New York State of Mind

It's a wrap - After nearly 20 years on the air, NBC announced this week that they were cancelling "Law & Order"! Sadly, not only will the show not get to make television history as the longest running drama ever, but they won't even have a traditional final episode.Unfortunately, this means more job losses for NYC too. It is really hard to find an actor in the Tri-State area who has not appeared on L&O. But who wants to speak of losses when we can talk about Obama's visit this week, so on with the show...

Sports – Yankees lost to the Tigers. And SC nominee Elena Kagan’s favorite team…the Mets!

Local – Speaking of Elena Kagan, NYC is beaming with pride that we may have a possible third native daughter sitting on the current Supreme Court. With the announcement of Kagan’s nomination, three of the five boroughs of NYC will be represented. Ginsberg was born in Brooklyn, Sotomayor in the Bronx and now Kagan is from Manhattan’s Upper West Side. And if you count Stevens who grew up in Queens, we actually have four out of five boroughs represented. It must be something in the water. Sadly, poor Staten Island is once again left out…

More Local (and Federal) - You remember last week we had an attempted “Islamic terrorist attack”. I put it in quotes because AG Eric Holder has not yet determined whether Faisel Shahzad was actually an “Islamic terrorist” yet. [insert **sigh**]



We will not hold our breath waiting for him to decide because we got the answer from President Obama.

As I reported last week, Mayor Bloomberg appeared before a Congressional panel to discuss our lack of terrorist gun laws and to beg for help in fighting terrorism aimed at our fair city. I am happy to report that this week because of Bloomberg’s heartfelt plea, President Obama announced deep cuts to the city’s anti-terror funds. I bet you didn’t see that one coming, did you? Neither did Bloomberg. And to further the humiliation, Obama arrived on Thursday afternoon during rush hour, tying up street, air, and water traffic for hours to personally thank the police officers for their efforts in thwarting another attack. NY's Finest were even kind enough to give Obama his own NYPD windbreaker with “POTUS” on it! But as we are learning each and every day of this Administration, as one astute NYer put it, Obama “speaks out of both sides of his mouth". This is what he had to say to say to our Finest even as he cuts their funds-

"And we want to make sure that we continue to work with you to get the resources that are needed for you to continue to be effective…”

At least Rep. Anthony Weiner (D/NY), who is otherwise a Obamaton, had this to say -

"Some of the funding decisions made by this administration have been mind-numbingly, insanely wrong.”

I think we can agree that there hasn’t been a more true statement made by a politician in the last 15 months.

And as if one hypocrisy wasn’t enough (and the real reason for his appearance in NYC), Obama attended a $15K - $50K a-plate fundraiser attended by all those overpaid bankers and Wall Street fat cats that he has been incessantly railing against for weeks. Though someone was quoted as saying “they ARE the only ones with money right now”. Well, at least for the next few weeks anyway.

State - As I reported last week, Governor Patterson was pushing for a one day-a-week furlough for all state employees because of a massive budget deficit. This week, he managed to push the necessary legislation through by cleverly attaching his plan to an emergency budget bill that had to be very reluctantly passed by the Legislature for the state to stay in business. The furlough requires that about 100,000 state workers take one unpaid day off a week thereby saving the state millions of dollars. However Patterson, fearing that he might be thought of as an effective leader, immediately gave his own staff a raise! I am not kidding. So now, instead of just bunch of whining state workers, we have about 100,000 righteously indignant state workers. Fortunately for them, they had a state judge who signed an emergency order staying the furloughs until further review. I wonder how the order will stand, as the judge was to be a furloughed state worker too...

And finally, Obama made his last stop in Buffalo, New York on his much touted "Main Street" tour this last Thursday. His surprise visit was used to pitch his stellar performance creating and saving jobs and curtailing another Great Depression. For a place like Buffalo that has suffered double digit unemployment for at least a decade, I think they were kind of surprised by the good news.

And talk about perfect timing, this billboard appeared in Buffalo just days before Obama even announced he was would be stopping there. Actually there's a funny story that goes along with this billboard. Through the journalistic thoroughness for which we have grown accustomed from The Left, a writer named "Karoli" of Crooksandliars.com, seeing a possible conspiracy, made a phone call to the billboard company and found out that someone named Scott Baker had paid to put this ad on the board. Not wanting to miss a scoop, Karoli rushed to attribute the billboard to the only Scott Baker he/she could think of - Scott Baker of the Breitbart.tv's webcast “The B-Cast”. By noon on Friday, the DailyKos had pick up the scent and both websites were savagely condemning the billboard as just another smear campaign against the Obama Administration being subversively funded by the notorious Andrew Breitbart.

Well, if they had done just a few more minutes of basic internet research before they published their findings, they would have found that it was not Breitbart's Scott Baker, but actually Akron, Ohio factory owner Scott Baker and his unemployed brother Buffalonian Jeff Baker who were behind it. Both are members of a new grassroots movement "I Need A Freakin' Job" at INAFJ.com which has started using the internet and other means to vent their frustration at the Obama Administration. I can understand the confusion. I mean, what are the odds that there would be two people named “Scott Baker” on the world wide web, right? To their credit, by the end of the day yesterday, Crooksandliars had published two retractions. I just checked the Daily Kos and they haven’t gotten the news yet...

Next week - New Jersey's new Republican Governor Chris Christie is kicking butt and taking names...