Well, he ain’t quitting.

But Gov. Paterson announced he won’t run in November.

Just minutes ago, State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli just released a statement, saying that the accidental governor should now bow out of the budget process. This is the statement in full:

“The Governor has made a wise choice to end his election campaign.  Now he needs to make another wise choice and designate Lieutenant Governor Ravitch to negotiate the budget with the Legislature.

“The circumstances are difficult and the budget clock is ticking.  New Yorkers can’t afford a government distracted during these rough economic times.

“Lieutenant Governor Ravitch has the integrity and experience to negotiate what will be a very difficult budget.

“I’ve already had a number of discussions with the Lieutenant Governor about the state budget. Now my office is prepared to take the next step.  As the budget process continues, my staff is available to provide an independent analysis of revenue and spending proposals to ensure they are reasonable before the budget is passed.”

Yesterday, I asked the following question: Will Gov. David Paterson make it through Friday without resigning?

Well, it’s Friday and I’m not sure he will get through the day. My guess is he packs it in at the  press conference he has scheduled for 3 p.m. But you really never know with this guy, who keeps saying crazy stuff about how he’s a fighter and will  only leave office if he’s carried out in a box.

What’s your guess?

The accidental governor, who has been suffering pitifully low approval  ratings already announced (at long last) today that he’s not going to seek election now that The New York Times has revealed that he and the state police contacted the  girlfriend of Paterson aide, David Johnson. Johnson,  an obviously troubled young man with a history of drug use,  allegedly attacked her in an out-of-control rage.

Why the governor felt compelled to call her is a mystery, but it really looks like he and the cops were trying to persuade the woman not to pursue her case against Johnson. This has the odor of scandal about it.

If he quits, the new accidental governor will be Richard Ravitch, the emergency lieutenant governor and the man who brought us the terribly unpopular payroll tax as a solution to bail out the broke MTA.

I meant to talk about Yonkers Mayor Phil Amicone’s State of the City Address on my “High Noon” radio show yesterday, but time ran out on us.

Amicone’s 38-minute speech was Wednesday night, and I only caught the last half of it. An engineer by trade, he has never been a great speaker—something he freely acknowledges. Nevertheless, Amicone has clearly honed his oratorical skills. He seemed much more sure of himself than in past years, more forceful in his delivery. I don’t remember him making any attempt at rhetorical flourish in past years, but this time he effectively punctuated his points with hand gestures.

I think the guy has been taking lessons.

Clearly, this was meant to be more than an ordinary  review of the city’s challenges.  Amicone’s repetitive attacks on the state legislature for not kicking enough dough into the Yonkers school system (He didn’t mention anybody by name, but he didn’t have to) further signaled his intention to run for the state Senate against Democratic incumbent  Andrea Stewart-Cousins.

Practically the last major Republican office-holder in Westchester, Amicone, whose reign is shortened  by term limits,  is operating from a position of political weakness made worse by a crippling recession and a yawning budget deficit. Strategically, he’s got to pin the blame on somebody else, i.e. Stewart-Cousins.

His best bet is that the anti-incumbent wave, which is primarily aimed at the Democratic majority that governs this county, will continue for some time—and all the signs right now say that it will.

So it may not be too late for Amicone to  get out of Dodge and find refuge in Albany. Who knows, maybe some day those long-talked about symbols of revival—the daylighting of the Saw Mill River, the downtown baseball stadium, etc.—will actually come  to pass. But the odds are they won’t while Amicone is mayor.

State of the City addresses are kind of silly events because they mimic the State of the Union. The dopey audience feels compelled to interrupt the speech with applause just like the doofus brigade that makes up the U.S. Congress. And there was Council President Chuck Lesnick sitting behind Amicone, ala Biden-Pelosi. Sillier still, the Democratic Lesnick was then granted a pre-taped opportunity to give an equal-time response to the cable TV audience. Can you say, Bobby Jindal?

