Author: Gatemouth

Gatemouth is suffering from burnout–hey hey my my.

“Well, nobody could have foreseen this, surely.

[S]tate elections officials in Albany say that Mr. Espada did not register his campaign for Senate this year; and he could face more than $6,000 in fines. It is not the first time he has run afoul of the State Board of Elections: His 2000 Senate campaign was fined for failing to submit finance reports.

In 2005, three employees of a Bronx nonprofit health care company run by Mr. Espada, the Soundview HealthCare Network, pleaded guilty to diverting $30,000 from programs for family care and AIDS treatment to one of his campaigns. Mr. Espada was never charged.”

I've spent virtually my entire adult life waitng for this moment, and perhaps a majority of that time working for it, only to find out that when it did occur, the devil was in the details.

Literally.  

According to today’s New York Times, California Attorney General Jerry Brown (where have I heard that name before?) has asked the State Supreme Court to review the constitutionality of Proposition 8, the voter initiative which bans same-sex marriage. Brown said such a review was necessary to provide closure and clarity on the ballot measure, as several challenges to the measure had been filed with the Court.

Apparently, the central argument in the law suits is that Proposition 8 is a significant enough revision to the State Constitution to require the approval of the Legislature.

A very compelling read is to be had examining an article posted by James Kirchick yesterday on the on-line edition of the New Republic entitled “Let Lieberman Live” and subtitled “The case for allowing him to keep his committee chairmanship.”

Kirchik’s article is smart, well argued and neatly sums up Lieberman’s case. Speaking from my perspective as a pragmatic, centrist, Clintonite, neo-liberal, new Democrat with closet DLC tendencies, who’s crazy about Rahm Emanuel, I have to say that Kirchick is dead wrong.

In recognition of the recent departure from the ranks of the Doghouse Democrats (Pedro Espada, Carl Kruger and Ruben Diaz) of Senator-Elect Hiram Monserrate, I’ve marked them down from “The Four Horsemen of the Preposterous," and renamed them "Carl and the Passions" (in memory of what is arguably the worst album ever issued by the Beach Boys while they were still trying). When it comes to loyalty to their political party, the theme song of the Passions is not “Be True to Your School,” but rather “I Get Around.”

I hold no particular brief for Senate Minority Leader Malcolm Smith, and can rattle off the names of several members I think would make a better Party Leader, but, for whatever reasons, Smith was the choice of his Conference by an overwhelming margin, and therefore, he deserves the support of all Senate Democrats when the Senate organizes in January.

Sometime in January, we were driving Dybbuk, then just about to turn five, home from his Aunt Feygeleh’s when he blurted out, “What about Obama?”

Nonplussed, Domestic Partner and I reacted exactly as we had when my youngest brother’s daughter informed us she had just had her First Holy Communion—we fell silent, gave each other a quick glance, and simultaneously yelled “Congratulations!”

In this case, after the silence and the quick glance, we simultaneously said, “What about him?”

As I’d reported earlier, Dybbuk had been transformed by Feygeleh, who essentially acts as his third parent, into a raging, Hillary-hating Obamaniac.

Dybbuk had been a wiseass for as long as we could remember. One day during his second year, I found myself covered in regurgitated milk, I asked him whether he’d just spit on me, or if he’d actually thrown up. He answered, “I threw down.” Days later, I stopped him from pulling his mother’s hair and said “that hurts, how’d you like if I did that to you?” I gently gave his hair a yank. He responded by pulling it himself and laughing while repeating, “Daddy, ouch!” His latest forum for mischief was Hebrew school. The teacher had asked the class to improvise a play about the Sabbath, and Dybbuk asked why the topic had to be something Jewish.

The responses to my unapologetically pro-Obama pieces on this election have come in two varieties; The first is where some Cro-Magnon, usually a pro-life lunatic or a Republican operative, vents their spleen:

“So let me get this.. about people of color….yes, because if this election has taught us nothing else it's that any comment made, no matter how true, must be motivated by racial hatred unless it equates to fawning over a candidate. Truly pathetic.”

During the discussion thread on a piece I published about three weeks ago called “The_Return_of_the_Welfare_Queen”, about the Republican effort to create a straw man/scapegoat story about a purported Democratic/ACORN conspiracy to commit voter fraud on a national scale, I got into a discussion with an anonymous poster who was quite obviously a Republican operative peddling a discredited fairy tale about how, two years ago, a black Democrats won a Westchester State Senate election by bussing in loads of ineligible voters from the Bronx.

Miffed by this idiocy I wrote: “Of course, you didn't have the evidence to prove it in court, but when has that ever stopped the Republicans from spreading libelous lies about people of color?

A majority of the two-decade span between my first and last service on the payroll of a New York elected official was spent in service to leaders of the NY State Senate Democrats, and though I’ve long been out of that business, like a junkie, I’ve never lost the taste. The need for the Democrats to take the Senate Majority is something I’ve written about quite passionately (for example here and here) through my years as a blogger. And now it looks like it is in sight.

But, as my friend Roscoe Conway likes to say (channeling Ben Franklin) "a Majority, if you can keep it."