Hayseeds No. 198

Really Good Rules Changes Proposed By Assembly Republicans.

In their latest attempt to make Assembly Democrats look really bad and really stupid, they proposed several dozen commonsense rule changes today, that were promptly voted down by the Democratic majority, a bit not by the whole majority:

1. All standing committee meetings shall be transcribed and the minutes be made available on the Assembly web-site and in the Assembly Public Information Office;
2. All legislators shall receive equal resources and staff allotments. Currently, Assembly Democrats receive more than twice as much money to pay staff as do their Republican counterparts ($183,373 per Democrat member versus $86,092 per Republican member);
3. Requiring immediate convening of conference committees when bills addressing the same subject have been passed by both chambers;
4. Allow 25 percent of the members of a standing committee to petition the chair for a public hearing;
5. Committee ratios shall reflect the ratio of majority to minority members that are currently elected to the house;
6. Require bills with Home Rule requests from local municipalities to be considered in committee within four weeks of introduction. Currently these types of bills are jammed through at the end of session and are often used as political bargaining chips;
7. All bills reported to the legislative floor must be accompanied by a detailed public committee report to help identify the legislative intent;
8. Allow motions to discharge at any time after 20 days has passed since the bill was referred to the committee and until five days before the end of the legislative session;
9. Require fiscal impact statements on all bills;
10. Require any bill that imposes a mandate on municipalities to be specifically labeled on the calendar;
11. Require a super-majority (2/3) vote for final passage of a bill imposing, continuing or reviving a tax;
12. Require a motion to report a bill immediately after a motion to hold in committee fails;
13. Permit each legislator to have at least one substantive bill discharged from committee and voted on the floor each legislative session;
14. Allow each member to sponsor a bill without first obtaining the consent of the Introducer;
15. Require 24 hours notice before substituting a member of a standing committee;
16. Require that a bill or a resolution sponsored by at least 76 members be discharged from committee;
17. Require three days notice before a resolution can be voted upon on the floor; and
18. Require 24 hours notice of a special committee meeting or of the addition or deletion of an item from a committee agenda.

The reality is who could be opposed to these things, except on a partisan basis (these are Republican ideas). But the reality is most of these ideas aren't conservative ideas at all, they are good governance ideas. Some big spenders might not like the 2/3rd for a tax hike or debt hike rule, but that one makes a lot of sense in the context of Albany's spending policies.

Throughout the debate this afternoon, I did not hear one legitimate excuse by Assembly Democrats, except that Republican proposals aren't worthy of consideration. Most of what I heard was a lot of bull, and that let me down.

From the Assembly Chambers This Wednesday.

Take a look:

  	
                       CALL TO SESSION
Tuesday  March 6, 2007

Happy Tuesday!

Speaking of State Budget.

It looks like it will be on time again this year. Late budgets are a thing of the past, and the public awareness of the issue has made it almost impossible to have a late budget nowadays. Spitzer wants his budget on time, and the reality is everybody has made the critical time lines to get the budget done on time.

That said, the New York State budget process sucks (now, you stop thinking about sex offenders!!). It has to be in effect prior to April 1st, which means we have very little solid information on how much money we will have for the upcoming fiscal year. But more seriously, the speed at which the budget is completed, leaves no time for public comment, and massively overworks even the massive Assembly Ways and Means staff, to say nothing of Senate Finance.

Years of Negotiation and Done.

It looks like yesterday, the legislature got done a lot of significant policy decisions with the Assembly passing the Sex Offender Bill and the Workers' Comp bill. Those are major policy decisions, that many people have worked on over the years, but somehow the governor was able to turn them golden and balance all the interests out.

We may never know how Spitzer got both of those bills not only embraced nearly unanimously by both sides of the aisle, and turned years of negogation and leaving the table empty handed at the end of the day, but he got it done ever so amazingly. Spitzer says he wants something done, and it gets done.

Now, many people say both the legislature and governor lost credibility over the comptroller battle. That was a serious misstep by both sides, but it shows that they can get back together make legislation happen.

Still it's a bit scary how fast things got done.

Workers Comp. Very few people discussed or said bad things about the Worker Comp Reform package, and it's passage was unanimous, there are problems with it. Permanent partial disabled people are going to screwed by this bill, and it's not clear how badly they will be screwed by it. We are ensured to hear horror stories about how permanent partial disabled people were wrongly denied benefits under the new regime, or how it's not all that much of a savings.

