It’s over.
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 …

So the cat is out of the bag and now the even the White House is worried about New York Governor David Paterson’s incredible deflating poll problem. But the way it’s playing out is not how the President, nor the people who put him up to this, expected.
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 …

So the Albany soap opera has come to a close. Crystal and Alexis will live to catfight another day. Serena and Blair will return in the fall. And Malcolm and Pedro will assuredly be ready for more battles next session. In the meantime let’s figure out the winners and losers from the month of madness.
Losers
We’ll start with the losers because it’s easier.
Republicans
Already in a deep state of disarray and on the wrong end of the demographic pendulum, New York Republicans came thisclose to pulling off a miracle. The problem is …

There’s big news about Tom Golisano.
The formerly upstate billionaire (he’s still got the money but he moved to Florida) is dating former tennis star Monica Seles. So reports Page Six. Oh, and the three-time candidate for New York Governor  just loves the circus. How else to explain his recent quarterbacking of the quasi-Republican coup in Albany?
Golisano has always been an odd bird in New York politics. In his three runs for Governor as an independent (94, 98, 02) he always seemed to have it out for Republican George Pataki (who …

It’s really hard to see the political logic in Governor David Paterson’s unveiling of a same-sex marriage bill for New York on Thursday. But maybe that’s the beauty of it. Honestly, Paterson has no where to go but up.
Paterson’s poll numbers are in the toilet. His handling of the Kennedy-Gillibrand-Clinton thing was a fiasco. He had his lunch handed to him on the budget. He can’t get a handful of gangster Senators from his own party to grow up and back a plan to rescue the MTA (and their own …

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 …

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 …

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 …

As much as we love to reward those who own up to their mistakes it’s a little hard to take Rupert Murdoch’s mea culpa over the NY Post Chimp-Obama cartoon at face value. Here’s what he wrote in an item place in a small box at the bottom of Page 2 in Tuesday’s Post.
“As the Chairman of the New York Post, I am ultimately responsible for what is printed in its pages. The buck stops with me. Last week, we made a mistake. We ran a cartoon that offended many …