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This belongs to you. Take it back...
Bruno 
Tue Oct 09, 2007 at 20:39:37 PM EDT
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( - promoted by phillip anderson)
Jim Odato's Times Union story today about Boss Bruno's meetings with very "controversial" cult leader Fred Newman is a nice start, but there's probably some real fire under all that smoke.
As in, what did Boss Bruno do for Newman, with state taxpayers' dollars, in return for Newman's granting Independence Party endorsements to endangered Republican senators downstate?
Which Newman did, in every instance.
Details below.
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Sun Oct 07, 2007 at 16:20:56 PM EDT
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(I'll have more on the TU story later. - promoted by phillip anderson)
The Times Union has two stories today that may finally drive a stake through the dark heart of the phony Bruno/Dicker "Troopergate" story.
It seems that troopers were keeping track of Bruno's Manhattan travels on the taxpayers' dime during the Pataki regime.
One particular detail in the accompanying story leaped out -- troopers took Bruno to a meeting with Fred Newman, who is described as a political operative "who sometimes appears on television talk shows," six weeks before the 2004 election.
Yeah, that Fred Newman.
More below.
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Wed Oct 03, 2007 at 16:33:46 PM EDT
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I don't think I could have expressed this any better than Wayne Barrett at the Village Voice. (Thanks, CapCon.)
...the first real challenge to [Albany's] insider-party game in modern history... Spitzer’s determination to take the senate away from the party that has controlled it ... is an electroshock to the state’s political culture—disturbing not just to New York’s Republican remnant, but even to the assembly Democrats, who, like prior governors of both parties, have protected and prospered from a divided legislature. What we are hearing in the high-pitched posturing over this scandal is the death wail of an incestuous bipartisan combine, threatened by a governor ... who knows ... what it takes to push his taut frame through a stiff Albany wind.
This sounds good, but I worry that Spitzer has done a weak job of dealing with the posturing, failing to explain basic civics to the participants and holing up against an investigation that seems to have nothing to find. I'm also not as optimistic as Barrett that this is a death wail - but it's certainly a wail.
(Barrett's piece leaves Andrew Cuomo in tatters, though, I think.)
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Tue Aug 07, 2007 at 17:48:16 PM EDT
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(Read this. - promoted by phillip anderson)
A couple of days ago I wrote an abstract diary about power. After a few cycles of comments and another blog post, I'm here to write about what's developed from that, "trying to build a working Rube Goldberg machine out of rotten fish."
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Sat Aug 04, 2007 at 11:08:48 AM EDT
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(More on this when I get back to New York, but I will say this: one of the reasons that I went to work for Brian Keeler's campaign was something he said in pretty much every stump speech he gave. He said, "The first thing I want to do when elected is to make it much easier for YOU get rid of ME." We need a few dozen more folks willing to do just that. - promoted by phillip anderson)
I know there's a New York Power Authority, but this isn't about electrical energy - it's about the concentrations of political power that New Yorkers take for granted. Putting power against power isn't working so well, and we may need to find a different approach.
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Wed May 16, 2007 at 12:03:14 PM EDT
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This week,two leading state politicians are trying to get our attention about things they have been pursuing over a long, long time. Bruno's "Upstate Now" initiative is basically more of same-economic development through, as the TU's article puts it, "$3.7B for high-speed rail, tourism and tax credits." More debt and tax exemptions. Brodsky is crafting legislation, with Spitzer, to deal w/NYS's out-of-control authorities and their massive public debt-one of his perennial issues. The NYTimes titles this "Citing Waste, Albany Seeks to Rein in Public Authorities." Of course, Brodsky's last go-round on this stuff (the law to make Empire Zone beneficiaries who did not reincorporate for a valid business reason, but, rather, in order to qualify for "new business" tax exemption giveaways) did not actually result in, well, results… See this in which the Syracuse Post-Standard quotes Brodsky regarding the non-enforcement of the changed rules that were intended to close that particular tax loophole: "It is unacceptable."
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Mon Apr 30, 2007 at 12:53:28 PM EDT
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Today's New York Times asks where Sheldon Silver's gone in this age of blasts between Joe Bruno and Eliot Spitzer:
Speaker Silver, above, contented himself to lie in the weeds. Having served a dozen years as former Gov. George E. Pataki’s chief Democratic foil — and as the party’s loudest voice in the capital — Mr. Silver has spent the first few months of the year largely trying to stay out of Mr. Spitzer’s way.
