"This legislature is a rat’s nest of insiders, expertly leveraging their positions of public trust for their private benefit. I applaud the Governor for his initiative, yet hope that this new push will go beyond a simple press release," Ball said. "The Legislature has spoken words of reform for a decade now, fully embracing the principle without ever intending to put these ideals into law. The recent Bruno case is just one small example and a common symptom of a much larger dilemma. If this Governor is serious about term limits and cracking down on outside influences and income he will have to take on Sheldon Silver, the real 800 pound gorilla and start a just and overdue war against Albany, Inc."

At the beginning of the 2010 session, Assemblyman Ball will re-introduce the ‘Bruno-Silver’ Ethics Reform Bill, which reaches beyond the limitations proposed by Paterson . Ball hopes the Governor will endorse his bill.

In addition to campaign finance limits and term limits, Ball's legislation will prevent lawmakers from holding any outside business interests and limiting their annual income to their government salaries. Paterson 's proposals, which Ball supports, call for elected officials to fully disclose their outside business interests, including client lists for attorneys.

"Millions of dollars are being shifted from state coffers to private interests at the behest of legislative members on both sides of the aisle and in both houses” Ball said. “The game of shifting money into non-profits and through law firms, thereby hiding behind ‘attorney-client’ privilege has become a professional sport in New York , and taxpayers are flipping the bill. The time for debating right from wrong is over," Ball said.

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• enact strict punishments for DWI – First offense: SCRAM bracelet; second offense vehicle seizure
• penalties for those knowingly allow their car to be driven by a DWI offender
• mandatory forfeiture of driver’s license and penalties for incompliance
• creation of DWI license plates
• increased monitoring ofo and consequences for bars who repeatedly over-serve patrons
• create a DA Task Force on DWI
• start a countywide taxi program
• mandate TIPS-certified training for bar owners, bartenders, and servers
• the establishment of a CHEERS designated driver program providing incentives for those who chose to be designate drivers
• create a countywide safe driving program for high school students modeled on the Caiazzo Foundation

• On October 14, in the pages of the New York Times, reporter Paul Vitello exposed the sad extent of child sexual abuse in Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish community. According to the article, there were forty cases of such abuse in this tiny community last year alone. Yet the Times did not demand what it has called for incessantly when addressing the same kind of abuse by a tiny minority of priests: release of names of abusers, rollback of statute of limitations, external investigations, release of all records, and total transparency. Instead, an attorney is quoted urging law enforcement officials to recognize “religious sensitivities,” and no criticism was offered of the DA’s office for allowing Orthodox rabbis to settle these cases “internally.” Given the Catholic Church’s own recent horrible experience, I am hardly in any position to criticize our Orthodox Jewish neighbors, and have no wish to do so . . . but I can criticize this kind of “selective outrage.”
• Of course, this selective outrage probably should not surprise us at all, as we have seen many other examples of the phenomenon in recent years when it comes to the issue of sexual abuse. To cite but two: In 2004, Professor Carol Shakeshaft documented the wide-spread problem of sexual abuse of minors in our nation’s public schools (the study can be found here). In 2007, the Associated Press issued a series of investigative reports that also showed the numerous examples of sexual abuse by educators against public school students. Both the Shakeshaft study and the AP reports were essentially ignored, as papers such as the New York Times only seem to have priests in their crosshairs.
  
  On October 16, Laurie Goodstein of the Times offered a front page, above-the-fold story on the sad episode of a Franciscan priest who had fathered a child. Even taking into account that the relationship with the mother was consensual and between two adults, and that the Franciscans have attempted to deal justly with the errant priest’s responsibilities to his son, this action is still sinful, scandalous, and indefensible. However, one still has to wonder why a quarter-century old story of a sin by a priest is now suddenly more pressing and newsworthy than the war in Afghanistan, health care, and starvation–genocide in Sudan. No other cleric from religions other than Catholic ever seems to merit such attention.
• Five days later, October 21, the Times gave its major headline to the decision by the Vatican to welcome Anglicans who had requested union with Rome. Fair enough. Unfair, though, was the article’s observation that the Holy See lured and bid for the Anglicans. Of course, the reality is simply that for years thousands of Anglicans have been asking Rome to be accepted into the Catholic Church with a special sensitivity for their own tradition. As Cardinal Walter Kasper, the Vatican’s chief ecumenist, observed, “We are not fishing in the Anglican pond.” Not enough for the Times; for them, this was another case of the conniving Vatican luring and bidding unsuspecting, good people, greedily capitalizing on the current internal tensions in Anglicanism. Finally, the most combustible example of all came Sunday with an intemperate and scurrilous piece by Maureen Dowd on the opinion pages of the Times. In a diatribe that rightly never would have passed muster with the editors had it so criticized an Islamic, Jewish, or African-American religious issue, she digs deep into the nativist handbook to use every anti-Catholic caricature possible, from the Inquisition to the Holocaust, condoms, obsession with sex, pedophile priests, and oppression of women, all the while slashing Pope Benedict XVI for his shoes, his forced conscription -- along with every other German teenage boy -- into the German army, his outreach to former Catholics, and his recent welcome to Anglicans.
• True enough, the matter that triggered her spasm -- the current visitation of women religious by Vatican representatives -- is well-worth discussing, and hardly exempt from legitimate questioning. But her prejudice, while maybe appropriate for the Know-Nothing newspaper of the 1850’s, the Menace, has no place in a major publication today.