Saturday the normally guns-ablaze Wall Street Journal editorial page called for patience in dealing with the pirate hostage situation off the coast of Somalia. Turns out they were right. To a point.
 
By sundown Sunday cargo ship captain Richard Phillips had been held for four days by four pirates on a small boat adrift in the Indian Ocean about 20 miles off Somalia. With each passing day calls for a military solution increased, first in the blogosphere and then in some of the mainstream media. And a military solution is what …

The headline in Friday’s Boston Globe would not have been out of place in the Post or Daily News: MBTA plans for drastic cuts in bus, rail service. Hmmm. And it gets even more familiar once you start reading the front-page article.
The MBTA would halt all evening and weekend commuter rail service, eliminate six Green Line stops, discontinue lightly used bus routes, and lay off 805 employees if the agency does not get legislative help with its $160 million deficit, according to a state document.
The agency has delayed making the …

There a few things more certain in life than this: Hyper-partisans (left and right) will twist everything and anything to fit their worldview. Today’s case in point comes courtesy of Red State and a contributor who speculates that the Somali pirates who have attacked and apparently captured an American-flagged cargo vessel did so because they know Barack Obama is a wuss.
While the author is correct no U.S. flagged vessel has been successfully attacked by pirates to this point it’s worth noting how few American-flagged vessels there are any more. The …

Ten years ago when I was doing a story on same-sex marriage, an advocate for gay rights said legal gay marriage would take time but would eventually become commonplace in America. It’s beginning to look like he was right and if prior highly-charged civil rights struggles are any indication it’s happening very quickly by historical standards.
Amidst the arguments for and against the central battle comes down to whether America is a country where the majority rules. The Founding Fathers certainly did everything they could to prevent that from happening with …

 
Nope. No way. Not gonna vote for it. Not gonna support it. Not gonna do it. Republicans are not gonna play ball with any Democratic bill, initiative, thought, proposal. House Dems could propose a resolution that “America is great” and Republicans would all vote “No” instead proposing a resolution stating “America is the greatest.”
 
That’s how Washington is working these days and it’s driving even some Republicans to warn the party is becoming the House of No to it’s own detriment.
Newt Gingrich told a group of Missouri college students that Republicans …

Add State Comptroller to the very very long list of people who think the budget agreed to by Albany’s “3 men in a room” sucks. In fact, other than the three men in the room (Governor David Paterson, Senate Majority ‘Leader’ Malcolm Smith, and Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver) and their respective lackeys, the list includes pretty much everybody.
Here’s what Comptroller DiNapoli — himself a former Assembly member who then-Governor Spitzer feared would go too easy on the Albany power trio — has to say:
New York faced an extraordinary challenge to …

 
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 …

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.

And you thought the stock market was having a rough year…. This morning’s Marist Poll piles on to the downward trend Governor Paterson has seen in two recent surveys from other polling organizations and shows his position to be getting worse by the week. Here’s the most damning line from the folks up in Poughkeepsie:
Governor Paterson’s approval rating is the lowest approval rating a New York State governor has received in the Marist Poll’s nearly thirty year history of statewide surveys.
Ouch. Paterson’s approval rating is down to 26% — five …

Now that President Obama has officially declared he wants to let the tax rates for those making more than $250,000 per year go back up to pre-2001 levels the flood of faux facts has begun. Chief among them is this one amply explained in a New York Post editorial on Thursday:
“Many of the folks who report $250,000 or more in income are hardly fat cats: They’re hard-working small-business owners who pay taxes on their revenues via their personal income-tax returns. In fact, in the top two income-tax brackets – the …