03 March 2010

New York's Stewardship Governor

Former Governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer, paid for sex, which is fine with me if he had not run on a platform of ethics, law and order. He couldn't just pay for the sex either. He had to arrange his trysts across state lines, set up special accounts to pay the agency, and then transfer the money across state lines, all to commit a crime. Besides that, I hear he kept his socks on while he was going at it. I can just picture the creepy guy wearing black pull-up socks with attached garters. When this came to light he finally came to his senses and stepped down. The poor guy's wife stood on the stage with him. His replacement, David Paterson, should follow Spitzer's example of taking responsibility for his actions and he should step down too. Paterson had the advantage of being a guy who could do what he wanted and not worry about his poll numbers. He was playing with house money. He could make unpopular decisions and lead the way to balance the $8,000,000,000 deficit that the state faced. All he had to do was play the Harry S Truman card: the buck stops here! But Steward Governor Paterson could not escape the ways and means that passes for state politics these days. One of his inside guys beat up his girlfriend and the State Police urged her to drop the charges. Actually, the guy in charge of the New York State Police, the top guy, tried to influence her. Then Paterson personally called her and urged her not to show up the next day in court. She didn't and the charges were dropped. Yesterday Paterson's former aides revealed that the governor had asked them to try to talk to sense into the woman who was the victim. "Talk some sense into" means that he wanted her to drop the charges. Today the governor is embroiled in a Yankee ticket scandal and the people who decide such things are considering pressing charges against him for illegaly accepting gifts. Over Yankee tickets. Yeah, they were in the World Series but still. I supported Paterson earlier when I thought he had some cojones. Recently someone in his administration, or him, proposed to dissolve the Public Market of Henrietta, a successful business whose success has contributed to over 1.5 million dollars in property taxes. Now the governor wants to take over the Market, take the twelve million dollars it has in the bank and contribute that towards the state's debt. After that it would most likely sell the market piecemeal. So, aside from the ethics violations, Paterson wants to take a successful business and dismantle it. If this is a snapshot of how government works then it's not surprising that the Democrats can't pass anything even though they have a majority of the votes. Steward Governor Paterson should step down and let someone else lead for the next ten months. There is an election in the fall and then maybe, just maybe, we can get someone removed from the Old Boys' Network with a sense of right and wrong to run our state.