Hoo boy.

Every speech about the state of things includes what I like  to call the “money line,” which varies but generally goes like this: “Don’t worry, be happy—the state of the city is strong.” Applause!

Amicone’s 2010 money line, however, was closer  to the truth. Things, he said, were “grim.”

I looked up his money lines from his past State of the City Addresses going back to this first year in office. Here they are:

2004: “This evening it is my honor to report that the state of the city is strong.”

2005: “I am pleased to announce  to you that the state of the city is strong.”

(The next year, a more  tentative tone took over, suggesting that  reality was beginning to set in.)

2006: “Yonkers is moving forward with great hope and pride, growing stronger every day.”

(Then the following year, things suddenly improved. Well, it was an election year after all, right?)

2007: “I come before you once again…to comment on the state of  the city, and I’m pleased to report that after  three years of steady and sustained progress, together we have made Yonkers a stronger more viable city.”

(Look out below, here comes the apocalypse.)

2008: ”… I am not looking forward to delivering tonight’s speech like I was my first one back in 2004. That’s because the speech you will hear tonight is not the speech I want to give. I wish I were coming to you under different circumstances to speak mainly about the things that really excite me about the City of Yonkers: our boundless potential, our hope for the future and the remarkable people you’ll find only here and no where else. While I will touch on those things, tonight we must engage instead a more somber subject that deals with no less than our survival as a city.”

2009: “Now, it’s no secret to anybody here or who’s watching at home, that this country and
everybody in it is in a real mess—and that includes Yonkers.”

Every time it snows, I eagerly await  the  hysterical, breathless and live (Live!) news coverage of snow (White Stuff!) replete with predictable references to the quirky whims of “Old Man Winter” and “Mother Nature,”  comically inane man-on-the-street commentaries (“I sure wish spring would get here!…Whatever happened to global warming?” ) and gratuitously sage advice on how to survive the terrible, life-threatening ordeal of winter (“If you don’t have go out, stay inside!”).

I love the pure absurdity of it because after the third  (live!) remote from the Tappan Zee Bridge and (exclusive!) interview with the Yonkers DPW chief, (“Our guys are doing a great job but we still haven’t plowed the tertiary roads!” you are left with the impression that the  members of the Channel Whatever Action (!) Team have once again discovered this incredible thing known as the month of February. Holy crap!

One reason news organizations love snow is because you can talk and write about it all day and not libel anybody. Plus, it makes for great pictures, though personally I’ m sick of this new TV craze of inviting viewers to e-mail photos of their kids and dogs playing in the snow.

In the old days, you didn’t know if school was closed unless the fire whistle blew a coded signal. At least that’s the way it was in the town of Mamaroneck where I grew up, just down the street from the Weaver Street Firehouse. It was a pretty poor notification system because the whistle would sometimes get clogged with snow, either rendering it completely unworkable or causing it to blow a high-pitched, flatulent toot.

We didn’t get too many snow days anyway. I seem to recall that it may have had something to do with the fact that the school superintendent was from Canada. A foot of snow is nothing, eh?

Now they announce all the school closings ad nauseum on radio and cable television. I was laughing today because with the bizarre exception of Mercy College, classes were called off everywhere and yet the various announcers were tortuously compelled to read off an endless list of public and private schools, not once but about 50 times.  I may have lost count, but there are at least five Our Lady of Something or Other schools. My personal favorite—The Mazel Tov School. I bet they don’t assign homework there.

I happen to live at 1313  Tertiary Road, by the way, which means I won’t see a snow plow for at least another 24 hours.

Let me tell ya, Old Man Winter really dumped a lot of white stuff in the Lower Hudson Valley. If you don’t have to go outside, don’t.

A Brooklyn activist by the name of Daniel Goldstein writing for The Huffington Post poses some serious questions about why Forest City Ratner, the developer of the Ridge Hill project in Yonkers, escaped accusations of criminality in a bribe case that resulted in the indictments of Yonkers city Councilwoman Sandy Annabi, former city Republican chief Zehy Jereis and Anthony Mangone.

