Let's sum up

A brief trip back through time to my favorite entries about the lovely and talented Governor Bush:

Jeb:

Has harsh, draconic, flat out stupid policies

Doesn't expect his campaign contributors or his political allies or his personal connections to follow them

Includes links to time-tested personal rant favorites:

Jeb, in the Elian case, leads the way in telling the federal government that Florida doesn't respect the executive authority of the president and/or the enforcement authority of the attorney general of the United States (before his views Evolved)

Jeb bends the law to help anti-gay crusaders, to guarantee our children an ongoing commitment to childcare which, while substandard, will be exclusively heterosexual

Jeb and Eunice protect the nation from alleged toll evasion

Jeb, not being completely straightforward about Jerry Regier

Jeb, the man who unleashed Katherine Harris on the world

Jeb, who leads the fight against terrorism in Florida, unless it's against muslims

Jeb manages to have his economy tank with a great big resounding tank (item three) despite Our Nation's President pouring grossly disproportionate amounts of federal money into Floriday explicitly to help his brother's campaign, item six

Also, Jeb says dumb stuff during the debate and has a ringer on the FEC force an investigation of the McBride campaign

Jeb: Family seems to be in need of some quantity time 1, 2, 3

Jeb: (outside link) not really in touch with the whole representative democracy thing

Jeb: just plain creepy

Now, as the far more lovely and talented Mssrs Capozzola and Atrios, among others, have been pointing out on their pages, Mr. Bush is up for election this year, and his opponent would very much like to discuss some of these issues with affected voters.

You can give Mr. McBride money here.

I think you should consider it. It would really bug Jeb's brother.

The Return of State Senator Espada

It's a rematch in the Bronx

Three weeks after a Democratic primary for an Assembly seat in the Bronx ended in a five-vote difference between candidates, a State Supreme Court judge ruled yesterday that a new election be held on Oct. 15.

After the city's Board of Elections issued a preliminary finding that Pedro Gautier Espada, a former city councilman, had five more votes than Assemblywoman Carmen Arroyo, a longtime incumbent, Ms. Arroyo went to court, charging that there had been so many irregularities that the true result was lost in doubt.

As a result, Justice Robert G. Seewald of State Supreme Court in the Bronx ordered on Sept. 24 that the City Board of Elections delay the certification of the results.

In calling for the new election, Judge Seewald stated yesterday that a court referee had found 216 instances of voting irregularities in the primary. Some, he said, involved registered members of the Conservative and Independence Parties who voted in the Democratic primary.

Others involved signatures of voters that did not match those in the voting books at the polls.

The new election will involve only Ms. Arroyo and Mr. Espada and not the third candidate on the Sept. 10 primary ballot, Jose Velez, who received 11 percent of the vote.

If you haven't been following the ongoing saga of State Senator Espada (who is a particular political pet of mine), let me introduce you.

The State Senate in New York is reliably Republican, which is what allows the governor to funnel all that money upstate - there isn't anything we can do about it. It's not a representative institution, and they just have more senators than we do.

They're getting a little nervous, though, because Hillary beat the carefully tailored pants right off their candidate in the fight for Mr. Moynihan's seat, and she did far better upstate than expected.

So, it was with great glee that they accepted the offer of State Senator Espada (D-Bronx) to jump ship to the Republican party _after the election_ and give their thinning majority a boost. He would run, of course, as a Democrat. (In the South Bronx? Whaddya think?)

OK, I can definitely see what's in this for Mr. Bruno, the alpha-thug (I say that with affection, of course) of the State Senate. What could State Senator Espada be thinking?

Aha! The light dawns: a historically huge State Senate discretionary grant goes to a "community program" run by State Senator Espada, which wildly overpays its director, State Senator Espada.

He's off the ballot! (about half way down)

He's back on the ballot and he won?

He won, but there are many more bad votes than he won by. The judge orders a runoff.

The Grand Jury is looking at the senate grants!

This is, of course, the primary, but as State Senator Espada (?-Bronx) points out, if you're not the Democratic candidate in his district, you can't win.

I think we should leave State Senator Espada and his constituents to work out the implications of that.

So, when I say "Vote the Court" what I mean is

Mr. Lott lays it out for us

Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) said yesterday that President Bush's judicial nomination of Miguel Estrada, a Hispanic attorney seen by critics as too conservative, appears virtually dead.

Bush nominated Estrada 17 months ago for a position on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. If confirmed, Estrada would be the first Hispanic on the court and would be positioned as a potential Bush nominee to the Supreme Court.

Senior Democratic aides agreed the nomination would not progress, saying Congress seemed certain to adjourn for the year without the Democratic-led Judiciary Committee even voting whether to send Estrada to the full chamber for confirmation.

"I don't think they are going to bring him up. There has been no movement at all," Lott said in a brief interview.

Lott said if Republicans regain control of the Senate in the Nov. 5 election, they would move in the new year to confirm Estrada and other conservative judicial nominees blocked by Democrats the past two years.

Please, people, if the spectres of the people who will die while our Commander in Chief tries to figure out why arranging for good notices in the newspaper isn't affecting the outcome of a goddamn war don't make you stop and think, imagine what your life is going to be like when Chief Justice Scalia has a majority.

Would you want this man on your chess team?

