The Seneca’s Buffalo Creek Casino has expanded its hours to 8am - 4am.

Pensioners and the working poor rejoice. Nothing like playing nickel and penny slots at 8am.

While Cookie Monster’s song echoes in your head, hopefully for the entire day, consider this news, which at least partly explains why the city of Buffalo is the second poorest large city in the nation.

The Business Council of New York State Inc. on Thursday released its Economic Growth Index, ranking the growth rate of the state’s 62 counties and all 50 states in five key areas between 1995 and 2005. The study questioned growth in jobs, average wage per job, total personal income, per-capita personal income, and population.

The Western New York counties of Erie, Niagara, Allegany, Chautauqua and Genesee received an F while Cattaraugus Wyoming received a D in the grading system. Also, the counties of Monroe and Onondaga, which include Rochester and Syracuse, respectively, received an F.

Of the 52 counties classified to be part of Upstate, 27 were given an F and 10 were graded a D.

Growth in jobs, population, and income are all at the bottom of the nationwide barrel. Given the mood I’m in, I’m of the mind that no one in Albany gives a crap. So long as their pet programs and allies are taken care of, and so long as Joe and Shelly are pleased, there will be nothing done whatsoever about this. Ex-frickin-celsior.

Buffalo is the second poorest city in the nation. According to census figures that are detailed on the front page of the paper, almost 30% of Buffalo’s population is below the poverty level, and a shocking 42.9% of children live in poverty. Buffalo’s median income is $27,850 - the third lowest in the nation.

This didn’t happen overnight, and turning it around is going to take time and will. The article focuses on schools and how important it is that the children get a good education so that they can learn the skills they need to compete in our post-industrial era. It’s hard to do when mom and/or dad can’t afford basic school supplies. It’s hard to do when many families are broken. It’s hard to do when people are so poor that school takes a back seat to just getting by.

But as I posted yesterday, safety is another part of the turnaround puzzle. Whether it’s gang warfare on the west side or petty theft downtown, community policing is the key to changing people’s perception of the city’s safety, as well as the reality. Cops walking a beat, getting to know the neighborhood they’re serving would make a huge difference.

We can CitiStat this place to death, and efficiency is nice. But safety and schools are critical, both in condition and of importance.

As for jobs, the future is in entrepreneurship and small business. We can’t rely on big industry anymore. Whatever the city can do to promote the creation of small businesses within its limits, whether through microloans or a streamlined, user-friendly permitting process, would make a big difference.

This post at Andrew Sullivan’s place is rather heartbreaking. Two years on and the hard work of cleaning up the 9th Ward continues to fall on eager volunteers.

Eager volunteers who leave outraged.

As for federal funding, it’s inadequate, the federal agencies are in over their heads, and it’s wrapped up in red tape and bureaucracy.

Maybe for a start we could design some levees that operate on a post-19th century design.

Clicky here for the full article.

In a Long Island speech yesterday, Governor Eliot Spitzer suggested for the first time that he might be willing to consider a state-imposed cap on property taxes. If the governor is serious, it could be a turning point for heavily burdened New York property owners.

If the gods of the news could grant me one wish, it would be that the news actually did news. I’m not criticizing the “as seen on TV” Mary Friona nonsense. I’m talking about the standard-issue cable news fare that has jettisoned actual, hard news for idiotic “screaming jerk right winger versus screaming jerk left winger” “debates”. The Today show just did a “story” about last week’s Opus comic, which poked fun at radical Islam. Some papers refused to run the cartoon, and Matt Lauer had to referee a screaming match between a right-winger who was outraged - OUTRAGED that some papers were to chicken to run a provocative cartoon, and a left-wing guy who was outraged - OUTRAGED that the right-wing guy didn’t recognize the editorial right of a paper not to run something it found provocative.

I don’t know who either of these two people are, nor do I want to. What passes for news and discourse in this country has devolved into little more than a WWE match, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

Here’s a question that a Miss Teen contestant totally demolished:

Now what that really shows is a very, very nervous teenager put on the spot during a live nationally televised event, and she can be excused for her inarticulate answer. But since “news” seldom contains actual news, or else contains very quick batches of sound bites about a small selection of the day’s events, Americans aren’t being made aware of what’s really going on in the world. Forget whether they can find the US on a map. Do they know about the crisis in Zimbabwe? Can they find Darfur on a map?

Sometimes we live in this bubble of information that’s hard to pop.

Welcome to the inaugural edition of the New York State Progressive Blog Roundup. Every week, we’ll be featuring news stories and highlights from blue bloggers across the state. Simple idea: it’s one state, and people should know what’s going on in other parts of it.