Goldstein interest in Ridge Hill stems from his opposition to the highly controversial $4.9 billion “Atlantic Yards” project in Brooklyn—another Forest City project—which includes the construction of 16 high-rises buildings and a basketball arena for the worst basketball team in the history of the NBA, the Nets. He is the co-founder of Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn and is also a spokesman for the group.

Goldstein wonders how it is that Ratner officials haven’t been indicted for bribery when the company directly benefited from Annabi’s sudden and rather shocking switch from objecting to the Ridge Hill project to then supporting it.

According to the federal indictment recounted by Goldstein, Annabi had been lobbied by Forest City, but didn’t budge from her position until several days after meeting at a restaurant with Ratner reps and Jereis. At the meeting, Jereis was given a $60,000 real estate consulting job, for which he was unqualified. Five days after a second meeting, Annabi changed her mind about Ridge Hill and stated her switch in a press release co-written by Ratner officials and Jereis.

Among other things, Goldstein asks: “When is Attorney General Cuomo going to investigate the wrongdoing in Yonkers and Forest City Ratner’s role in it? A first step for the yet-to-be-officially-announced gubernatorial candidate would be to return the $5,000 donation Bruce Ratner gave him because of the clear implications of the Ridge Hill indictments.”

Sounds like a law firm, doesn’t it?

Well, not quite. The first guy, Murtagh, belongs to John Murtagh, a Republican member of the  Yonkers City Council who is indeed a lawyer.

But the other two guys were comedy outlaws—George Carlin and Lenny Bruce. How can those two standup legends  possibly be connected in any way to Murtagh?

Well, they are…sort of.

Murtagh told me today that he was reading Carlin’s posthumous biography “Last Words” and saw that Carlin gave his family a “twofer.” First the he comedian mentioned Murtagh’s father, also named John, who was the presiding chief judge in the 1964 Lenny Bruce obscenity trial.

By all accounts Judge Murtagh gave no quarter to the comedian, who was convicted by a 2-1 judicial vote. The judge who sided with Murtagh was reportedly convinced to do so only after being threatened with a banishment to night court. The dissenting judge later resigned in disgust.

Prominent liberals of the time came to Bruce’s defense with a petition. Nevertheless, he was sentenced to four months in a workhouse. Later his conviction was overturned.

The second connection to the Murtagh family is McGuire’s Chop House in upper Manhattan, which was owned my Murtagh’s grandfather. Carlin’s father frequently got drunk there.

Here’s an excerpt:

My first home—the Vauxhall, 780 Riverside Drive at 155th Street—was, according to my brother, “opulent.” Expensive new furniture, a sunken living room, a dramatic view of the Hudson River and—Amanda, a very large, strong black woman who was actually capable of backing my father down. She became Patrick’s and my protector when Dad got out of line—which was plenty. The bar at Maguire’s Chop House on Upper Broadway got regular and strenuous workouts. Meanwhile my mother had settled into her Marie Antoinette period, sitting at the dinner table, tinkling her little bell to cue Amanda that the next course should be served. In fairness to my old man, that sort of behavior in a New York City cop’s daughter would be enough to drive anyone out to the boozer for a few pops.

Last week I climbed Mount Everest without the use of oxygen, and only lost the middle finger of my right hand to frost bite. It was a miracle.

Ah, if only my furloughed week off was that interesting.

But the time did go fast, as it always does when you spent most of it catching up on the stuff you’ve put off  like doing your taxes, a task I tackled the day after Joseph Stack went beserk and flew his airplane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas.

The act of insanity combined with  a suicide screed on the Internet (which recalled the much, much longer but equally angry manifesto of  the Unabomber) was instant fodder for the anti-Tea Party set—an elite group of snobs who used  Stack’s violence to discredit the much publicized,  albeit loosely organized, effort to make government more accountable to average Americans. That Stack had no apparent connection with the Tea Party gang hardly mattered to the movement’s critics, who saw an opportunity to generalize and seized it.

