Results tagged “nystaterepublican”

Reach out and touch someone - and get fired for it, possibly even if you didn't do the reaching out and touching. The nutty voicemail message left for Bernard Spitzer, father of Governor Spitzer, is reassuring everyone that it's just politics as usual in Albany. The elder Spitzer's lawyers believe that the call was made by GOP consultant Roger Stone, who was recently hired at $20,000/month by NY State Republican (he was consulting with Spitzer's rival, State Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno).

"Probably a lot of Republicans would want Hillary, but I think they'd be making a mistake," he said, pointing out that Democrats licked their chops over Ronald Reagan in 1980.

While the Senate race this fall is kind of boring, in that Senator Hillary Clinton is pretty much assured re-election, one thing that is exciting is the insanity of the Republican party. The two Republican candidates, John Spencer and K.T. McFarland, debated on NY1 last night and it was balls out nuts. Spencer won the Republican party's nomination, but McFarland is hoping to sway some people during the primary (September 12) with digs like this:

"You brought up your wife, and I must tell you that that’s not a personal issue. That’s a professional issue. Because when you were mayor of Yonkers, you had an affair with your secretary while you were married to somebody else. You tripled her salary and made her your chief of staff. You were living with her. You doubled your own personal income. You got financial gain from that. And you had two children... If you'd worked for the federal government and you'd behaved that way, you would have been subject to indictment."

Meow! Spencer then said, "Shame on you, shame on you as the mother of children and a woman yourself, to talk about my wife and my family like that," and explained his current wife had been a staffer in other political offices and that he had gone through a "private separation and remarriage." Still, McFarland managed to say, "You are like the Clintons. You taxed and spent like Hillary, and you behaved like Bill," which Spencer dismissed as a ploy for a soundbite. Well, the ploy worked!

Former Massachusetts Governor William Weld, who lost the NY State Republican party's support to be the Republican nominee for the governor's race this fall, is being pressured to drop out of the race. Weld, who can still force a primary after earning more than a third of the NYS Republican party's votes, has lost support from both the current and former NY State Republican Party chairmen, who are urging him to quit, probably in order for John Faso to focus his efforts on defeating the looming favorite, Democratic nominee and current Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.

- And this picture is from trying not to offend, where ranex's friends were stuck in the Fifth Avenue Apple Store elevator...at least it's clear, so the store knew they were stuck (we were at the Apple Store in SoHo back in 2002 during the lower Manhattan blackout and people were stuck in that elevator then!)... anyway, the folks got out after 45 minutes and gave the NYPD high marks for their help

The NY State Democratic Convention is taking place in Buffalo today and tomorrow (the NY State Republican Convention is in Long Island on Wednesday and Thursday), and the gloves are coming off as the Democrats are looking to grab the Governor's house. Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, the Democratic frontrunner for the gubernatorial nomination, called the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation "an abject failure". Well, of course he would say that - didn't recently resigned LMDC chairman John Whitehead claim Spitzer had threatened him on the phone? Spitzer didn't mince any words: He called what's happening downtown an "Enron-style debacle." The LMDC said that Spitzer was continuing his vendetta against Whitehead, and Governor Pataki's spokesperson also used the word "vendetta" when criticizing Spitzer's words about a World War II veteran on Memorial Day, no less. Whitehead might be a WWII veteran, but a better question would be, what got done at Ground Zero?

In other news, it turns out that the G.O.P. has been paying for the personal assistant of NY's First Lady, Libby Pataki, raising questions of about whether that's the best use of the NY State Republican party's funds, given the lack of up-and-coming Republican talent. Man, Governor Pataki, you're making it so easy for us to dislike you! To the relief of NY State Democrats, the only noise that came from Senator Hillary Clinton's appearance upstate was that she fainted during a speech. She's fine, apparently suffering from a stomach flu, and will be back to polarizing voters soon enough.