Saturday, July 11, 2009

Filling the space between

On July 10, New York Governor David Paterson finally appointed a Lieutenant Governor, naming Richard Ravitch to the post. The real shocker is that few realized that there hadn't been a Lt. Governor since Paterson was promoted to Governor in March 2008 to replace the disgraced Eliot Spitzer.

The next thing you know, the Senate is all whole again, the stalemate settled after 31 days, and the Democrats wasted little time in naming one of the chief weasels in the whole scandal, Pedro Espada, Jr., as Majority Leader, replacing Malcolm Smith. Now, it's Ravitch's job to keep Espada in line before anything else happens. Espada has already been villified in NYC, and it can be suggested that, perhaps, Espada coveted the role of Majority Leader, and somehow managed to convince his party that Smith wasn't the leader they wanted. It will take a very long time for the State Senate to recover from this, and they won't soon do so, as long as Espada has any sort of stroke that allows him to feather his nest at the expense of the Senate and the people he is supposed to represent.

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