Progressive blogs who’d like to join this network should send an email to NYPBN – at – googlegroups – dot – com. And now, your roundup.

The Daily Gotham checks out Wikiscanner and finds some possibly, or probably, self-interested Wikipedia editing by the New York City Council.

A classic on The Albany Project: check out this diary about the Telecommunications Reform Act of 2007, also known as the Brodsky Bill. This legislation will

[require] the buildout of high speed broadband infrastructure to a minimum of 85% of the state, something desperately needed by under-served and economically depressed communities upstate. It would also protect net neutrality, bring cheaper cable and telephone rates through increased competition and allow New York to once again be a progressive, innovative model for other states to follow.

Rochester Turning takes a closer look at a fundamentalist church in Pittsford, and finds some disturbing messages spread, as ever, by an incompetent press.

Danger Democrat casts a baleful glance at John McHugh and some rather curious earmarks; flip-flopper McHugh was for these earmarks – he inserted them in an appropriations bill – before being against them – which he did when he voted against said bill.

DragonFlyEye has a very well-designed reader survey, well worth taking not just to help a brother out, but for other bloggers who might gain from doing such a thing themselves.

OnNYTurf provides a sneak peek at the upgrade of possibly the most useful feature of any New York City blog, its searchable Google/Subway map mashup.

NYCO draws some wider inferences from shenanigans involving a billboard and, needless to say, state funds, at the New York State fair in Syracuse.

Upstate Blue explores the background of the influence of the Independence Party in Saratoga Springs. With Democrats and republicans close to parity in terms of voter numbers, this minor party is able to affect close elections.

Democracy in Albany is impatient – get in line – with mainsream media coverage of Bruno/Stonegate. Amen, brother.

Joshing Politics is presently reporting from Paris, with photos, presumably to rub it in.

10,000 Things needs to publish more often. Check out their take on impeachment via William Shakespeare.

NY-13 gauges public sentiment in the Thirteenth District via a very to-the-point letter to the editor in the Staten Island Advance.

Troy Polloi shakes its head over goings-on at the local Democratic Party, but

All in all, we prefer the chaos of the Democrats to the eerie, Teutonic, lock-step discipline of the Republicans.

Nasty Letters has mildly disturbing video of Congressman Peter King, Wingnut-NY, palling out with Commander Guy. Not for the faint of heart.

Also on Long Island, The Community Alliance takes a look at what could be either Habsburg court protocol or the rules governing the ascension to sainthood, but is in fact the logic behind and implementation of property tax rebates.

Both Buffalo Pundit and Buffalo Geek are, unfortunately, dark at this writing due to a site upgrade. Next time, guys.

And that’s what’s going on. Apologies to anyone left out - shoot an email to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

…at the CACGEC candidate’s night I attended last night. While most of the talk was on casinos, at the very end of the meeting a woman stood up to make a great point. This happened in the middle of a short debate between three of the four people running for the Niagara District Common Council seat.

A woman in the way back stood up and instead of asking a question, she made a statement. She said she lived in the East Village of New York City, but had gone to school in Buffalo and loved the city. She indicated that nothing would truly change in the city until its safety was improved. She indicated that what Giuliani-Bratton did in New York in the 90s needed to be duplicated in Buffalo; cops walking a beat, being permitted to talk to people and to become acquainted with the people whom they serve. Her point was that having all of these wonderful things going on in Buffalo would be for naught if people weren’t safe, and/or didn’t feel safe. For all the hand-wringing over one- or two-officer patrol cars, community policing is what should be set up.

Wow, that sucked.

Sometime on Sunday evening, something happened to all of the WNYMedia.net sites. I don’t speak fluent php and I’m not that tech savvy, but let’s just say we broked teh internets.

Given the emergency situation and the fact that they all have actual day jobs, I have to hand it to the WNYMedia.net ninjas for getting the sites back up so fast. In sum, I believe there was only one comment left in the afternoon of Sunday, and it’s gone now and I apologize for that, but this is the only way we could restore the sites.

And I don’t mean the Ford Fusion. Clicky here.

Senator Volker has apologized for the epithet he hurled at MIT-educated RIT Professor of Civil Engineering Dr. Abi Aghayere. That’s nice. He didn’t mean to call Dr. Aghayere a “bohunk”. He just meant to say that Aghayere was an outsider poking his nose in where it didn’t belong. Oh, that’s much better.

