State Of The State Live
-
- January
- 7
Time Warner Cable news stations are carrying Gov. David Paterson’s State of the State address live today, as are upstate PBS stations.
You can also watch it online here.
The speech starts at 1 p.m.
Paterson said on ABC Nightline last night that he had to spend 60 hours memorizing his hourlong speech—listening to a tape recording of the speech one minute at a time because he is legally blind.
“I can’t read the speech. Since I’m not totally blind, I never learned Braille, so I can’t read the speech by hand and then recite. So, I basically have to memorize it,” he said.
“That’s 60 hours I had to invest in this process that I probably could have used … in other areas,” he said. “Certainly there are a lot of ways where one’s disability limits them from succeeding as well as they might have otherwise. That’s what a disability is.”
In the seven-minute interview, Paterson also said he’s not going to be coerced or persuaded into picking a specific candidate for the U.S. Senate seat.
He also repeated how he was upset with the Saturday Night Live skit that mocked his blindness.
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, January 7th, 2009 at 10:04 am by Joseph Spector.
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Jay Gallagher has covered Albany for Gannett News Service since 1984 and has been Albany Bureau chief since 1989. He`s a native of the Boston area and likes to point out that in this millennium, the score is Red Sox 1 championship, the Yankees 0. 
Cara Matthews has been a statehouse correspondent in the Albany Bureau since August 2005. Prior to that, she covered Putnam County government and politics at The Journal News for nearly five years. Before that, she worked at newspapers in Connecticut and covered the state Legislature for one of them. 
