This comes on the same day that The Washington Post revealed that the Department of Justice had snooped on a Fox News reporter’s private emails, and only a week after the AP reported that the DOJ had surreptitiously obtained their reporters’ phone records, making it an easy addition to the government versus press narrative. Three, after all, is a trend.

But on closer inspection, the situation in Albany seems less All the President’s Men and more Mean Girls. The AP story notes that Mr. Dicker and Mr. Cuomo “have had a rocky public relationship” which is an understatement.

The two were the best of friends for much of Mr. Cuomo’s time in Albany. Mr. Dicker regularly praised Mr. Cuomo in his Post column, interviewed him on his radio show, and even planned to write a his biography. Until earlier this year, that is, when they had a nasty falling out over Cuomo’s support of aggressive gun control measures.

Soon, Mr. Dicker was trashing Mr. Cuomo in the Post and Mr. Cuomo was boycotting Mr. Dicker’s radio show. Then Mr. Cuomo decided to write his own memoir, which killed Mr. Dicker’s planned book deal.

Releasing Mr. Dicker’s email to his competitors is just Mr. Cuomo's latest attempt to humiliate his frenemy.

(Getty)

It looks like UFC is fighting hard to make its way into the New York arena.

In an exclusive report, the Daily News found that Zuffa LLC—which owns the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and World Extreme Cagefighting—has spent $1.6 million on lobbying in New York State since 2007. Of that $1.6 million, $594,200 has been allotted to campaign contributions—and Governor Cuomo has benefited the most.

“No one has benefited more than Gov. Cuomo, who has received $180,600, or 30.4% of Zuffa’s total donations in New York since 2007,” the Daily News reported. After Gov. Cuomo, the Assembly Democratic Campaign Committee has received a significant portion of the contributions—$110,000. The Republican Senate Campaign Committee has received $95,000, followed by the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee, which has received $39,500. UFC must think that watching muscly cage fighters beat each other into bloody oblivion is a bipartisan desire.

For UFC, the quest for legalization has been a long battle. The sport was first banned by Governor George Pataki in 1997. Four times since then, the Senate has passed legislation to legalize ultimate fighting, but each time it’s been knocked out in the Assembly. In March, the Senate passed the legislation again; the jury’s still out on whether or not the bill will make it past the Assembly round, and then on to Gov. Cuomo.

Make of it what you will, but Gov. Cuomo doesn’t seem opposed to legalizing the sport.
“I don’t have a feeling towards the sport that says, ‘That sport should not happen in the state,’” Gov. Cuomo said to the AP.  “My question is: Why should we do it? The obvious answer is that it could be an economic impact to the state, and you could generate economic activity. That could be persuasive, if it’s true.”

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver also had inspiring words regarding the UFC vote.

"I think at some point there will probably be an approval in this state," Speaker Silver said, according to MMAFighting.com, "I can’t tell you when."

We won’t make any official calls yet, but who knows—maybe this is the year that all of Zuffa’s lobbying efforts will finally, er, pay off.

Quick Draw ticket

Governor Andrew Cuomo has been waging a war against puritans, trying to lift the last pieces of legislation in place to curb gambling in New York. No, he's not going to so far as to propose full-blown casinos-- though the $2,000,000 kickback contribution to his office from the New York Gaming Association, along with the $138 million revenue for the state's education budget created by the Quick Draw game this year make it sort of hard to argue against creating QD casinos, like the faux-version spotlighted in today's New York Times article.

But here's the thing: Don't do that. Please. I don't want to be poor.

While Cuomo is trying to eliminate the bans currently in place that make Quick Draw and alcohol a no-go, not every legislator supports the Pronto Lotto model. According to the Times:

Assemblyman Steven Cymbrowitz warn that the game a Brooklyn Democrat who is chairman of the Assembly’s Alcoholism and Drug Abuse Committee, warned in a statement that the age change could result in a generation of new addicts. About one million New Yorkers have already been identified as “problem gamblers,” he said, noting that Quick Draw has been called “video crack.”

