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Welcome to the Capitol Pressroom’s special Pre-fixe menu for our State of the State Pre-Game show. 

Everything will be cooked to order.  

Appetizer: 

We shall begin our State of the State coverage with a rich melt-in-your-mouth delicacy – Toro tuna belly for the mind (an amuse bouche for the brain).  It is a generous dollop of fresh & thoughtful analysis on which to sustain the rest of the menu.  It’s courtesy of Pulitzer Prize winning NYTIMES Albany Bureau Chief Danny Hakim. 

Soup:             

We follow up the buttery Toro with a fragrant chicken stock & squash puree made surprisingly zesty by the addition of  both lemongrass & sassy observations made by blogger Jimmy Vielkind of the New York Observer.

Intermezzo:

Catch of the Day

Entree:          

Our piece de resistance is a surf & turf special featuring SUNY Cortland Professor of Political Science Robert Spitzer, and former Assemblyman & candidate for Governor, John Faso. 

Please submit your reviews for our review:  

 susan@thecapitolpressroom.org  

I am the chef here. 

I also do the dishes.

The Capitol Pressroom provides Take-out at the following locations:

Binghamton – 11am – noon on WSKG/WSQX

Albany – 12:00 — 1:00pm on WROW NewsTalk 590

Buffalo – 1pm – 2pm on WBFO

Oswego – 3pm – 4pm on WRVO-2

Syracuse – 11am – noon on WCNY & 8pm – 9pm on WRVO main channel

Perhaps it is time to take Frost’s advice. 

 The coup, the prostitutes, the cocaine, the debauchery, the corruption.   It’s clear some of our elected-officials have come to Albany to indulge their baser selves. 

That is not to say that these men and women haven’t, at some point during their careers, contributed to a lively civic dialogue, some important community building or positive legislation.  They probably have contributed.  They may have their names on a slew of buildings, and we may thank them for a variety of projects they brought to our region. 

But ultimately their contributions weren’t coming from  individuals committed to “public service”.  They were coming from individuals using the idea of public service for personal gain.  

 Our Capital City is not alone in this. 

After the Blagojevich scandal, USA Today undertook a Department of Justice analysis  of the number of public corruption convictions the federal government had won from 1998 to 2007.  On a per capita basis, Albany was not the winner.  The winner was Bismarck.

Don Morrison, executive director of the non-partisan North Dakota Center for the Public Good, said it may be that North Dakotans are better at rooting out corruption when it occurs.  “Being a sparsely populated state, people know each other,” he said. “We know our elected officials and so certainly to do what the governor of Illinois did is much more difficult here.”

North Dakota had 8.3 convictions per 100K residents.   That’s 53 convictions.

Baton Rouge had 7.7 convictions per 100K residents.  That’s 332 convictions. 

Chicago had 3.9 convictions per 100K residents.  That’s 502 convictions.

Albany meanwhile, generated a mere 3.6 convictions per 100K residents; 704 convictions. 

No, that doesn’t seem like a large number given the fact that the state has 12.8 million residents.  But what if we were to tweak USA Today’s analysis, and count the number of convictions per number of elected officials?  Would the statistic seem more shocking?  

Perhaps it’s time to try the road not taken.

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Blair Horner of NYPIRGwill join me on The Capitol Pressroom to describe the series of reforms he and other reform groups have been pushing in Albany for more than 20 years.  

Jimmy Vielkind of the NY Observer  & James Madore of Newsdaywill have our political update du jour.

And we continue to talk gas drilling.  Today, Dereth Glance, the Executive Program Director for the Citizen’s Campaign for the Environment. 

I hope you can tune in.

Pow.

A black-eye for Albany.

The significance of Joe Bruno’s conviction on 2 counts of corruption of power will be known next year after the legislature does, or does not, pass ethics reform.

The charismatic former Senate Majority Leader was done in by what boils down to this:

Accepting money from several companies run by his friend and Loudonville (fancy Albany bedroom community) businessman Jared Abbruzzese in exchange for really doing… nothing.

Again, this from the Albany Times Union’s Rob Gavin:

Abbruzzese noted the senator appeared at swanky dinners in New York City as a consultant and introduced Abbruzzese to celebrities — including Donald Trump — to help him with possible development of golf courses in Florida.

Prosecutors had another view: that Bruno’s employment with Abbruzzese was nothing but an influence-peddling scheme, and that the senator was effectively being paid gifts.

They noted Abbruzzeze had helped found the Troy-based Evident Technologies, which was earlier approved for $500,000 in state grants through Bruno.

Just how easy is it in Albany to mix business & political influence?   Today we will speak with Glenn Blain of the New York Daily News about the trial, the verdict, the March 2010 conviction and the great question of Albany’s future. 

Dean David Rubin of Syracuse University’s Newhouse School joins me to discuss how the media are covering issues in Albany.  What letter grade to we deserve?

And our series on gas drilling continues, this time we hear from the drillers’ perspective with Brad Gill, the head of the  Oil & Gas Association of NYS.

It’s all coming up on The Capitol Pressroom.   Listen on-line or on-the-air.