f*ck is going on with the economy. But still, there are some “experts” that really shouldn’t even be allowed to speak or write or exist.
Remember the heady days almost precisely a decade ago of the dot com boom? Thanks to new technology and supersmart economists the world’s advanced economies had little to worry about in the way of recessions or downturns. Sure there might be a hiccup here or there but the bad old days of economic cycles …

While Mayor Mike spread the green (so to speak) at the Staten Island St. Patrick’s Day Parade this weekend, his so-far-only-kinda-officially-announced major Democratic competitor (sorry Tony A) stepped up his “Mike’s out of touch” attacks.
Comptroller Bill Thompson launched into a (for him) blistering blast on Bloomberg — specifically the Mayor’s comments during his radio show on Friday morning when hizzoner responded to questions about the fairness of hiking taxes on the rich in these tough times.
Here’s what Bloomberg said on Jon Gambling’s show: “We can tax the rich, except that, …