† Empire State Repubs Rise Again: Dems are running around Albany like headless chickens, as this Associated Press vignette illustrates:

The Republicans seized control of the New York Senate this week in a takeover that played out like comic opera, with the Democrats locking the chamber's 15-foot brass gates and hiding the keys, and the GOP rebels vowing to convene in a park outside the state Capitol if necessary.

You’ll recall that on Monday the Dems instinctive response to the unfolding coup was to turn out the lights in the Senate chamber and cut off the live television feed, prompting The Heel – irrepressible wag that he is – to quip, “The revolution will not be televised.” 

Meanwhile, The Stiletto is a bit taken aback at the two new additions to the Repub ranks: Pedro Espada Jr. – who was fined $60,000 for state campaign finance law violations, and may not even live in Bronx district he represents - and Hiram Monserrate – who allegedly slashed his girlfriend’s face in a jealous rage.

Says, kingmaker Thomas Golisano:  "Don't talk to me about ethical background in Albany. We have a governor who stood on a podium on national television and said he had extramarital affairs and used cocaine."

So that makes these two mugs choirboys?

† Deconstructing Obama’s Cairo Speech: In a New York Times op-ed, André Aciman, a professor of comparative literature at the City University of New York Graduate Center carps that, “for all the president’s talk of ‘a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world’ and shared ‘principles of justice and progress,’ … [t]he president never said a word about me”:

Or, for that matter, about any of the other 800,000 or so Jews born in the Middle East who fled the Arab and Muslim world or who were summarily expelled for being Jewish in the 20th century. With all his references to the history of Islam and to its (questionable) “proud tradition of tolerance” of other faiths, Mr. Obama never said anything about those Jews whose ancestors had been living in Arab lands long before the advent of Islam but were its first victims once rampant nationalism swept over the Arab world.

Nor did he bother to mention that with this flight and expulsion, Jewish assets were - let’s call it by its proper name - looted. Mr. Obama never mentioned the belongings I still own in Egypt and will never recover. My mother’s house, my father’s factory, our life in Egypt, our friends, our books, our cars, my bicycle. We are, each one of us, not just defined by the arrangement of protein molecules in our cells, but also by the things we call our own. Take away our things and something in us dies. Losing his wealth, his home, the life he had built, killed my father. He didn’t die right away; it took four decades of exile to finish him off.

Substitute “Armenians” for “Jews” and “Turkey” for “Egypt” and every single word of Aciman’s editorial holds true. Not that you’d hear any of this from Obama.

† All Stressed Out: In an assessment of the $700 billion government bailout of the financial industry, The Congressional Oversight Panel, recommends that stress testing of large banks should be repeated, given that the unemployment rate hit 9.4 percent this month and the tests assumed a worst-case scenario of 8.9 percent, reports The Washington Post:

The 154-page report called for the banks to be subject to further stress tests as long as they continue to hold large amounts of toxic assets on their books. The panel also said that regulators should retain the power to conduct stress tests even beyond that time, and that banks should be required to run internal evaluations between federal tests and share the results with regulators.

While the panel painted the stress tests as a useful exercise, the report urged that they should be used cautiously.

"While no one should gainsay the potentially positive results of the tests," the report said, "it would be equally unwise to think that those results reflect a diagnosis of all of the potential weaknesses or create a necessarily sufficient buffer against future reverses for the banking system."

Nonethless, 10 banks have now been allowed to repay a combined $68.3 billion in bailout money, reports The New York Times:

[B]anks that return taxpayers’ money will remain dependent on other forms of government aid. Among them are enhanced deposit insurance, incentive payments to modify home mortgages and federal guarantees on bonds that banks sell to raise capital.

“They may need the government’s money to get through this storm,” Christopher Whalen, a managing partner at Institutional Risk Analytics, said of the banks. “If the banks have to come back and ask for more money in a few months, I don’t think the response from Washington will be too kind.” …

The first round of repayments will free up billions of dollars that the administration can then funnel to other troubled banks and companies without having to return to Congress for more money.

But homeowners and consumers are unlikely to benefit if banks repay their TARP funds en masse. Banks are giving back money that might otherwise be used to make loans.

† Employers Hiring Forged Documented Aliens Are Lawbreakers In Other Ways, Too: New York Times columnist Bob Herbert takes a break from race-baiting to consider the plight of farmworkers - most of them forged documented aliens – in upstate NY who tend to ducks being raised for pâté de foie gras:

Animal-rights advocates have made a big deal about the way the ducks are force-fed to produce the enormously swollen livers from which the foie gras is made. But I’ve been looking at the plight of the underpaid, overworked and often gruesomely exploited farmworkers who feed and otherwise care for the ducks. Their lives are hard.

Each feeder, for example, is responsible for feeding 200 to 300 (or more) ducks - individually - three times a day. The feeder holds a duck between his or her knees, inserts a tube down the duck’s throat, and uses a motorized funnel to force the feed into the bird. Then on to the next duck, hour after hour, day after day, week after week.

The routine is brutal and not very sanitary. Each feeding takes about four hours and once the birds are assigned a feeder, no one else can be substituted during the 22-day force-feeding period that leads up to the slaughter. …

When I asked one of the owners, Izzy Yanay, about the lack of a day of rest, he said of the workers: “This notion that they need to rest is completely futile. They don’t like to rest. They want to work seven days.”

Covering this story has been like stepping back in time. Farmworkers in New York do not have the same legal rights and protections that other workers have, and the state’s multibillion-dollar agriculture industry has taken full advantage of that. The workers have no right to a day off or overtime pay. They don’t get any paid vacation or sick days. When I asked one worker if he knew of anyone who had a retirement plan, he laughed and laughed.

New York Farm Bureau spokesman Peter Gregg echoes Yanay’s sentiments: “They don’t want days off. The farmworkers want to work. They came here to make money.” But that’s what pro-illegal alien activists have been saying all along, isn’t it?

† Updates To Previous Posts  (last item, Why We Need Gitmo): Now ensconced in his new home at the Metropolitan Correctional Center – an easy walk from Ground Zero - former Gitmo detainee Ahmed Ghailani pleaded not guilty to charges he assisted al-Qaida in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed more than 224 people, including 12 Americans.

In a press release, Attorney General Eric Holder said:

With his appearance in federal court today, Ahmed Ghailani is being held accountable for his alleged role in the bombing of U.S. Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya and the murder of 224 people. The Justice Department has a long history of securely detaining and successfully prosecuting terror suspects through the criminal justice system, and we will bring that experience to bear in seeking justice in this case.

The Associated Press reports:

Ghailani's trial will be an important test case for the Obama administration's plan to close the detention center at Guantanamo in seven months and bring some of the suspects to trial. …

Last month, President Barack Obama said that preventing Ghailani from coming to U.S. soil "would prevent his trial and conviction. And after over a decade, it is time to finally see that justice is served, and that is what we intend to do." …

Four other men have been tried and convicted in the New York courthouse for their roles in the embassy attacks. All were sentenced to life in prison.

Oh, and BTW, The American Lawyer reports that “who will represent the defendant in his criminal proceeding remains a matter of confusion - not because he doesn't have a lawyer, but because he has too many.”

Editorial Note: On June 24, 2004, NY’s highest court declared the death penalty unconstitutional, and life in prison without parole is the harshest penalty that can be imposed for any defendant – whether a serial killer or a terrorist – tried and convicted in the state.

Correction: The Heel reminds The Stiletto that Ghailani is being tried in federal court - as any other (alleged) terrorist would be - therefore, he is subject to the death penalty. So about that Editorial Note: never mind.