Ken Fisher

The city’s Campaign Finance Board will be posting updated campaign finance numbers for 2009 candidates later today. But some numbers are available for campaigns that cross-filed with state Board of Elections, like City Comptroller candidate Melinda Katz.

Katz raised $582,756 and now has $1,078,196 on hand for her campaign.

 

She got donations from, among many others, Helen Sears ($100), Kenneth Fisher ($4,950), and James Capalino ($1,000) [link added].

Katz has spent $36,800 on mailings (anybody get one?) and $2,000 on committee dues at the American Jewish Congress.

More updates when the official numbers come in.

Consultant and former councilman Ken Fisher thinks there’s something familiar about Eliot Spitzer’s first-term troubles: “A travel office brouhaha, endless investigations of non-criminal scandals and a botched major policy initiative? Sounds like the beginning of Bill Clinton's administration, which I seem to recall lasted two terms. The Governor has some work to do but he's proven that he learns from his mistakes.” 

Eliot Spitzer is making his second trip to Washington D.C. today, to explain his decision to back off his plan to allow illegal aliens to obtain driver’s licenses.

Spitzer will make the announcement flanked by New York’s Democratic congressional delegation, which almost uniformly opposes a related aspect of that driver’s license policy: the federal Real ID Act.

The long-term political question is going to be whether this will be the beginning of a second act for Spitzer, in which he finally regains control of a governing agenda that's been getting away from him since he took office. Short-term, though, the question will be whether this will really allow him to step away cleanly from the licensing issue at all. Certainly, his Republican opponents will do their best to see that the controversy lingers.

More after the jump.  read more »

In what Michael Cooper correctly termed "a very nineties moment," former Giuliani aide Randy Mastro is accusing Mark Green of lying in a new ad about his role in forcing the mob out of the new York carting industry.

The money quote from a laughing Mastro in today's Post: "Mark Green had nothing to do with that."

The Green campaign begs to differ. And to be fair, unless the press has been getting it entirely wrong for more than 15 years, it seems like they have a point.

Mark Benoit sent over the campaign's version of Green's history of dealing with organized crime and garbage.  read more »

To the many of you with longer (and better) institutional memories than I have: please take a look at it after the jump and let us know whose version is right.

-- Josh Benson