The Times Union and Tom Golisano

The Times Union sneers at Tom Golisano for moving to Florida to reduce his taxes. Some quotes from the TU:

to get out of paying his fair share of taxes

I'm pretty sure Golisano has paid more taxes than anyone at the Times Union, and probably more than the entire operation.

That what it all comes down to is, he just doesn't like paying taxes, and would rather keep his money?

Soon to follow in the paper is the list of people who like paying taxes and don't want to keep their money.

he might remember ... where he came from. New York was where he made all that money. Here ... was an environment that nurtured this entrepreneur: The businesses and work force on which to build his payroll enterprise

He could have built his business anywhere. He chose to do it in NY and in doing so he created thousands of jobs - more jobs than any of the TU's beloved politicians. His efforts generated huge benefits for our state.

Tom Golisano deserves thanks for all he's done for New York. Instead he gets the TU's "version of the Bronx cheer".

The practical reality of governing: Your policies influence people's choices. Does the TU blame city residents who move to the suburbs for better schools? How about all the NY seniors who move to Florida which has better policies for them?

The State decided on a "soak the rich" tax plan. Why would you expect the rich to stick around for that?

Meanwhile, budding entrepreneurs see the writing on the wall, and start their businesses elsewhere. New York will continue its long slide.

Donald Csaposs: Cyberstalker?

Update: Click the following for the latest in Don Csaposs stalking me on the web.
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For those who don't know, Donald Csaposs is a Guilderland town employee. His current title is "Grant Writer," though he has had other titles in the past, such as "Economic Development Director." Many consider him to be Ken Runion's right-hand man.

Well, Donald Csaposs appears to have another life. I don't think this makes him my fan, but he certainly likes to talk about me. Do a search on Google for "Comment by Donald" redlich on the Times Union blogs and you'll see he has posted numerous comments about me. (Comments appear at the bottom of the blog posts.) This does not include the many comments posted under fake names such as Col. Bat Guano, haddanuffathiscrap, reality now and factsdontlieliarslie. Then there Don's recent and completely out of the blue shot at me on Kristi Gustafson.

Of course it really isn't just about me. Do the same search, but only for Comment by Donald or just Csaposs and you'll see he is prolific - hundreds of results. One of my fellow town board members is another frequent target. But his latest is about me - in a post about the 20th congressional district special election. Will it never end?

He complained when I called him a "taxpayer funded political operative." But he posted three attack comments during work hours in one Times Union blog post about a McKownville campaign event, and there were others.

Guilderland residents should wonder if Runion's star employee does anything to make the town better. The evidence for that is scant.

And you might wonder why a guy with such a fascination for computers would leave that cushy job at Trustco.

The Tonko Times Union

The Times Union is falling all over itself to embrace Paul Tonko for Congress. I swear there has to have been five stories about him running.

- He's thinking about running
- He's close to running
- He quit his job so he's probably running
- He's going to announce that he's running
- He announced that he's running.

This doesn't count all the stories before where they speculated that he might run.

Meanwhile, plenty of candidates who have been running get little or no coverage. Um ... media bias?

More Times Union Bias Against Ron Paul

Today the Times Union staff went over the top. They stuck their fingers in their ears, their heads in the sand, and any remaining journalistic integrity into a dark and smelly hole. The front page has a big story (not as big as the Giants of course) about Super Tuesday. It shows five presidential candidates. On the Democratic side they show Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. On the Republican side they show McCain, Romney and Huckabee. No Ron Paul. Inside - page A4 - they have a more detailed breakdown of "leading Democratic and Republican presidential candidates." They break down the same five, again with no mention of Ron Paul.

Let's see. Ron Paul raised more money in the 4th quarter than any other Republican candidate - and double what Huckabee has raised the entire campaign. Ron Paul reported more cash on hand than any other as well - actually more than the three mentioned Republicans combined. Ron Paul placed second in both Nevada and Louisiana, and a close third in Maine. Mike Huckabee won Iowa and 2nd place in South Carolina. That's better, but not that much better.

While a lot of major media show some bias, these days it seems like Huckabee is also getting less coverage as well. For some reason the Times Union has singled out Ron Paul. This is hard to understand. I do get the perception that, at this point, he seems to have only a small chance of winning. But the same is true of Huckabee - that's why other major media are reducing coverage of him as well.

Locally there is a lot more visible grass roots activity for Ron Paul than Huckabee -- the Ron Paul signs are everywhere; sign wavers annoy people at many major intersections; there are so many people in the local Meetups that they had to split up. Huckabee doesn't even have a full delegate slate for New York. He is missing a lot of alternates. He has no delegates at all for district 10, only one delegate in congressional district 3 and only two delegates in districts 5 and 8. Ron Paul has a full slate of three delegates and three alternates in all districts.