Volker: “I had no idea, that was a mistake. Bohunk I always thought was an old Lancaster term or Western New York term for somebody that buts in, a ‘buttinsky’ or whatever, but it slipped out, I shouldn’t have said it. You should never characterize people, especially those you don’t know, and I apologize for that, as I did to him.”

Channel 4 sought out a qualified engineer to opine on the condition of the Cemetery Road Bridge, and his opinion was that it is unsafe. He’s not a “buttinsky”. He’s a fricking expert witness in the trial that ensues when someone dies on or under that bridge.

I don’t know which is more offensive. His insistence that it’s important to denigrate Dr. Aghayere for being a “buttinsky”, or that there’s nothing to see here, everybody move along now.:

My only point, and a position I still stand for, is that the bridge is safe - - confirmed again by both the New York State Department of Transportation and the Erie County Highway Department.

It’s safe. That must explain this:

Tuesday, the state raised its own safety flag. A state inspection of the Cemetery Road bridge in Lancaster has prompted a safety flag and now Erie County highway crews have 24 hours to respond.

We first told you about the condition of this bridge in May. An inspection in November found rocker bearings overextended and almost maxed out on the railroad side of the bridge. Two yellow advisory flags were issued, but to date…no physical repairs have been made.

A very wise person called me yesterday to catch up and talk about my campaign. This person has been in the thick of politics more than anyone I know. We talked about the Roger Stone phone calls, and he made the observation that it’s time for Albany to cut it out with the BS and get back to work. He said that if he was counseling Spitzer, he’d tell him just that, get him to go over to Bruno’s office to act like a governor and start being a leader.

The New York Times adds:

Now that Mr. Stone, the phone call and the caller’s charges are official distractions, we’d like to add to that list of sideshows all the breast-beating in Albany these days about the Spitzer administration. Whatever the new governor’s administration did wrong, it is now just the latest excuse for legislators to avoid doing the hard stuff, like cleaning up brownfields or the scandalous way campaign dollars control politicians in New York State.

Think of how much progress and potential has been squandered by all sides during Spitzer’s first 9 months in office. Nobody’s perfect, but Spitzer needs to stop using the State Police as a private eye, and Bruno needs to stop using proxies to harass Spitzer’s family, and disingenuous speechifying.

Hey guys, New York is still a shambles. Cut it out and get to work.

What’s the point of getting a college education when you walk off the podium with your mortarboard on your head, your degree in your hand, and a debt equal to the mortgage on a large home in Lancaster?

And we’re not talking federal school loans. We’re talking private loans with unpredictable variable interest rates.

It’s one thing to attack your opponent’s record. It’s another to call him a Klansman. Yet that’s just what an ad in the Buffalo Challenger did.

See Channel 7’s video here.

This politics thing isn’t cheap, so I’ll be holding some fundraisers over the next several weeks in order to fund my campaign to represent the people of the 4th District.

If you’re so inclined, please come by to 67 West at 67 West Chippewa at 5pm on Friday the 24th. A $99 donation gets you in the door, drinks & food.

I appreciate any and all support you might be willing to offer, and contributions can be made here.

Bush has finally admitted it. He has admitted what his critics have been saying for some time. Something for which they were labeled unAmerican traitors at worst, and Chamberlainesque appeasers at best.

He drew the comparison of Iraq to Vietnam.

Bush compared Iraq to Vietnam thusly:

“One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like boat people, re-education camps and killing fields,” Bush told a receptive audience at the Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention.

Vietnam had a brutal Communist totalitarian government.

Iraq has no functioning government.

In Vietnam, we knew who the enemy was.

In Iraq, the identity of our enemy/ies can change from day to day.

Would the Khmer Rouge have come to power, and Cambodia’s killing fields have come to pass had there not been American involvement in Vietnam? Hell, it was an invasion in 1979 by Vietnam that finally brought down Pol Pot’s genocidal regime.

But finally Bush has inadvertently acknowledged that our adventure in Iraq has become a quagmire.

Reading through the text of the speech, Bush compares Iraq in 2007 to Japan in 1945. He recounts generals and pundits stating that the Japanese psyche was incompatible with democracy, and that many people claim the same thing with respect to Iraq. Yet there is one stark difference between Iraq ‘07 and Japan ‘45.

After WWII, Japan did not descend into civil, sectarian war, and American occupying forces were not subjected to kidnappings, IEDs, and other constant, daily murders and provocations.

Bush expressly claims that people who oppose the Iraq war are doing the bidding of bin Laden and Zawahiri. This is outrageous.

