Tom McGeveran

After a weeklong stint on this blog last summer, I'm back again.

"Who cares?" I can hear many of you asking, not unreasonably.

After all, it was Ben Smith who built The Politicker into a local phenomenon. It was Tom McGeveran and company who nurtured it over the last few weeks.

My only job, then, should be not to screw it up.

Some things will certainly stay the same.

As always, it will be a source of relevant and frequently updated material from me and the scary-smart Observer staff, geared towards the sorts of people whose hearts sink each time they reach the end of a Fred Dicker column.

More importantly, The Politicker will continue to serve as a vehicle for interaction with our readers, giving us the chance to tap directly into your politely-rendered collective wisdom about who to look at, what to write and when we've got it wrong.

The catch, of course, is that with the recent proliferation of New York politics blogs -- Ben remarked on it with the resigned air of a local whose neighborhood has just been overrun by hipsters -- it's going to be more of a challenge than ever to distinguish ourselves.

We accept it.

In the meantime, as I slowly recover from two years of writing about people with names like George Norcross, Sharpe James and Jim McGreevey, The Politicker may veer unpredictably. You may well read it for the same morbid reason that you watch car chases, magicians in water bubbles or a Jeanine Pirro campaign speech: it's a live spectacle that can go horribly wrong at any time.

That's fine. We're here to amuse as well as to inform.

Either way, we'll give it everything we have. All we ask in return is your continued attention, comments and tips.

Please.

-- Josh Benson

The Governor's rather tame vetoes yesterday are expected to snowball into significant ones today. Here's The Sun on what's expected:

To the alarm of lawmakers, he's taking aim at some of their most cherished spending items, like the Senate's program to give millions of New Yorkers property tax rebate checks. He's also using the court's decision to confront lawmakers on Medicaid spending, which he says is too high. And he's vetoing the Legislature's entire revenue bill because it doesn't include a pro-school choice measure that would give tuition tax credits to low-income parents.

This rather presidential-looking move (hello, Red States! I'm a fiscal conservative!) is obvious enough.

One question: won't it further damage Republican candidates upstate, where voters are watching the appropriations closely to gauge this administration's commitment to improving their economic forecast? Or will Joe Bruno be able to protect Republicans upstate by further distancing himself from Pataki?

Here he is on the Pataki "nuclear option" yesterday:

He said it would be "very unfortunate and tragic" if the governor struck down the Legislature's property tax rebate program.

- Tom McGeveran

The Politicker has finally been overhauled by a professional designer and I'm now wincing at how clumsy my previous design was. While the main changes to this site are aesthetic (with a few tweaks yet to come) you'll also see a new search function on the right side of the page. The search function isn't working right now, but it will be in a week or two.

Bigger changes are afoot at the Observer. The Politicker welcomes a small pack of sister sites: The Real Estate, edited by Tom McGeveran; The Media Mob, edited by Tom Scocca; and The Daily Transom, edited by Choire Sicha.  read more »

Enjoy.