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By Bill Altreuter

Tom Robbins makes a good point: lost in the story of the New York State Senate's dysfunction is the fact that Steve Pigeon and Tom Golisano's coup has derailed a number of worthwhile progressive changes.

Pigeon is the kind of political operative that I find the most despicable-- he's a lever-puller. Nominally a Democrat he has no interest in governance or in any social issues that I have ever seen. He likes politics because he thinks the mechanics of it are fun. Golisano's politics seem to be mostly the sort of politics that fatcats all have-- he doesn't want to pay taxes, and he finds that government inconveniences him because it prevents him from doing whatever he wants, whenever he wants to do it. That's not very attractive, but it is at least an articulatable agenda. Pigeon doesn't even have that. He just wants to play, and so woman prisoners who are in labor will remain shackled; and campaign finance reform is off the table; and gun tracing legislation dies, and so on. If more people were made aware of the damage that Golisano's adventure has caused there'd be a lot more outrage.

Full post as published by Outside Counsel on July 02, 2009 (boomark / email).