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ALBANY – In the first internal party break against Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a Buffalo Democratic member of the Assembly said he is quitting the Democratic conference and wants Silver to resign his leadership post over how he handled a sexual harassment case involving a now-former Brooklyn assemblyman.

“I just can’t sit idly by after reading that report,” Assemblyman Michael Kearns said this afternoon, referring to a scathing investigation by a special prosecutor and a state ethics agency that portrayed Silver and his top team more concerned with damage control than protecting the interests of female legislative employees who last year accused Assemblyman Vito Lopez of sexually harassing them.

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Buffalo, NY (WKBW) - We now know where some of the billion dollars that Governor Cuomo promised to Buffalo will be spent.
Some money is being planned to go towards a new Workforce Training Center.

The local manufacturing industry says there are not enough trained workers in Western New York.
With employees retiring faster than young workers coming in, industry insiders say there will be 17-thousand vacancies by 2020.

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The Working Families Party says Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s plan to scrap the current Wilson-Pakula system “might be great for candidates with big war-chests, but it is certainly not good for voters,” according to WFP Executive Director Dan Cantor.

Cuomo wants to do away with a system that empowers party leaders to certify that members of another party can run on their line in favor of a petitioning process to win third-party ballots. Progressive voices such as the Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel say it would mean the end of fusion voting.

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As YNN’s Liz Benjamin noted, New York is one of only eight states to allow fusion voting.

Of course, some might look askance at the WFP’s worry that its ideological purity and vaunted independence should be in any way compromised by big-money candidates. You can tell a lot about a party’s integrity when its statewide ballot line hangs in the balance, which in New York happens in every gubernatorial cycle.

For an example of what New York would lose if the WFP fell in thrall to monied pols, let’s look back on the collection of wild-haired academics, radical thinkers and uncompromising pathbreakers the party has nominated as its gubernatorial candidates in the past few election cycles. Consider:

• In 2010, the WFP endorsed an underfunded and little-known Democratic candidate named Andrew Cuomo, who had to scrape by spending only $28 million over the course of the election. The Daily Kos pointed out a few problems with the party’s decision.
• In 2006, the party endorsed a virtually unheard-of pair of Democratic bolsheviks called Eliot Spitzer and David Paterson.
• In 2002, the WFP spat in the face of convention and backed Democratic former Comptroller Carl McCall and Dennis Mehiel, who had as much success against Gov. George Pataki as the party’s 1998 candidates, Democrats Peter Vallone and Sandra Frankel. Did the WFP endorse Democrat Mario Cuomo in 1994? Hell no — but then again, the party didn’t exist back then.

This stands in contrast to the state Green Party, which in 2010 took the easy way out by nominating Howie Hawkins, whose massive name recognition was paired with his ability to draw on the vast pools of money available to the average community organizer from Syracuse. Sellouts!

Somehow, the Greens’ cynical gamble paid off when Hawkins received more than 50,000 votes to put the party on the statewide ballot.

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