Author: buffalopundit

Democratic candidate for the 143th Assembly District, Kristy Mazurek, filed her campaign financials almost a week too late. Neither she nor her campaign offered a credible excuse for this delay, which is evidence either of design or negligence. 

You may recall that this person is a cooperating witness into a wide state and federal probe into disgraced political operative Steve Pigeon’s dealings over the years.  This particular Assembly district has seen its last two representatives leave office in a prurient disgrace, and it’s safe to say that ethics and public integrity in Albany are big issues for voters this year. 

The campaign finance illegality of Mazurek’s zombie committee, the “WNY Progressive Caucus” (AwfulPAC), has been well-documented, and it’s safe to say that its record of impropriety was not by accident, but by design. It was set up as the 2013 iteraton of the perennial Pigeoning effort; a shady conduit for Pigeon’s dirty money to be funnelled, sub rosa when possible, against candidates endorsed by Democratic Headquarters. It was the point of entry for the May 2015 Preetsmas raids which led to the MIchalek conviction, the Pigeon indictment, and whatever more might come down that pike. 

Being targeted and interrogated by state and federal law enforcement is enough to spook anyone into modifying their behavior, right? As far as anyone knows, Mazurek remains the treasurer of AwfulPAC. Is it proper or legal for a current candidate for office to also be in charge of a disgraced zombie PAC? 

Let’s take a look at the Mazurek campaign’s filings. 

It bears mentioning here that Mazurek did not set up her campaign committee with the state until July 14th – the day before the first financial disclosure came due. This is illegal. Almost all of it is illegal. 

Election Law §14-100(7) states that you’ve become a candidate when you start circulating nominating petitions or receive contributions/spend money in furtherance of your candidacy. A “contribution” can be anything of value, under Election Law §14-100(9). 

Mazurek started campaigning over a month before she filed as a candidate with the Board of Election. She received and spent money even though she hadn’t registered herself or her committee. She announced her candidacy on Facebook on May 26th,

Political operative Kristy Mazurek officially announces her candidacy for 143 Assembly District on Facebook. pic.twitter.com/GFz1Xw5b6j

— Ryan Whalen (@RyanTWCNews) May 27, 2016

and held a campaign kick-off at a bar on June 8th.

Kristy Mazurek, treasurer of committee at center of AG’s probe of Steve Pigeon, announces press event tonight on campaign letterhead.

— Bob McCarthy (@bobmccarthybn) June 8, 2016

She is seen in photographs circulating petitions and handing out palm cards as early as June 20th. She is seen in images on Facebook marching in a July 4th parade with a banner, campaign shirts, and other items. 

Mazurek herself began collecting petition signatures on June 7th, and it appears from the BOE filings that Frank Max’s Progressive Democrats of WNY paid people to circulate petitions on her behalf in June and July. Shouldn’t her campaign disclose that spending on her behalf as an in-kind contribution? How does a campaign allow another committee to circulate petitions without coordination? 

So, Mazurek has been an active candidate since late May/early June, but didn’t file until July 14th. The image above shows that she collected money from people for a non-existent candidacy in violation of Election Law §14-118(1), which requires that, “No officer, member or agent of any political committee shall receive any receipt, transfer or contribution, or make any expenditure or incur any liability until the committee shall have chosen a treasurer and depository and filed their names in accordance with this subdivision.”

So, it’s perhaps no accident that Mazurek failed and refused to file her financial disclosures until they were five days late – after Democratic Headquarters and the media began asking questions. She received the contributions shown above, but also reported these pre-July 14th in-kind contributions: 

And expenses: 

These, too, are illegal. 

Election Law §4-118 states that “no candidate, political committee, or agent thereof may receive from any one person an aggregate amount greater than one hundred dollars except in the form of a check, draft or other instrument payable to the candidate, political committee or treasurer and signed or endorsed by the donor . . . .” But Mazurek reveals cash contributions in excess of the $100 limit from her father and her campaign manager. She also paid $500 cash to a band to play for her during the July 4th parade.  Under EL §14-118, “no candidate or political committee shall expend an amount in excess of one hundred dollars except by check drawn on the depository and signed by the candidate or person authorized to sign checks by him or in the case of a political committee, the treasurer or a person authorized to sign checks by him.”  

Two late filings. Seven line items; four of them apparently illegal. Hundreds in petition expenses not disclosed. In this scandal-plagued district, in this scandal-plagued state, this is fundamentally irresponsible. 

Carl Paladino, a prominent locally reputed racist and backer of neo-fascist nominee Donald Trump, sent this image Thursday to his broad email list.

 

Here’s a question, 

Why “mow the lawn”? 

Our man in Cleveland, Marquil from EmpireWire.com, sends us his sketchpad from the last day of the Republican party congress and precatory pogrom. 

Senator Ted Cruz’s stage dive into the arms of the NY delegation.

Thursday: Rudy Giuliani recounts for New York’s delegation the misbehaviors of Hillary and Bill Clinton.
 

Congressman Peter King barbecues Texas Senator Ted Cruz for the NY delegation’s final convention breakfast.
 

New York press corps showing signs of convention fatigue.

Police, police, and still more police.

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

 

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. 

 

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.

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The RNC Sketchbook: Day 1

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. 

 

 

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

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Sunday afternoon: NYGOP Chairman Ed Cox greets the press

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

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

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

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

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

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. 

“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?