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 …

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 …

 
Mea Culpa! Apparently after all those years of a President who couldn’t think of a single mistake he’d made and corporate executives who couldn’t find a failure they wouldn’t reward, mea culpa’s are back.
 
Earlier this week New York City’s Independent Budget Office released it’s annual “how we would fix this screwy city budget if we could” report (Budget Options for New York City). It contained dozens of ideas for how the city could save hundreds of millions by changing some big and small things about the way the city does …