I'm sure there are people who see Silver's quiet as a hearty endorsement of Spitzer's reform push, but I'm inclined to think he's letting Bruno take all the heat rather than make it clear how little he really likes reform. Or maybe I'm too cynical...
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Sat Mar 10, 2007 at 11:23:12 AM EST
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Having not heard much about Bruno's BFF Abbruzzese in a bit, I thought we could travel down memory lane and take a peak into the dark underworld that our Senate Majority Leader has dipped his toes into. And when I say underworld, I mean that literally. You see, back in the day, Joe's buddy Mr. Abbruzzese joined forces with Stephen Feinberg of Cerberus Capital Management LP whose "specialty . . . is investing in debt of companies at the gates of bankruptcy." Cerberus emerges from the underworld. Yes, Cerberus - the three-headed dog that guards the gates of hell, the same Cerberus which is now breaking in the news for its connections to the Walter Reed Scandal and much much more! Let's look at how these vultures are tied to our friends Joe and Jerry.
The 3 heads in our much smaller story here is that of Cerberus, Romulus Holdings Inc., and Mr. Abbruzzese's TechOne. This budding partnership was happening about the same time as the more reported Motient/Tejas shenangans - where Mr. Bruno's investment has raised eyebrows. But the stories are somewhat similar, as are the players. In the coverage at that time: "Vultures Circling" we see that "Romulus and Cerberus are known as "vulture funds," or investment banks that specialize in buying the debt of distressed companies at rock-bottom prices." And Romulus is "an investment vehicle of . . . Gary Singer, who was sentenced to 28 months in prison in 1995 as a result of insider-trading violations." (my emphasis)
These three formed CRT Satellite Investors LLC (for Cerberus, Romulus and TechOne), and Digital Satellite Lenders LLC (DST) which invested in WSNet, Inc. We learn in WSNet Bankruptcy Slammed that WSNet filed for Chapter 11 in 2002 after "its primary lender [DST] cleaned out its [WSNet] bank account. Alleged in this article that "Singer and Feinberg fired the company's CEO and replaced him with Abbruzzese" when WSNet tried to acquire 2 cable systems that the partner's in DST were working to acquire the public debt on. The NYT wraps up the affair this way:
In 2000, Cerberus invested $42 million in the debt of WSNet Holdings, a small provider of satellite television programming. Over the next two years, according to shareholder lawsuits, Cerberus forced the company into bankruptcy by secretly buying up the bonds of companies WSNet hoped to acquire and forbidding WSNet executives from pursuing deals. Through bankruptcy proceedings, the fund tried to take control of the company, lawsuits contend. The suits also contend that Cerberus installed directors at WSNet who maximized Cerberus's profits at the expense of other stakeholders. The claims were settled for a relatively small amount [hmmm… does this imply that even though they settled, it wasn't really all that guilty?] in 2005, by which time Cerberus had recouped its initial investment in WSNet, according to the lawsuits.
This is all happening at the same time that Singer's brother Steven is the chair of Motient and Abbruzzese is a director. The connection to Romulus is still strong as we see below the jump. .
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Wed Feb 07, 2007 at 10:57:14 AM EST
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Yet another gracious statement ( via Times Union Capital Connection) from the Senate Majority Leader. I bet these guys are thrilled to be working for Bruno right about now. He also had this to say about about Sen. Robach, "He's staying a Republican for the rest of this life"
Well, that just means we will have to win the Senate Majority by electing good, progressive, reform Democrats! Explanation on the flip:
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Mon Dec 04, 2006 at 08:23:04 AM EST
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Not to beat a dead horse, but I've converted Bruno's "glitchy" PDF of 2004-2005 pork into a version that can be searched.
This means that the original images are still what you see when you look at the text, but you can also search, copy, and paste the text.
Some caveats:
- I did not attempt to clean up the word recognition at all. That means there is a large amount of incorrectly recognized words in the PDF. That said, searches for a particular Senator or organization should work fairly well.
- The file is 76MB in size. That is smaller than the 100+ MB that Bruno's office provided, but it is still quite large.
I will be processing and posting 2003-2004 in a similar format this week.
You can download the file at: http://www.thealbany...
Enjoy, and happy hunting.
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