Joshua Malbin

It takes some balls, after being expelled from the NY State Senate for lying about assaulting your girlfriend, to try to regain your seat through naked gay-bashing. Hiram Montserrate is truly just vile.

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Time for Mort Zuckerman to write a bitter op-ed in the Daily News explaining how he would run because all other New York and national Republicans suck, but he won’t because he loves the Republican Party so much. (I think he’s a Democrat, but he would have run as a Republican, much like Mike Bloomberg.)

The field in the battle for a New York Senate seat became a little clearer Tuesday when Mortimer B. Zuckerman announced he would not join the race.

Mr. Zuckerman, chairman and publisher of the Daily News, said personal and professional reasons were behind his decision not to challenge Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand.

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So demonstrateth Harold Ford in his op-ed declaring his noncandidacy for the Senate in New York. Why isn’t he running? Of course it has nothing to do with not paying taxes in New York until this year, or the fact that he’s now an average of 20 points back in the primary. No, he’s just being a good party soldier.

If I run, the likely result would be a brutal and highly negative Democratic primary — a primary where the winner emerges weakened and the Republican strengthened.

I refuse to do anything that would help Republicans win a Senate seat in New York, and give the Senate majority to the Republicans.

It only makes sense, therefore, to pen a bitter op-ed in the nation’s leading newspaper that takes as many shots as possible at the current Democratic officeholder and the state Democratic party. Nothing says “I refuse to do anything that would help Republicans win a Senate seat in New York” better than, oh:

…The party bosses who tried to intimidate me so that I wouldn’t even think about running against Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who had been appointed to the seat by Gov. David A. Paterson, are the same people responsible for putting Democratic control of the Senate at risk… Too few in the Democratic Party are really willing to break with orthodoxy to meet these challenges. …Voting for health care legislation that imposes billions in new taxes on New Yorkers and restricts federal financing for abortions is not good for the people of this state. Voting against critical funds necessary to ensure the survival of the financial services industry — the economic backbone of this state — is not good for the people of New York.

Who could be so delusional as to think that standing up for banks and stopping health care reform is Democrats’ best chance for retaining the Senate in November?

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That’s how I imagine the first thoughts of CEOs and chairmen of boards upon reading this:

The cost of pollution and other damage to the natural environment caused by the world’s biggest companies would wipe out more than one-third of their profits if they were held financially accountable, a major unpublished study for the United Nations has found.

The primary reaction is supposed to be shock that these externalities add up to so much, I suppose. And it is shocking. But anyone with a passing knowledge of the current relationships between business and government in America and China, to take two highly important examples, has to have a sinking feeling in his heart.

“It’s going to be a significant proportion of a lot of companies’ profit margins,” Mattison told the Guardian. “Whether they actually have to pay for these costs will be determined by the appetite for policy makers to enforce the ‘polluter pays’ principle.”

For that, taken collectively they have the appetite of a single anorexic sparrow.

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Here’s the NY Times big story that was supposed to make David Paterson resign. It won’t, but he really really really won’t win now, as opposed to just really one time.

I assume that when we were all waiting for it before (around Feb. 8, remember), that probably had to do with this bit:

…just before she was due to return to court to seek a final protective order, the woman got a phone call from the governor, according to her lawyer. She failed to appear for her next hearing on Feb. 8, and as a result her case was dismissed.

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In the course of marshaling statistics to explode the myth of rampant Latino immigrant criminality, Ron Unz of the The American Conservative makes the following observation about LA:

Los Angeles today ranks as America’s least white European large city. Half of the population is Hispanic, and many of these are impoverished illegal immigrants and their families. Yet all crime rates have been falling steadily over the last two decades, with homicide dropping a further 18 percent just last year. As Chart 14 illustrates, most major crime categories are now back down to where they were in the early 1960s, when the population really did look very much like the actors appearing in “Dragnet” and “Leave It to Beaver.” And indeed, violent crime is now roughly the same as for Portland, Oregon, America’s whitest major city.

This Los Angeles example also raises important questions about the official claims that Latino youths have exceptionally high rates of gang membership, 1800 percent higher than for whites. Los Angeles supposedly has among the worst Hispanic gang problems, yet the city’s actual crime rates are roughly the same as what they were back in the lily-white days of the early 1960s. So if these local gangs aren’t committing much crime, what exactly is the definition of a “gang”?

A cynical observer might draw a connection between the hundreds of millions of dollars the federal government distributes each year for gang-prevention programs and the zeal with which local officials uncover the severity of their gang problems. In the case of Los Angeles, public officials have held January press conferences each of the last several years hailing the unprecedented drops in serious crime rates. They often follow these up a few months later with contrary press conferences on the horrific state of local gang violence and the desperate need for increased federal funds to cope with this scourge. If the federal government pays cities to find gang problems, many city officials will surely oblige them.

This has the ring of truth to me, but I don’t live in Los Angeles. What say you, Angelenos?

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This is just getting stupid.

Mortimer B. Zuckerman, the real estate tycoon and publisher of The Daily News, is considering a bid for the Senate seat now held by Kirsten E. Gillibrand, according to two people told of the discussions.

The Times thinks he’d run as a Republican, which I guess he won’t do if Pataki steps in. I don’t know which scenario makes me feel ickier.

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When it comes to his shadow run for Senate, Harold Ford is a New Yorker through and through. When it comes to paying taxes, though, he’s still a Tennessean — he’s never filed a New York return.

Ford claims to have moved to New York three years ago, and says paying “New York taxes” makes him a New Yorker. But his spokeswoman confirms to Gawker that he’s never filed a New York tax return — meaning that he’s never paid New York’s income tax, despite keeping an office and a residence in New York City as a vice chairman of Merrill Lynch since 2007…

Ford presumably decided that his real home was Tennessee, which conveniently has no income tax. Which means that, despite the fact that New York law requires part-time and nonresidents to pay income tax on money they earn in the state, Ford has shielded his entire Merrill Lynch salary from New York’s tax collectors for the past three years.

Even before this latest carpetbaggery revelation, the guy was averaging over 18 points behind Gillibrand in primary polling. Apart from his being buddies with Mike Bloomberg, is there any reason to take him remotely seriously as a candidate? Who pulls this kind of easily discovered stupid crap and thinks he can win? WTF?

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Same as it ever was in the nation’s leading newspaper: lunacy and bullshit given the same weight as the overwhelming preponderance of scientific evidence. Because who can say who’s right? Certainly not John M. Broder, who covers the climate beat as his full-time job.

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Buh-bye, Hiram.

But if Paterson does have to resign (unlikely), and his brand-new lieutenant gov steps up, what does that mean for the now evenly split Senate? Prolly deadlock again. Horrors! They might not get anything accomplished!

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