Sex Offender Bill. As the two gay members of the Assembly (Dan O'Donnell and Deborah Glick) and others point out, the sex offender bill has some very troublesome ramifications and might end up causing the state all of the headache of the Rockefeller drug laws. It's lot better thought out then other state sex offender programs, but there is no guarantee that results will be equitable or fair. An exbishionist (somebody who gets his jollies by showing them off in public), might just be put in civil confinement while a rapist might not. And to boot it's totally unfunded, although they plan to give the program a measly $1 million dollars in the state budget when they past it in the next couple of weeks. There are going to be a Chapter amendment on this bill next year most likely.

Why Obama Is A Good Candidate for President.

Not only because he advertises on fine blogs like New York Cowboy.org, but also because he's a real parking scofflaw. We need people like him to lead our country—there are too many good doers out there who always make sure they put enough quarters in the meter.

And it's not like he couldn't afford the $400 in back fines and fees for the 17 outstanding parking tickets he owed in Massachusetts. He's a real man of the people, if you ask me. People who get parking tickets, don't have chauffeurs to drive them around from birth to death.

Can't Forget Those Sex Offenders.

It looks like the people over at Cap-Con have noted that Senate Republicans are already been trying to drum up support for new sex offender legislation that would create a state police unit to go after them, a pretator alert system, and a website featuring missing offenders.

And Assembly Republicans don't want to be left out of the sex offender feeding frenzy. They want to have the DMV put sex offender information in their database, so that police know when they've pulled one over. As we all know, sex offenders are much more likely to be speeding or have a tail light out on their big padded vans without windows.

And then their are those people in Odgenberg who don't want a sex offender prison in their backyards. A toxic waste dump or mass burn incinerator would be more popular with the locals. Probably suits them right for allowing Chris Hessing live their and ramble on about how burn barrels are so bad.

Of course, there is a simple solution to where to put sex offenders. Remember that 16-acres of vacant land in lower Manhattan? We'll call it "Freedom Sex Treatment Facility". After all, why should upstate be taking all those sex offender trash from downstate.

As a side note: there are no registered sex offenders in Westerlo (12193), although there is a child rapist from 1991 in Norton Hill (12083)—who is long out of prison and off parole. No, I don't know that person. Charming people though you find on the sex-offender registry.

Albany To Study Why They Can't Plow The Roads.

Our favorite big city, appears to have realized that their response to the snow storm of a couple of weeks ago was totally inadequate and generally bad, and now they promise to study the problem.

Yassin Aref and Mohammed Hossain.

As you may know, these two very respected Muslims men recently got 15 years in prison by offering a loan to another man who later turned out to want the funds to buy a bomb or a create a terrorist attack or something like that.

In the words of Albany Times Union Columnist Fred LeBrun:

Yassin Aref, 15 years in jail for doing nothing wrong at all. Except for having his name and Albany address show up on papers at a purported Iraq terrorist camp that may have been a refugee center at one time. All according to the vaguest and shakiest American intelligence imaginable. Name and address, and no other connection.

And the other side—these guys were all too happy to profit from something they clearly knew was illegal.

Aref and Hossain were convicted in October of money laundering and conspiring to aid terrorism, a case built by a government informant who enlisted their help to launder $50,000 from the sale of the surface-to-air missile.

The informant, a Pakistani immigrant looking for leniency in a separate case, told the men he sold the missile to operatives from Jaish-e-Mohammed, a terrorist group that sought to kill a Pakistani diplomat in New York City.

Aref said he never showed approval for the mission, a statement prosecutors say is belied by his own actions and past writings. The plot was fake and the missile inoperative. But Aref did supervise the transactions between Hossain and the informant, who went by the street name Malik.

You just have to wonder: where these people really bad or was this entrapment, plain and simple, that had no grounds in reality? Is it true that they knew they were loaning money for such a bad cause? In other words, here some bureaucrats more concerned about their career advancement, or did these men pose a real threat to our country? We may never know as they sit in prison—at least until their appeal is perfected.

If there ever was a case for having open government and revealing all the facts in public this would be it. For sure, both sides were heard in the court room, and assumingly the federal prosecutor made a far better argument then that of the defense. It would be even better if they had put their oral arguments on line for all to read and discuss, and pass judgment on these men and the system that convicted them.