Turns out New York’s “Accidental Governor” is no more capable of understanding the responsibilities that come with the job than his predecessor. But while Eliot Spitzer’s fatal flaw is hubris mixed with a wee bit of sex addiction is seems, David Paterson’s problem is simply ineptitude.

Paterson and his supporters have been making the claim for months now that he has been unfairly targeted by the media, and certainly the ugly coupling of sloppy bloggers and immoral tabloids produced a pathetically irresponsible miasma of “a rumor from a single unconfirmed unreliable source” “reporting”. But as it turns out, there was even more fire than smoke.

That the sitting Governor would call the victim of an alleged assault by one of his closest aides (his people say she called him but DP declined to make that case on the radio this morning) after she had been pursuing legal redress is unfathomable to those of us who haven’t been CEOs. It’s just strange how power seems to erase a person’s (presumably) natural ability to use his brain. It’s not like he was turning up aces before this happened. You’d think with all of his troubles he might have thought picking up the phone and calling this woman was maybe not the best idea. Or not.

Paterson was never suited to be the boss. To his credit he said all the right things about the state budget and the economy and did his best to shame the hucksters in the Legislature to take the crisis seriously. But they never took him seriously and for good reason. What happens behind the scenes in politics is way more important than what goes on in public and everyone in Albany knew Paterson was the captain of a rudderless ship.

Let’s be fair: “Steamroller Spitzer” didn’t do any better with the Legislature either but there was no question he, and everyone else, at least knew what he wanted to do. Paterson has shown no such inclination.

The political establishment has been waiting for him to declare he wasn’t running for (re)election and Democrats have been fretting about his unwillingness to take a fall for the sake of the party. Seems like that’s all about to take care of itself.

And so now it’s in the hands of Andrew Cuomo. Haven’t we seen this movie before? Cuomo — the guy who wants to be Governor so bad we can taste it — was given the opportunity to screw Spitzer with Troopergate (Spitzer ended up screwing himself instead…well someone ended up screwing Spitzer but she’s not important right now) and now Cuomo has the power to finish off Paterson. There’s definitely something Shakespearean going on around here.

Can I Get a Pink Slip?

At the end of the day there is simply nothing more stunning about the Conan-Leno-NBC meltdown than this: Jeff Zucker still has a job.

Zucker-bashing has been a tried-and-true sport among entertainment reporters, business analysts, and Hollywood insiders for years. No one, the storyline goes, has done so much to destroy something so valuable and been rewarded so handsomely in the process. I won’t pile on lest I get a nosebleed on the way up….

But at the risk of further angering the guy who works for GE Medical in the UK who recently took exception with some of my thoughts about the Comcast-NBC deal and suggested I ought not write about things I don’t understand (because surely the business geniuses who have led GE’s stock price to decline by 2/3 since they took over do have valuable thoughts), I plunge ahead.

Having worked at NBC for 11 years and having been part of one of the many many waves of staff cuts I can’t help but admire Conan for doing the right thing and taking the high road — for the most part. Leno’s been shit on by the peacock more times than he can count but he’s grinned and beared it. Not Conan.

Conan tore into NBC brass in his hilarious Monday night monologue and then released a statement Tuesday in which he said he wouldn’t go along with the network’s embarrassing about-face. Whether it really has to do with his not wanting to participate in the “destruction” of a storied show (dude, it’s a TV show not the Magna Carta) is beside the point. He’s doing what thousands of former NBC staffers wish they could have done.

To be fair,  as Conan said in his statement, I have nothing to complain about. NBC paid me very well for a long time to do a job that I loved so much it didn’t really seem like work. It’s all the people who don’t have Conan’s stature — the legions of behind-the-scenes people who have been treated even more shabbily than the red-haired goofball — that are cheering him on. Television has always been a nasty business filled with mercurial egocentric madmen (and madwomen) but Jeff Zucker’s tenure sets a new standard for passive-aggressive slash-and-burn business demolition.

Conan is simply speaking truth to that misused power. Sadly, however, if he does leave NBC he will end up solving one of Zucker’s big problems. NBC can’t really use four (let’s not forget Carson Daly!) late night hosts and Conan has arguably shown the least promise. How ironic that Conan could help Zucker partially fix the mess of Zucker’s own making. Let’s not forget this total devaluation of a prized and profitable piece of TV real estate began back in 2004 when the fair-haired CEO convinced his boss, GE chief Jeff Immelt, that instead of fixing what was broke (no new hits in primetime during Zucker’s entire tenure) he needed to fix what wasn’t: late night. But then who’s gonna argue with the smartest guy in the room?

I’ll never forget the “town hall” meeting in 2008 in which the head of the “Local Media Division” (the then-new name for what used to be a collection of the most profitable local TV stations in America), John Wallace, waxed poetic about how he was outsmarting the competition by following the “Blue Ocean Strategy”. I chuckled under my breath. I knew the book.