While "video crack" sounds like a fun name for a post-punk band, I am personally worried about its effects. You see, I am a scratch off addict. I buy a two dollar Bingo Doubler at least five times a week. I could have probably paid off my student loans by now with all the money I've spent funding New York State. And though I've never been a Quick Draw fan--the payoff is too long, I want instant gratification, specifically the kind that comes from realizing I have just thrown another two dollars down the drain--the idea of a bar where I can buy a lottery ticket and then drink until my numbers don't appear on the giant, glowing TV screen sounds right up my alley.

And this is a bad thing. Because, as the article noted, the majority of Quick Draw sales come from Sunset Park in Brooklyn, a low-income neighborhood, even though the funds from the lottery are spread out across all zip codes. Also:

Anti-gambling groups have forcefully criticized the proposal, arguing that Quick Draw, like other forms of gambling, extracts money from the people who can least afford to risk it, while also fostering gambling addiction.

Although I do not live in Sunset Park, I can't help but imagine myself in five years, red-rimmed eyes and a glassy stare, sitting in one Pronto Lotto or another video crack gambling bar, trying to decide whether to spend my last two dollars on a PBR or another ticket.

Though to be fair, I probably won't need that beer anyway, so I'd be doing myself a favor. Right? Right?!?

Coming soon to a sea level near you: Iceland's melting glaciers. From Chasing Ice.

“Wow. We live in a horror movie,” my husband opined one morning not long ago. He was reading an article about the melting of the Arctic tundra releasing massive bubbles of methane gas into the atmosphere, which in turn causes more melting, which in turn causes global warming, which in turn creates monster storms that threaten to end civilization as we know it.

I love scary movies, the creepier the better. But this Halloween season, they’re bleeding off the screen and into real life.

Can we please turn it off now?

Actually, no, we cannot.

A week ago, I was invited to the premiere of a deeply alarming documentary called Chasing Ice. It follows the work and adventures of a National Geographic photographer named James Balog in his endeavor to document, with time-lapse photography, the epic melting of the Arctic glaciers, a melting that is filling the world’s seas and atmosphere with water that has nowhere to go but onto land. 

Mr. Balog became an ice aficionado in 2005, when The New Yorker sent him to document the frozen landscape in Iceland. A year later, National Geographic sent him to document melt. He was stunned by the speed of the changes he witnessed and began documenting the retreating ice on three continents.

With the help of National Geographic and other funders, he created the Extreme Ice Survey, which he calls an “art meets science” project that also involved some serious adventure travel. With a small team of graduate students, he rappelled and hiked up ice walls from Greenland to Everest to Alaska, installing 27 time lapse cameras that are still recording images every half hour.

The cameras, currently at 18 locations, yield up to 8,000 images a year.

Arranged as time-lapse video, the shrinking of the mountains of ice in the northern hemisphere and the higher altitudes of our planet is plain to see, and absolutely alarming.

One of the most shocking images in the film was captured by two young members of Mr. Balog’s team who were flown in and dropped on the edge of an unstable Greenland glacier. After two weeks freezing their asses off in a lonely tent in the middle of a windy, white landscape, they were rewarded, first with a thunderous noise, and then by witnessing and videotaping the epic collapse of an edge of an Arctic glacier bigger that the island of Manhattan.

That’s a lot of water, flowing into the world’s oceans, and it’s bad news for cities like New York.

It also is not news. In 1995, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a report predicting that by the year 2100, the sea will rise 20 inches both from “thermal expansion” (warming) of the ocean and from melting glaciers and ice sheets. That rise has huge implications for coastal cities.

To view this movie is to witness epic amounts of ice turning into billions of gallons of water, in real time. It is impossible to watch it and not wonder how islands on the edge of the ocean, like Manhattan, are not already underwater.

The issue of climate change has been utterly ignored by the candidates, both of whom won’t challenge the status quo on it.

Because it’s happening so slowly, mostly out of sight and with no apparent solution, it’s been almost impossible to get emotional about global warming. Until Sandy.

The moment it hit me was a few months back, reading a Times article that (again) predicted that the city of New York will be mostly underwater in 100 years. I was sitting in an airport, and suddenly I burst into tears. Our city will be either gone or utterly transformed by the time my grandchildren are adults. My kids will be among the last generation to remember this great city.

How is it that everyone isn’t crying over this?