(sorry, I know I said I would do this the other day, but I spent the week lolling on the divan eating bonbons)

Dennis Rivera is (although you didn't hear about it so much until just lately) a power in New York politics. He's the president of local 1199, the Health and Hospital Workers Union.

On 10/2, Eric Alterman singled him out for supporting Governor Pataki (formerly a wholly owned subsidiary of Al D'Amato, now a certified Friend of W), currently spending our tax money to get ever-higher levels of legal support to accomplish his goal of gutting the New York City school system. I may have mentioned this (near the bottom) once or twice myself.

If you haven't been following the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit against the State of New York, their page of coverage links is here. The Gotham Gazette's coverage (and essential links) can be found here. Briefly, money has flowed out of New York City into the suburbs and upstate New York for years, at a pace which rapidly increased after Robert Moses finished turning the "metropolitan area" into a money-sucking lawn farm that can't (and doesn't try to) support itself. The City supplies the lion's share of the state's funds, in return for which our kids get the lowest amount of spending on our schools, which are some of the oldest in the state (/country). What little money we do get goes, at a greater rate than anywhere else in the state, to maintenance and rebuilding.

(Of course it doesn't help that Mayor Giuliani, who sent his own kids to a catholic prep school which cost more than twice the annual spending he felt was excessive per child for the public schools, declined to ask for federal funds we were eligible for as part of a long-running dicksize war he was having with the Board of Ed, or that Pataki stripped even more money from the city as part of a dicksize war he was having with Giuliani, who dissed him because he wears the D'Amato brand, and Giuliani and D'Amato have loathed each other since Giuliani held a press conference to announce that the Senator, who at that point was mentoring the shiny new, still partially-haired Giuliani and going on drug raids with him and stuff, had called him and asked him not to prosecute a "mob figure" because he was, you know, A Good Guy. (Of course, there were those who felt that he was shaking D'Amato off because he thought that the Senator and his ally/enforcer in New York politics, walking time-bomb Roy Cohn, were likely to get in the way of his, Giuliani's, future career.))

Don't you wish your city had fun politics like this?

Anyway, a court has decided on behalf of Governor Pataki's appeal, on the grounds that the state is not required to provide an education for New York City's children to a greater than eighth grade level, and they aren't even required to make sure that the conditions are such that they can take advantage of that.

Keep in mind that Mr. Pataki took it on himself to file this appeal.

Healthcare workers have always gotten screwed in New York politics. They make next to no money, they get very little respect, they're poor, they live in lousy neighborhoods and their children go to lousy schools. They are, however, overwhelmingly african-american and hispanic. These are demographics the good governor is starting to pay a great deal of attention to (he's been flat-out courting the dominicans for years). The State Senate also could use some votes from them (there are 200+k in 1199). Mr. Bruno, the head of the State Senate and a living rebuke to biblical inerrantists, has made it his personal crusade to end rent control, something which is only really an issue in New York State for the people of the city. This has not made him terribly popular with poor people who are paying attention.

In return for an endorsement from Mr. Rivera, the state (Pataki/Bruno) agreed to a deal giving a raise to hospital workers (the ones who work for the state, anyway) over the life of an eighteen-month contract. The Governor also passed a law to block state money from being used for anti-union activities. Mr. Rivera has also signed on to be the governor's little friend in the hispanic community.

I am completely in sympathy with the healthcare workers, who could most of them be making more money cleaning offices in midtown than being the only resource the sick and elderly have. I take issue with Mr. Rivera on their behalf, as well as my own.

- Eighteen months? A year from now, contracts are going to be up for renewal, and the projected deficit is going to be huge. Pataki is going to feel the least pain bleeding that money from

a. the suburbs
b. upstate
c. the city

- When he's looking for people to bleed in contract negotiations, he's going to go after

a. state police
b. overfunded upstate schools
c. people who speak imperfect english, have no money and whose leader is sitting in his pocket like a bunny foot

- He's going to take into account that he's putting his supporters in 1199 at risk when Bruno asks him to sign rent decontrol

a. snort

- Who's going to be taking care of you when you enter the hospital in twenty years? Who's gonna be your home health aide?

a. some kid from upstate
b. the kid your mom's home aide is working three jobs to support. There is some possibility that she's gonna have an eighth grade education.

Slick, Dennis. Only I think Pataki's got you beat.

Big Talk from a man with a minivan

Apparently no-one has shared with Mr. Lileks the role of middle east petroleum products in the powering of a TIVO unit

"The world would be a much better place if he were gone and the regime in Iraq were changed. That's why the U.S. should unite the world against Saddam, and not allow him to unite forces against us. A go-it-alone approach, allowing for a ground invasion of Iraq without the support of other countries, could give Saddam exactly that chance."

Saddam would not have that chance if he was a smoking meat-heap in a busted bunker. Wellstone apparently believes that Saddam would use a “go-it-alone” invasion to inspire France, Canada, the Solomon Islands and Belarus to launch simultaneous attacks against us. What forces would he unite? Do we fear the mighty Egyptian Army swimming to Florida? If he’s talking about the terrorists, then he seems to believe that an invasion of Iraq would topple those fence-sitters who hated America, hated Jews, hated the pig-monkey mongrel West with its beer-and-Britney sinfulness. It’s bad enough that the West exisst at all, but toppling a secularist whack-job who co-opts the Muslim cause for his own clan’s advancement - that’s the last straw. And the infidels won, too - all the more reason to rise up and demand that they kill us, too!