The Buffalo Record

The story isn’t that a creepy congressman from Florida Mark Foley was busy behaving inappropriately online with 16-year-old male congressional pages. (I wonder how many Barney Frank jokes this guy guffawed at). The story isn’t that a creepy congressman from Florida got caught doing this almost a year ago.

The story is that Denny Hastert claims not to have known about it, but Tom Reynolds admits that he knew about it a year ago, and told Hastert about it.

So, locally the story is that Tom Reynolds likes people like Tom Delay and does absolutely nothing when he learns that his Republican congressional colleague abused his position by making inappropriate comments to underage boys ostensibly under the Congress’ tutelage.

They can’t say they didn’t know. They can only say they didn’t care. They can only say that protecting that Republican seat was more important than protecting a 16-year-old boy from a person in authority.

Tags: News

Business First reports that the WNY construction boom continues unabated.

Contracts for future construction in Erie and Niagara counties totaled $82.5 million in August, up from $61.5 million in the same month last year.

The biggest gain was seen on the nonresidential side of the industry, where contract volume increased 82 percent.

Just a bit of good news that was drowned out by the typical static this week.

Carry on.

Tags: News

Craig Howard thinks that the Democrats are indistinguishable from al Qaeda.

How droll. How reasonable.

Of course, I don’t recall the last time a Democrat blew up 3,000 people. But that oughtn’t get in the way of a hi-larious freeper metaphor.

Tags: News

So, the first questions out of the box involved whether I missed living in Westchester (not at all – you try getting caught in nasty traffic on the 287 or the Sprain or on Central Ave on a Saturday afternoon, coupled with generally unfriendly people, by Buffalo’s standards), and ribbing about the weather in Buffalo (no, a cloudless 50-degree morning does not constitute a heat wave).

The radio show is run by two law partners from White Plains, and the first segment involved a client of theirs who had recently gotten himself into some trouble in Family Court down in Yonkers. They had a pretty insightful discussion about where the breakdown is that permits a kid so young to get into so much trouble so fast, and what society in general could do to minimize that from happening when the family obviously is broken down.

We began by discussing some pretty abysmal math scores from Buffalo city schools, and I spoke about Superintendent Williams’ efforts to reform the city’s schools, and how certain entrenched interests – both labor and management – are at odds about how and whether the schools should be reformed. We talked about flex time for schools, and the possible extension of the school year, and I noted that the one thing that would help New York improve in a lot of ways would be for these competing interests to all show a little flexibility so that progress can occasionally be made.

They were particularly galled by the fact that the <a href="http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20050616/1050134.asp“>Buffalo city school’s budget is larger than that of the <a href="http://www.ci.buffalo.ny.us/document_1947_3.html“>City itself.

The segment was over pretty quickly, and we’ll talk again about other topics.

Step one a lot of times involves convincing our downstate cousins that upstate and western New York aren’t wholly populated by the cast of Deliverance.

Tags: News