via City & State.

Manhattan State Sen. Adriano Espaillat is expected to announce that he will run for re-election to the state Senate this evening, at Fort Green Presbyterian Church in Manhattan at 6 p.m. Espaillat sent out an announcement to supporters last evening terming the announcement “Adriano’s next steps.” Espaillat is slated to face a primary challenge against Assemblyman Guillermo Linares, a longtime rival, who has been running for the Senate seat for months, and who is expected to have the backing of Rep. Charlie Rangel, Espaillat’s erstwhile primary opponent. A spokesman for Espaillat did not immediately return a request for comment.

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Photo by Hippohere, courtesy of Flickr Commons.

Have we stumbled into an episode of Mad Men?

Later this month, Republican State Sen. Marty Golden’s office is holding a career-development event for women in his southern Brooklyn district teaching them “Posture, Deportment and the Feminine Presence.”

That’s according to a taxpayer-funded mailing being sent out in Golden’s district, which an offended reader passed along. The taxpayer-funded event – presented by a “certified protocol consultant” – is part of a series teaching women in Brooklyn “what’s new in the 21^st century as it relates to business etiquette and social protocol.” More details are also available on Golden’s Senate website, including the fact that women in attendance will be taught to, “Sit, stand and walk like a model,” how to, “Walk up and down a stair elegantly” and “Differences in American and Continental rules governing handshakes and introductions.”

The event is being held in Bay Ridge Manor, the catering hall formerly owned by Golden, which is now owned by Golden’s brother and run by his wife.

A spokesman for Golden said the goal of the event was simply to help young women land jobs.

“In these economic times, when so many people are out of work, and graduating with advanced degrees to set themselves apart in the workplace, events such as these are also important,” said the spokesman, John Quaglione. ” Senator Golden hosts a multitude of events annually, and this is our first event of this kind, and we hope it to be successful and benefit those who attend.”

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A memo being circulated by Todd Breitbart, a Democratic redistricting attorney expert who has worked closely with the Senate Democrats, states that the proposed redistricting constitutional amendment released late last night would bring back prison-based gerrymandering.

In 2010, the practice, which had counted prison inmates in the largely upstate communities where they were held, rather than in the downstate communities where many of those inmates hailed from, was ended through legislation passed by the Democratic-controlled Senate. The Senate Republicans, who have since regained the majority, sued to overturn the law, but eventually dropped the litigation.

But Breitbart says the constitutional amendment, as proposed, would get rid of the 2010 law abolishing prison-based gerrymandering:

The amendment would reverse the one significant reform of New York legislative redistricting since the one-person-one-vote decisions of the 1960’s – the end of prison-based gerrymandering.

The reform enacted [in] 2010 specifically requires LATFOR to create a database in which inmates of state and federal prisons have been subtracted from their places of incarceration, and reallocated insofar as possible to their prior home addresses. LATFOR is further required to use the adjusted database in recommending Senate and Assembly districts to the Legislature.

The prisoner subtraction-and-reallocation law is in the Legislative Law, Section 83-m, Subsection 13, which would be completely superseded by the proposed amendment. The amendment abolishes LATFOR, but does not impose the prisoner subtraction-and-reallocation rule upon the new commission or the Legislature. It thus repeals the rule, and brings back prison-based gerrymandering.

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The four candidates vying to succeed Eric Schneiderman in the State Senate will debate transportation issues Tuesday, Sept. 7.

“With a massive fare hike looming after the worst service cuts in a generation, public transit has never been a more important election year issue,” said Paul Steely White, executive director of Transportation Alternatives, a New York City group that advocates for bicycling, walking and public transit.

The debate will be hosted by Transportation Alternatives and WE ACT for Environmental Justice, a community-based organization that involves low-income Manhattanites in the development of environmental health and protection policies.

The debate will be co-moderated by West Side Spirit reporter Dan Rivoli and David King, assistant professor of urban studies at Columbia’s School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.

Topics of discussion will include sustainable transit funding, traffic safety, bike lanes and transportation equity.

The candidates attending include Assembly Member Adriano Espaillat, Mark Levine, Anna Lewis and Miosotis Muñoz.

The debate will be at the Armory Foundation, 216 Fort Washington Ave., at 7 p.m. Voters are invited to attend.

By Alan Chartock

The more we watch these powerful folks in politics, the clearer it is that many of their actions can be explained by “rationalization,” the term we all learned back in our basic Psychology 101 course. For example, when Charlie Rangel is accused of not paying his taxes after having written much of the tax code, or Eliot Spitzer consorts with prostitutes after he wrote and enforced many of the laws against “Johns,” we ask ourselves how they could be so stupid. Or when former Republican Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno skirts the ethical line by selling a nearly worthless nag as a way of having a business associate funnel money to him, we shake our heads and wonder what he could have been thinking.

The answer, I am convinced, is that they truly do not believe they are doing anything wrong. Any lie detector read-out would indicate they were telling the truth when they insisted they had done nothing wrong. Some have described this self-deception phenomenon as a sense of entitlement. Some suggest that when you get very powerful, you think you are owed something by the rest of society. I’ve seen this kind of arrogance in politicians up close and personal, time and again.