Chasing Ice humanizes an enormous and incomprehensible geological phenomenon with time-lapse images, putting unusually rapid geological change on breathtaking display. It also personalizes the story by focusing on one man, the photographer whose commitment to the project involved repeated knee surgery so he could keep scrabbling up icy inclines to check his cameras, and the technological difficulties of building and maintaining photo gear in the harshest conditions on the planet.

The film also has an emotional component, insofar as Mr. Balog, who attended the premiere, is shown with tears in his eyes talking about what his findings mean for his—and everyone’s—children.

“This is the memory of the landscape,” he said of the film. “That landscape is gone; it may never be seen again in the history of civilization.”

Mr. Balog and the filmmakers are among the vast majority of world scientists who are convinced that the sudden warming of the world is caused by human burning of fossil fuels. Their graphs are pretty hard to argue with. Average world temperatures have risen in a parallel line with tonnage of burned fossil fuels since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

There are still a small number of scientists–hacks on the Koch brothers’ payroll or simply contrarian cranks—who argue that the historic melt underway is unrelated to fossil fuel burning. They’ve managed to portray climate change “believers” as tree-hugging outliers.

These so called “deniers” give just enough cover to the drill baby drill crowd on the right, but also allow our own progressive president to remain silent and to promote the continued extraction of these fuels from American soil.

The near-total silence from our leaders on this vital issue in the wake of the storm is truly scary. Gov. Cuomo mentioned climate change on WNYC Tuesday, but Chris Christie has so far only given it lip service without acting on his convictions. Last year, he said that “climate change is real” and “impacting our state” while pulling New Jersey out of a regional greenhouse gas initiative.

The fate of the planet is a political football. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that 85 percent of Democrats believe there is evidence of global warming, while 48 percent of Republicans say the same. Some of them might be waking up. Monday night, while tidal storm surges were inundating the streets of America’s greatest city, Meghan McCain was tweeting, “So are we still going to go with climate change not being real, fellow Republicans?”

I hate to sound like a torture-loving W. administration lawyer, but maybe the “deniers” should be forced to watch Chasing Ice with their eyelids held open, like Alex in Clockwork Orange, until they get it. And then maybe someone can invent some spine juice for our leaders, so that they begin talking about making some hard changes in our habits.

In the meantime, what to tell the kids about the real-life geological bogeyman scientists are crediting with this awful storm?

Our own little darlings watched Sandy blow past with interest but strangely little alarm as lashes of wind, water and eerie electrical transformer explosions filled the night sky. They laughingly went along with packing the go-bag. This is their world: they’ve been waiting for the zombie apocalypse since they learned to read.

The dawn after the howling black night, we found ourselves among the fortunate high-ground survivors. But we’re still shell-shocked.

Halloween night, we’ll be hunkered down with the candy corn and a stiff drink, freaking ourselves out while watching the scariest movie ever, the original Swedish version of Let the Right One In, about a child vampire.

The great thing about it: it’s probably not real.

editorial@observer.com

That’s wonderful. But as the governor and his advisors know, the upstate economy requires more than preservation of the Adirondack region’s forests. The Great Lakes cities of Syracuse and Rochester have faded dramatically over the last few decades, and Buffalo is an economic basket case. Small towns in the North Country and elsewhere are on the verge of becoming ghost towns.

Upstate can’t make it on prisons, state colleges, and defense spending anymore. The state has to find wealth creators to replace the industries that have left the region or died off. Where is the next General Electric, the next Carrier, the next Kodak? These companies once employed tens of thousands, but as their payrolls shrank, so did the region’s economy.

New York can’t prosper without private investment upstate. It’s that simple.

For nearly two decades, New York City has been cracking down on food-stamp fraud by fingerprinting eligible recipients. The measure has saved millions of dollars. But it now appears that the program is doomed—Governor Cuomo has said he will put an end to fingerprinting food-stamp recipients and so remove what critics see as an unnecessarily harsh requirement for needed benefits.

Mr. Cuomo paraphrased his father and predecessor, Mario Cuomo, in signaling his support for phasing out the fingerprinting requirement. “It is important that government leads using its head and its heart,” he said, echoing a phrase Mario Cuomo used during his 12 years in office. He’s right—government cannot be heartless, nor can it be unthinking.

