Stoned

Seems libertine Tricky Dickster Roger Stone has hopped a boxcar north, perhaps, as The Albany Project surmises, to perform his black arts for James Tedisco in the 20th CD count.
Will be interesting to see if he feeds talking points/insider info to the AP's Michael Gormley. In late 2007 the Albany wire-service writer seemed to get a heads-up on Stone's, uh, wet work, regarding Eliot Spitzer. In a Gormley story from Nov. 24, 2007, just five days after Stone sent a letter tipping the FBI to Spitzer's hooker habit and three months before Spitzer's downfall, there was this:

"He's done,” said Roger Stone, a Washington political consultant who worked on President Nixon's re-election and worked for presidents Bush and Reagan. “I don't think he'll be re-nominated.”

Of course, Stone, according to Stone, had a lot to do with that. If he's launched a sneak attack on the 20th race, though, it hasn't started well. A judge says they can start counting the absentee ballots Wednesday, which isn't what the GOP wanted.

Mass killing and the new normal

This piece posted Friday in the wake of the Binghamton tragedy notes the numbers of lives claimed in mass shootings--50 in a month, and nearly 30 in one week. And that was before the three police officers in Pittsburgh and whole family slain in Washington state. Fifty-eight dead, and no media trend stories? Oh, right, I forgot, there was important stuff going on. Michelle Obama touched the queen.

Just do it, then, or shut up

The mayor came out and threatened bad stuff for the city, and unless he's able to do something about the taxes, or something, something bad will happen, like, like... like... dissolving the city.

"Although I did talk about the idea of dissolving the city during my first campaign for mayor (2006), I don't think we are at that point. But we may have to look into it in the future if the tax burdens continue to increase," Kasprzak said. "We are landlocked, and we have no place to grow and get more revenue to help deal with these problems."

Go for it. Because if the mayor can't see that rewriting zoning laws so they're more open to density and mixed commercial/residential use would go a long way to improving the city's attractiveness and business climate, then he should just shut the whole thing down. No, we don't have room for a mall or suburban subdivisions in the city. That doesn't mean it can't grow. There are plenty of vacant storefronts around. But the city won't grow unless attitudes change (sorry to disappoint all the glibertarian Ayn Rand cultists, but we do need taxes if we want things like roads) and the governance improves. The current city leadership can't perform simple tasks like watering the grass on playing fields. How can we trust it to figure out tough budget issues?
So take the mayor's advice. Kill it. Dump the strong mayor city-government system, since its only function is to air strange local factional grievances that are beyond earthly understanding. Then get a city manager, or shut the city down and merge with the Town of Plattsburgh. Of course, it's doubtful the town would have us.
Guess we're stuck with listening to people elected to do a job bitch about it.

Ring ding-a-lings

It's not my district, but...
When the counting's all done, the first thing constituents of NY-20 should do is tell their new Congressman, whether it's Jim Tedisco or Scott Murphy, to quit wasting breath and precious time talking about bringing back the Olympics. It can't happen, and even if it could, you wouldn't want it to--unless you want to bankrupt your already bankrupt government. See, the IOC doesn't give Olympics away without massive government support, read, subsidies. And there are better things to spend massive government funds on than rare, elite sports. Don't believe it, then read this and this and this.
Jayzuss.

Nate Silver on Murphy-Tedisco

In between baseball preview posts, he beats back some b.s. thrown against the wall by a Roll Call pundit.

Precious fluids, salty dogs

The always-good Eric Alterman delivers another scary, decline-of-the-news-biz column, which focuses on how already-poor business reporting, particularly health reporting, is likely to deteriorate.

...in “Revealing How Dentists Profit by Abusing Children,” Roberta Baskin earned one of the highest honors in broadcast journalism for her reporting on real-life little-shop-of-horrors dentistry at a chain of Medicaid clinics called Small Smiles. That same winter, she found out that her investigative unit had been axed by WJLA-TV because it was “’a luxury’ they could no longer afford.” She asks:

Is it a luxury when our reports convince companies to reform bad business practices? Is it a luxury when regulatory agencies suddenly are motivated to enforce laws already on their books?

Evidently, yes.
Meanwhile, bad reporting allows all sorts of health hokum to gain traction. I give you, ladies and gentlemen, Gen. Jack D. Ripper, er, the Plattsburgh City Common Council, which is seriously considering removing fluoride from public drinking water. And while they waste time on this, nobody talks much about an actual health threat that affects the North Country's large population at risk for heart disease: too much salt in the diet. Why? Because there's a Big Salt lobby, which bullies government agencies that release accurate information.
-ht/dmc

The Betty factor

If the Republicans end up losing the 20th Congressional District race, their leadership may rue the day the party went with the old boy and stood up their best gal, State Sen. Betty Little. Check out this map: Jim Tedisco lost in the northernmost three counties of the district to unknown Scott Murphy, which just happens to constitute a huge chunk of the area Little represents and where she is quite popular. Assuming Republican machinery in Saratoga and other points south would have kept her numbers competitive with Tedisco's, the GOP would have gained a House seat by choosing Little.