Larry Littlefield

Pat Healy notes that Hillary is for capping the number of troops going to Iraq, but not for capping the funds that pay for them.

Eliot Spitzer has a new DOT Commissioner.

Spitzer's promise to ease driver license access may help terrorists, argues a critic.

Larry Littlefield doesn't like Spitzer's tuition tax credit deduction.

Errol and Bill are taking predictions in tomorrow's special election in Nassau.

As of Saturday, Democrat Craig Johnson held a small lead over Republican Maureen O'Connell.

A candidate in Brooklyn's special election wants her money.

City building permits are down from 2006, but still way, way up.

ReformNY defends public financing for presidential candidates, which is notably out of vogue this time around.

Mike Bloomberg dared state workers to play solitaire when he swung by the capitol today.

The Illinois state Senate president who called for black voters to unite behind Barack Obama doesn't always practice what he preaches.

An imam who spoke at the DNC meeting thinks there's a Jewish conspiracy behind the Iraq War, according to Karol.

Dan Abrams predicted that his network will beat CNN. Soon.

Get ready to hear some Scooter Libby tapes.

And pictured above is Hillary Clinton at this morning's press conference on health care spending.

Only hitch: the $6.9 billion price tag. Weld suggested he'll pay for it by laying off public employees and tossing people off Medicaid.

This should, actually, be the substantive heart of the race for Governor, a job which is largely about steering huge rivers of money here and there. Tom Suozzi got a bit tangled up on NY1 last night when asked about what he would cut to reduce property taxes. (He, too, picked a big Medicaid number, and promised to explain more soon.)

And Eliot Spitzer, who downplays the easy savings from Medicaid, seems to think that he can find money on the margins. In Long Island earlier this year, he told an argument that money for cutting taxes or new spending would come from the "delta" (in the mathematical sense) between the natural increase in state revenues (natural, as long as the economy is good) and the ideally-less-rapid grown in costs.

That's at best a narrow little fiscal raft, freighted with quite a lot.

(If you want some great comparative numbers on New York State's spending, Larry Littlefield has the data, with charts, in his lesser-known online reference classic straightorwardly titled State and Local Government Taxes, Spending, Debt, Employment and Average Pay in New York City, Other Parts of New York State, and Other States: Comprehensive, Comparative Data From the Census of Governments. Great data, very clearly presented, if a couple of years old.)