New Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos plans to visit Binghamton next week, the second stop on an upstate tour for the state’s most powerful Republican, a spokesman said today.
Skelos, 60, a 24-year veteran lawmaker from Rockville Centre, Nassau County, was elected last week to succeed Joseph Bruno, who stunned the Capitol by suddenly quitting the [...]

Gov. David Paterson today provided some interesting statistics about the state’s agriculture industry when he announced he wants the federal government to declare 23 counties disaster areas because of the July 16 hail storm. Such a declaration would make farmers in those counties eligible for low-interest loans.

Paterson pointed out that the state has [...]

  And now one more word from Sen. Darryl Aubertine, D-Cape Vincent,  Jefferson County, on whether he was indeed offered a job as president of the state Power Authority by Gov. David Paterson:

“If there was a misunderstanding, there was a misunderstanding,’’ he said today, declining to comment further, obviously eager to put the story behind [...]

  In a stunning political move, a North County Democratic senator today confirmed that Gov. David Paterson has offered him a state job that would have more than doubled his salary – and cleared the way for Republicans to regain his highly coveted seat.
Sen. Darryl Aubertine of Watertown said the governor’s top aide, Charles [...]

  Gov. David Paterson took the unusual step today of telling a crowd something other than it wanted to hear.

The governor made an unscheduled appearance at a rally outside the Capitol of scores of truckers angry at high gas prices who want the state to suspend the 35-cent-a-gallon state tax on gasoline through Labor Day. [...]

  The Assembly just approved a bill to legalize the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes, 79-48. This is an annual exercise in futility,  since the measure has never been passed in the Senate, and is unlikely to be this year as well.

Sponsor Richard Gottfried, D-Manhattan pointed out that other more potent drugs are legal, [...]

  The state Public Service Commission should reject the planned takeover of Energy East by the Spanish energy firm Iberdrola, an administrative law judge recommended today.

The $4.5 billion deal involving the company that owns New York State Electric and Gas and Rochester Gas and Electric should be turned down because “it does not satisfy the [...]

 Gov. Paterson denied today that he said this weekend that he couldn’t trust New York City  Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and that the mayor’s temper reminded him of Eliot Spitzer.

“No, I didn’t,’’ he told reporters today, who asked him about a New York Post report today that he had said several sharply critical things about Bloomberg [...]

  My tenure as a Capitol reporter started in August 1984, a few months before  Tim Russert, who died today, quit as  then-Gov. Mario Cuomo’s press secretary, and he went to work for NBC.

As Cuomo was a larger-than-life figure  then, thought of as a likely presidential candidate, so Russert, although only 34 years old then,  [...]

The MTA faces a new budget gap of between $500 million and $700 million next year because of a slowdown in tax collections, MTA boss Elliott Sander said today at a hearing in Albany.

When asked if that means tolls and train, bus and subway fares might go up, he said not if the state [...]