The Rulez

Alright, so I'm finally set to start emailing legislator type persons with the intent of asking some key questions. Each district will have their postings start with the words "The mighty," followed by the district # and the candidate. Only districts where I could email both sides (and the green or conservative candidate if one is listed on democracywise) are to be emailed. Wish I'd gotten this off sooner, but I'll give 2 weeks in which I'll wait for both (or all) sides and then posts are going up as I get responses. Oh, and I'll email the exec candidates too. For size reasons, answers going above 200 words may be trimmed, I'll do my best not to alter meaning but candidates have been warned. Without further ado, here are the questions:

1) The teeball: Choose the issue you find most important, crime, education or jobs. State what your priorities are in that area.
2) The softball: What will you do to get young people to come to Syracuse and stay there?
3) The hardball: The county seems to have had a city government will take care of the city kind of attitude, but if we are to lure young folk and businesses to come to CNY, I think they'll think of it as coming to Syracuse. In my opinion, if we are to really boost CNY, we have to have the county work with the city, because as Syracuse goes, so too does Onondaga County. What do you think of this? What will you do (or have you done for incumbents) to change this attitude.

So that's a preview for the next couple of weeks, and sometime in the next few days I plan to comment on the article on Spitzer's vetoes. So you know what to look forward to.

Well, yeah, I'm behind in blogs

So it took some finagling of schedules, but I finally managed to meet with Deb Moynihan. Two days ago in fact. Yeah, read the title of the post. But it was a good meeting. We had an interesting conversation about the assigned council program, a topic which I deal with daily, as I work with the courts. I was uncertain on this issue before, as I've had the opportunity to see that there are some lawyers out there who take those assigned cases and defend the heck out of them, but sadly mostly what I see are lawyers that don't return phone calls. On the other hand, a public defenders office is typically expensive and overworked and I'm not sure if it solves any problems.

Deb pointed out that in most public defenders' offices, anyone any good either leaves for more money, or tries to get promoted, in which case they don't end up handling the large number of cases. Also, she cited statistics in Maryland, a state she viewed as similar to NY due to it also having one large city with several smaller cities around it. There they found that places with a public defender typically had longer sentences for defendants. She started college as a math major folks. I have no doubt she'll study the issues and look particularly at the numbers before making decisions.

So anyway, she convinced me, although I was leaning slightly in that direction anyway, even though there are a few assigned council I'd like to slap around (metaphorically of course). And she said if I had any questions I could email her. Which got me thinking. What if I emailed her opponent as well. And other candidates and their opponents. We could have an email debate. Not a real debate where the candidates actually get to ask questions of each other and have true back and forth, but that kind of thing hasn't really been done since prehistoric times, when it would often end with one side clubbing the other unconscious. It would make this blog a forum. Now if I could just get some decent time online. I'm out of town this weekend, maybe after that.