So if they're going to exclude Ron Paul, why include Huckabee? The Times Union has demonstrated a clear and disturbing bias against Ron Paul for this entire campaign. They deprived their readers of information about a candidate, and deprived Ron Paul supporters of a fair hearing for our candidate. Why?

It would be easy to just say they're evil, but that's too simplistic. For me, it makes more sense that they just aren't intelligent enough to deal with him. He doesn't fit within their extremely limited world view - for them Republicans support the war and Democrats oppose it. Never mind that most congressional Democrats (including Hillary) voted for the war. Ron Paul's views on the Constitution defy the kind of binary black/white analysis that is routine for the Times Union, and the same goes for a variety of topics such as federalism, monetary policy, and so on. So it's probably not a consciously evil choice to exclude him from coverage. More likely it's due to their lack of intellectual capacity.

You might think I'd be worried that the Times Union will somehow retaliate against me, but no. They were extremely biased against our campaign in Guilderland and we won in the face of that. The voters are smarter than that. In the end, Times Union readers don't really count on the Times Union for meaningful political news. It's okay for entertaining stories about cats, and the occasional local story, but most readers know that the coverage is limited and they need to do their own research if they want the truth instead of biased fluff.

For more information on media bias, the Times Union and Ron Paul, I wrote last month about the bias against Ron Paul by both the Times Union and Fox News, and back in April about the Times Union's bias.

Ron Paul and Media Bias in the Times Union and Fox News

I posted way back in April of 2007 (remember way back then?) about the Times Union bias against Ron Paul. I have to admit that Fox News took the cake on this one by keeping Ron Paul out of their televised debate tonight. That one's pretty unbelievable. Many have discussed this, but in short, Paul beat Giuliani 10-3 in Iowa and outpolls Fred Thompson in NH, yet somehow Fox News decided he wasn't worthy.

Getting back to the Times Union, in my April post I compared news coverage in the TU for Ron Paul as compared to Sam Brownback, who was mentioned in 47 stories versus 8 for Dr. Paul.

Well now I can update the numbers for the year 2007 and even for the first week or so of 2008. Note that I'm using my Lexis account for better accuracy than the TU archives.

Ron Paul was mentioned in the Times Union 46 times in 2007. This number is deceptive, as it includes listings for a Ron Paul Meetup in the community calendar. Taking those out brings him down to only 25 mentions. This is the lowest among almost all the presidential candidates, though Duncan Hunter did get fewer mentions.

Going up the scale we see Mike Huckabee with 64 mentions, Fred Thompson (83), and Mitt Romney (151). On the Republican side the most covered were Rudy Giuliani (256) and John McCain (214). On the Democratic side John Edwards (207) was not far behind Giuliani and McCain. Hillary Clinton got more coverage with 231 mentions. The stunner here is Barack Obama, whose name was mentioned no less than 362 times in the Times Union in 2007.

The Ron Paul suppression is not merely an accident. Unlike many major news sources, the Times Union did not cover the November 5th and December 16th money bombs. There's been no mention of all the activity by Ron Paul supporters in the area, with sign waving events at key locations, etc. These get mentions in other papers like in New Hampshire, but not here.

For 2008 so far, Hillary (9) and Edwards (13) are well behind Obama (21). Huckabee has taken the limelight on the GOP side with 20 mention, just ahead of McCain (19) and Romney (17). Trailing are Giuliani (9) and Thompson (4). Ron Paul actually surged ahead of Thompson with 6 mentions, but that's not meaningful. None of the Ron Paul mentions have any substance to them, either mentioning that he'll be in a debate or listing his results in poll numbers.

Perhaps the best example is the AP article describing the ABC debate, where Ron Paul got mentioned as follows:
Former Sen. Fred Thompson, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Texas Rep. Ron Paul also shared the stage, but they were largely eclipsed for significant portions of the 90-minute debate as Romney, McCain and Huckabee struggled for advantage.

Funny. I watched the debate and I thought Ron Paul stood out (for better or worse) in stating very different positions than the other Republicans. When he did so they attacked him and a couple of times could be seen laughing at him. This was downright disrespectful and adolescent, but maybe that's what wins elections.

The Times Union apparently agrees with Fox News and its biases, as it did not cover the decision to keep Ron Paul out of the debate. Again, this is something that has been covered by a quite a few national media sources like the NY Times and LA Times. I'm not letting those others off the hook by any stretch though. When I was out there last week the LA Times ran a section with photos of the candidates on the trail, with a little "human interest" side of their stories. Ron Paul was not included in the section, though Fred Thompson was.

