#RNCinCLE Sketchpad Day 3

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Day 3 of the RNC Sketchpad courtesy of Marquil from EmpireWire.com. Follow him on Twitter at @empirewireNY

With his candidate’s nomination in the bag, Carl Paladino joins the NY delegation and press for breakfast.

Congressman Peter King shares thoughts with NY press.

 

Lunchtime in Cleveland’s public square: homemade Trump hat man.

Lunchtime in Cleveland’s public square: Amnesty International observers.

Lunchtime in Cleveland’s public square: Dump Trump butterfly girl.

 

Lunchtime in Cleveland’s public square: the sousaphonist who took on Westboro Baptist Church’s bullhorn

 

The Green Old Party

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Democratic Candidate for State Senate (SD-60) Amber Small put Republican operative Todd Aldinger on blast Wednesday afternoon for filing petitions that are “fraught with so many irregularities as to rise to the level of suspected election fraud.” 

These are not, however, petitions for Republican candidate Chris Jacobs, but for James V. DePasquale on the Green Party line. The thing is that Mr. DePasquale has been a registered Green Party member for about 10 minutes, and it was Republican commissioners of deeds and notaries who circulated his petitions on that line. 

Small’s campaign released a statement indicating that it had filed a complaint with the Public Corruption Unit of the Erie County District Attorney’s office regarding these Green Party petitions, which Aldinger filed on July 13th on behalf of the “DePasquale campaign”.  Small alleges that DePasquale was not even registered to vote until two weeks ago, and enrolled in the Green Party. Republicans circulated Green Party nominating petitions for DePasquale in an effort to split the left-of-center vote come November. 

In her statement, Small said, “I am appalled at the utter lack of respect for the electoral process and the voters of WNY. My opponent has shown that he is no better than the corrupt leaders who have been lining the halls of Albany for the last decade. This community deserves better. We deserve a champion of ethics and reform—not another crooked Albany politician who manipulates a system to serve himself. The last thing we need is another Senator who thinks he is above the law.” 

The next time the Republicans recruit somebody to be their Green Party dummy candidate, they might want to select someone who doesn’t have about $700 in Department of Social Services liens filed against them. (#2007273609 filed 12/21/2007, book 187 page 2589; 2007263115 filed 12/10/2007, book 186 page 6383). They could have found this out by checking with the office of County Clerk Chris Jacobs. 

 

#RNCinCLE Sketchpad Day 2

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Our man in Cleveland, Marquil from EmpireWire, transmits his sketches from day two of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. 

NYS Delegation whip Nicholas Langworthy interviewed before breakfast Tuesday.


At breakfast Tuesday, US Senate candidate Wendy Long soft boiled Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton.  

After a full opening day, delegates reflected quietly on Wendy Long’s breakfast comments Tuesday.

Addressing the NY delegation, Congressman Chris Collins (R-NY 27th District) praised Rudy Giuliani’s Opening night convention speech with an incendiary metaphor and projected on the diversity of President Trumps cabinet.


The RNC Sketchbook: Day 1

Campaign Finance Tuesday

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Monica Wallace is the endorsed Democratic candidate for the 143rd Assembly District. A political novice running her first campaign, she has raised an impressive $60,419, and has $45,800 on hand going into the primary.

Wallace’s primary opponent, Kristy Mazurek, has not filed her financial disclosure with the NYS Board of Elections. It was due on Friday the 15th, and last-minute on-time filings were posted to the website on Monday morning. As of Tuesday morning, Mazurek’s still shows this: 

This is rather funny for a candidate who is known for only a few things: her defunct TV show; her DWI history; and her incompetence or criminality (it’s one or the other – you pick) as treasurer of the WNY Progressive Caucus (AwfulPAC) in 2013. 

An interesting point is that the people who obtained nominating petition signatures for Mazurek appear to have been paid by either the Flaherty for DA campaign or Frank Max’s Progressive Democrats of WNY. Because one committee apparently spent money on behalf of another, be on the lookout for how and whether Mazurek discloses that. You’ll apparently have to wait because Mazurek simply cannot bring herself to follow the law and timely disclose her campaign finances. Somebody paid for that banner, this literature, and those tootsie rolls and shirts

Amber Small is the endorsed Democratic candidate for the 60th Senate District. Small is a Parkside community activist, and has also had scant political experience. She has raised an equally impressive $101,136, and has $58,609 going into the primary.