Many of the people who then worked at WNBC gathered in the legendary Studio 6B where Jack Paar had invented “The Tonight Show” and where Channel 4 had broadcast the local news for three decades. We had been called together to hear about the big changes coming to our station and others across the division. At the time Wallace had been in charge for nine months but had made almost no appearances at the stations so this was his big coming out. Unfortunately there was no way for him to sugar coat the decisions he had made up in his office suite on the 52nd floor.

Wallace talked about how the business was changing — people were watching less broadcast TV, ad revenues were falling, and the high costs had to come down. What to do? Wallace said NBC needed to leave the red ocean and sail into a blue ocean — shorthand for a hot-at-the-time economic theory propagated by two economists who got a lot of space in the influential Harvard Business Review before compiling their new economic dreamscape in a best-selling book released in 2005. Their bottom line was relatively simple: leave the “red ocean” of battling known competitors in existing markets and sail to the “blue ocean” of unknown markets where competition is scarce or non-existent. Best of all a company can radically cut costs but still maintain big profits. Sounds good, no?

At NBC that meant giving up competing in the broadcast television space at the local level and instead repositioning as a “content provider” across numerous “platforms”. New websites! New workflows! Video screens on the PATH train! Monitors at gas pumps! And, oh yeah, half the staff. It’s worked out pretty well if going from the #1 brand to irrelevant was the goal.

I tell this story because Wallace is a favorite of Zucker. The “we’re-smarter-than-everybody-else” attitude is pervasive in the network’s executive suites. No matter that the authors of the Blue Ocean Strategy have been unable to show a single company that followed the plan and was successful. That the idea you could radically cut costs by giving up on a known business and still be just as profitable in an unknown (and perhaps non-existent) business sure sounded good in the boardroom!

The late-night fiasco is more of the same. Don’t compete at 10pm with ABC and CBS. Just give up and set sail for the blue ocean. Unfortunately there is no blue ocean in primetime. Just a blood-red ocean filled with giant icebergs — the sea in which the once proud and impregnable Titanic of broadcasting floats, dead in the water, and listing heavily. Yet the captain and his corporate masters act like he’s a genius. Please let me fail like that in a future life!

Tuesday’s review of Diane Sawyer’s debut in Tuesday’s NY Post is a case in point. Kyle Smith goes on a spleen dump and gets almost everything comically wrong. He’s one the the paper’s TV writers but you wouldn’t know it from his lack of knowledge, writing ability, or research acumen.

First let me say for the record that I don’t have strong feelings about Diane Sawyer one way or another. It’s good that two of the three big seats of TV journalism are filled with women (finally) but I kinda prefer Katie. Nonetheless I don’t watch any of the nightly newscasts regularly (I’m decidedly under the age of 63) so I don’t particularly care.

Second, it pays to remember here that the Post and Fox News are Rupert Murdoch’s one-two partisan political punchers — media outlets that feed off of one another to help create news-like events that do the boss’s bidding (see: Tea Partys). Once you get that it makes all the sense in the world why Mr. Smith would go to Cuckooland in talking about FNC competitor ABC News.

Smith takes Sawyer to task for interviewing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last week, holding the “get” until this week, and then not really grilling him. That’s all fair. TV news has always been about the “show” as much as the journalism and lining up big interviews so that the promotions department can tease the crap out of it is SOP on all the networks including Kyle’s beloved FNC. Remember Fox’s Sarah Palin week? A sharper bulb might have used ABC’s reliance on this old skool technique to point out how all the network news divisions have turned their nightly 22 minutes into shows about their anchors rather than about the news.

Instead Smith goes on to note that ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl did a piece on health care that was, according to Kyle, insufficiently like one Glenn Beck would do. He notes with derision that the story was filled with “last week’s” news about the deals made to get various Senators to back the bill. The same reports that fill his own paper’s coverage today. I’m pretty sure the intrepid Mr. Smith has not taken his complaints about the Post’s coverage to his boss Col Allen. Probably because the story is still developing….

Then there’s this:

A story on the dropping crime rate cited FBI statistics that showed, for instance, murder down 10 percent from January to June. Wait: you’re giving us news that became available July 1? Is this ABC or The History Channel?

Hahahaha. Oh that Kyle. So clever! But wait: it take the FBI six months to collect crime stats from the hundreds of cities and towns and law enforcement agencies across the country. So the FBI report was released…wait for it…yesterday. The day ABC (and everyone else including the NY Times, Bloomberg, the Washington Post, and 686 other news sites according to Google) reported on it. Apparently fact-checking is not a strong suit of either Mr. Smith or his paper. Maybe I can help. Here’s the press release from the FBI.

