An Opinion
The recent political chatter about “Obamacare” before the Supreme Court of the United States got a great deal of media attention. President Obama added fuel to the fire when he declared, “Ultimately, I am confident the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”
For someone who was a law professor those words were absurd. Even if a bill passed unanimously in the house and senate, it could still be overturned – if the law was in violation of the Constitution.
Viewpoint
None of the four developer proposals to “reinvent” the Nassau Veterans Coliseum is shockingly flawed or disturbing.
A couple of the artist’s conceptions seem like real improvements to the look of the arena building, but it’s not clear that making a cooler coliseum is what we should be looking for. Now that we no longer have to focus on what the public can do for the Islanders hockey team, we no longer need to lock ourselves into merely a newer version of what we already have.
Yet we haven’t unleashed the public’s creativity, and we still haven’t measured or reassessed what it is Nassau County needs, wants and expects out of that site and any remaining space around it. The county government seems resigned to give us Islanders Lite. No NHL hockey? We’ll have minor league hockey. Minor league something.
Eye on the Island
Lawrence Quinn, a former Glen Cove resident and the father of New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, is an Irish-American man of a certain age. So I can only imagine the look on his face when playwright Eve Ensler read aloud graphic passages of her best-known work, The Vagina Monologues, at his daughter’s 1999 City Council swearing-in ceremony.
When Ensler was finished, Mr. Quinn, who was sitting onstage during Ensler’s performance, looked at his daughter and said, “You couldn’t just have had the Pledge of Allegiance?”
Nassau Voters Deserve Real Choices
Written by Michael A. Miller Friday, 22 February 2013 00:00
For a long time, I cut County Executive Ed Mangano a lot of slack, partly because he was the first countywide elected official we’ve had in a long time who didn’t quickly begin jockeying for another office. There was something refreshing about that.Mangano was largely left to wither by the Republicans until the last 20 days of the 2009 campaign. He was opposed by the Conservative Party. Only when State Senate district polling tipped off party leaders that there was a chance to embarrass the ambitious incumbent, Tom Suozzi, by holding him to a smaller-than-expected victory, did the G.O.P. invest modest financial support in the Mangano campaign. Mangano should have recognized that he was elected with little political debt, with freedom to act independently, to step outside the circle and mine the wealth of managerial talent that resides in this county, to make hard choices and appeals to reason.
Instead, he immediately heaped praise on party leaders and allowed some partisans around him to practically run wild in the streets, even before he took the oath of office.
There would be no breathe of fresh air or break from hyper-partisanship. We have only escapes from reality.
Late last November, in the midst of a natural disaster, the County Executive mailed yet another taxpayer-funded brochure featuring a small child “thanking” him for not raising property taxes and for reforming the tax assessment system. On the same day it hit mailboxes, county legislators blocked Mangano’s request to borrow $165 million to pay commercial and property tax refunds, a practice which raises taxes in ultra-slow motion. This $100,000 mailing was answered in mailings by some legislative Democrats: “Under Democratic control, Nassau County had 10 straight years with a budget surplus…”
At what point will someone at the state level step in and issue guidelines about what partisan propaganda can be paid for with public money?
Now, former County Executive Suozzi has declared his candidacy for re-election. There are hard feelings among some Democrats left out on a limb or unexpectedly shut out. By the time you read this, the extent to which Suozzi will face opposition will be clearer.
We don’t yet know which Tom Suozzi is running.
When Suozzi reigns himself in, when he dials it down and shows some restraint, he can be very effective. Really the best in the county. But Suozzi was also not well-served by his party, which provided almost no oversight or boundaries, denying valuable opportunities to hone messages or practice subtle maneuvering. His campaign for Governor in 2006, to put it briefly, and kindly, was named the second-worst campaign in America by a national political blog.
People get worn down. Lessons were not learned. Three weeks before Election Day 2009, his county campaign materials had the theme, “Let’s Fix Albany.”
The 2009 results show that Suozzi’s problem was not merely low turnout among Democrats, or “Obama voters” or “self interest” or some of the other tortured explanations he or his supporters offered. There were Democrats in Democratic strongholds who wanted to rebuke Suozzi and did so by voting for the underdog, Mangano.
Three out of four Nassau County voters, including four out of five Democrats, did not feel that voting was worth their time in the 2009 county elections. If we are to have the same candidates again, we can’t just have another useless hissing match about who hates property taxes more. The people of Nassau County deserve big, meaningful choices. They deserve to be engaged, to be shown a way. If the last two county executives cannot do that, other choices may appear.