Graduation Weekend

It's another Cornell graduation weekend, and we're hosting Mollie's family. Today, Speaker Pelosi addresses the grads, Tea Party members address Pelosi, and a motley crew of Ithacans for Obama address the Tea Party members. We're staying home, planting our garden, and baking for tonight's dessert party.

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R.I.P.

Jay Gallagher died last night, which won't mean much to anyone who hasn't at some point been obsessed with NYS politics. He was probably the best Albany reporter of all time. For the past 11 months, he'd written little more than a blog on his battle with pancreatic cancer, which his children completed this morning.

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Who Elected This Loon?

The Massa story gets crazier by the minute.

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R.I.P.

Farewell to Law & Order, which at one time or another employed every actor I ever met.

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PaleoLibertarianism

Ithaca will be visited Saturday by Speaker of the House and Cornell Convocation Speaker Pelosi, and therefore by a horde of Tea Party members, who will line the airport roads in protest. Meanwhile, the Tea Party's biggest success story, Rand Paul, is neatly dissected in this NYT op-ed piece, which shows what happens when your ideology is too rigid for the subtle shadings of the real world.

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An Important Work of Art

By KAZ, for Dairy Day.

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AG Candidate Schneiderman

Today I met one of five, or is it six, Attorney General candidates for the State of New York, West Sider Eric Schneiderman. He's got a great liberal-progressive resume, even as someone who's been too long in the rattrap that is the NYS Senate. Everything he said was believable and heartfelt, from the fact that Dems in power tend to lie down and try to make friends rather than explaining what they're for and grabbing for it to the sotto voce suggestion that his politics and the governor-in-waiting's may be somewhat incompatible. Schneiderman believes that we benefit from an AG who is not the governor's lapdog, and I can't disagree, although he hints at a separation of powers that is not really implied by the Constitution, which sites the AG within the executive branch of government. Anyway, he was very impressive and very personable, gave a great presentation, and is being overrun somewhat by Eric Dinallo, who comes up first on Google when I type in "Attorney General." (Really, Eric D? Over Eric Holder? And what's with all the Erics, anyway?) The primary is four months away, but the convention is next week.

My favorite part: He gets how corruption in Albany feeds into Tea Partiers' hatred of government, and he vows to do everything in the AG's power to clean it up.

I wish I had read this before I went to breakfast--we ran over, and I got a parking ticket, negating the fact that the senator paid for breakfast.

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No Anti-Incumbent Fervor Here

The throw-the-bums-out fervor doesn't seem to have trickled down to school elections, where all the local budgets passed (Cortland's by 55 votes) and incumbents were returned just about everywhere except in Groton. Paul continues his Adlai Stevenson role--always a bridesmaid, never a bride.

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Sign of a Governor Who's Checked Out

Paterson dourly predicts that school budgets will fail statewide, despite the fact that the average rate of passage is about 90 percent.

LATER: Well, 92 percent of statewide budgets passed. So the guv just sounds peevish.

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What's at Stake

Based on this editorial in the IJ, the people of Dryden would be well-advised to vote for Paul.

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Letters for Paul

When you don't have a large congregation or the Rotary Club behind you, you must rely on other means of building support.

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Speaks for Itself

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Gone Fishin'

Paul's off to Lake Ontario today, despite weather that conjures up images of "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald." "Gales of November come early," my foot. What about the "Gales of May"? This climate change stuff is killing me.

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Drug Quiz

Something tells me that there's absolutely no correlation between performing well in the Rite Aid Drug Quiz Show and living a clean and sober life. Nevertheless, we're proud of O's team's success and will head up to Syracuse tonight for the state finals.

LATER: Lost by one point to Clinton, the district that's won this eight years in a row. It seriously could have gone either way. Everyone got nice trophies. Channel 9 got the caption wrong. We saw a cigarette butt fly from the window of the Dryden van on our way home. Another life lesson wasted.

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Webby Award

The good news is that DB has footage involved in the site that won this award. (It's not named for ducks.) The bad news is that the Lab of O laid DB off some months ago.

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Meet the Candidates, redux

Here's the story, as written up in the IJ. The question about honors classes came from local resident O. Lutwak. Her father has never said the word "dismayed" in his life, but that's show biz.

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Meet the Candidates

Meet the Dryden School Board candidates tomorrow, Tuesday, at 7:30 in the HS library.

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