Smith digs Sawyer and her show as a “stale plate of info-leftovers for shut-ins, news for people who aren’t all that interested in news” without noting that the three network newscasts still get at least four times as many viewers as all of the prime-time cable clowns combined. I admit I’m not one of either group but if Smith’s colorful description of Sawyer’s show is accurate I can’t wait for him to let his quick wit loose on the shows of Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity or Keith Olbermann all of which traffic in talking about days-old stories (forget about reporting anything) to audiences that are even older (and presumably more shut in) than the network newscasts.

Finally Smith shows his true colors when he derisively points out that the Sawyer broadcast spent 27 seconds on the death of actress Brittany Murphy as compared with 42 seconds on Obama delivering cookies to kids. I’m not sure either deserved that much time but what do I know? Unlike Kyle Smith I don’t work for a “news”  organization that devoted more back-to-back covers to Tiger Woods sex life than it did to the September 11th attacks in which almost 3000 Americans died.

What is Comcast thinking?

Normally Get Real is about politics but I can’t help myself on this one. I worked at NBC for 11 years and in the television biz for 21 years. It gives me a little perspective on the Comcast-NBC deal. A lot of people have written a lot of copy on this takeover and there are a lot of angles on it. But I haven’t see anyone point out the obvious: Comcast is looking a lot like Time-Warner, Rupert Murdoch, and GE in betting on the wrong company in the wrong business at the wrong time. The only thing Comcast has gotten right is the price — NBC is being stolen. We’ll get to that.

In all the coverage about Comcast’s purchase of NBC there’s been tons of talk about how NBC Universal has done very badly in traditional broadcast television world but very well in cable. True enough if your horizon stretches no further than, say, next summer. The obits for broadcast have been written before and with $600 billion in ad revenues sloshing around I’d bet the reports of broadcast television’s death are still very premature. But there’s no denying cable networks have a better economic model — at this moment. Here’s the conventional wisdom as written in the New York Times on Saturday:

NBC has been mired in fourth place among the major broadcast networks, and the economics of the broadcast television business has deteriorated in recent years amid declining overall ratings and a decline in advertising. By contrast, cable channels have continued to thrive because they rely on a steady stream of subscriber fees from cable companies like Comcast.

True dat. But for how long? AOL seemed like a sure thing when Time-Warner made one of the dumbest, costliest decisions in the history of corporate America. After all, everybody was getting on the web and AOL had the biggest market share. In dial-up.

Fast forward a few years and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corportation made what many considered a very savvy play by buying MySpace for $580 million. Rupe grabbed the hottest company in the hottest tech segment, social networking. But a funny thing happened on the way to the rich house — Facebook. FT has a pretty devastating look at all this here. As News Corp employee Homer Simpson would say, “Doh!”

And then there’s NBC itself. In 2006 GE allowed NBC honcho Jeff Zucker to spend $600 million (really!) on women’s web portal iVillage. Even at the time a lot of people questioned what they were smoking on the 52nd floor of 30 Rock. Needless to say, iVillage didn’t prove to be NBC’s salvation as women moved on to websites with better social networking. And that promised synergy? The iVillage Live TV show didn’t work out so well.

So now comes Comcast to snatch NBC away from a desperate GE. Clearly Comcast has driven a hard bargain as it is getting 51% of a $37 billion company (the new NBCU) for just 37% of $37 billion ($6.5 B paid to GE and $7.25 B in Comcast cable networks being put into the new company). But even at this fire sale price, is it a smart deal?

The potentially fatal troubles for broadcast have been easy to see for a decade for anyone bothering to look. Broadcast is a linear medium: you experience it in continuous timeframe. While first the VCR and now the DVR allowed viewers to take some control, broadcasters could still be sure their programming was being watched on televisions. That day is swiftly ending and with it broadcasters will be left high and dry.

Comcast, though, is a cable company and is not terribly interested in NBC’s broadcast unit nor it’s anachronistic television stations. For now the company is making all the right noises about keeping broadcasting free for the public, blah, blah, blah but there are a lot of regulators to please in the next year so what do you expect. Think about it: take NBC’s local stations. From Comcast’s perspective, what’s the point? When 90% of Americans get their TV via cable or satellite, what purpose does a local TV station play? Comcast could get NBC programming directly from NBC, split the cable fee revenue, and it’s cable subscribers wouldn’t know anything has changed (other than they’re missing the local news but NBC has pretty much given up on local news anyway and Comcast has 24/7 news operations in many markets so it’s unclear anyone would notice).

No, Comcast doesn’t care about broadcast. It wants Universal’s movies to fill its cable pipelines and it wants NBC’s hot cable networks and their hefty cash flows. Cable nets like the supposed crown jewels in NBC’s crown (Bravo, USA, SyFy) have two big advantages over their broadcast counterparts. First, cable audiences have different expectations about the amount and quality of programming on cable. While it’s true that cable nets are increasingly running first-rate original dramas, most of these channels live on a diet of reality, reruns, and replays. Programming a week of USA or Bravo is an exercise in putting a small number of shows into a large number of slots. And audiences are okay with that. Imagine CBS getting away with running only 3 or 4 hours of fresh programming a week.

