The robo-calls are starting.

I just got one from Chappaqua resident Bill Clinton—or maybe it was just a guy disguising his voice. It is Halloween, isn’t it.

Besides, there’s more than few car dealerships around here that hire bad impressionists to appear in radio and cable-TV commercials masquerading as the former first president.  And it’s not all that hard to effect Clinton’s twangy voice.

I mean, there’s no possible way I could tell if  that was a phone recording from the real Bubba. It could have been anybody.

Even I could have done Clinton’s voice.

Of course, if it had been me I would have added heavy breathing to give it the perfect Clintonian edge. Then I would’ve said: “Hey baby, this is your old president, Bill. Your husband isn’t home, is he? I hope not. Hah, I’m just kiddin’ ya!”

In any case, the  10-second call was on behalf of County Executive Andy Spano, who is seeking his fourth term on Tuesday. I expect Hillary, or the Bam will call next…or maybe Jack Nicholson. How about the Guvenator of Cal—ee-forn-i-a?

“Hallo, dis is Ahnald. Dohn be a gurlee mahn…vote for Ahn-dee Spah-no!”

I’ve just checked Andy Spano’s campaign contributions. It amounts to 126 pages, the length of a short novel. The total take for this election cycle? More than $3 million.

But what the records don’t show is the shadow contributions paid for by taxpayers. That’s the money that goes into bogus press conferences, press releases, mailings and vote-getting gimmicks that ostensibly have to do with important county issues but are transparently timed in the weeks, days and hours leading up to election day. Spano’s staff, whose salaries are paid for by the citizens, are not supposed to be engaged in electioneering.

So one might question a letter dated Oct. 19 that was written by Spano’s deputy, Sue Tolchin,  and mailed to South Salem residents. Accompanied by a brochure, the letter purports to explain Spano’s controversial affordable housing settlement which calls for the county to spend at least $52 million to build, buy or lease 750 units of housing in 31 mostly white communities.

Because this issue has bitten Spano in the backside, one might conclude that the purpose of the correspondence was more about politics than policy—and that it was done on the taxpayers’ dime.

It begins this way:

“Dear South Salem Resident:

“It has come to our attention that there is a great deal of misinformation about the fair and affordable housing settlement that was recently passed by the Board of Legislators. Because of this, we have put together the enclosed brochure that will give you the facts about what the settlement means and what it does not mean.”

Note that Tolchin puts the settlement at the feet of the Board of Legislators. Spano negotiated the deal and then put a gun to the board’s head to pass it quickly, even pulling out the race card to shame them into action.

Spano should reimburse the taxpayers for the cost that went into this. Come to think of it, he should also make good on the Columbus Day Weekend discounts he gave to Bee-Line bus riders.

He can afford it. He’s got more than $3 million.

An RNN-TV and Siena Institute Research poll released tonight shows Andy Spano leading Rob Astorino 48 percent to 41 percent in the county executives’s race. That’s a sevne percentage point spread.

But the good news for Astorinos is that leave 11 percent of the voters up for grabs. The poll has 4.5 percent margin of error, plus or minus.

Here’s the whole press release from Andrew Whitman of RNN:

RNN Television (Regional News Network) and the Siena Research Institute have released the results of the only public poll in the race for Westchester County Executive, and Westchester County District Attorney.

The results were first made public on the network’s news/talk/opinion program Richard French Live Thursday night at 7pm.

The results in the County Executive race are particularly revealing, in that the lead is just 7 points in a county where Democrats hold a huge registration advantage (D:  46.6%; R: 25.5%), and where Spano defeated Astorino by more than 16 points in 2005.

Other areas of note within the poll:  Spano, a 3-term incumbent, leads despite a high unfavorable rating (46%); Spano’s favorable/unfavorable split is even more pronounced among unaffiliated voters (34% favorable/60% unfavorable; unaffiliated voters make up 22.2% of the electorate in Westchester County); Astorino is within striking distance, even though nearly half of those polled (1/3 of all Republicans, as well) say they still don’t know enough about him to form an opinion.

In the DA’s race, incumbent Janet DFiore (D) remains in solid shape for re-election, polling at 52% against® Dan Schorr’s 21% and (WF/I) Tony Castro’s 14%.

Complete results (including polling on some specific issues) as well as demographic breakdowns are attached.

For any additional information or comment, please feel free to contact RNN as listed below.

There was a point in last night’s debate when Andy Spano fell face first into a “Neville Chamberlain Moment.” That is never a good thing in politics.

Chamberlain was the British prime minister who famously waved a piece of paper signed by Adolf Hitler in 1938 that basically said Germany had no intention of invading Czechoslovakia. And we all know what happened, don’t we? That’s right—the opposite of “peace in our time.”