The President of the United States has bungled this war practically from day one. We can assign blame to Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Powell all we want, but it all happened on his watch. De-Baathification was a disaster. Not anticipating religious strife (if not all-out warfare between Sunni and Shia) was naive and catastrophic. Leaving a power vacuum that we did not bother to adequately fill permitted every al Qaeda member and wanna-be to come on down and take potshots at Amrikan soldiers.

We took down Afghanistan’s Taliban. We took down Saddam Hussein. We left a weak Afghani government that we did not adequately support and fund, and civil war has broken out again in that country. The power vacuum in Iraq has left it a disaster, particularly in the Sunni triangle, and there is no credible government of which to speak. (Libertarians and anarchists, take note).

Would American defeat in Iraq be disasterous? One can’t answer that question until one defines what success in Iraq should look like. Mission accomplished didn’t do it. Blue fingerprints didn’t do it. Maliki didn’t do it. We didn’t do it. What does it entail, anyway?

If we were to abandon the Iraqi people, the terrorists would be emboldened, and use their victory to gain new recruits. As we saw on September the 11th, a terrorist safe haven on the other side of the world can bring death and destruction to the streets of our own cities. Unlike in Vietnam, if we withdraw before the job is done, this enemy will follow us home. And that is why, for the security of the United States of America, we must defeat them overseas so we do not face them in the United States of America. (Applause.)

You can’t defeat a stateless ideology solely on the battlefield. We’re fighting a reactive war against an enemy that organizes itself on internet bulletin boards around the world. They don’t wear uniforms. There’s a lot more to creating a functional democracy and society than holding elections and holding the terrorists at bay. There have been some signs of promise in the past, but the overall picture is grim. It’s hard to win hearts and minds when they don’t have clean water or 24-hour electricity.

We hear a lot about the surge. What are we doing to actually promote the creation of a civil Iraqi society? That’s the only way we’ll know we’ve won.

Via Daily Politics: On his own website, Roger Stone claims to have had nothing whatsoever to do with the harassing phone call placed from his apartment to Bernard Spitzer. How do we know he’s for real?

Before you shed a tear for poor old 82 year old Mr. Spitzer, read the Weekly Standard account of his pattern of illegal loans and gifts to finance his son’s campaigns.

So, he didn’t do it, but there’s nothing wrong with it, either.

Stone also provides an alibi:

On the night this call was allegedly made, I was at the theater catching the play NIXON and FROST. I highly recommend it to Governor Spitzer. It shows you what hubris and lying brings you.

Geoffrey Gray from New York Magazine tells us,

August 6, 2007, was a Monday. And like many Broadway shows, the play, which closed this weekend, took that night off. “We were completely dark on Mondays,” a rep from its management company told us.

What was that again about hubris and lying?

I have to say it’s easy to review the car you end up buying.

I like cars that are fun to drive. I like them to be quick off the line. I like them to handle well; I don’t like them to lean too much, and I like to feel that the car is stuck to the road like Velcro. I like cars that stop when you need them to stop and that have a bit of oomph to them. I like cars that have a solid feel with good interior materials to maximize perceived quality.

Check out the whole thing here.

This was Stone’s explanation for how the threatening phone call to Spitzer’s father may have come from his apartment:

Stone noted his building is owned by Democratic fundraiser Dale Hemmerdinger, whom Spitzer has tapped to serve as MTA chairman, and suggested Hemmerdinger’s management company, ATCO, which has keys to every apartment, may have allowed someone into his apartment to make the call.

“This is another in a pattern of dirty tricks - the same kind of dirty tricks that they tried on Sen. (Joseph) Bruno,” Stone said.

Hemmerdinger’s secretary said he is on vacation in Europe and could not be reached for comment.

Then, Daily Politics posted this tidbit:

Stone’s Dale Hemmerdinger defense is a new twist on a technique he has employed in at least one previous controversy.

In September 1996, the National Enquirer wrote that Stone, then a volunteer spokesman for Sen. Bob Dole, had placed ads and photos seeking sexual partners for himself and his wife, Nydia. Stone denied the allegations, saying he did not place the ads himself and allegeing had been framed by a former domestic helper who had stolen both his photographs and his checkbook.

Which reminded me of this:

And you can see the 1996 Enquirer article by clicking here.

I find this passage amusing:

A website is a place on the Internet where computer users who pay a fee can post any pictures and text they want. Then anyone who visits the Internet can access the website.

That explanation was necessary a mere 11 years ago.

When one has the upper hand in a dispute, it’s seldom smart to overreach.