Only the unthinking would argue that government should simply hand out benefits without making some inquiries about eligibility. But the fingerprinting process does have a heartless quality to it. After all, fingerprinting is most associated with criminal suspects. Poor people should not be made to feel as though they are criminals for simply asking for help to feed their families. “You cannot stigmatize these New Yorkers,” said Lt. Gov. Robert Duffy. He’s right.

That said, the Cuomo administration needs to devise a better way to combat fraud, using both its heart and its head. After all, those who game the system inevitably hurt those who genuinely need public assistance of some sort, whether in the form of food stamps, workers’ compensation or welfare.

Fingerprinting does conjure images of criminalization. That’s a burden the poor should not have to carry.

But the abandonment of fingerprinting should not mean an end to government crackdowns on frauds and cheats.

The state should come up with a better alternative.

So now is not the time for politicians to pass an election-year increase in the state’s minimum wage, currently set at $7.25 an hour. Hikes in the minimum wage invariably lead to fewer new entry-level jobs, and that’s something the city and state can ill afford.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo said the other day that while he supports a minimum-wage increase, such a measure would never get through the Republican-controlled state Senate. So, in essence, the governor seems prepared to throw in the towel on this issue, even though he is under tremendous pressure from his fellow Democrats and various advocacy groups to force the issue.

Mr. Cuomo is right about the politics: Republicans in the Senate surely would kill a proposed increase to $8.50 an hour. But he should also make it clear that the issue of timing involves more than politics. It’s simply common sense.

Economic policy in 2012 should have one and only one outcome in mind: job creation. Raising the minimum wage would have precisely the opposite effect, as study after study has shown. In better times, like the mid-1990s, increases in the minimum wage have been implemented without destroying entry-level jobs. But those increases were approved when the creative engines of capitalism were running on full throttle.

Today, the engines continue to sputter. An increase in the minimum wage very likely would lead to a stall, which would help nobody.

The Cuomo administration has put into place several policies aimed at encouraging job growth. A new tax credit is available to companies that hire young males who have suffered through long-term unemployment. A new low-income housing program has the doubly beneficial effect of creating construction jobs while offering the poor better housing choices.

Those are precisely the kinds of economic development programs that lead to long-term benefits for the poor.

But in an election year, Democrats in the Legislature would prefer to appease politically powerful special interests with support for a minimum-wage hike. It is to Mr. Cuomo’s credit that he seems determined to resist the temptation, regardless of his reasons.

Finally, we have a governor who understands that his first duty must be to the taxpayer, not to the unions—even though many of those unions supported his campaign. Governor Andrew Cuomo has decided to face the issue head-on with a broad plan to reform pension benefits in both the state and in New York City. His quote was simple and direct: “The numbers speak for themselves,” he declared. “The pension system as we know it is unsustainable.”

Precisely. He is not the first person to realize this. But there is a difference between spotting a problem and doing something about it. Mr. Cuomo has chosen the latter course. He wants to raise the retirement age for most state workers from 62 to 65, and for teachers from a youthful 57 to a more-realistic 62. State and city workers would have to contribute 6 percent of their earnings to their pensions, up from 3 percent.

Best of all, Mr. Cuomo is moving aggressively against the corrupt but widely accepted practice of pension-padding. That’s when workers run up stunning overtime earnings in the final years on the job. Pensions are then calculated based on the inflated figure rather than on workers’ true salaries. Enough is enough. The governor wants to exclude overtime earnings and unused sick time from pension considerations. Predictably, the union bosses are raising hell about these common-sense solutions. Danny Donohue, who heads the state’s largest public employee union, played the class card by accusing the governor of carrying out the wishes of his “millionaire friends” at the expense of “the real working people of New York.”

That’s curious—does Mr. Donohue believe that public employees are the only working people in New York? If so, he has been in the union business too long. There are millions of real working people in New York who are being crushed by high taxes. They are the people paying for those pensions and health benefits. They’re the people who suffer when public employees work the system to inflate their pensions.

Another union boss complained that the governor was imposing horrendous cuts for what is, in his words, a “transient problem.” Transient? Anybody who follows state government knows that Albany’s finances have been in disorder for years, and all signs indicate that things will only get far worse without true pension and benefit reform. Again, anybody who thinks that the state’s problems are “transient” really isn’t paying attention or simply doesn’t care about the tax burden on other working people.