Small’s primary opponent, perennial candidate Al Coppola, raised $163 and has a little over $10,000 on hand, mostly from past electoral efforts. What Coppola has, however, is a lot of time and name recognition, and is being assisted by people with loyalties to indicted alleged felon Steve Pigeon and one-term Senator Marc Panepinto. The former are carrying out the anti-Zellner vendetta, and the latter are carrying out a similar battle against Small, whom they want to hurt because she announced her candidacy long before Panepinto suddenly withdrew from the race. 

On the other hand, the Republicans’ pick, County Clerk Chris Jacobs, has raised almost $200,000, and has $463,000 on hand thanks in part to a $200,000 loan Jacobs made to his campaign fund, and $100,000 Jacobs transferred in from his “Jacobs for Clerk” committee. That money helps make up for his enrollment disadvantage, which is also counteracted by his name recognition. So far, though, Jacobs’ major policy initiative has been to join the hue and cry over Lyft and Uber in upstate New York.

As for the competitive Democratic primary for District Attorney, interim DA Flaherty has just under $250,000 on hand, with $21,500 in contributions since January, and endorsed Democrat John Flynn has raised $188,000 with $151,600 on hand. Flaherty benefits here from $140,000 in loans from family and friends, such as Pigeonista James Eagan. Flynn has no similar influx of cash, but is racking up party and union endorsements that Flaherty can’t match. 

As for the quality and quantity of petitions, look for there to be challenges a-plenty from all sides. Stay tuned. 

 

 

The RNC Sketchbook: Day 1

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Our man in Cleveland, Marquil from EmpireWire, sends back pages from his sketchpad. 


Sunday afternoon: NYGOP Chairman Ed Cox greets the press


NY delegation’s breakfast guest, former Speaker of the House and VP candidate honorable mention, Newt Gingrich.


Ohio’s “open carry” gun policy does not extend to Cleveland’s Marriott Renaissance Hotel, home of the New York GOP delegation.


Monday morning: Economist & Media personality Lawrence Kudlow delivers applause lines at NY delegations “Make America Safe Again” breakfast


Representative Chris Collins (R-NY 27th District) took calls while waiting for breakfast. 


Open carry (and lowered flags) on display in Cleveland’s Public Square

Death Cult Commits Mass Murder

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I don’t really have a hot take for you in response to the news of yet another terrorist mass murder in western Europe. These attacks are horrific for their randomness, their senselessness, and their carnage. It doesn’t matter if it’s a pressure cooker bomb in Boston, a truck in Nice, an AK-47 in Paris, or a bomb in Istanbul or Baghdad – terrorism is not a new phenomenon, and hysteria is not a reasonable reaction to it. 

People who follow Donald Trump cheered his call for a “declaration of war” against ISIS or “radical Islamic terrorism”. Some took to Twitter last night to insist that President Obama doesn’t have the “will” to win a war against ISIS, and should ask Congress for a declaration of war, just like FDR did in December 1941. 

But ISIS isn’t Nazi Germany. It isn’t a real state with a real army. What happened in Nice wasn’t an act of war by one army attacking another. This was a slaughter of innocent people by mass murderers. You cannot declare war against jihadist intent. You cannot firebomb Paris or Brussels and slaughter millions in order to also get the bad guys. In fact, declaring war against ISIS plays right into that group’s hands, as it lends them the legitimacy they so deeply crave. 

It bears mentioning here that ISIS is losing in Syria, is losing in Iraq, and the ISIS jihadist fad is on the decline. Living in a brutal, totalitarian, merciless, homicidal pseudo-“caliphate” may sound appealing to a bored kid in the banlieues, but getting vaporized by a drone strike doesn’t hold the appeal for disaffected French North African millenials it once did. 

