Lloyd Constantine

More than anything NY needs? A convention center in Ozone Park!

The State of the State address gives the governor the opportunity to survey New York and put forth priorities for the new year. While the substance of the governor’s intentions is contained in the annual budget speech, the State of State spotlights what President Bush 41 quizzically called “the vision thing.” It is the governor’s moment to rally support for the most important and loftiest objectives. And among a handful of projects the governor can mention in a speech of less than an hour, there must be one proclaimed first, implicitly the most important, which media will focus upon and remember when comparing the governor’s vision with what was accomplished. (more…)

To cure the dysfunctional Congress — don’t call the doctors

Public approval of Congress stood at 11 percent in the most recent CBS and Gallup polls. The consistency of such highly negative opinions, Congress’ recent work product and the manner in which it has been done suggest the dismal ratings are well deserved. One candidate for president, the incumbent who has modest approval ratings of his own, yet four times as high as Congress, has clearly taken a page from Harry Truman and shrewdly decided to run against a “do nothing Congress.” (more…)

Ron Paul: doctor heal thyself

The Weekender’s periodic analyses of the major candidates in the 2012 presidential primaries has me visiting the offices of the good Doctor Paul this week. While it is debatable whether Ron Paul actually is a “major” candidate, I have interpreted the adjective both expansively and idiosyncratically. As examples, I have disregarded Herman Cain, Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann, with the prediction that they would disappear. That happened to Cain. Actually also to Santorum and Bachmann, but they don’t seem to realize it. (more…)

Thanks governor, I really needed that tax cut

Truth is stranger and generally more perverse than fiction. That’s why the reader knows that a tax cut for New Yorkers with an annual income in the range of $300,000 to $2 million is neither a nightmare nor the product of The Weekender’s fertile imagination, but fact. Correction, it is a nightmare, but one that actually became the law of our state in a signature performance by Gov. Andrew Cuomo. (more…)

Fifty reasons to spank your (big) banker

Last Saturday, Nov. 5, was International Bank Transfer Day in Chatham, on the Isle of Manhattan and throughout the world, at least according to the label. On or by that day people were urged to take their money out of big banks and establish accounts at the tens of thousands of credit unions and community banks spread across our nation. And in the four-week period preceding transfer day, some 650,000 Americans had done just that, a rate 1,400 percent greater than usual for switching accounts. (more…)

Jon Huntsman: The Republicans’ canary in a coal mine

The fate of Jon Huntsman’s candidacy for president will go a long way toward determining whether sanity prevails in the Republican Party and whether it has any chance of wresting the presidency from the grasp of Democrat Barack Obama. Huntsman, whose last two jobs were ambassador to China and governor of Utah, does not need to win his party’s nomination for Republicans to pass those two tests. But if Huntsman’s 1 percent support level doesn’t radically improve and if he quickly is drummed out of the primary field because he espouses moderate to traditionally conservative positions, held by the vast majority of U.S. general election voters, then the Republicans will lose the election and be relegated, at most, to the role of “Drs. No” in the House of Representatives. (more…)

A fall festival and the Arab Spring

Today is the first day of Sukkot, the Festival of Tabernacles, at the little synagogue in Chatham Center and at Jewish and certain so-called “Hebrew Roots” Christian houses of worship throughout the world. Sukkot, a harvest holiday, also commemorates the 40 years when Israelites wandered the desert after emancipation from slavery in Egypt. The Sukkah, a hastily made grass or straw hut, symbolizes the temporary structures that sheltered the Israelites during those four nomadic decades. It’s a sweet holiday, worthy of everyone’s respect, if not active participation, being a celebration of agriculture, freedom and an autumn thanksgiving as well. (more…)

Chatham Plaza: Home of the Whopper

For this column, The Weekender briefly descends from the heady heights of presidential politics to the wetlands on the Chatham Village/Ghent border. I attended the public hearing held on the evening of Sept. 19 at Tracy Memorial Village Hall concerning two competing visions for the development of about a dozen acres abutting Route 66. As one now dead politician frequently intoned while in office (free large latté at Ralph’s to the first reader who sends that president’s name to me at lloydconstantine@gmail.com), “let me make one thing perfectly clear, I am not,” suggesting by the title of this column that the best use of the building currently housing Price Chopper, should it leave, is a 23,000-square-foot Burger King. But there were many whoppers, little lies and ludicrous pronouncements made at this public hearing. Without categorizing them, my favorites were the overarching claim to competence and trustworthiness by the Price Chopper contingent and the equally absurd assertion of objectivity and civic mindedness by the Chatham Plaza team. (more…)

Mitt Romney — The ‘Karma Chameleon’

Republicans who are Evangelical Protestants (and make up a majority of likely voters in the key early Iowa and South Carolina primaries) are worried that candidate Mitt Romney is not a Christian and more specifically that he’s a Mormon. However, a broader group of voters, including The Weekender, increasingly focus on the distinct possibility that Romney is reptilian and specifically, as the Culture Club crooned, a “Karma Chameleon” who “comes and goes” depending upon which way the wind blows. (more…)

Listen to Governor Perry’s call and respond

President Obama’s Midwest bus tour and the Republican straw poll in Iowa marked the beginning of the 2012 campaign. However, neither the president nor any of the Iowa contestants commanded the attention paid to the entry of Texas Governor Rick Perry into the contest for the Republican nomination. In the first of a periodic series of columns on the presidential candidates, The Weekender examines Perry and whether his intemperate criticism of Obama and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke are merely Texas tough guy talk or an important indication of what this candidate really stands for and the path he would follow if elected. (more…)