The incumbent county executive’s moment came midway through the debate when he was forced, once again, to defend his settlement of a federal lawsuit that will require Westchester to build, lease or acquire 750 affordable housing units to be spread over 31 communities with mostly white populations. The settlement calls for the expenditure of $52 million, a cost that Spano claims will not be exceeded.

“We don’t see any additional impact on our budget because of the spending, ” he said. “The money that we have to spend is capped. What that means is we have capped the amount of money we should spend, and will spend—and that’s all the housing we have to do, is that amount of money.”

So far so vague. But then Spano walked into it when he said the following. I’ll put it in bold print. “We have a letter from the Justice Department indicating that and I’m confident that everything stands in that vein.”

He should’ve waved the letter aloft. See, peace in our time!

Rob Astorino, the Republican challenger, had a pretty effective rejoinder.

“Well, let’s just do the math,” he began. “He wants you to say it’s a $52 million cap and he has a letter from the Justice Department that says that. The letter is just that. It’s not part of the binding agreement and that is very specific if you read this settlement.”

Astorino said Spano wants people to believe that the cost will be contained. But 750 units divided into $52 million comes out to $68,000 per unit. No way does housing come out that cheap. Not here. And not Aberdeen, South Dakota for that matter.

“By Mr. Spano’s  own estimation in our last debate he said it’s going to be about $400,000 a unit. So if you do 750 times $400,000 you’re going to come out to much more than $52 million. You’re  going to come out to  hundreds of millions of dollars.”

In other words, look out Czechoslovakia. Hello Poland. So long France.

Now, this may be true. Or maybe not. The problem for Spano was that he had no answer to this. At least not a convincing one. This was true pretty much throughout the debate. Politics is about persuasion. And last night Spano left his powers of persuasion at home.

Fines.

The best thing about tonight’s debate between the candidates in the Westchester County executive’s race is that it was over before the start of the first game of the World Series. So I watched the whole debate.

If I were forced to give a peformance grade to the combatants, I’d say that Rob Astorino, the Republican challenger got an A-minus grade and Andy Spano, the incumbent Democrat got a “gentleman’s C.” I know I give Spano a hard time, but by any objective analysis Astorino clearly won the debate that was aired on Cablevision’s News 12.

Astorino came across as polished, prepared and pugilistic—the three “P’s.” Spano came across as, well, tired. He sounded like he was mailing it in.

The most annoying thing about Astorino’s message was his constant reference to his Web site. Spano’s mantra was that Astorino was “divisive.” Most interesting, however, was that Spano, knowing he was on TV, mightily restrained himself from coming across as a grumpy, old codger—which is the way he appeared in previous untelevised debates.

The result was that Astorino got the aggressive upper hand. He started out the debate by telling the viewers what Spano was going to tell them. For instance. he said Spano would complain that  the county’s high property taxes aren’t his responsibility. Also, Astorino predicted Spano would claim credit for the county’s a triple bond rating. without explaining that the rating is high because the local municipalties are responsible to make good on the prioperty tax collections. And he was right—Spano couldn’t veer from his script and he mentioned most of the things Astorino said he would.

And he kept pounding Spano on taxes, on Playland, on the affordable housing settlement and even on Spano’s driver-bodyguards. Spano still hasn’t come up with an answer to that one.

Spano seemed lost at times. When he tried to score on a Fair Campaign Practices Committee that faulted Astorino, he garbled the answer with an inside-baseball explanation that must have been lost on the average viewer.

Astorino also got off a good one-liner, maybe the best one of the night. As he has all through the campaign, Spano read aloud the breakdown on Astorino’s property tax bill to make the point that the county portion of the bill isn’t high. This was an effective “gotcha” in the first debate between the candidates. But this time, Spano garbled it.

Then in an aside, Astorino leaned over to Spano and said. “It’s a little creepy that you’ve been snooping around in my taxes.”

Phillies Win Game 1

Astorino Wins Debate 3

This is great. Yonkers Mayor Phil Amicone announced that today is “Chip Taylor Day in the City of Yonkers.”

Taylor, grew up as James Wesley Voight in Yonkers and went to Archbishop Stepinac High School in White Plains. He is the brother of actor Jon Voight,  wrote the classic garage-band hit, “Wild Thing” and other other songs. His other brother, Barry, is also an actor. 

The announcement fro Chip Taylor Day is being made, probably as I write this post, at City Hall in the Mayor’s Reception Room. (From left to right, the photo shows Barry, Jon and Chip Voight.)

Taylor and his friends and family and friends are there right now. According to the mayor’s office, the songwriter has a new album out that was inspired by  Yonkers. But he’ll probably be always know for “Wild Thing.”