ISIS is a death cult attracting unemployed, disaffected Arab youth from Europe much like Charles Manson attracted unemployed, disaffected upper-middle class hippies in the 60s. The only thing that can be done is to invest more heavily and improve our electronic surveillance and expand our efforts to infiltrate these groups in order to improve our ability to predict where and when these will happen. Nothing we do – or refrain from doing – in the Middle East will stop these attacks in the West, which are perpetrated almost exclusively by citizens of the very countries being victimized.

These attacks are happening in Western Europe because those nation-states have almost no history or tradition of assimilating immigrants. Places like France were once homogeneous; never a melting pot of nationalities like the United States. We are far better at avoiding this because we have wider, better experience welcoming and assimilating people from different religions, ethnicities, races, and cultures. Not so for European nation-states. 

No wall will keep out a kid of Tunisian extraction with a French passport. No declaration of war will halt a bunch of Algerian twentysomethings from slaughtering concertgoers in the name of some perversion of religion. The unique social, national, and economic situations among Arab immigrants from former colonies in once-ethnically homogeneous European countries have no analogue here. The US should certainly be at the lead in this fight against jihadist terrorism, but by no means should we overreact or hand these murderers the propaganda victories they so desperately want. 

Paladino Harasses GOP Delegate

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“Carl being Carl” means threatening Republican delegates. The Hill reports that Carl Paladino casually calls for the hanging of people with whom he disagrees, and throws the word “treason” around a lot. 

Stefani Williams, a vocal member of the Free the Delegates movement, told The Hill that Carl Paladino sent a menacing email in response to her pitch to the convention’s credentials committee. Paladino serves on that committee. 

“You should be hung [sic] for treason Stefani. There will not be a Republican Party if you attempt to replace Trump. I’ll be in your face in Cleveland,” Paladino allegedly wrote, according to an email that Williams shared with The Hill. 

The email’s sender matches an email address used by Paladino, a former New York gubernatorial candidate. 

“I was pretty taken aback that a delegate, for one, and a member of the credentials committee would send such a nasty, threatening email,” Williams told The Hill. 

“There have been some less-than pleasant emails I’ve received from delegates, but this was the top.” 

When reached by email Thursday, Paladino didn’t deny that he had sent the message. 

“What the person was proposing is to encourage violation of the rules of the Republican Party under which Donald Trump rose legally to be the presumptive candidate,” Paladino wrote in an email to The Hill. “The person is being treacherous to the party in doing so and as such the colloquialism is appropriate and if the person’s underwear is all bunched up over his or her sensitivity to my reaction then tell the person if he or she can’t take the heat of what he or she dished out, then get out of the kitchen.”

What Carl Paladino – a Trump surrogate and local developer with ties to myriad political figures – is saying here is that it’s perfectly normal and reasonable for him to call for the hanging of someone with whom he disagrees. For Mr. Paladino – a former and possibly future candidate for statewide office, and a current trustee on the Buffalo Board of Education tasked with overseeing a troubled school district made up of young people – disagreements over the arcana of internal Republican convention rules should be resolved through threats of murder. 

Hey, kudos to keyboard warrior Paladino finally learning how to spell “underwear”, though, right? 

Legislative Elections to Watch

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Senate District 60

Is there something in the water in the 60th? After jettisoning smart, brave, and competent Republican Mark Grisanti, the predominately Democratic district elected Marc Panepinto, who will only serve one term. So, it’s an open seat and it’s been a typically turbulent primary race throughout the spring and summer, as the Democrats couldn’t decide what to do after Panepinto quit the race. Although Parkside activist Amber Small has been running for months, Democratic HQ flirted with running someone like Assemblyman Sean Ryan, and others. In the end, Small was the only person left running, mostly because the Republicans are running millionaire developer and county clerk Chris Jacobs as their endorsed candidate. In a normal place, that would be the race: Small vs. Jacobs and let them have at it.

But the 60th Senate District isn’t a normal place. 