The other edge cable has over broadcast is money. Cable nets get money from advertising and from the cable companies like Time Warner Cable, Cablevision, and Comcast. That’s why your cable bill is a hundred bucks a month. You are paying a buck for  O, another buck for Nat Geo, maybe two bucks for Discovery or A+E, and pretty soon you’ve spent some real money. That’s the dirty little (not so) secret of the cable biz. But it’s also where the fallacy of Comcast deal lies.

People have stopped watching broadcast TV in large numbers because they can see broadcast TV programming when and where they want it. Viewers are in control and that is decimating the broadcast industry. A friend of mine watches downloaded commercial-free episodes of Fox’s “Glee” on his iPhone. Not because he can’t watch it on TV when it actually airs or on DVR playback but because this method gives him TOTAL control. And there’s the canary in cable’s coalmine.

What happens when people start dropping their cable TV connections in the same way they’re dropping their telephone landlines? It’s not a hypothetical. There’s strong evidence this is just beginning to happen with young adults who aren’t cutting out cable — they’re not getting in the first place. Did you catch the lead paragraphs in Brian Stelter’s Times piece on this very topic?

As she prepared her daughter for college, Anne Sweeney insisted that a television be among the dorm room accessories. “Mom, you don’t understand. I don’t need it,” her 19-year-old responded, saying she could watch whatever she wanted on her computer, at no charge. That flustered Ms. Sweeney, who happens to be the president of the Disney-ABC Television Group.

“You’re going to have a television if I have to nail it to your wall,” she told her daughter, according to comments she made at a Reuters event this week. “You have to have one.”

But she does not, actually. For 60 years, TV could be watched only one way: through the television set. Now, though, millions watch shows like “Grey’s Anatomy” on demand and online on network Web sites like Ms. Sweeney’s ABC.com and on the Internet’s most popular streaming hub, Hulu.com.

Ask a 25-year-old what night, time, and channel her 3 favorite shows are on — cable or broadcast. You’ll be stunned at how few can do it. That’s because it’s no longer how people find and use video media. Here’s another way of looking at it: why do we still have channel numbers? I have no idea what channel number MSNBC or Bravo or TNT are on. Do you? Verizon FiOS already groups cable networks by themes in their system. Channel numbers are as archaic and irrelevant as program times.

Which brings us back to GE’s pathetic stewardship of NBC and Comcast’s late-to-the-dance takeover of the faded legend. Everybody touts the great cash-generating cable nets Comcast is getting. But if the band has packed up, the bar has closed, and the lights are about to be shut off at broadcast’s goodbye party, the DJ is clearly preparing to spin “Last Dance” at cable’s shindig.

GE is taking a well-deserved bath on NBC Universal but it’s far from clear Comcast is getting  an asset with anything other than declining value. AOL anyone?

St. Sen. Hiram Monserrate (photo: Ellis Kaplan)

If you want some advice about marriage — same-sex or otherwise — I can’t think of anyone better to ask than convicted girlfriend-batterer, ex-cop, and current New York State Senator Hiram Monserrate. Monserrate was one of eight Democrats in the state’s “upper” chamber who voted against allowing people of the same gender to marry yesterday.

(Irony alert! Four of the eight ‘no’ votes came from members who represent Queens — but apparently not queens.)

Although I’m sure he had very good reasons for his decision (the word in Albany and his Elmhurst district is he’s hoping to beat back a primary opponent by appealing to religious voters!) Monserrate is pretty much the poster boy for everything that is wrong in Albany and he proved it yet again with his vote.

You may recall a grand jury charged Monserrate with three felonies and three misdemeanors in the caught-on-tape beating/slashing of his girlfriend Karla Giraldo. Giraldo was seen on surveillance tape clinging to the doorway of Monserrate’s home screaming while the Senator shoved her outside. At first Giraldo made statements that lead prosecutors to believe Monserrate had slashed her in the face with a broken drinking glass. Later she changed her tune.

Nonetheless the Senator was convicted of misdemeanor assault and will someday, maybe, be the subject of a “disciplinary” hearing in the Senate. And Friday he will be sentenced for his crime.

So now this “family values” Democrat wants to gin up support among the Pentecostal crowd out on Roosevelt Avenue by voting against same-sex marriage? Perfect.

The arguments for and against marriage equality are well known and honest people can disagree about whether it’s fair to deny two people civil, legal but non-religious marital status solely because of their gender. It would be interesting to hear Queens Senator Shirley Huntley’s take. The 71-year-old African-American Senator certainly remembers anti-miscegenation laws that denied civil, legal marriage to two people based solely on the color of their skin. She was another of the 8 Dems who voted ‘no.’ Unfortunately she chose not to explain.

