I've been involved to a limited degree with Manny Innamorato's special election campaign to fill Andrew Lanza's usually empty Southshore/Mid-Island council seat (Marchi's successor and Titone's State Senate opponent had the worst attendance in the Council)against State Assemblyman Vincent Ignizio, a Vito protege.

Manny, the head of IT for the City of Yonkers (Talk about bad commutes), held a fundraiser last night on the Island. Steve, Janele and most Staten Island Democratic officeholders, activists and operatives were there.

Daniel is right, that a win here would help Democrats win other races in the forgotten borough (Although I appreciate Daniel not forgetting us). Ignizio, who ran unopposed for his Assembly spot, is being groomed to eventually succeed Fossella. Iggy defeated Manny for the Assembly seat in 04. Beating him in the council race will dampen his ambition and possibly give a Southshore Democrat the courage to oppose him when he runs for reelection to Albany.

The Council district is slightly more Democratic than that of the all Republican dominated Southshore Assembly because it includes New Springville which is mixed (New Springville became slightly less Democratic two days after election day when my wife and myself moved to the Northshore.)Manny should do better than he did against Iggy for City Hall than for Albany just based on that.

How do you know that Team Hillary is definitely planning a run for 2008? When James Carville starts writing Op-Eds that make the threadbare case that she can be elected.

Carville's case is essentially this: Hillary got elected in 2000 to the Senate despite objections from the naysayers; some of her polling numbers are not catastrophic; she has a net positive rating of 54%-42%; having been through the right-wing slime treatment for over a decade, nothing they can say, supposedly, will stick; and besides, those people who like her really, really like her.

Wake up, James (if I may call you that). It ain't so.

Hillary got elected in 2000 because of four factors: her willingness to work very hard for it, her own glamour as First Lady, her luck in having a weak opponent, and because New York is a blue state, at the time a blue state still angry over impeachment. For a sitting First Lady, especially this one, to get elected against a completely unknown junior Congressman in this state is not illustrative of anything. Whatever naysayers there were, not that I can really recall any, were at best marginal; after all, Rangel and Moynihan recruited her.

With regard to her polling numbers, show me one poll that shows a majority of the electorate willing to vote for her. Just one. No, polls from your own outfit, Democracy Corps, don't count. Then, I'll show you a whole series of polls that show a majority saying they wouldn't vote for her if her opponent was Satan incarnate.

An argument recently broke out between representative of ACORN and a representative of Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn (DDDB) over the racial implications of Ratner’s Atlantic Yards project. I have mostly focused on the