Should Walt Disney Company CEO Robert Iger be worried? His wife, television journalist Willow Bay, helped inaugurate a new divorce section on the Huffington Post.

Huff Post Divorce will launch on Monday. There are currently over 20 special sections on the Huffington Post about a wide variety of topics including College, Books, and Technology. The new divorce page will include legal and financial advice, forums for readers dealing with crumbling marriages, and news on...

He may leaving his Assembly career behind at the end of the year, but Westchester’s Richard Brodsky plans to be pursuing waste and abuse among public authorities right up until the end.

Brodsky  and the Assembly Corporations, Authorities, and Commissions which he chairs is planning hearings tomorrow on the Fulton County Economic Development Corporation, which will include further probes into some of the bonuses handed out to officials there. Whether the people who’ve been called to testify show up in front of a lame duck commission chairman remains to be seen, but Brodsky does note this organization has already been subpoenaed.

Here are the details:

November 9th at 10:30am in Roosevelt Hearing Room B, Legislative Office Building, Albany Assemblyman Richard Brodsky (D-Westchester), Chairman of the Assembly Committee on Corporations, Authorities, and Commissions, will receive testimony from officers and board members of the Fulton County Economic Development Corporation and their affiliates.

The Committee is awaiting confirmation of the appearances of the officers and board members of the Fulton County Economic Development Corporation and their affiliates. These individuals have previously been issued subpoenas calling for information previously requested from the corporations, as part of the Committee’s ongoing investigation into state public authorities, specifically large bonuses paid by the corporations to certain employees, details of real estate transactions, a list and description of all PILOT payments, the activities of the corporations and the adequacy of current laws to prevent such apparent abuses.

What: Hearing Regarding the Policies and Practices of Fulton County EDC, Crossroads Incubator Corporation and any other affiliates.

When: 10:30am Tuesday, November 9th

Where: Roosevelt Hearing Room B

Legislative Office Building

Albany, NY 12248

Republican Queens state Sen. Frank Padavan has officially admitted defeat by Democratic challenger and former City Councilman Tony Avella, according to a statement his campaign just blasted out. Padavan refused...

 I linked Byron's piece on the huge swing in the senior citizen vote yesterday, and got an e-mail from one member of that demographic, D.J. Cur

Mayor Bloomberg says his equestrian daughter, Georgina, who took a bad fall at a show jumping event in Syracuse Friday evening, appears to be fine despite a concussion and a...

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said that his daughter was in pain, but was able to walk around after being injured during an equestrian tournament.

Former Governor George Pataki appeared on ABC's Top Line this afternoon to talk about Tuesday's results, the race for 2012, and why Republicans did so poorly in the statewide races.

"I think we got massacred at the top and it affected the entire vote down the line," Pataki said. "We had our victories, but we should have done a lot better."

Pataki said he did, in fact, cast his ballot for Carl Paladino, in spite of...

A reader sent along this memo from Republican State Chairman Ed Cox to count chairs, focusing on the positive outcomes of Election Day for the GOP in New York.

I wrote an article for Sunday’s paper about why the Republicans didn’t ride the national wave to victory in statewide offices. In her inaugural column for the Daily News, good Old Celeste reports on the grumbling about Tom Basile, the party’s executive director.

Cox wrote in the memo:

Election Day also brought us the most successful night in Assembly Republican history in more than three decades. Our Republican conference in the State Assembly is now stronger by seven (7) seats, with two additional within reach. Voters also went to the polls and made sure that Republicans also are no longer in the minority in the State Senate. The State Senate majority is in reach as close races will be decided in the coming days. We had great victories around the state from a crop of impressive candidates that have made our Republican party stronger.

We haven’t had this kind of excitement and impact since 1994. Sure, I was disappointed by some of the results as were you. Our state-wide candidates fought hard and drove our message with passion and energy. But our gains in the State Senate and Assembly and dramatic congressional wins will immediately make for better governance in Albany and Washington.

He then detailed the party’s GOTV efforts. Here’s the memo:

Ed Cox Post-Election Memo

 Michigan's Gov.-elect, Rick Snyder, starts off in a conciliatory direction at a confrontational moment, hiring a rival to a top post:

With rumors swirling that some members of the Assembly Democratic conference are mulling an attempt to topple Speaker Sheldon Silver, our Erin Einhorn caught up with arguably the most powerful...

While Bill Clinton's decision to rent office space in Harlem may seem like a modest one--imagine if the former president using taxpayer money to pay Park Avenue prices--he still pays more, on a per-square-foot basis, than any of his presidential colleagues, even after renegogiating his lease for the top floor of 55 West 125th Street.

The Journal broke the news today that the Arkansan-turned-New Yorker had renewed his presidential lease for the 8,715-square-foot office just off Lenox...

 This sounds familiar:

Israel has approved more than 1,300 new housing units in occupied East Jerusalem, settlement watchdog Pea

County Executive Rob Astorino will unveil his first budget at 11 a.m. Tuesday and it’s expected to have significant program cuts and possibly some layoffs.