Speaker Sheldon Silver says that his house passed a very strong ethics bill that, for some reason, was vetoed by Governor Paterson. The bill was vetoed because it had enough loopholes to drive a semi-truck through. The people deserve to know where every penny a legislator raises comes from. Shelly Silver and his colleagues don’t like that. If that had been part of the ethics bill, the governor would have signed it.

The very powerful seem to act as though the laws are for other people. I know many of these people fairly well and, more often than not, I really like them. They are real characters. Sometimes they spring at you like a Damon Runyon character from Guys and Dolls. When you speak to them, they are just like us. They have foibles. They are human. They have a sense of humor. They have good and not so good sides to them. In some cases, they have flirted with legal prohibitions and enter into a state of denial. In others, they fool themselves on policy matters.

These days, it is fashionable in some reform quarters to speak of Shelly Silver, the top guy in the New York State Assembly, as if he is the devil himself. His former chief of staff, Pat Lynch, is now one of the most important lobbyists in Albany. The word on the street is that if you want something from Shelly, you hire Pat Lynch, his former, most trusted aid. In Albany, true or not, perception is everything. Perception gets lobbyists hired.

When I recently asked Shelly whether lobbyists in Albany are too powerful, he answered that he can show us good laws like “Leandra’s Law,” which was pushed by citizen lobbyists and makes it a felony to drive intoxicated with children in your car. Hey, come on now, Shelly, there is a huge difference between the big boys and girls who push the laws and funnel money to the legislators for their election campaigns and the few good government types who occasionally get a win to make the Legislature smell good.

When I asked the Speaker about the law that the Governor and the Senate are pushing that would “empower” SUNY, he seemed dead set against it. He says, and he is again right, that every time you raise tuition, a young person will be denied the American dream. Under the “Empowerment Act,” SUNY schools and presumably City University schools will be given the power to raise tuition for their schools and will, presumably, be allowed to keep the increase to run their schools.

The problem is that we are in really tough times. The State University has been slashed terribly. To keep the University viable, it makes sense to allow the schools to raise tuition. Otherwise the great SUNY and CUNY systems are truly doomed. The Speaker has the power to make sure that those with the least are given tuition assistance (TAP) funds.

All this proves that both politically and substantively, our public officials are human and can get it wrong.

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Alan S. Chartock is president and CEO of WAMC/Northeast Public Radio and an executive publisher at The Legislative Gazette.

I have been hanging around the New York State Legislature and watching government as a professor, broadcaster and columnist since about 1965. I’ve seen a lot, but I have truly never seen anything like what I am seeing now. It’s degenerate, disgusting, venal and beyond comprehension. It is particularly bad in the New York State Senate, where a clique of Democratic politicians has grabbed power and captured the top leadership positions.

We are seeing a study in self-deception. These people are totally lacking in redeeming qualities. Their piggishness reminds me of the guy in the desert who walks around for weeks without a drink of water. Just as he is about to die, he comes across a lush oasis with a beautiful, clear stream. He drinks and drinks, and pretty soon he is gasping for breath and expires. He was just too greedy and didn’t know when to stop.

Every day I get email alerts as to what these folks are up to. They are spending a fortune of our taxpayer money on their personal and political public relations. They posture as champions of the people, but they refuse to see that they have endangered their own majority. The present so-called Democratic leaders replaced the disgraced Republicans, who at least knew how to hide their piggery behind a facade of moral rectitude. The Democrats, as disgusting as they are, are convinced that they will win again because so many of the aging Republicans are getting out of office and their seats will have to be defended. So what are the disillusioned and disgusted New York State voters supposed to do?

In California and other progressive states, the voters do have options when things get bad enough. In some places they can mount “recall” elections. You get enough signatures on a petition and you can kick someone out of office. States like California also offer the voters something called “initiative and referendum.” Under this plan, if you can collect enough signatures, you can propose and then pass a law rescinding what the Legislature has done. Of course, there are two sides to this. The big money people can put up all kinds of spurious ballot propositions and then use their money for huge radio and TV campaigns. Nevertheless, tough times like these call for tough measures.

In other cases, voters have imposed term limits on state legislators. In some states they have put the brakes on the self-serving interests of legislators by setting up independent redistricting commissions. Instead of allowing the legislators to design districts that guarantee themselves a win, these commissions act as umpires to set up fair district boundaries.

Let me tell you something: If you were to offer voters any of these options, they would approve them in a New York minute. But you know what? We don’t have the tools to do that and the only way to get those tools is through a Constitutional Convention. The problem is that the same people who run for the Legislature either run themselves or get their friends to run as delegates to the convention and nothing changes. We spend a fortune and have little or nothing to show for the effort.

I think that the present crop of politicians may be cruising for a bruising. When people feel like they have no options, you get political revolution. That is exactly what is happening now. It’s sort of like a pressure cooker. The steam has to go somewhere when you have a defective machine. Entrenched politicians will start to lose in primaries. Someone will start a “throw them all out” campaign. Certain really corrupt legislators will become the targets of district attorneys. Former Senate head guy, Joe Bruno, is one such example. A whole crew of Democrats in the Senate is facing investigation. These folks are so far gone that we can hardly expect them to turn things around. The more they misbehave, the angrier people will become and the more they endanger their own political futures. 

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Alan S. Chartock is president and CEO of WAMC/Northeast Public Radio and an executive publisher at The Legislative Gazette.