In any case, for blowing his stack, Stack is far and away the front runner for the 2010 Howard Beal Award to be given to the man or woman who best  epitomizes the slogan, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

Now, what else? Oh yes, I visited Grant’s Tomb on the Upper West Side on Monday, which happened to be President’s Day. Grant was a failed president but a great general, and he’s one of my all time favorite historical figures, partly because of the fact that I share his birthday, April 27, and because he liked horses more  than he liked most people. (Quiz: Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb? See answer at the end of this post).

We didn’t plan on going to Grant’s final resting place, by the way. My original mission was to find the general location of a house that once stood in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx where my great-great grandfather, an Irish immigrant named James Lynch, lived with his wife and eight children. Before the Civil War the family moved to the Bronx from a house in Manhattan to escape the racket caused by  the development of Central Park. It’s hard to believe now that the urban nightmare of Mott Haven, considered to be among the poorest districts in the U.S., could ever have been a pastoral refuge.

In any case, I couldn’t find my ancestor’s neighborhood, not even close.  Too much traffic, too many one-way streets and barricades and nowhere to park. Lynch, by the way, joined the army at the start of the Civil War and was a corporal in a horse artillery brigade when he was killed in 1864. Leaving behind a widow and all those kids was a catastrophe that became an enduring part of my family’s lore. So the trip into the maze of Mott Haven was frustrating.

That’ s when we came on the idea of going to Grant’s Tomb. After all, I’d never been there before and I couldn’t think of a better way to pay homage to an ancestral hero and the thousands of other brave soldiers who sacrificed their lives for the Union, than to go straight to the head general’s heavenly HQ.

During the week off, I was able  to take some longer walks with my dog, who  is getting on in years. Among other problems that come with advancing age,  she’s got the retriever curse—bad hips. In her youth, she could outrun a border collie and a greyhound  in a three-way race, or at least that’s  the way I like to remember it. Now in a burst of rare enthusiasm, she may break into a short canter that, with the stiff back legs moving in tandem, has the look of a jack rabbit’s lope.

The good news is I can let her off the leash because she won’t run away anymore, which should come as good news to  the Canada Geese, who regard her as a prime nemesis. We took slow walks to the Bronx River and threw snowballs at the geese instead. (Relax PETA, we didn’t try to hit them, nor did we even come close.) It was a glorious waste of time.

Speaking of wasting time, I also watched the Tiger Woods apology. Like most people, I really don’t care who the guys screws in his off time and I don’t require his damn apology about it. The  fact that he was driven to go on national television to say for 15 excruciating minutes that he was sorry about his pathological behavior didn’t rehabilitate his character so much as it had the opposite effect of only emphasizing his narcissism. The guy is a horn dog , pure and simple, who fell prey to the post-feminist, Blackberry-packing sirens of the great American Skankocracy and yet he gets up on a stage with a curtain backdrop to deliver a speech like he’s as important as a president delivering news of a nuclear attack. The hugs at the end of that embarrassment really made me cringe. Talk about insanity. I think the airplane-flying kook, Joe Stack, missed his target.

But let’s be real about Tiger’s mea culpa. It’s fitting that the man comes across as a cold, automaton. For in fact, he is not a merely an individual who plays golf better than anyone, he is a one-man corporation who generates millions of dollars of revenue for himself and a legion of sponsors, product-floggers and hangers-on.  In the age of consumer branding of individuals, Woods is the ultimate brand.

His appearance last week had nothing to do with anything but money. Just like Toyota’s struggle to win back the faith of its loyal consumer base, Woods was only working to restore the damaged brand and stop the bleeding of  endorsement bucks. His poor cuckolded wife didn’t stand up there with him, and thank God for that. But she was beside the point, and that’s the real tragedy.