In fact just one of the 38 Senators who voted against same-sex marriage explained his vote. St. Sen. (and minister) Ruben Diaz has had a bee in his bonnet about gay everything since as far back as I can remember. I’ll never forget the news conference in the South Bronx a bunch of reporters attended one winter day a decade back in which the speakers were there to talk about some environmental racism they thought was going on in the neighborhood. One by one they decried how the area was bearing far more than its share of pollution. Then Diaz came to the mic and went on a bender about gays. Huh?

In 1994 when he was on the Civilian Complaint Review Board he said bringing the Gay Games to New York would only increase the number of people with AIDS. A few years later he was the driving force in trying to close the Harvey Milk High School (designed to give gay kids a safe space to go to school) by claiming it was “heterosexual discrimination.” At least he’s consistent. But one has to wonder why he has for so many years been fixated on gay things. Freud would have a field day.

And here’s where the story comes full circle. Diaz told the Post recently that he will be officiating the marriage of Hiram Monserrate and Karla Giraldo. After the restraining order that is keeping the Senator away from his punching-bag fiance-to-be is lifted.

Oh, so that’s the traditional marriage the Senate is protecting! God bless them.

Funny thing is the preaction from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party and it’s enablers in the blogosphere was just as predictable. They have signaled from the start of the Afghanistan conversation that more troops — escalation — was a terrible, dangerous decision they could not support. Now that the Iraq War is winding down it’s no time to up the ante on another foreign adventure whose subtitle is “Quagmire.” Their talking point: Vietnam.

What seems to be missing here is an undeniable fact which Obama helpfully reminded America about right at the start of his (too) lengthy speech:

Just days after 9/11, Congress authorized the use of force against al-Qaida and those who harbored them — an authorization that continues to this day. The vote in the Senate was 98 to 0. The vote in the House was 420 to 1.

No one has really argued that the threat from al-Qaida has vanished. Indeed Obama’s critics on both sides (many of whom participated in those votes) acknowledge the criminal terrorist gangs have regrouped along both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. But to say (as some progressives do) that this wouldn’t be the case had Bush not redirected the effort to Iraq where al-Qaida had no personnel and no bases, is a red herring. Yes it’s true history will almost certainly regard Bush’s Iraq dance as a sham and a distraction but that doesn’t mean al-Qaida isn’t alive and well in Afghanistan. Wisconsin Democratic Senator Russ Feingold makes a more convincing case in questioning whether more troops now, years after military commanders on the ground began asking for them, will actually work. He raises valid questions and he may be right but Obama is betting additional troops will make the difference. There is no demonstrably right answer. It’s a toss of the dice either way with our national security at stake.

On the other hand to argue that Obama’s decision is late (a total lie, as the AP helpfully points out on Fox’s website) or that in setting a deadline he is sending a message to the terrorists to,

Wait it out. Blend in. Pretend to be a non-terrorist until July of 2011, then all will be well.

is kinda bizarre. That last quote was from the radical Christian radioman Kevin McCullough whose “analysis” of the Obama speech was prominently featured on Fox’s website yesterday evening. He spins the yarn that setting objectives and deadlines is handing al-Qaida a gift. We’ll be hearing that non-stop for a while I suspect since conservatives have been pushing for big troop deployments to Afghanistan for months. But doing a troop surge and then setting deadlines for withdrawal is precisely what Bush eventually did in Iraq and, much to the chagrin of his critics, it worked better than anything else he tried. Indeed Bush’s conservative defenders say liberals refuse to give him credit for accomplishing what those critics said he wouldn’t with the surge.

What last night’s speech really did was make plain that there are no good choices here and that while our last President governed with his gut, this one is governing with his head. To some that may sound like an improvement but it doesn’t mean he’s gonna get it right either.

A Gun Nut

When we wrote last week about the ridiculous press release put out by the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association claiming that David Yassky lost his run-off primary race for New York City Comptroller because he was a proponent of gun control we got the predictable stream of unpublishable screeds and a few comment arguing with our reasoning.

Putting aside the venom, several people wrote to say that Yassky had made gun control an issue in this race, one stating that Yassky had made it a “central issue of his campaign.” Others repeated that assertion in arguing we were off-base.

So since we like to deal with demonstrable facts here let’s cut to the chase. Here are the scripts for Yassky’s four TV spots:

#1 “Know Me”

YASSKY: I’m David Yassky. You don’t know me but I’m going to save you money.

I’ll get rid of government waste and stand up to the special interests.

It’s what I’ve always done.

I worked with Chuck Schumer to pass the Brady Law and the Assault Weapons Ban.

On the Council, I closed tax loopholes for luxury housing developers.

Sued Exxon Mobil to clean up our water.

