For many New Yorkers, it was enough to know that the executives of Entergy Corp. lost little sleep over putting our health and lives at risk to arrive at a principled opposition to the continuing operation of Entergy’s trouble-prone nuclear reactors at Indian Point. The fact that the $10 billion, New Orleans-based company has managed for several years to get away with sloppy, third-rate oversight of a nuclear plant 30 miles north of midtown Manhattan was enough to spur elected officials such as Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, Westchester County Executive Anthony Spano and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to call for stricter federal oversight of Indian Point.  read more »

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been on a campaign to make sure that the granting of tenure in New York City’s public schools is not the pedagogical equivalent of social promotion—something conferred simply for showing up. His efforts appear to be producing results: The number of teachers denied tenure has nearly tripled over the past year. This is good news.

The mayor has made it clear that he wants tenure to be something earned, not something regarded as an entitlement. The problem is that not everybody is so enthusiastic. Last April, state legislators made it more difficult to deny tenure, by barring test scores from consideration in the tenure process.  read more »

Political junkies and maybe even a few ordinary voters will remember Tom Golisano as New York State’s answer to H. Ross Perot: A business leader with money to burn and an inexplicable desire to be a political player. Mr. Perot, of course, ran for president in 1992 and for a time seemed a threat to the established order. When he ran again in 1996, he seemed like yesterday’s news.

Mr. Golisano seemed to be heading in the same direction. His first bid for governor, as the Independence Party candidate in 1994, attracted a fair amount of attention during a race that eventually saw George Pataki defeat incumbent Mario Cuomo.  read more »

There has apparently been a collapse of comic literacy in the United States of America, as the magazine-reading class in this city has deteriorated to the point at which it can no longer absorb a political cartoon. Barry Blitt’s assault on the bias and profiling leveled at Mr. and Mrs. Barack Obama, “The Politics of Fear,” on the cover of the July 21, 2008, issue of The New Yorker embodies the kind of wit that was once standard issue in great cartooning from John Tenniel to Herblock.

Mocking the racial preconceptions that the yahoos have tacked onto the Chicago politician Barack Obama—whose first name isn’t much stranger to the American palate than Adlai’s or Lyndon’s once were—was Blitt’s really good idea.  read more »

State Senator Joseph Bruno is an old-fashioned politician who never saw much reason to hide the power and influence he accumulated during the decades he represented parts of the Capital District. Senator Bruno was—is—a character out of a William Kennedy novel, a white-haired, well-tailored power broker with a taste for racehorses and political patronage. His retirement, announced last week, will leave Albany a duller place.

When Mr. Bruno took over as majority leader of the State Senate in 1995, many downstaters believed he would be more interested in ideology than in wheeling and dealing. True, Mr. Bruno was a conservative Republican from a conservative district, and his caucus traditionally was more concerned with upstate and the suburbs.  read more »

“The secret of a magazine is passion.”

So said Clay Felker, a giant of journalism who died Tuesday morning in Manhattan at age 82. And the passion which most animated Clay was New York, the city he loved and understood so much that he founded a magazine by that name and mentored more than one generation of the city’s best writers. And while the names he minted—Tom Wolfe, Gloria Steinem, Jimmy Breslin—may loom large, Clay’s true legacy rests in his tireless and electric commitment to young journalists; where other editors saw employees, he saw passion that could be plumbed for new ideas, and channeled into the deep gorge of ambition that rumbles day and night beneath the city.  read more »

Last Friday, Michael Bloomberg went to the nation’s most prominent swing state, into the heart of Palm Beach County, and spoke to a Jewish audience in Boca Raton. He went there to tell voters to ignore the “whisper campaign” of lies and falsehoods being spread through the Internet and on right-wing talk radio, and even network TV, about Barack Obama’s supposed ties to radical Islam. Mayor Bloomberg deserves praise for speaking out loudly against those pernicious whispers.

The lie first infested the Democratic primary, kindled by right-wing bloggers and stoked by a Clinton campaign employee sending Matt Drudge a photo of Senator Obama trying on traditional African robes and turban, as well as Senator Clinton’s misunderstood and overplayed statement that her opponent was not a Muslim “as far as I know.  read more »

Nondisclosure agreements may be a common arrangement in the private sector. The boss wants somebody to go away, for whatever reason, and that somebody accepts a tidy package in return for never speaking, ill or otherwise, about the boss, the company and the circumstances of the departure.

Such deals emit a bit of an odor, but not enough to inspire public disgust. But when public agencies start to, in essence, purchase the silence of departed employees, the practice begins to take on the qualities of the Gowanus Canal in mid-August: Murky and stinky.

The New York Times reported on Sunday that at least 19 former employees of the state’s Power Authority signed nondisclosure agreements in order to remain eligible for severance packages or lump-sum payouts.  read more »

With Lehman Brothers bruised and staggered from its $2.8 billion loss in the second quarter, analysts and financial pundits have been writing rough-draft predictions that the bank may soon be joining Merrill Lynch, Citigroup and Bear Stearns as an institution in free fall, an institution that, despite its best efforts, simply could not overcome the unforgiving gravity exerted by the mortgage-backed securities meltdown. And while Lehman’s posting of its first quarterly deficit since going public 14 years ago is cause for concern, the bank’s shareholders, and Wall Street at large, began to breathe a bit easier this week as the firm’s chief executive officer, Richard Fuld, stepped up to take sole responsibility for his firm’s troubles.  read more »

He was a fixture in Washington, one of the most influential people in a city where power is the only currency that matters. From Capitol Hill to K Street to the suburban boxes of Alexandria, Va., Tim Russert was a man to be courted, flattered and envied. He was the best politician never to run for office.

But for all the glory and all the power that came with his job, Tim Russert never really stopped being a kid from Buffalo, an unapologetic political junkie who loved the spectacle of campaigns and elections and who never lost his curiosity about the people who would lead us.  read more »