Do an experiment today: ask any New Yorker whom you know or meet randomly on the street who their state representatives are. The odds are very good that they won't know. This is because that knowledge makes little pertinent difference in their lives. The ramifications of that simple fact are laid out in two Daily News pieces today that should make you cringe. One is headlined Ex-staffer says top Shelly aide raped her and Silver did nothing about it, the other, New York burns while Albany fiddles. The first piece deals with an alleged rape incident in the State Assembly.

[Alleged rape victim Elizabth] Crothers, 32, was a young staffer for an upstate Republican assemblyman when she brought an internal complaint in 2001 with the Assembly that she was raped by Silver's then-counsel Michael Boxley. Crothers and her boss met directly with Silver, who she said was callously eating pretzels as she recounted her story.

Boxley later in an unrelated incident pled guilty to misdemeanor sexual assault. The second piece ends on this note:

The other two players, Silver and Bruno, rule with iron fists but have no agenda of their own - other than getting themselves and their members reelected, which translates roughly into keeping the special interests fat and happy. The result is Albany politics in its purest, ickiest form - passing hundreds of trivial bills while, in the words of government watchdog Blair Horner, playing "kick the can" with the toughest problems facing the state.

The common thread between the two stories is accountability. A legislative leader worried about his re-election is not going to munch pretzels while a young woman is telling him she's been raped by a member of his staff. Meanwhile, legislators who worry about their re-election - as, this year, many republican Senators actually have cause to be - might reasonably be interested in passing legislation that addresses the state's problems. So why isn't this happening, even while there are some pretty smart people in that legislature? Because the pretzel-muncher guy and the other guy who just announced his retirement are the only ones who call the shots in that dismal body. Best of all, realistically, there's not much you can do about it, unless you live in a Senate district represented by a republican. So if you go out and ask people who their state reps are, and they don't know, cut them some slack. It's not as if, in many cases, this is useful knowledge.