And I put the entire City Budget online because it’s your money.

As Comptroller, I’ll demand accountability. The buck will stop with me and I will watch every penny.

#2 “Behind”

YASSKY: Behind every dollar that government wastes is a child without a textbook, or a senior without a hot meal.

And behind every budget loophole is a special interest that benefits.

That’s why I put the entire City budget online so taxpayers can see how our money is being spent.

As Comptroller, I’ll demand accountability and results for every dollar, and eliminate waste and sweetheart deals with tough audits of City agencies.

I’m David Yassky. The buck will stop with me and I’ll watch every penny, because it’s your money.

#3 “Endorse”

NARRATOR: For Comptroller, the New York Times endorses David Yassky as the candidate “most suited to do the job, with skill, intelligence, and independence.”

The Times praises Yassky’s work on affordable housing, gun control, and for putting the City budget online.

Democrat David Yassky for Comptroller.

#4 “Marty”

SCRIPT—“Marty.”

MARKOWITZ: Brooklyn’s got the best. Junior’s, Nathan’s, Cake Man Raven, Yassky.

WOMAN: Yassky? What’s a Yassky?

MARKOWITZ: David Yassky. Running for City Comptroller. He’s my guy.

NARRATOR: Democrat David Yassky. In the Council, he closed tax loopholes for developers, sued Exxon Mobil to clean up Greenpoint, and put the City budget online because it’s your money. As Comptroller, Yassky will demand accountability with tough audits of City agencies. The buck will stop with him and he’ll watch every penny.

WOMAN: Wow, we’ll take a Yassky.

MARKOWITZ: Me too.

MARKOWITZ: Brooklyn’s got the best. Junior’s, Nathan’s, Cake Man Raven, Yassky.

WOMAN: Yassky? What’s a Yassky?

MARKOWITZ: David Yassky. Running for City Comptroller. He’s my guy.

NARRATOR: Democrat David Yassky. In the Council, he closed tax loopholes for developers, sued Exxon Mobil to clean up Greenpoint, and put the City budget online because it’s your money. As Comptroller, Yassky will demand accountability with tough audits of City agencies. The buck will stop with him and he’ll watch every penny.

WOMAN: Wow, we’ll take a Yassky.

MARKOWITZ: Me too.

Sure enough when we wrote that there was no mention of gun control in the papers or TV coverage of this race we failed to recognize that there was a mention — actually two — in the ads Yassky put on local cable channels. Fair enough. We were wrong. But isn’t it true that the first mention is really just a way to point up his endorsement from wildly popular New York Senator Chuck Schumer? And isn’t the second one of several items the New York Times mentioned in their editorial endorsement of Yassky? It’s quite a stretch to say he made gun control a “central issue of his campaign.”

The truth is none of the people writing in addressed this from our last post:

And follow the logic: If “the citizens of New York City have delivered an unambiguous rebuke to the gun control movement” then Sen. Chuck Schumer should be in deep doo-doo. He’s up for reelection in 2010. So how are his poll numbers holding up? According to the Marist Poll last month 6 in 10 New Yorkers think he’s doing an excellent or good job — just 13% think he’s doing a poor job.

Please answer this question before you send out another round of “Yassky-lost-because-of guns” missives.

And while you’re at it explain to me, if gun control was a “central issue” in a very low turnout election in which every political pro will tell you organized labor backing is the only guarantee of victory, how it is that Bill de Blasio running for Public Advocate on the very same day, won. Unlike Yassky, de Blasio got a pretty fair amount of ink and airplay for airbrushing out a gun necklace on his daughter’s neck from a campaign flier. Remember that de Blasio was Hillary Clinton’s first campaign manager and has always supported Mike Bloomberg’s anti-gun crusades.

If Yassky lost because of guns, then Bill de Blasio should have lost for the same reason. But wait. He won, didn’t he. Facts are stubborn things.

Sometimes spin is so ridiculous — so obviously wrong that political reporters have to laugh. Or blog about it.

So here’s a great press release sent out Wednesday regarding the New York City Comptroller runoff election results from Tuesday night. Remember this is from an organization based in upstate Troy that probably had never heard of John Liu or David Yassky until today.

News from New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc.

New York City Primary Voters Reject Gun Grabber

TROY, NY (09/30/2009)(readMedia)– For the second time in two weeks, the citizens of New York City have delivered an unambiguous rebuke to the gun control movement by rejecting David Yassky’s bid for Comptroller. Yassky based his campaign largely upon his gun control record. As a staffer to then Congressman Charles Schumer he worked on both the Brady Act and Clinton Gun Ban. His campaign was endorsed by Senator Schumer, the Daily News and the New York Times because of this. Yassky’s double-digit loss in the runoff election demonstrates just how far outside the mainstream of society gun control advocates are. A solid majority of Democrat voters in all five boroughs have soundly rejected this candidate and his ideas.