Democrat Al Coppola is running for perhaps the millionth time, and careful observers will recall that the turnout two years ago was so anemic that Coppola actually gave Panepinto a run for his money. Coppola reportedly submitted his nominating petitions on Wednesday, and was assisted in that effort by people who have ties to Steve Pigeon and Panepinto. Rumor has it that Panepinto is livid at Small for announcing a primary race against him well before he got caught up in a scandal and decided not to run, and this may be evidence of that. 

The Republicans have their own perennial candidate running a primary, Kevin Stocker, who lost to Panepinto two Novembers ago. Stocker will likely self-fund, and he’ll force Jacobs to spend some money before September. How he does in the primary should, in a normal place, inform Stocker’s decision to carry on in September. But, see above – this isn’t a normal place, and Stocker has already said he’ll run on a minor party line – whether it’s one he wins a slot on, or one he creates as a vanity party. If true, Stocker and Jacobs can split the conservative vote, and Small can benefit from the Democratic enrollment advantage. 

Assembly 144

My Assemblywoman, Jane Corwin, isn’t going back to Albany next year. She’s quitting, and it didn’t come to light until two days before petitions are due. This means that party bosses get to essentially hand-pick (technically, it’s done by a committee). This is all convenient because the Democrats didn’t bother to run anyone against the incumbent in a district with a 60/40 Republican enrollment advantage, but vacant seats are a different animal.

With public integrity and reform so high on people’s minds, the time is ripe for a genuine race in the 144th, but it’s too late for the Democrats to circulate petitions for anyone now. So, while Corwin seeks to score points for “term limiting” herself, she did so in a way that ensures that the democratic process is completely thwarted and the constituency is force-fed a candidate whom one party’s bosses select.  The only option now is a write-in campaign, which is tricky but not impossible. 

Assembly 143

Law Professor and former law clerk to a federal judge, Monica Wallace, is campaigning hard, and she’s had some very successful fundraisers. When mid-July campaign disclosures come out next week, look for her status as front-runner to be further cemented. Given her opponent’s 2013 “experience” as treasurer for the scandalous WNY Progressive Caucus, everyone will be examining the accuracy and timing of those reports. 

The Republican Dance with Genocide

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Maybe old Caucasian politicians should just stay off of Twitter. Maybe people should think or reflect before they Tweet. When you’re running for President, believe it or not, every retweet is, actually, an endorsement. When you’re a Caucasian member of the Board of Education in a school district whose population is overwhelmingly African-American, even a casual sensitivity to that fact would be expected – demanded

People like Donald Trump and his mini-me, Carl Paladino, make mistakes like everyone else, and mistakes can be forgiven. But that forgiveness is not an entitlement, but something earned. You have to apologize. You have to be contrite. You have to own it, and take some adult responsibility. Maybe – if you’re up for it – recognize how insensitive it seemed, and show some remorse or regret. Don’t offer an “sorry you were offended” non-apology – say something like, “I am horrified by this error I made, and I apologize for making it.” But Trump and Paladino are cowards. They’re so wrapped up in their reputations for being un-PC, that they can’t just man up and admit they were wrong. After all, if they admit fallibility, they succumb to the “PC crowd” itself, and lose their followers’ perverse respect. Instead, blame the media. Blame the millennial running your Twitter for you. Blame liberals. Blame Hillary. Blame Obama, Kenya, and long-form birth certificates. Blame progressives. Being Donald or Carl means never having to say you’re sorry. 

Donald Trump had already favorably retweeted several “alt-right” (which is the right wing’s politically correct term for neo-Nazi) Twitter accounts before his latest dalliance with anti-Semitism. It’s why so many accounts had (((echoes))) around them over the past few months. This isn’t just an accident – this is a deliberate appeal to a constituency that hates everything and everyone not white and male. It has its genesis in Trump’s ignorant, racist, and quixotic effort to prove that President Obama was born in Kenya. Trump went where few other mainstream Republicans would go; not satisfied simply accusing Obama of hating America and everything it stands for, Trump took the extra step of insisting that Obama wasn’t even one of us. He’s other. You can see it, can’t you? 

