Open Thread

Did you read it Cobble??? what do you think???

I don’t think Cuomo has any plans to cut taxes and spending!!!!!!!!

I coming to see that Rob has a masochistic streak.

UGH! i gotta go on an errand to brooks brothers in midtown :-/

*rob*

Paladino Calls New York Assembly Speaker a ‘Criminal’
Oct. 5 (Bloomberg) — New York Republican candidate for governor Carl Paladino called Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver “a criminal” who has protected the insurance industry to benefit his private law practice.
“The man’s a criminal, OK?” Paladino, 64, said today at a breakfast forum in Manhattan sponsored by Crain’s New York Business. “He’s never said how much his income is or how he earns it. You can just look at it and smell there’s something wrong when we in New York have the highest insurance rates in the country.”
Paladino said Silver, 66, a Manhattan Democrat and partner in the law firm Weitz & Luxenberg, controls the Legislature like a dictator. He said he would refuse to sit down with Silver and negotiate a budget on the speaker’s terms. He added that if the Legislature didn’t present him with a financial plan by the March 31 deadline, he would shut the government except for public health and safety agencies.
New York legislators in August approved a $136 billion budget that was four months late. The budget was the latest since 2004, when it wasn’t approved until Aug. 11, a record 133 days into the fiscal year.

‘Baseless Hectoring’

“It is unfortunate that New Yorkers are being forced to endure the insulting and baseless hectoring of the Republican candidate for governor,” Silver said in a statement. “I will not get into the gutter with Mr. Paladino, nor dignify his comments with a response. Rather, I will let New Yorkers judge his fitness for public office.”
In a Siena Research Institute poll released today, about 60 percent of likely voters agreed that Paladino is “a loose cannon, who doesn’t have the temperament to be governor.”
Voters favored his opponent, Democrat Andrew Cuomo, by a margin of 56 percent to 32 percent.
In prepared remarks at the breakfast forum, Paladino pledged to cut income taxes by 10 percent, or $3.3 billion, and corporate capital gains by $1 billion. The third-most populous U.S. state faces a projected $8.2 billion budget deficit next year.
He would close that gap with $10 billion to $12 billion in spending cuts, including $5 billion from the state’s $13 billion tab for Medicaid services to the poor; abolishing and consolidating state agencies; and dismantling the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, operator of New York City subways, commuter trains and buses, and some bridges and tunnels.

Serving Notice

“I’m going to take the MTA apart piece by piece,” he said, adding that if elected he would fire Jay Walder, the agency’s chairman.
Paladino, a real estate developer from Buffalo running with Tea Party support, said he could revamp state government because he owes no one any favors, having won the Republican nomination in a self-financed primary election. He said he intended to serve just one four-year term.
“I’ll do my job in four years,” he said. “I can because I’m not beholden to anybody and I don’t care about being re- elected, and I don’t have to join the pay-to-play club to build up my campaign fund to run for re-election.”