Since taking office earlier this year, the Republican executive has pledged no tax increases and predicted the budget season, which will go through December, will be a battle with the Board of Legislators over what government services will be provided.

So far, Astorino has cut bus routes, day care and staff — mostly through buyouts and incentives — as well as other programs. Just last week, he announced that he was canceling the county’s section 8 contract with the state and the 40 or so jobs that administer those housing vouchers..

For their part, legislators have also pledged not to raise taxes, so it will likely come down to choices.

The board must have a 2011 budget in place by Dec. 31.

Stay tuned.

I believe I was among the first to write about a complaint made against state Sen. Steve Saland to the state Legislative Ethics Commission by two men who accused him...

Outgoing Lt. Gov. Richard Ravitch is making another attempt to find remedies to the state’s fiscal problems.

He and the Rockefeller Institute in Albany commissioned a study released today that proposes requiring local-government and school-district employees to pay part of the cost of their health insurance coverage.

The report—“Health Insurance Cost Sharing: New York State’s Model for Localities”—says it could save New Yorkers more than $1 billion a year. The Times-Union wrote about the report today.

“New York’s present budget crisis is unprecedented and could persist for years,” Ravitch said in a statement put out by the Rockefeller Institute. “Continuing business as usual is not sustainable. In order to adjust to the new reality, everyone involved in policy making at the state and local level will have to change their behavior.”

Ravitch in March laid out his plans to get the state’s finances under control, and included a plan to borrow up to $6 billion. It received tepid support, but went nowhere with Gov. David Paterson and lawmakers.

In September, he offered fixes to the Medicaid program, the state’s largest expense.

Today’s report says that state employees and retirees contribute an average 18 percent of premiums for their health insurance, but in most municipalities and many school districts, the employee contribution is “none to minimal.”

The report essentially proposes that all public employees submit to making the same contributions as the state employees under New York State Health Insurance Plan (NYSHIP).

 
Good news for White House optics managers, bad news for Drudge:

Over the years, one of the most memorable moments of th

Dr. Thomas A. Farley ran the marathon in 3 hours 18 minutes, three minutes slower than he had predicted.

The state Board of Elections says the election results in 10 races across New York have been impounded by the courts because of the closeness of the contests.

The races include the three tight contests for the state Senate—the Buffalo seat held by Democrat Sen. Antoine Thompson, the Westchester seat held by Democrat Suzi Oppenheimer and the Long Island seat held by Craig Johnson.

Republicans are currently in the lead against Thompson and Johnson, while Oppenheimer is deadlocked against Republican Bob Cohen.

Also impounded is the results from the 25th Congressional District between Democratic Rep. Dan Maffei of Syracuse and his Republican challenger Ann Marie Buerkle, who holds a 684-vote lead.

Six tight Assembly races have also been impounded: Districts 1, 89, 96, 100, 109 and 121.

What impounds means is that the vote totals are now supervised by a judge. In the case of the state Senate races, it means absentee ballots will begin being counted tomorrow, as who is in the majority remains in the balance.

Via the always interesting Fake Sheldon Silver, I found this New York Post piece speculating on the possible end of Silver's time as Speaker. It's the Post, of course, and mostly anonymously sourced, but there are some interesting bits about Silver's prospects in the Cuomo era:

No clear candidate has emerged, but the likeliest scenario for a coup, insiders say, is that the 31-member Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic and Asian caucus would join with an outer-borough delegation and a few upstate Democrats to plot an ouster.

Sources close to Cuomo said he's not willing to back any coup against Silver and actually wants to keep him around -- as long as the veteran pol stays cooperative....

Silver may voluntarily relinquish his leadership role after this term, said an Albany source close to the speaker.

There's another piece (also via @ShellySilver) speculating on the Post's speculations. Rumors, fog, shadow.

Update: The real Sheldon Silver isn't impressed. And Cuomo isn't confirming or denying anything.

Brian Nearing, my colleague (and Green blogger) filled this Sunday’s front page with an article about abandoned oil wells around the state.

Scattered throughout the state are the ghostly remnants of thousands of gas and oil wells — rusting, rotting rigs, lines, tanks and holes left behind by busts dating back more than a century. Some of these relics have been slowly leaking for decades, and their owners are long gone, sticking state taxpayers with tens of millions of dollars in unfunded cleanup costs.

“There are a lot of old wells out here that people are still finding all the time,” said Brian Davis, director of the Cattaraugus County Soil and Water Conservation District. “You can be walking through the woods deer hunting, and find these rusted-out old wells. Sometimes lines aren’t even buried, so you trip over them.”

Figuring out who is responsible for the relics can be almost impossible in a state where drilling dates back to the 1820s. Estimates are that about 75,000 wells have been drilled in the state, but the location or condition of half of those wells remains unknown.

Brian devoted a good deal of space to quoting from a bunch of DEC reports which, if you’re inclined, you can peruse here.