Boy Blunder on The Hudson: The opposite of crisis management -pouring more gas on the fire and your own already bad reputation. N.Y. Governor Andrew Cuomo is the thin-skinned boy governor who can't help himself

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Boy Blunder on The Hudson: The opposite of crisis management -pouring more gas on the fire and your own already bad reputation. N.Y. Governor Andrew Cuomo is the thin-skinned boy governor who can't help himself Cuomo the Bad, who if you didn't know it, opposes a version of Jessica's Law in New York State, would make a very good South American general who overthrows the democratically-elected government and who -wait for it- imprisons reporters in a soccer stadium, a la Missing.
Unless you want to go another way and go the Emperor's New clothes route, though I've probably used that metaphor a little too often here on the blog over the years.

New York Times 
Top Cuomo Aide Delivers Public Rebuke of State Worker Who Talked to the Press
By Thomas Kaplan
February 21, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/22/nyregion/top-aide-to-cuomo-rebukes-state-worker-who-talked-to-the-press.html

CapitalNewYork

Why Andrew Cuomo is losing a fight against an engineer named Mike

By Azi Paybarah

February 22, 2013 4:02 p.m.

http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/politics/2013/02/7929992/why-andrew-cuomo-losing-fight-engineer-named-mike?top-featured-1

Andrew Cuomo freaks out over a little hostile media coverage.

http://moelane.com/2013/02/23/andrew-cuomo-new-york/

For those of you who don't already know the story, let me share with you a true tale about Andrew Cuomo that happened in Washington, D.C. when I was living and working there, and sadly, many years pre-blog.

it's the sort of delicious and meaningful story that likely didn't make its way down the media food chain to South Florida because the Herald and Sun-Sentinel's editors were either asleep at the wheel, disinterested, or deemed it too-inside-baseball.

That sort of lazy journalism attitude 15-20 years ago -and continuing to this day- explains why, as I've stated here and other places previously, so few people in South Florida, even usually well-informed people, DON'T realize the extent to which the Beltway press corps had completely soured on Sen. Bob Graham, and towards the end, often could barely stifle their contempt and laughter for him.

So here's the story as best I remember it. 

Cuomo, while HUD Secretary for the Clinton White House and with the tough task of filling the boots of perpetually effervescent Jack Kemp, was actually verbally reprimanded by top people within the White House -by Chief of Staff Mack McClarty if I recall correctly-  as well as verbally tonue-lashed by Congress, for being SO overly concerned with his own image and

press that he actually over-spent HUD's budget for PR/media, and spent either three years worth in two years, or four years in three.

Don't recall which of the two it was but it really happened, so you get the larger point.

(As has been said so often about New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, especially the first few years post-9/11, when Sunday morning network TV chat show bookers semed to have him on every weekend, to everyone's dis-satisfaction, don't ever, ever get between Cuomo and a mirror or a microphone.)

So, on top of that episode, and then the very weird situation with his ex-wife, Kerry Kennedy, where we're led to believe that largely for their kids' sake, she seems to have gone out of her way NOT to talk publicly about his well-known control-freak tendencies when they split -which raised all sorts of flags among the crowd I knew in Washington precisely because of what was being squelched- we can add this latest episode of Cuomo-style "Seldom is heard a discouraging word."

The paint is beginning to dry on Andrew Cuomo and the overall picture that emerges is increasingly looking more and more like one of a megalomaniac elected official who is getting

closer and closer to exploding, like Martin Sheen's fictional character, Greg Stillson, at the end of the awesome film version of Stephen King's The Dead Zone, just as Christopher

Walken's character Johnny Smith had foreseen.

As for those East Coast/Beltway media types who, rather than focusing their time and efforts on writing about pols who are genuine problem-solvers and not puppets, instead, keep writing that Cuomo, hyper-liberal Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley and moderate Virginia Senator Mark Warner will emerge as the top 2016 Democratic presidential candidates from east of the Mississippi, would be wise to drop Cuomo from the equation before they invest too much more time and energy into a relationship that will never bear fruit.

He doesn't have either The Right Stuff or enough self-control, and if you doubt me on this, wait until his competitors and their supporters get a chance to bait him. 

He can't help himself.

-----

http://www.capitalnewyork.com/

New York Times does their condescending ethnic drive-by "gotcha' thing in Crist-Rubio FL Senate race

re 3/30 NYT's Caucus blog: Crist Backer Uses Ethnic Terms About Rubio

New York State is the home of the most ethnically-divisive
politics in the country.
Candidates with not much to offer are continually
elected principally because there are large number
of voters there whose first qualification for someone
being elected to office is often that they are Black
or Hispanic or Jewish or Italian or Puerto Rican.
That's their choice. Period.

And we didn't sleepwalk thru the '80 and '90's like
certain of the Times reporters seem to have,
who seem to forget that Jews in the United States
were killed because they were Jews, in the wrong
place at the wrong time, not in Florida, Idaho,
Alabama or Arkansas, but in New York.
Multiple times.

I lived in the Chicago area in the mid-80's, when
Harold Washington was the first Black mayor
of Chicago, thanks in part to people I knew.
It was far-and-away the single-most racially-polarized
city in the United States, and the Chicago-area
news media, especially the TV Network O&O's,
were constantly looking for examples of New York
not quite being God's Little Acre, as if that,
somehow, would make what was happening in
Chicago less worse.

But in their online blogs New York Times reporters
are always conveniently forgetting this well-known
fact about New York, and are always looking to
play "gotcha" somewhere else with some remark
uttered by someone in a campaign that 99.99%
of the population have never heard of.

Again, as if that somehow would make what was
happening in New York less worse.

