Jeffrey Wiesenfeld

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad attended a dinner at the Grand Hyatt yesterday, predictably drawing a large protest and some presidential politicking.

Among the protesters was outspoken Jewish activist and former Pataki aide Jeff Wiesenfeld, who was saying that Obama finance director Penny Pritzker “owns this hotel,” and insisting that she donate the money earned from hosting  Ahmadinejad to the United States Armed Services.

(Pritzker's family does own Global Hyatt Corp., but several media outlets report that there's no indication Pritzker knew anything about the dinner in advance, nor that she oversees daily operations at the hotel.

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After months of delays, George Pataki sent the name of Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, his former Jewish liaison, to the Republican-controlled state Senate for reappointment as trustee to CUNY last Friday. And it went nowhere.

A spokeswoman for Senate Republicans, Lisa Black, blamed the hold-up on a technicality: Wiesenfeld's name, she said, was sent too late on Friday for the chairman of the higher education committee, Kenneth LaValle of Long Island, to schedule a meeting on it. And since the appointment wasn't taken up by the committee, it wasn't passed on to the senate for a vote.

Pataki had reportedly been reluctant to reappoint Wiesenfeld because of opposition from the CUNY faculty union.

Now, because of the last-second nomination, Wiesenfeld's appointment will have to wait for the next time the senate is called into session -- which likely won't be until Pataki is gone and, by the looks of things, a Democrat named Eliot Spitzer is running the show.

All of which either means that the Pataki folks were guilty of a innocent-but-clumsy bureaucratic error that could potentially cost Wiesenfeld his trusteeship, or that the hold-up was a deliberate way of sinking the reappointment without appearing to do so.

Theories?

Update: State Senator Liz Krueger has more on Pataki's appointments over at Room 8. -- Azi Paybarah