The support Trump now enjoys from the neo-Nazi and neo-Confederate fringes – the people with totenkopf and “88” tattoos, and the guys running rusted coal rollers with massive Confederate treason flags – don’t much care about Hillary’s emails or Trump’s policies. However, they love Trump’s anti-Mexican and anti-Muslim animus, and his ignorant pronouncements and promises of walls and exclusion. Trump’s desire for this support is proven by his cultivation of it. 

Late last week, Trump retweeted a neo-Nazi Twitter account that had a picture of Hillary Clinton superimposed on hundred dollar bills with a Star of David bearing words accusing her of being corrupt. Trump and his surrogates lurch between excuses: “It’s a sheriff’s badge!” “It’s in Microsoft Shapes!” to outright defense of the Tweet as recently as Wednesday nightKlansman David Duke loved the Tweet – especially the Star of David

But context is everything and Trump never saw where the original image came from – a neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic account. That is all the explanation anyone needs. But through his long-winded defiance, Trump solidifies his overt dalliance with the White Nationalists. They are his, and he is theirs, and this week underscored that simple equation. 

It’s true that Hillary Clinton has a big problem with trustworthiness, and this week’s mess of news about her private email server – the substance of which is for another time – has reconfirmed a lot of those suspicions for people on the right and left alike. But the Republican standard-bearer screwed it up. On the day the Republicans needed only to be sane, he was insane. On the day the Republicans needed to be concise and credible, he was neither. He blew it. Instead, the big headline was about Donald Trump praising a genocidal dictator for his skill at “killing terrorists”, perhaps ignoring if not forgetting the whole “gassing Kurds” and “invading Kuwait” thing. 

(One thing strikes me when listening to Trump’s interminably long, self-indulgent, petulant speeches: he is doing a low-rent, unfunny, racist impression of Howard Stern. You hear it in his tone of voice, when he exaggerates his Queens accent, in his syntax and diction. He thinks he’s being comedy-angry, like when Howard yells at Scott the Engineer over a mic that’s not working, or an intern who brought the wrong lunch. But Trump has no sense of humor and never got the joke; whereas Stern would have on KKK guys ironically to laugh at their ignorance, Trump seems to think it was a compelling set of interviews. Stern is an entertainer with a biting wit, whereas Trump is just a listener who doesn’t get it.)

Locally, we have home-grown Trump surrogate and depraved notable Carl Paladino. Wednesday morning, he Tweeted the image shown above, “Lynch @LorettaLynch let a grand jury decide”. The tweet was taken down after 30 minutes, and replaced without the first Lynch, (and in such a way that only people who follow both Paladino and Lynch would be able to see it). Michael Wooten at WGRZ caught it and got Paladino’s account to tweet this: 

I inadvertently called for the genocidal vigilante hanging of the sitting African-American Attorney General. “My bad.”

Paladino quickly blamed his employee, former Assembly staffer Jackie O’Bannon, for sending the first Tweet with the first “Lynch” inadvertently added. Funny for the almost-septuagenarian Tweeter to let the millennial take the fall, rather than just be a man and take the hit. While the ghoulish Paladino hasn’t Tweeted much, he’s had an account since 2009 – seven years. 

If Carl Paladino was a normal human being, he’d perhaps be entitled to the benefit of the doubt. We might take at face value that this was just an innocent screw-up by a staffer who runs his Twitter, rather than an aborted call to hang Loretta Lynch from a tree with a rope around her neck. But Carl Paladino long ago forfeited that doubt, and doesn’t have the courage or character to show contrition for something he says was an inadvertent mistake. (You don’t just get to say, “I didn’t mean it.” You have to say, “I’m sorry”.  At least, that’s what I teach my kids.) 