Most people watching think Thompson is about out of the race, with little money and not much success in polls or otherwise. At least Ron Paul has the money to go forward. But I guess Ron Paul isn't as good at using cliches like "The bottom line is ...."

And did anyone notice when Mitt Romney described Pakistan as a moderate government in the debate? I was not impressed with that comment. Despite that, Romney might actually be my second choice. Of all the candidates on both sides, he's most likely to govern from the middle instead of polarizing everything.

But getting back to the point, Rudy Giuliani was mentioned more than 10 times as often as Ron Paul in the Times Union in 2007. Results in Iowa? Ron Paul got 10% and Rudy got 3%. The New York Times has had a number of substantial articles covering Ron Paul. The Times Union sometimes runs articles from the New York Times, but has had literally no

Look. The guy's now in double digits. He's raising more money than any other GOP candidate, and apparently more in the 4th quarter than any other candidate. He was just behind McCain and Thompson in Iowa and he's crushing Thompson in the polls in NH. When is the Times Union going to cover Ron Paul?

Maybe if he wins the GOP nomination. Maybe. :-)

Times Union bias goes to 11

The Times Union has taken its anti-challenger bias to a new level. One courageous blogger has been criticizing the TU and its bias for some time now, on the Albany Media Bias blog. I haven't blogged about it in this campaign until now, but they took it way over the top this morning.

We have been raising significant issues with the incumbents -- sweetheart assessments, abuse of taxpayer money through a non-profit, zoning breaks, and of course their refusal to debate.

The TU ignored these stories. I was used to that part. This is consistent with their general policy of ignoring challengers, while writing the occasional story about incumbents.

To the extent that they covered it at all, they minimized the criticisms as "snippy attacks". See their September 14th article, for example - the only example.

The pro-incumbent bias roared out on October 2nd with this article, which is also available here.
In these articles, the TU printed a completely uncritical story reporting what the incumbent Town Supervisor claims is no tax increase, with a very positive headline. All of it is, of course, inaccurate. The reporter was well aware of our criticisms of this very issue, but did not mention them nor did he contact us for a comment.

This happened one month before the election, and came out about the same time as the incumbents' advertising claiming that they have not raised taxes.

The article opens with the following quote: "For the eighth consecutive year, the town's proposed budget does not contain a tax hike." It then continues with: "Runion ... said his administration has controlled overall spending to prevent tax increases throughout his tenure."

Ahem. Town spending is up 70% since 1999, more than double the increases seen by other area towns like Colonie. That's according to the State Comptroller (a Democrat no less). Unless you're drinking some kind of special Kool-Aid, you should know that spending doesn't go up 70% without taxes going up too.

In fact, taxes have gone up. The morsel of truth in the story is that the tax rate is staying the same. But the tax base has gone up dramatically as the town has increased tax assessments. Thus town revenue from property tax is up dramatically since 1999. Taxes have gone up, even though the rate has stayed the same.

The article also says: "Guilderland's infrastructure doesn't need improvements now ...." This is in direct contrast to our campaign contention that the town has neglected Tawasentha Park and its pool. And again, this is just one month before the election, and while both sides are getting their message out. The TU is actively reinforcing their message and criticizing ours.

In today's article (I'm not linking because the link will probably change) they really went over the top. They criticize us for complaining about the lack of coverage. Some quotes from the article:
"They claim that one of their Democratic opponents ... won't debate them ..."
-- It's not a claim. It's verified by the League of Women Voters and by e-mails written by our opponents themselves. And it's not one of our opponents, but both of them. And they've done it for each of the last three election cycles (2003, 2005 and now 2007). All well documented and backed by evidence - but reduced to merely a claim. They also refer to our claims of improper dealings by the incumbents without any reference to the mountains of evidence.

Then they make this statement: "Gripes like these are common during an election season, but that doesn't make them news."

Apparently our gripes against the TU's lack of coverage (in e-mails to the reporter and editors) is news, but the campaign issues themselves are not news.

Here is a quote from the reporter's e-mail to me during a conversation about this:

"This is not a political story. There have been no tax increases in Guilderland and it's my job to explain why. I know it doesn't fit in with your political campaigning, but these are quick hit stories that look at the budget. They're not the forum for political opponents to campaign.
My job is to write about what readers care about and they are concerned about their taxes a lot more than your campaign."

A friend of mine calls the paper the Times Useless, but this is incorrect. The Times Union is very useful for incumbents.