Yet that’s what happened with Joe Bruno and the Senate Republicans. In their glee to portray Eliot Spitzer as a latter-day Nixon, they retained a guy who worked with the real Nixon - a shady mudslinger named Roger Stone.

First, this:

The hypothetical basic modus operandi seems to be this: Roger Stone sets up a web site, anonymously. Emails start going out, and people start asking questions; people being the Progressive blogs, because the mainstream media sure as hell doesn’t understand what’s going on. Then, some frontman is called in - Michael Caputo for NYFacts.net, one Sergio Rodriquez for the W.J. Mahoney GOP Club. Because of the various shielding mechanisms built into the design of the campaign, such as the private domain registration, Stone remains untraceable.

Well, except when he does stupid things like sending out emails to people that sign up for only one of his sites, because he’s getting them confused.

And that’s Emailgate for you right there, on a silver platter. I’ll bet dollars to donuts that this is Roger Stone, consultant to Joe Bruno, single-handedly creating a faux grassroots movement, or more colloquially, astroturf.

There’s a local aspect to that story. Michael Caputo is a public relations guy working out of Orchard Park. Sergio Rodriguez is the lone Republican running for office in the City of Buffalo, for Niagara District Councilman.

Have you ever heard of the W.J. Mahoney Republican Club of Buffalo? Me, neither.

Things came to a head yesterday when the New York Times reported on a vicious voice message that someone who sounds like Stone, calling from a phone number controlled by Stone, left for Spitzer’s 83 year-old father.

Beating up on little old men - even ones who are rich and powerful - is seldom a class move. Seizing the moment to control the damage, Bruno and the Senate Republicans canned Stone today. Here is the text of Bruno’s statement:

The news reports today on allegations regarding Roger Stone can only
serve as a distraction from the real issues - the abuse of government
power, political espionage and a cover up of information. These are the
real issues that are being reviewed by Albany County DA David Soares and
the State Ethics Commission.

Roger Stone was hired as a consultant to the Senate Republican
Campaign Committee in June. He has agreed to resign and end his
relationship with us at our request. We are not going to allow this
incident to become a distraction or to be used as an excuse to hamper
people from getting at the truth.

The investigations into the Executive Chamber are continuing. We
hope that both District Attorney Soares and the Ethics Commission will
conduct full and thorough investigations to get at the truth that the
public demands.

Senator Winner and the Investigations Committee are moving forward
with their legislative response, including a meeting on September 5th on a
bill to automatically refer Inspector General investigations to the
Attorney General when there is a conflict.

We hope that we can get the truth and clear the air so we can also
move forward on critically important issues such as investments to create
jobs and more property tax relief for senior citizens.

What it boils down to is that the Senate Republicans got so caught up in the “Spitzer is up to dirty tricks” meme that they forgot to avoid engaging in dirty tricks themselves. The Daily Gotham and The Albany Project were instrumental in bringing this to a head.

From Daily Politics:

The message left on Bernard Spitzer’s office phone, which is a publicly-listed number, on Aug. 6 at 9:57 p.m. refers to the multimillion-dollar loans he made to his son’s attorney general campaigns that opponents of Eliot Spitzer have long insisted were illegal under state Election Law.

“This is a message for Bernard Spitzer. You will be subpoenaed to testify before the Senate Committee on Investigations on your shady campaign loans. You will be compelled by the Senate Sergeant at Arms. If you resist the subpoena, you will be arrested and brought to Albany. And there is not a God damn thing your phony, psycho piece-of-shit son can do about it. Bernie, your phony loans are about to catch up with you. You will be forced to tell the truth, and the fact that your son’s a pathological liar will be known to all.”

You can listen to it here. (It repeats itself).

Here’s a .pdf of the letter from Bernard Spitzer’s attorney to the State Senate. (Roger Stone works for Senate Republicans like Dale Volker and Mike Cole Mary Lou Rath, and is reportedly paid $20,000 per month to bully old men).

Stone’s comment to the media about it:

Stone denied having anything to do with the voicemail and suggested the governor’s supporters broke into his apartment to make the call.

I think it was gremlins. When asked to comment, the gremlins denied having to do anything with anything.

How an online travel guide called “Schmap” describes Buffalo:

America’s quintessential melting pot, home of the spicy chicken wing and beef on weck, Buffalo has gone from 19th century industrial behemoth to 21st century high tech powerhouse–without losing the charm that makes it The City of Good Neighbors.

Very nice, but it’s in dire need of some additional content. The neighborhood guide is a bit scant on details.