Oh, the joys of summer, not the least the joys of attending one’s local county fair.

So, Tom Golisano, three-time minor-party candidate for governor, is going to pump $5 million into this year’s campaigns for the state Legislature, immediately making him a bigger player than the teachers’ unions or anyone else. What does he want? Oh, the usual stuff and fustian of reform: “end to unfunded ...

I hied myself over to the car show at the Saratoga Auto Museum the other day and thoroughly enjoyed it despite basically not giving a hoot about cars, much less about Pontiac Firebirds, which were the cars on display. I didn’t even know what a Pontiac Firebird was before this ...

No surprise that the U.S. Court of Appeals turned down Yassin Aref and Mohammed Hossain, the two Albany Muslims convicted of supporting terrorism as the result of an FBI set-up. I thought the arguments in their favor were compelling, but I could hardly imagine an appeals court overturning a jury ...

Wonderful! Daren Dopp, former communications director of former Gov. Eliot Spitzer, is digging in his heels. He will not plead guilty even to some trivial little offense, he told The New York Times, and thereby assume the blame for the release of Sen. Joe Bruno’s travel records. He says he ...

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed:” Second Amendment You might call it judicial activism, this latest decision from the Supreme Court declaring that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual ...

So Sen. Joe Bruno is calling it a career. It may be just as well, since each year it becomes more and more likely that the Republicans will lose their majority in the state Senate, which they hold by only a two-vote margin, and once the majority is lost, Sen. ...

Some new thoughts on the proposed tax cap, as it’s called. (This would be a limit on how much school districts could increase their total haul from property taxes from one year to the next.) I dismissed it recently, saying what we really needed was a spending cap. E.J. McMahon ...

I wrote the other day about how petroleum will someday run out and commented on how we’re not doing more to develop alternative sources of energy. In response I received the following from a reader, Jay Spivack, which I think may be of interest to readers of this blog, and ...

For those of you with an interest in oral presentations in addition to written, I will be at the Albany Public Library at noon today to discuss the book “Standard Operating Procedure,” which chronicles the horrors of Abu Ghraib, the notorious prison in Iraq. It’s an intriguing question: How did ...