Where to start? Oh wait let me pull my jaw off the floor and then stop howling. For those (few) people who were actually following this runoff election the only issue that got any resonance at all was about the Working Families Party’s backing of Liu and how that might make him beholden to the union-backed mini-party. Guns? No mention in the papers or on TV.

And follow the logic: If “the citizens of New York City have delivered an unambiguous rebuke to the gun control movement” then Sen. Chuck Schumer should be in deep doo-doo. He’s up for reelection in 2010. So how are his poll numbers holding up? According to the Marist Poll last month 6 in 10 New Yorkers think he’s doing an excellent or good job — just 13% think he’s doing a poor job.

So here’s some advice to the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association: It’s fine to try and look on the bright side but leave the production of fantasy to Hollywood.

Back up to this past winter when Paterson’s amateur-hour handling of his pick to replace Hillary Clinton in the Senate left just about everyone slack-jawed. He managed to piss of anyone connected to the Kennedys (not an insignificant body of people especially in the Democratic Party) by publicly dissing and embarrassing Caroline Kennedy before doing precisely what the White House didn’t want him to do — pluck newly-reelected Congresswoman Kirsten Gillibrand from her very Republican district thereby allowing the GOP to score a quick victory just months after Obama’s sweeping win. Fortunately for Dems the GOP in New York is even more dysfunctional than they are and managed to lose what should have been a sure win.

That gave New Yorkers a taste of the Governor’s incompetence. He then inexplicably fed that perception over the next couple of months by failing to exert any leadership over the Legislature as it’s members descended into chaos. Ever since Paterson’s poll numbers have been in the dumps and we’ve talked a lot about it here, here, and here. In fact all along we’ve said despite his disasterous ratings — even among African-Americans — Paterson was probably safe from a primary challenge unless a major African-American politician broke from supporting him.

Enter Barack Obama.

But why? Why would Obama care enough at this stage to get involved in New York’s local politics? He’s not from here. He doesn’t need help from a New York Governor. The election isn’t until 2010 when Congresssional elections will surely dominate the political storyline. So why?

Enter Chuck Schumer.

Several people close to Paterson and Schumer say this has Chuck’s fingerprints all over it. Schumer was the one who first mentioned Gillibrand and eventually got his way. Chuck is the one who in two terms heading the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee brought his party first into the majority and then made it filibuster-proof. Chuck is the (not so) hidden power center in the Senate. And Chuck doesn’t want to deal with a Governor heading the ticket in 2010 that could bring it all crashing down.

You see Senator Gillibrand is up for election in 2010 too and her poll numbers are only so-so despite her spreading a heavy dose of Chuck’s media magic across the Empire State. If Paterson is in trouble on top — especially if Rudy Giuliani were to run as he has been threatening — Gillibrand could be collateral damage. Meaning Chuck’s choice — Chuck’s bluest of blue states — could be the one that yields the filibuster-proof majority.

And so he called in the big gun to try and ease Paterson out. Unfortunately the Governor has other ideas and our sources say he is the one who leaked the story creating blowback on Obama and Schumer (neither of whom he is all that fond of anyway). So now Paterson can say he’s running and he’s standing up to pressure from his own party because he puts the people of New York first. Blah blah blah.

Michael Steele’s unchecked inanity aside (the Times lets the RNC Chairman get away with this: “I think Governor Paterson’s numbers are about the same as Governor Corzine’s numbers, and yet the president was with Governor Corzine and I don’t know whether there’s been a request for Governor Corzine to step down in New Jersey….” Corzine is down by 8, Paterson is down by 20), Obama should not have let himself be drawn into this mess this early. Worse, he got smacked by the woefully undertalented Paterson.

Nonetheless Paterson and the Democrats have real problems. Watch Charlie Rangel. If he starts spending private time with Paterson the feckless Governor may yet find himself with an ambassadorship to Fiji.

Joker or Whiteface?

It was inescapable from the very start of Barack Obama’s campaign waaaaay back in January 2007 that race and racism would play a big part in whatever came to pass. And of course it did and it has and it still is and it always will. Now the New York Times — or to be fair one of her columnists — has finally said what is pretty apparent: An awful lot of the screaming incoherent rage ostensibly directed at Obama’s actions is actually just plain racism.

Maureen Dowd put it this way on Sunday:

I’ve been loath to admit that the shrieking lunacy of the summer — the frantic efforts to paint our first black president as the Other, a foreigner, socialist, fascist, Marxist, racist, Commie, Nazi; a cad who would snuff old people; a snake who would indoctrinate kids — had much to do with race.

Nothing new here if you’re a regular follower of even the slightly-left-of-center blogosphere but for the Doyenne of the Paper of Record it’s a mighty leap.

