Eye on the Island

Major League Voice

Kenny Albert, who grew up in Sands Point, began his 19th season last weekend as an announcer for Fox Sports’ National Football League (NFL) broadcasts. Calling football games, however, wasn’t part of his game plan after graduating from New York University (NYU) in 1990.

“My goal was to get a job doing hockey play-by-play on the radio. That’s what I always wanted to do,” Albert said, during a recent interview.

NY’s Tampa Delegates

Recognizing that millions of Americans were seeing him for the first time, Admiral James Stockdale, Ross Perot’s vice presidential nominee in 1992, famously asked during a televised debate, “Who am I, why am I here?’

Variations of those same questions could be posed to the delegates spending Aug. 27-30 in Tampa, Florida at the Republican National Convention (RNC).

Disappearing Act

The late Jack Benny said he’d purchased so much life insurance from one company that Benny’s demise threatened its solvency. “When I go, they go,” Benny said.

Raymond Roth, the 47-year-old Massapequa man who has emerged as Nassau’s most notorious life insurance policyholder, purchased coverage valued at more than $400,000, the Wall Street Journal reports. But law enforcement authorities theorize Raymond wanted Jonathan Roth, his 22-year-old son, to cash out the policy’s proceeds while Raymond was alive. Alas, that is illegal, and not easy to do. The saga’s courtroom machinations have been well-chronicled while the hurdles to getting a person declared officially dead, if their body has not been found, have gone largely ignored.

Northeast’s Future

A legal notice published last week in The New York Times attempted to do the near-impossible—generate interest in a public hearing this week on improving the U.S. rail network between Boston and Washington, D.C.

Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), the NEC (Northeast Corridor) Future meeting is being held on Thursday, Aug. 16, between 4:30 and 7:30 p.m., at the Farley Post Office/Moynihan Station, 380 West 33rd Street, Room 4500, Manhattan. The New York City gathering is one of nine sessions the FRA has scheduled as part of its NEC Future initiative, which is summarized at www.necfuture.com.

Party Switch Fiascos

Gore Vidal, the legendary 86-year-old writer, died last week and one of his obituaries noted that Vidal’s four favorite English words were, “I told you so.”

It is a sentiment I must reluctantly invoke, while calling attention to my observations from 2009 and 2010, following a New York Post report this month that state Senator Malcolm Smith (D-Queens) met recently with the state Republican committee’s leadership team about running for New York City mayor as a Republican in 2013.

New Jersey’s Jets

Hofstra University and the New York Jets announced last week that the Jets’ planned practice session at Hofstra, which was to be held on Tuesday, Aug. 21, had been canceled.

This is the second straight year the Jets are not making their one-day-only pilgrimage to Hofstra. The institution’s Hempstead campus was the site of the Jets’ annual training camps from the late 1960s through 2008.  

Plum Island’s Future

The federal government wants to sell Plum Island, situated near Long Island’s North Fork, but is there a buyer who wants an 840-acre parcel where today more than 40 foreign animal diseases (FADs), such as hog cholera and African swine fever, are being studied?

Oh, and if Plum Island’s use since the 1950s as a place where the federal government has also developed technologies to mitigate the risks of FAD-caused catastrophic economic losses isn’t enough of a turn-off, its location may give pause to a prospective buyer, too.

Nassau Hub Reset

Newt Gingrich said that President Obama’s public approval ratings have sagged because his campaign’s mantra has evolved from “yes, we can,” to here is “why we couldn’t.”

Bringing the analogy closer to home, Nassau’s voters made it clear in a non-binding referendum nearly a year ago that they had no interest in having the county’s taxpayers borrow upwards of $400 million to build a new Nassau Coliseum and a minor league baseball stadium in Uniondale. It would have been constructed at the 77-acre, county-owned site north of Hempstead Turnpike that is commonly known as the Nassau Hub. The August 2011 referendum had the avid support of county executive Edward Mangano and New York Islanders owner Charles Wang but was voted down by a decisive 57-43 percent margin, meaning these two entertainment and sports venues would never be built, at least not with taxpayers providing the bulk of the financing.

Capitol Hill VIPs

Barclays’ interest-rate manipulation scandal has generated headlines but less attention has been paid to the Capitol Hill figures that benefited financially when Countrywide Financial Corp. did something comparable on their behalf.

How Countrywide Used its VIP Loan Program to Influence Washington Policymakers, a report prepared for Rep. Darrell Issa (R-California), chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Oversight and Government Reform Committee, was released July 5 and offers an eye-opening window into D.C.’s world of crony capitalism.

Uncovered Campaigns

New York’s print and broadcast media outlets collectively made in-kind contributions this spring to the re-election campaigns of U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and U.S. House Representative Carolyn McCarthy (D-Mineola) by refusing to acknowledge the people who want their jobs.

Newspapers, radio, and TV stations, with few exceptions, boosted Senator Gillibrand and Rep. McCarthy by ignoring for months the three candidates who competed in the state’s Republican U.S. Senate primary election on Tuesday, June 26 as well as the two rivals who competed in the Republican and Conservative primary contests in New York’s 4th Congressional District (CD) on that same day.