This is a guy who, when he’s not sending his buddies blatantly racist garbage (in one case even being called out for it by one of them), is busy dancing around the fringes of racial animus, going as far as the public and media will permit. To date, that well of tolerance has proven to be deep and wide. This is a guy who sent around pictures of President Obama and his wife as a blaxploitation pimp and whore. Paladino sent a picture showing a plane seemingly landing on top of a group of running Africans with the caption, “run, niggers, run!” On what basis does this guy deserve the benefit of this doubt

So, no, I don’t buy that this was an innocent mistake. Past being prologue, I think it was affirmatively typed out that way for a reason, and Paladino doesn’t deserve people buying his blame-shifting excuse. His cowardly flailing about, blaming the help and liberals, would be pathetic even for a middle-schooler. Paladino told CNN

I intended to say to Lynch to send the FBI report to the grand jury to decide criminality which she is legally obligated to do,” Paladino said in an email. “I have never personally tweeted. We are novices. My assistant tried to send it directly to Loretta Lynch by adding ‘@Loretta Lynch.’ It was a well-intended mistake that the progressive press wants to take out of context.”

It wasn’t “well-intended”. It was objectively ill-intended. He’s been on Twitter for 7 years, so the time for rookie mistakes long ago came and went. Here’s what he emailed to ABC News: 

To be clear, that’s a millionaire developer college graduate and elected member of a Board of Education who can’t spell “Loretta” or “underwear”. 

The main reason we know the “Lynch @Loretta Lynch” tweet wasn’t a novice mistake or inadvertent is that Paladino won’t apologize for it. Like Trump, he is physically, psychologically, and intellectually incapable of admitting he did something wrong and saying, “sorry”. Trump isn’t sorry he – perhaps inadvertently – retweeted an anti-Semite’s anti-Semitic image, and Paladino isn’t sorry he – perhaps inadvertently – called for the genocidal vigilante murder of the Attorney General. (I don’t believe either one was inadvertent, nor does either man deserve that indulgence.) So, what that all means is that some people matter to Trump and Paladino, but others don’t. They’re ok with that, and their cult-like followers aren’t just ok with it, they’re proud of it. This is making “America great”. This is #AmericaFirst. Blame “liberal progressives”, and retreat to your safe space – right-wing talk radio. 

Hillary Clinton is perceived as being dishonest, so the Republicans trot out men who are more full of shit than an overextended septic tank to run campaigns against her.  Donald Trump and Carl Paladino are liars, too, but they’re more bombastic and unapologetic about it. 

I don’t have a problem with Republicans attacking Hillary Clinton for her trustworthiness, honesty, or policies. That’s all fair game. But the appeal to Nazis and racists is shameful, and the local Republican committee has absolutely nothing to say about it, lending instead tacit approval. If you think America isn’t already great, and needs to be “great again”, behaving like a reasonable human being would be a good example to set. 

How Pigeonism Ends

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Pigeonism is over. No longer can that individual credibly participate in any electoral process, anywhere. He owes more than three Teslas’ worth in unpaid federal taxes, he is under arrest – although free on bond – accused of nine felony counts, including grand larceny by extortion. Right now, two races are testing the scattered Pigeonistas’ ability to continue the patronage gravy train without their depraved guru. In the Assembly 143 race, the former treasurer for the WNY Progressive Caucus (“AwfulPAC”) is running as a Democrat, despite being a major player at the epicenter of the events that led to Pigeon’s downfall. The acting District Attorney, Michael Flaherty, has surrounded himself with Pigeon operatives, and had the nerve to comment on the Michalek conviction Wednesday despite the fact that Flaherty and his predecessor/mentor failed and refused to prosecute the alleged crimes that led to the Pigeon/Michalek bribery counts. 

The word is chutzpah, and we have a glut of it here in western New York. Flaherty has the chutzpah to comment on a conviction his office could have – and should have – prosecuted. Mazurek has the chutzpah to try and make it a scandalous trifecta in the A-143, after the disgraces of Gabryszak and Wozniak. Pigeon and Michalek had the chutzpah not only to devise a jobs-for-fixing-cases arrangement, but were so brazen as to memorialize it all in writing, believing they’d never be seen or caught. Sure, you can tell in some of what’s been released that Pigeon was uncomfortable discussing the ongoing corrupt behavior in emails, but Michalek had no similar qualms. These were two men who were sure this would never be revealed. 

What it says to me is that this was likely how people generally operated with Pigeon. All of it was corrupt horse trading of influence for jobs. It all boils down to how the patronage gets dealt, and to whom.