The British group, the Troggs, made a hit out of “Wild Thing” back in 1966. Click on video.

Check out the low production values with the Beatle-brow hairdos and striped, clown suits. And how about the half-dead onlookers on the train platform? This should’ve been a zombie movie, and I don’t mean, The Zombies, another group from the British Invasion years.

Soupy Sales, who died last week at the age of 83, was a precursor to Uncle Floyd and Pee Wee Herman—and a lot funnier.  One of the things that made him so funny was his expert utilization of the comic pie throw, which goes back to the silent comedies of Mack Sennett, Laural and Hardy and later, the Three Stooges.

It’s hardly sophisticated brand of humor, but it still cracks me up. There’s an art to it.

Soupy was a pie connoisseur. He knew that the pie had to have a crust that allowed for pieces of it to slowly fall off  the face of the “victim.” To be really funny, the impact also had to have a loud, whirlwind kind of sound to give it that shock and awe feeling.

A key element to  confection-based slapstick is the have the proper recipient. Here’s an example of a particularly effective  pie-throw, involving, of all people, the rock star, Alice Cooper.

He appeared on Soupy’s kid show in 1979. The setup involves White Fang, the giant dog who was mostly off-camera and had an expressive way of grunting.

Here’s an update on the visit to my Yonkers home by a team of ghost investigators from Katonah Paranormal. They arrived last week and concluded that there is indeed, some paranormal activity going on, particularly in the second floor hallway where my son saw the image of a tall man (a phantom?) during an incredibly violent thunder storm one night last summer. That’s the storm that knocked out the electricity, and there was talk that it also created a tornado effect in Mount Vernon.

Here’s a photo of that storm taken by a friend of mine, Mike Augustyni n Mamaroneck. Ain’t that incredible? Right out of a Frankenstein movie.

Bob Marrone, the fine journalist of WVOX radio and host of “Good Morning Westchester,” will do a Halloween special on the results of the investigation this Friday at 7 a.m. I was interviewed for the piece, so it should be very amusing.

Tune in Friday at 1460 AM or log onto wvox.com.

In this election cycle, incumbent Westchester County Executive Andy Spano has received $15,000 in campaign donations from  G&S, the Long Island development firm that was able to transform much of downtown Port Chester, thank to an abusive implentation of eminent domain. That’s a little added tidbit that’s relevant to  today’s column, which begins as follows:

By attributing racist motives to those who may be skeptical of a controversial settlement in an affordable housing lawsuit, Andy Spano has unwittingly put himself on notice.

If the incumbent county executive truly believes in the principle of a level playing field in which everyone – regardless of racial, ethnic and economic background – has an equal shot at the American Dream, then he can make a very simple statement to back it up.

To see how that involves eminent domain and Port Chester, read more by clicking on column.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not out to the soak the rich baseball players.

But this was a mind-blowing revelation. While I was watching a recent playoff game between the Yankees and the Angels, I got to thinking about how the so-called “post season” has now extended deep into the regular season of the NFL. Some day they’ll be playing the October Classic in December, I thought.

Then I wondered how much the players get in World Series these days. As a kid back in the 60s, I remember how the perennial champs, the Bronx Bombers, always counted on, and in fact, expected to receive the extra money gained from their series shares. Going online, I found this very revealing chart.

It shows the winners’ and losers’ shares from the first year the World Series was played in 1903. The winners got $1,182 for a full share. Somehow the losers got a few bucks more—$1,316. Maybe somebody can explain that anomoly to me, but it was the only year in baseball history that it was better to lose than win.

Looking at the chart, you can see that for nearly a half-century, the shares rose in only small increments. Year after year, the take was $2,000 or so, slowly building to the five- and six-grand range. (A low point for the losing side was $439.50, but in 1908 that was still pretty good bread.)

It was unitl 1954 when the New York Giants faced the Cleveland Indians that the winners’ share topped $10,000—but only be $1,147. From that time until 1968, the winners’ share exceeded $10,000 only five times.

In 1988, when free agency was pulling in higher and higher regular season salaries, the winners share finally went over the 100-grand mark.

Then came the sterioid era of the 90s. World Series shares have more than tripled since then. During the Yankees heyday of the late 90s, any player (even a bullpen coach, potentially) earned well over $1.5 million just in World Series shares alone.

Last year, the winners’ sharted was $351,504.48 and the losers got $233,730.05.

This is handsome bonus money indeed. So I pose the question: if the government can impose salary and bonus restrictions on investment bankers that took taxpayer bailout money, why can’t the same be done with baseball? It seems to me that with taxpayer-subsidized stadiums, they got bailed out too, thanks to the hard-earned money of regualr wage earners.