Answer to quiz: If you said U.S. Grant is buried in Grant’s Tomb, you’d only be half right. Grant’s wife, Julia, is buried there too. By the way, by all historical accounts, Grant really and truly loved his wife.

Session data->

This blog as well as my regular Journal News/Lohud column will be on hiatus for a week due to a work furlough I am obligated to take.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t continue to comment. To quote the SNL  “Coffee Talk” host Linda Richman (played by Michael Myers), “Talk amongst yourselves.”

I’ll give you a topic—The Battle of Thermopylae. Discuss.

Now, I must go. I’m feeling a little verklempt.

When I was writing a column earlier this week about how Yonkers was rated 99th on a list of the 100 “drunkest cities” in the United States by Men’s Health magazine, I asked our in-house data specialist Tim Henderson to dig up town-by-town DWI arrest stats for Westchester.

Frankly, I couldn’t quite grasp the notion that Yonkers was that sober, so  I wanted to see some hard facts. The magazine gave the city an A-plus for moderation with regard to the imbibing of alcohol., which seemed absurd.

Henderson couldn’t get the numbers until today. As far as Yonkers goes, they don’t say much. Yonkers police made 116 DWI arrests in 2009, compared to 106 in 2008 and 111 in 2007.

The 2009 figures places Yonkers second to White Plains (139 arrests) among local police agencies. White Plains has a very active bar scene, so this stands  to reason.

The most DWI arrests were made on county and state roads, which also makes sense. So the Westchester County Police Department, which patrols the parkways, led with 510 arrests, followed by the state police in Cortlandt with 459.

Here’s another interesting fact. The village of Port Chester usually exceeds Yonkers in DWI arrests. Last year, it had 107. But in 2005, the village recorded 191 DWI arrests and 184 in 2008.

The year 2008 by itself saw an overall spike in DWI arrests in Westchester when 2,706 drunks were charged. Last year the number fell by about 10 percent to 2,456.

Maybe the near collapse of the economy in 2008 had something to do with it.

It’s tax time again, so like everybody else who pays taxes I’ve been in the process of trying to figure out how much more I owe the government for its past year of service.

I’m a lucky man, no question. This is a great country. Americans should count their lucky stars that they have the good fortune to be living in this country—especially those of us who have steady jobs and loving families. (Quick, knock on wood.)

But back to my taxes.

The other day I noticed  that I hadn’t received a 1099 statement from the Chase Bank reporting the  interest on a joint-savings account with my wife. We keep this account to ward off any fees that ordinarily would be charged against my wife’s checking account. You know how that works—it’s like holding your money hostage.

The account has about $7,000 in it, which, I must say  is pretty good for people in my line of work. Many of my friends have close to zero and are in serious credit card debt.

So I have no cause to bitch, except that I wondered when the hell the bank was going to send me that 1099 stating the year’s  interest on that account. The other day I called the bank and after going through the usual electronic menu managed to make contact with a real human—  a preternaturally polite chap, who took down my account number, asked me to confirm my identity, etc.

Finally, he informed that I wasn’t going to get the 1099 because by law banks do not have to send them out for accounts bearing interest of less than $10. That’s right—ten bucks!

He then instructed to look at my wife’s last bank statement for 2009 to see how much interest we received for the seven grand the bank was holding hostage.

And so I looked…and there it was. Our interest for the year came out to $1.94. I swear I laughed out loud. One dollar and ninety-four cents.

This is  how screwed up the system is.

First, taxpayers bailed out the banks, who got into trouble by making reckless investments.

Then, flush with money, the banks  refused to loosen credit to supply the loans needed to make the economy work.

Meanwhile, we continue to underwrite their greed by handing over our money to them to put in hostage-accounts without interest. In effect, it is we who are giving them loans which are free of charge.

The banks that are supposedly too big to fail are failsafe, and the safe has our money.