You scratch my back, I subvert one of the foundations of our pluralist democratic republic – an independent and impartial judiciary. 

Ultimately, this all reveals quite clearly that Steve Pigeon was the strongman of a shadow banana republic that operated quite freely and openly for a couple of decades. Pigeon might have been deposed, but his diehards continue their insurgency in A-143, with Flaherty, and perhaps even with Republican state Senate candidate Kevin Stocker, based on rumors I’ve heard. 

I think that it’s becoming clear that what’s left of the Pigeon faction is not going to find great success this election season. They are rudderless and will find it harder to fund their campaigns without Uncle Steve miraculously coming up with hundreds of thousands of dollars in shadily-sourced, seldom properly disclosed funding. The best Flaherty’s Pigeonista ally Jim Eagan can do is buy a Flynn-sounding URL and redirect it to Flaherty’s own site. Weak sauce, shady, savage, salty, are all terms the kids would use for that idiot tactic, and it does nothing to promote the candidate. It simply demeans the office and the process. 

The Republicans, who so often conspired with Pigeon to screw the Democrats, have been uncharacteristically silent, given the disgraceful fall of two prominent local (nominal) Democrats. You’d expect them to be howling, but in this case, Pigeon was oftentimes the greatest gift they could ever have. For instance, it was Pigeon who engineered the 2010 coup in the County Legislature, that transformed a majority Democratic body into a rubber-stamp for the execrable Chris Collins. Just months earlier, he had manipulated a similar coup to transform a Democratic state Senate Majority into a Republican one. That one earned Pigeon a patronage job under convicted felon Pedro Espada. 

In the Preetsmas series of articles, I coined the phrase, “Pigeoning: pi·geon·ing ˈpi-jən-iŋ: (n) the action of using money and influence, oftentimes pushing the election law envelope, to actively sabotage and undermine the Erie County Democratic Committee.” As you might imagine, this oftentimes required the Republicans, but especially the obsequious fusion parties – “Independence” and “Conservative” alike – to conspire with Pigeon to advance not just candidates, but their committees’ access to patronage jobs.

Nothing that Steve Pigeon ever did brought about real reform or good government. Nothing he touched had anything to do with policy, or helping the community – it was all about enriching Pigeon and the pilot fish who clung to him. Western New Yorkers of every party, of every race, of every nationality, of every class deserve so much better than what Pigeon and his cult offered. 

For many, including me, the Michalek bribery charges were anti-climactic. There’s got to be more. What happened to the election law crimes? Former DA Mark Sacha, who is also running for DA, and was instrumental in pushing the allegations of Pigeon’s criminality to the authorities, says that there remain election law-related felonies that could still be prosecuted. He suggests that they’re being swept under the rug because of politics. I hear rumors of other state court judges who have lawyered up. The FBI confirmed yesterday that a federal investigation is ongoing, and Attorney General Schneiderman made it clear that the state’s own investigation is also “ongoing”. There will no doubt be more. In fact, the FBI called this bribery investigation as only “one prong” of a multi-faceted, ongoing investigation. 

There has to be more. I suspect that the Michalek bribery case is just the amuse bouche – the low-hanging, easy to reach fruit that can be pushed through quickly to reassure an impatient public that progress is being made. All the while, law enforcement continues to build its other cases against Pigeon and others. 

(Bonus: read Ken Kruly’s retrospective and analysis here). 

This is all great for western New York generally, reasserting control over our political process and restoring some integrity to the process. But don’t overlook what a huge victory this is for the Erie County Democratic Committee and its chairman, Jeremy Zellner. Every time he’s been disrespected, dismissed, insulted as “young and inexperienced” by Pigeonistas and pundits, he’s maintained his professionalism. He’s taken his licks, and he’s come out on top. Every time someone disrespects him as a “boy”, he can simply wave a copy of the Pigeon indictment around and silently claim victory. Not victory as in, he’ll win every race he backs, but the victory of being the only chief of a Democratic faction who’s not under arrest facing nine felony counts of bribery and extortion. 

Pass the popcorn, because we’re just watching the trailers. 

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