Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Wednesday, February 17, 2021

Andrew Cuomo

I have no idea why people think I'm an Andrew Cuomo fan. He is in fact universally despised among progressives. Fortunately, CNN is willing to hold him to account


Going back more than a hundred years, New York has held the dubious distinction of being a corruption leader among US states and has struggled to ensure integrity in state government. In recent years, high-profile bribery cases have ensnared the leaders of both legislative bodies and Governor Andrew Cuomo's former right-hand man. Now, a different kind of potential abuse of the public trust has come to light, and this time Governor Cuomo himself is in the hot seat.

Late last month, New York State Attorney General Letitia James issued a scathing report about how nursing homes in the state handled Covid-19, including a finding that the state's Department of Health undercounted Covid deaths at nursing homes by approximately 50%. While the discrepancy didn't change the overall number of New York Covid-19 deaths, it attributed deaths where a nursing home resident had been transferred to a hospital for treatment to the hospital instead of the nursing home.

This is perhaps something of a tempest in a teapot: it was likely originally just a bureaucratic mistake. However, the response was first to try to cover it up, then to excuse it away. Cuomo is just generally not a model of transparency or commitment to principle, and he cooperated with the so-called Independent Democratic Conference to allow Republicans to control the Senate even though Democrats held the most seats. (Long story.) The IDC is in the past, however, as Democrats now have a supermajority, which is a good thing because they can override Cuomo's vetoes. Anyway shut up about Andrew Cuomo already. I don't like him either. 


However, I don't live in New York and there are plenty of governors to complain about, so there's no particular reason to expect me to write about him.

 

BTW, CNN has been covering this story extensively for weeks.



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