Author: Jerry Skurnik

Sunday’s New York Times reported that the MTA, in order to save money, has discontinued the Long Island Railroad express train to Belmont Raceway.

One paragraph in the story jumped out at me:

“Racing association officials, who lobbied against the elimination of direct train service, estimate that the park will lose more than $5 million this year because of the cut, while the authority says it will save about $112,000.”

A person doesn’t not to have to have the business expertise of a Warren Buffet to propose a winning bet to the New York Racing Association  – give the MTA $112,000 so they keep running the train so you can keep $5 million you say you will lose if the train stops.

Every Presidential Election brings new voters to the polls – voters who have never voted before.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0409/20833.html

A little over a year ago, I wrote on this blog about my theory of the electorates.

The extremely close election in the 20^th Congressional District has partisans on both sides predicting their candidate will win after all the paper ballots are counted. Each side seems to have already determined who received the most votes among the 6,000-10,000 paper ballots that none of them has seen.

The possibility that Congressman Anthony Weiner might not run for Mayor has stirred up speculation about how this might negatively impact turnout in this year’s Democratic Primary. And that has led to talk about which candidates would be helped and hurt by less people voting.

There will be three Special Elections for City Council on Tuesday and I’m willing to guess that very few voters who are not active in politics are even aware of them.

This week, the Wall Street Journal’s John Fund, wrote a column attacking the Obama Administration for supposedly trying to politicize the census at the expense of science.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123423384887066377.html

Fund wrote – President Obama said in his inaugural address that he planned to "restore science to its rightful place" in government. That's a worthy goal. But statisticians at the Commerce Department didn't think it would mean having the director of next year's Census report directly to the White House rather than to the Commerce secretary, as is customary. "There's only one reason to have that high level of White House involvement," a career professional at the Census Bureau tells me. "And it's called politics, not science."

Friday’s New York Times reports that Comptroller Bill Thompson and Congressman Anthony Weiner have raised money from limited liability corporations and partnerships despite the law enacted by the City Council banning these businesses from contributing to City candidates.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/nyregion/13donations.html?ref=nyregion

In the coverage of the appointment of new Senator Gillibrand, a number of media outlets (and Wikipedia) have gotten at least fact wrong.

They have described Gillibrand’s father, Douglas Rutnik, as a Republican lobbyist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirsten_Gillibrand

http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2009/01/23/kirstin-gillibrand/

He is a lobbyist but he’s a registered Democrat.

Here’s Rutnik’s voter information from the Prime New York voter file (I removed some information for privacy concerns)
First name DOUGLAS Initial P Last name RUTNIK Suffix (jr,sr,etc) Gender (M or F) M City SCHENECTADY State NY Zipcode 12309 Phone number NOT FOUND Affiliation D Precinct 01 06 00014