Sen. Majority Leader Malcom Smith

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 agreed to sign off on some bridge tolls and tax hikes to rescue the transit system, Smith and his fellow Senate Democrats dickered and (internally) bickered. The result? A completely farcical “plan” to save the MTA with modest tax and fare hikes — a plan that was mathematically flawed — a plan that would not work.

To his credit Paterson rejected it almost immediately. And Smith? There has been no real response. There’s some leadership.

So here’s my question: Which newspaper editorial page will be the first to call for Smith to resign? Maybe the first will wait until after the budget is finished. But sooner or later it will come….

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Gov. David Paterson

Which brings us to Governor Paterson and his woes. A new poll shows his approval rating continues to decline and now resides in the sub-30 range. Ouch. A new report dug up by Liz Benjamin over at the Daily News shows that when he was Senate Minority Leader his leadership was essentially nonexistent. Finally it appears that Paterson has signed off on a Silver-Smith (there are opportunities here for wordsmiths more clever than I) budget plan to spend every dime of the Federal stimulus money on keeping state spending high while also raising $8 billion in taxes over the next two years.

So here’s another question: Which newspaper ed board will be the first to call on Paterson to declare he will NOT seek reelection thereby freeing him to act in the best interest of the state — not his political rehabilitation?

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President Obama’s toxic asset plan has gotten some terrible reviews from some of his biggest fans but Wall Street seems to love it. Of course remember that lots of conservative critics have been quick to point out that the market has dipped a lot since Obama took office and dipped precipitously on certain days when Obama announced certain proposals or Congress passed certain bills (see: Stimulus, for one).

So will the frothers at Fox give Obama credit for coming up with a “good” plan, at least according to the market? I’m going with…”Yeah, right!”

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Speaking of Obama, Nate Silver over at 538 has a great re-analysis of the election results from last fall. Remember that shortly after the election one of the principle bits of analysis was how Obama did better than the previous Democratic nominee John Kerry everywhere except Appalachia. That led to a lot of subtle and not-so-subtle talk about how racist all those poor white folks (rednecks) were.

But Silver went back and looked at how Obama did only among non-black voters figuring that the previous analysis was skewed by the large and almost totally one-sided nature of the vote among African-Americans. What he discovered is that whites in the Deep South were much redder than their Appalachian cousins.

In retrospect that probably shouldn’t surprise anyone considering our history. Still it’s important to set the record straight. Kudos Nate!

Percentage of White Vote (Red=McCain, Blue=Obama)