If anything, the governor could have gone even further with reform. He could have proposed an end to the state’s generous system of defined-benefit pensions, in which many—but not all—state retirees collect a fixed percentage of their salaries until they die. All governments are going to have to shift to 401(k)-style pensions in the coming years. Mr. Cuomo isn’t prepared to that go far, at least not yet.

Still, what he has proposed is revolutionary enough. Early-retirement packages would come to an end. Workers would be vested after 12 years in the system instead of 10 or, in the case of some uniformed workers, five.

The state and city simply can’t afford a pension-and-benefit system designed for another age. The city now spends $8.4 billion per year on pension costs. A decade ago, the figure was $1.1 billion. At the state and local government levels outside of New York City, pension costs have gone from $368 million per year to $6.6 billion over the past 10 years.

Mr. Cuomo realizes that this is simply unsustainable. Luckily for the working people of New York, he is determined to do something about it.

Mr. Cuomo himself noted that there are no certainties in Albany. That cautionary note seems well-advised, since the property tax cap has no shortage of enemies and skeptics. Many public employee unions oppose the cap, while some lawmakers are talking about a provision that would require the cap to be reviewed by the Legislature every few years.

The union opposition is not surprising. But the quiet maneuvering in the Legislature to require a so-called "sunset provision," that is, a clause that would require the cap to be renewed time and time again, is more than a little mischievous. When Mr. Cuomo campaigned for a property tax cap, he made it clear that he wished to achieve real, long-term efficiencies in local government. There was no asterisk attached to that promise.

Members of his own Democratic party, however, seem less than enthused. So the governor should be prepared for a fight if he wishes to avoid a cap that would inevitably become a volatile political issue every time it comes up for renewal.

Local governments, of course, collect property taxes and depend on them to pay for municipal services, including schools. So it's interesting to note that many local officials support the governor's effort to cap property taxes. They also argue, with merit, that the state needs to do its share by reducing Medicaid costs and unfunded mandates. These costs have helped drive up property taxes to unaffordable rates throughout the states.

Property tax relief entails more than a simple legislative dictate. It should require a broad examination of all those issues that drive up the cost of local government. That said, property tax caps should be real, with little room for creative accounting. And they should not be subject to renewal every two or three years. The state needs genuine and permanent relief from oppressive taxation.

Earlier this month, Governor Andrew Cuomo introduced a series of proposals designed to foster a greater sense of accountability in the state's schools. Test scores will now count for as much as 40 percent of a teacher's evaluation score, up from 20 percent.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and other voices for education reform hailed the new formula as another step toward accountability in the classroom. Predictably, however, union leaders objected. Now they are threatening to sue the state in a sad effort to block the new evaluation scheme.

Mr. Cuomo basically has dared them to bring it on. During a recent radio interview, the governor said that he was going to "persevere" and that he intended to "accomplish the goal."

"If there are lawsuits," he continued, "there are going to be lawsuits and we'll win the lawsuits and we'll prevail."

Make no mistake about it: those are fighting words, especially coming from a Democrat whose party traditionally is aligned with public employee unions. Mr. Cuomo has drawn a proverbial line in the sand. The unions will have to decide whether to cross it.

If the unions had any sense, they'd recognize just how bad they'll look if they take this case to court. Imagine the fun Mr. Cuomo will have in portraying union leaders as obstacles to simple accountability, especially in failing classrooms around the state.

Mr. Cuomo is not alone in trying to figure out how and why New York spends more money per pupil than any other state--more than $18,000 per year--and yet ranks 39th in four-year high school graduation rates. That's truly shocking--and infuriating.

Mr. Cuomo is right to be defiant and determined. But this issue goes beyond schools. States and municipalities throughout the country are re-examining the pension and benefits packages that are driving costs--and tax increases--from east to west, north to south. Reforms may have to be legislated rather than negotiated, simply because unions simply won't recognize reality.

The road to genuine reform may wind up going through the courthouse. With any luck, governors and mayors will take a page from Mr. Cuomo: Don't back down. Don't panic in the face of a threat.

Instead, do the right thing and let the unions try to defend the indefensible. That's a winning formula.