ANOTHER REASON WHY I♥NY

There is a horse running in the Belmont named "Luv Guv". And if he wins (the odds are 40:1), who's giving out the trophy? Could be Governor Paterson.

BONUS: the New York Times called Eliot Spitzer for comment. That is beautiful.

POLL: PATERSON HAS NO FRIENDS

Pretty much anybody polls better than David Paterson these days.

Maybe not Carl Pavano.

LOOK WHO'S BACK

Bow-chicka-bow-chicka-bow-bow. It's the Steamroller!

And third, as Eric R. Dinallo, the superintendent of the New York State Insurance Department, has wisely pointed out, we will have to step back from the current environment in which government has become a guarantor of all major risk.

So says the former governor of the state with the $60 billion Medicaid budget, the gold-plated pension system for government employees, and the ironclad incumbency-protection plan for members of the state legislature.

Although mistakes I made in my private life now prevent me from participating in these issues as I have in the past...

Mistakes? A mistake is when you use baking soda in the recipe instead of baking powder, not when you damn well know what you're doing is wrong on multiple levels and do it anyway.

I very much hope and expect that President Obama and his new administration will have the strength and wisdom to do again what FDR did.

What - extend the hard times?

O'ROURKE HOLDS FORTH

We Blew It is the title of P.J. O'Rourke's latest rant. He's beautiful when he's angry (and that's not a sexist observation):

We've had nearly three decades to educate the electorate about freedom, responsibility, and the evils of collectivism, and we responded by creating a big-city-public-school-system of a learning environment.

Mm-hm. I do have a quibble with:

People are even more conservative if they have children. Nobody with kids is a liberal, except maybe one pothead in Marin County.

This is not entirely true. When you have kids you become half-conservative-firebreather, half-liberal-nancypants. So when somebody suggests that it might be a bit much to hire Padma Lakshmi for the grade-school lunchlady, we start in bleating on how They Don't Care About The Children^TM; on the other hand, some years down the road when the first young fellow comes to our doorstep calling on Noodle he will be greeted by me as Ted Nugent and my wife as Gunny Hartman, and woe betide any nanny-stater who dares challenge our right to make that boy dance to the tune of our combined weaponry.

Continuing:

And yet we chose to deliver our sermons only to the faithful or the already converted.

Yes, yes, a thousand times, yes. Once upon a time, in September, New York was actually kindasorta in play if you go by the Marist and Siena polls that had McCain down between 5 and 10 points, and yet the McCain campaign never even bothered to open a campaign office in New York, let alone campaign here - their Jersey operation, such as it was, covered both states. Pathetic.

Here in New York was an enormous opportunity for McCain to really let both parties have it - after all, the state GOP establishment was in the tank for Bush back in '00 and tried keeping McCain off the primary ballot even, so it's not like McCain owed them anything even if the NYGOP were Republicans in more than name. And as for the state's Democrats, it's time to turn in your vast right-wing conspiracy secret decoder ring if you can't make hay taking swipes at the likes of Hillary, Sharpton, Shelly Silver, the departed Spitzer, and father and son Cuomo.

All these sharp operators at Camp McCain and not a one of them saw the parallels between Barack Obama and Mario Cuomo circa '82-83 - soaring oratory joined at the hip to a legislature gone flabby, locking in unsustainable gold-plated benefits for preferred constituencies. How'd that whole taking-care-of-the-base thing work out for you again, lads?

The whole thing, you go read it, yes?