Sorry, but walking-up to uninformed voters and
saying, in essence, 'X just said this about your
candidate. What do you think?,' is NOT reporting.

But it is why why when Rush Limbaugh uses the
term drive-by media as a pejorative, he's 100% right
so often.

Worse, the New York Times writing this will now
give the reporters and columnists at the Miami Herald
and other Florida newspapers the excuse they need
to once again write about this rather than issues
-as if the majority of them really wanted to write
about issues instead of personalities, polls and
pithy anecdotes.

Actually, I was being sarcastic in that last sentence.
The vast majority of reporters anywhere have
never needed an excuse not to write about what
most citizens want to hear, as opposed to the
horse race aspect of a campaign they enjoy,

In case you forgot the facts, though,
here's a helpful reminder:

Number of Hispanic and Black governors and
U.S. Senators elected by voters where the
New York Times has their HQ: zero.
Dozens of states had elected a female U.S.
Senator before New York elected their first,
Hillary Clinton in 2000

Number of Women elected governor by voters
where the New York Times has their HQ: zero
Alabama had a female governor in the '60's,
Kentucky in the '80's.

Number of women elected mayor of New York
City by voters where the New York Times has
their HQ: zero.

Dear New York Times reporters: You might
want to work on that troubling ethnic and female
candidate aversion situation closer to home, dudes,
and while you're at it, your state legislature is
STILL THE most corrupt in the nation.

Why does The New York Times continue to have
so little practical effect on the state legislature
located closest to them?
Now THAT sounds like a story worth exploring.
Albany almost makes Tallahassee look clean.

Dear New York Times, you're welcome.
No charge for the consult.

------------------
New York Times The Caucus
The Politics and Government Blog of The Times
Crist Backer Uses Ethnic Terms About Rubio
By Damien Cave
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/crist-backer-uses-ethnic-terms-about-rubio/

See also:
http://www.observer.com/politics

Expect more New Yorkers in Broward, as NY Post reveals: GOV PLOTS SECRET TAX HIKE ON RICH

I've highlighted below in blue the aspects of the article that I thought

you'd find of particular interest!

It's as if Gov. David Patterson never learned the lesson of why so many

people left New York State in the first place in the early '70's, which was

responsible for so many tens of thousands of New Yorkers flocking to

South Florida, and sometimes it seemed, all into North Miami Beach

on NE 163rd Street, with their orange license plates with blue numbers

and letters.

And their kids became my classmates at Fulford Elementary and J.F.K.

Junior High, yet they still acted like the Mets, Jets and Knicks winning

their respective championship was, somehow, the natural order of things,

and that the Dolphins success under Don Shula was a fluke.

That was SO grating and irritating!

Obviously, demographics being what they were then, I knew lots of

ex-New Yorkers in North Miami Beach in 1972 when I was eleven

-and first got Dolphin season tickets- who were still convinced that Joe

Namath would, single-handedly, defeat the Dolphins and prevent an

undefeated season. Nope!

Meanwhile, forty years later, the Jets still haven't returned to the Super Bowl.

------------------------------------------

New York Post

http://www.nypost.com/seven/03232009/news/columnists/gov_plots_secret_tax_hike_on_rich_160855.htm

Fredric U. Dicker

EXCLUSIVE

March 23, 2009

GOV. PATERSON and legislative Democrats have secretly agreed on an $8 billion, two- year tax hike on individuals making more than $500,000 a year that will "sunset" around the time he plans to run for election in 2010, legislative sources told The Post.

Also under intense discussion yesterday as lawmakers rushed to complete a budget by April 1 is a proposal to raise the state's 4 percent sales tax to 4.5 percent the total of which would jump to close to 10 percent in parts of the state with the addition of local sales taxes.

PLUS: Paterson Takes Huge Hit in Poll

The sales-tax hike, too, would sunset at the end of next year or in early 2011, legislative Democrats said.

While Paterson has repeatedly claimed he was against a "millionaires' tax" on the very wealthy and hasn't backed a sales-tax hike, the sources said he was privately backing both.

The current top tax rate is 6.85 percent for all incomes over $25,000 a year. Sources could not say yesterday what the rate would rise to for incomes over $500,000.

"Paterson has told everyone he really wants the taxes, but he wants it to appear to the public that he's against them," a senior legislative official said.

"Then, next year, when he's running, he'll say we can afford to phase them out so he can claim that he's a tax cutter."

Billions in other tax hikes proposed by Paterson in December, including huge increases in levies on insurance policies and health services, have been left in the budget for the fiscal year beginning April 1.

The budget, which is meant to close a multibillion-dollar deficit made less severe by billions of dollars in last-minute federal stimulus aid, is also expected to cut several major state programs, including Medicaid, deeper than many have expected.

The proposed cuts have angered many Democratic lawmakers, as well as the powerful unions that regularly bankroll their campaigns.

Democrats who control the Legislature and the governor's office for the first time since the late 1930s plan to ram the budget through with virtually no debate or scrutiny using special "messages of necessity" issued by Paterson that will circumvent the legally required three-day waiting period designed to give lawmakers, and the public, time to review proposed new laws, several sources said.

As lieutenant governor and Senate minority leader, Paterson strongly opposed using the "messages" to cut off debate.

A Paterson spokesman yesterday refused to say whether the governor would use the procedure to ram through the budget.

The budget plan, meanwhile, is expected to shift longstanding state commitments from wealthy, Republican-oriented Long Island school districts to poorer districts in New York City and upstate, potentially angering suburban Senate Democrats whose votes will be vital for the budget to pass.

fredric.dicker@nypost.com

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