Author: Luke Parsnow

For all the money spent on annoying campaign commercials every year, we should question just how effective they actually are.

Even guilty politicians are treated better than us. Despite two convictions, disgraced lawmaker Sheldon Silver has yet to serve a single day behind bars.

Gov. Cuomo suggested New York winters were driving residents from the state. Those comments are silly and ignore the work that still needs to be done.

The controversial “I Love NY” highway signs were to be removed by Sept. 30 to avoid losing $14 million in funding. More than 500 signs are still up.

The outcome of the New York 2018 primaries shows the state is at a political turning point of proportions we cannot yet comprehend. Buckle up.

Planning to vote in New York’s primary elections on Thursday, Sept. 13? If you want to change your party affiliation to vote for a certain candidate, you are out of luck. In order to change your status to a Republican, Democrat or any other party member so you can vote in the Sept. 13 primaries in New York, you had to submit that change a very long time ago: The deadline was Oct. 13, 2017! You had to change your party affiliation for the 2018 election before even last year’s general election took place. That’s even earlier than the deadline…

A Labor Day tweet slamming the Reps. Chris Collins and Duncan Hunter indictments crosses a new line, hitting a new low in a very public way.

The Aug. 29 televised debate between Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Cynthia Nixon may have been about two candidates seeking a state office, but it was hard to tell. That’s because the two Democrats running for New York governor spent the majority of their time onstage squabbling about who is least like Donald Trump, the condition of New York City subways and whether or not the incumbent plans to run for president in several years. For the amount of aggressive language the two used toward each other — Nixon at one point said “Can you stop lying?” and Cuomo called Nixon…

“I’m running for governor,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently told reporters while assessing severe flood damage in Seneca County when he was asked about comments President Donald Trump said about him the day before in Utica. Just days later, Cuomo made national headlines by saying in a speech that “America was ‘never that great’” in an obvious jab at the president’s trademark slogan. The remark even made it to Trump’s Twitter feed, with the president posting that Cuomo’s gaffe was a “career-threatening statement” and that “Andrew ‘choked’ badly.” The governor later walked back the remark, calling it “inartful” but…

Some form of conflict-of-interest policy is fairly standard in a lot of workplaces. But for whatever reason, similar policies in one of the most important workplaces — government — too often seem to be either nonexistent or are littered with loopholes and backdoors. The recent arrest of New York Republican Rep. Chris Collins helped expose one of those loopholes, and his colleagues must now do what they can to close it immediately. Collins, whose congressional district covers Western New York from the suburbs of Rochester to the suburbs of Buffalo, was indicted Aug. 8 for his alleged role in an insider trading scheme. Prosecutors accuse the congressman — a…

As one of the most powerful people in New York, former state Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver spent years using his public office for his personal profit. He funneled $500,000 in state grants to a Columbia University doctor who, in return, sent his patients to Silver’s law firm — which then paid Silver for the referrals. He also voted for state tax breaks for a real estate company, which then steered business to a law firm, from which he also received referral fees. He pocketed $4 million in illegal kickbacks and then earned another $1 million by investing that money. He…

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is right now considering signing a bill into law that would create a commission to investigate possible misconduct by prosecutors. The bill passed both chambers of the state Legislature this spring after several years of pushing for it. Cuomo has until the end of the year to sign it.   But if lawmakers and the governor are so eager to create watchdog groups to seek out wrongdoing, they should start with re-creating the Commission to Investigate Public Corruption, better known as the Moreland Commission.   The commission was created by Gov. Cuomo in July 2013 to investigate any red flags of possible corrupt activities committed by anyone…

Over the last decade and a half, we’ve been bombarded with reports about large and small newspapers cutting their staff, reducing their content or folding altogether. So last week’s report that The New York Daily News was laying off half of its newsroom staff shouldn’t really have affected us that much. And yet, this time was different. “We are reducing today the size of the editorial team by approximately 50 percent and re-focusing much of our talent on breaking news, especially in areas of crime, civil justice and public responsibility,” the email to staffers said. The newspaper’s approach “will evolve…

This spring and summer have been open season for prosecutors hunting down the public corruption that remains rampant in New York state government. One of the repetitive pinpoints of this year’s corruption trials has been the serious flaws in the state’s economic development initiatives. We saw it once again two weeks ago when Alain E. Kaloyeros was convicted in a bid-rigging scheme that steered hundreds of millions of dollars in state contracts to favored companies in Buffalo and Syracuse. Kaloyeros, the former president of the State University of New York’s Polytechnic Institute, was the chief architect of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s…

For the second time in two years, the U.S. Supreme Court will play a role in a national election. And yet, it’s rather the role of an election in the Supreme Court that actually laid the groundwork for the battle currently taking place on Capitol Hill. In February 2016 when Associate Justice Antonin Scalia died, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said President Obama should not appoint Scalia’s replacement. He argued that because it was an election year, voters should have a say in the matter and choose the next president, who would then select a new Supreme Court justice. “The next justice could fundamentally alter the direction…