It’s not a leap Obama nor his inner circle want to make, though, lest the President get drawn into the elemental American battle. It’s been raging for 300 hundred years — from the Founders through the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, Brown v. Board, OJ Simpson, to the first African-American president. America has never worked through it’s race-tainted birth and probably never will unless and until we’re all so intermixed that to be American means to be “Made of Many Parts.”

Obama has done his best to act as if we are post-racial but he, and everyone else, knows better. As a black man, though, he can’t actually engage in this battle directly without becoming exactly what his conservative critics so desire — another Jesse Jackson. Turning Obama into a black guy who happens to be President (as opposed to what he is: the President who happens to be a black guy) would be a major accomplishment for the Beck-Limbaugh Axis of Anger. And so they will continue to work very hard on that goal knowing they have fertile soil in which to till their seeds of rage.

In the meantime let’s face the facts: When a bunch of angry, white, post-65-year-old people scream and yell all summer about the government taking over health care, it cannot really be about the government taking over health care. Why? Because the screamers all have government health care. It’s called Medicare and every American over 65 gets it (not that Maria Bartiromo would know this). So when these folks rage with such force that they risk stroke and heart attack they do so knowing full well that should such a health calamity befall them, you and I  will pick up the tab for their hospitalization and care. Must be nice.

And when fringe groups organize Tea Parties to protest taxes and bailouts that then reappear months later as personal hate-fests aimed at one man, it is clearly not about taxes and bailouts which got relatively scant attention at Saturday’s big 9/12 rally in Washington. The rally, which was respectfully covered by the Washington Post and The Hill has become yet another paper tiger for conservatives like Matt Welch (of the conservative opinion mag Reason) writing in today’s New York Post:

How do you marginalize a significant protest against a politician or policy you support? Lowball the numbers, then dismiss participants as deranged and possibly dangerous kooks. In the case of Saturday’s massive 9/12 protest in Washington, done and done.

“Small protest,” popular lefty blogger Josh Marshall reported from his armchair, as an overflow crowd (at least 100,000, by my rough, unscientific estimate) filled the 1.5 miles between the south White House and the US Capitol, spilling out all over the National Mall and even down the street to Union Station.

Welch goes on to quote the head of a DC-based think tank and, of course, Dowd. When he frames the argument that way (using a liberal blogger, a think-tanker, and a liberal op-ed columnist as the only evidence of media bias) he’s able to make a convincing case that the protest had nothing to do with race and everything to do with the mainstream media keeping the facts from the American people. Well done sir!

Of course we can thank Representative Addison Graves Wilson Sr. (oh, sorry, that’s Joe to his constituents) of “You Lie!” fame for at least some of this belated recognition of racism as the root. The Republican Congressman from the great state of South Carolina was a folk hero at the march on Saturday for allegedly speaking truth to power. There were more than a few “Joe for President” signs. But as Dowd put it better than I can:

The congressman, we learned, belonged to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, led a 2000 campaign to keep the Confederate flag waving above South Carolina’s state Capitol and denounced as a “smear” the true claim of a black woman that she was the daughter of Strom Thurmond, the ’48 segregationist candidate for president.

Joe Wilson is a racist. And so are many of the people that have attended rallies and town halls who are incapable of explaining what it is they are opposed to other than “him”. “Socialism” doesn’t count — especially for Medicare recipients and anyone who lives in the West where life exists in most places only because the Federal government built dams to provide cheap water and cheap power. Glenn Beck and Rush Limbauch are racists of convenience: Spouting thinly-veiled racism earns them huge paychecks (Limbaugh = $38 million/year minimum, Beck = $18 million/year).

Case in point: Beck’s recent regurgitation of a video showing young black men in military camo pants and blue t-shirts doing some sort of drill. Watch it all here. Beck first spent a couple of weeks wondering what these young men were up to back in October (during the last month of the campaign natch) and never quite was able to discover (despite plenty of very quick posts to the web explaining what the video was) that it was a high-school drill team practice. If only they’d been dressed in leotards he would have understood! In fact Beck learned very quickly what the video was and he certainly knows now but he still uses it to conjure up the specter of a secret army of black men ready to help the black president get his way — and give us all health care….

And then there’s that Obama as The Joker poster. Is it an affirmative action success story that a black man is playing the Joker? Or is it a not-very-subtle racist reminder of the not-so-distant past? We report, you decide.

Everyone knows there’s deep-seated racism in America and it’s not just among white people. Latinos, Asians, Blacks, Caribbean-Americans, Indians. There’s racism in every group and in every one of us. Sometimes there’s a lot,  sometimes very little. And that’s what Obama tried to be open about in his groundbreaking speech on race during the campaign. His grandma was a little bit racist and so is he. His point was that racism is alive and well and will never go away unless we acknowledge it, talk about it, and keep it uncovered.

Unfortunately some people have taken that to mean wearing racism on one’s sleeve is a good thing.