"I go forward with the belief, as others have said, that as human beings, our greatest glory consists not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall."

- Eliot Spitzer
Godspeed, Mr. Spitzer.

I just wanted to note some things for tomorrow ( Read more... )

Tomorrow is Election Day. Please remember to exercise your voting rights, even if the votes "don't seem that important" in a year where there isn't a national or gubernatorial race. Remember that some of your local town/village/hamlet/parish/prefecture/whatever representatives are likely up for election, and they can have a really big impact on ( Read more... )

Here in the New York area, fast-food standby Taco Bell has been implicated in dozens of accidental E. Coli 0157:H7 poisonings in the past few weeks. The CDC is testing each of the individual ingredients (A lot of little things go into a taco!), and they first thought that it was the green onions, but now maybe it's the white onions, but who knows ( Read more... )

Well, here we are. Election Day is Tuesday, and all the things that I could hope for this time around may come to pass. Everyone's saying that the Democrats are going to take over... something. Personally, I think that nothing is assured. But, make no mistake - this is a jersey-color election. I'm normally far more measured, judging candidates ( Read more... )

Many of the people arguing to "send the immigrants home" are missing a key point about the United States. We were all immigrants, once. It's more than a little chilling how we're so willing to abandon our sense of history. People would do well to consider the words of Bill Murray, from the 1981 movie Stripes:
We're Americans. With a capital A, ( Read more... )

Back in April, I wondered how a particular Supreme Court case - Georgia v. Randolph - was going to pan out. The decision was handed down today, with the court deciding 5-3 (Alito recusing) that given no other mitigating factors, any resident of a home may refuse a search, and the refusal must be honored by police even if another resident of the ( Read more... )

Nassau County is back where it started. From Newsday:

After six weeks of deadlock and official inaction, Nassau legislators late Friday ended up where they began their bizarre journey - putting Democrat Judy Jacobs back in the post of presiding officer, and returning Republican Peter Schmitt as their minority leader ( Read more... )

Remember that "Thousand-to-one-shot" court challenge that I mentioned? Well, I should have bet the long shot. State Supreme Court Justice Joseph Spinola agreed with the Democrats:

"A constituent would expect his legislator to vote for a presiding officer who is a member of the same political party of the legislator he elected to represent his ( Read more... )

Prince Niccolo Machiavelli once wrote that,
"Men are so simple and yield so readily to the desires of the moment that he who will trick will always find another who will suffer to be tricked."It's been a wild ride here in Nassau County these past few weeks. Just this past october, I was expressing considerable adulation for my county's collective ( Read more... )