The state budget did not go into overtime, but there were a number of buzzer beaters this week. Top-seeded Gov. Andrew Cuomo outpaced 16th-seeded David Paterson’s legacy in the first round, but trailed eighth-seeded gun rights advocates at halftime due to sloppy turnovers. The ninth-seeded minimum wage hike ran away from the eighth-seeded small business employers, who sought to limit its scoring to under $9 an hour, and barely slipped by top-seeded Senate Republicans, who forced the wage’s restaurant workers to foul out. But 420th-seed Assemblyman… [More]

  What does Mayor Michael Bloomberg do on his birthday, which also happens to be Valentine’s Day and the day he addressed the city in his 12th and final State of the City talk? Does he put on a tuxedo and throw himself a classy yet staid black tie party at the Waldorf Astoria like Jack Donaghy did once? Does he pop a copy of Annie Hall into his 90-inch television and curl up on his animal print sofa with… [More]

A look at the 50-year history of New York’s Conservative Party One day in the fall of 1960, a New York lawyer named J. Daniel Mahoney and his brother-in-law, Kieran O’Doherty, met for lunch in the financial district to vent their frustration over the leftward shift of the Republican Party under Gov. Nelson Rockefeller. That day, the two decided the time had come to launch a political party of their own. Over half a century later, the upstart Conservative Party… [More]