Saturday, May 02, 2009
New York's governor invokes the 'Colbert' defense.
Gov. Paterson, who raised state taxes by $8 billion last month, just cost state taxpayers $300,000 more.
The state has secretly settled an embarrassing federal racial-discrimination lawsuit [that] accused Paterson, back when he was Senate minority leader in 2003, of firing a white Senate photographer in order to replace him with an African-American ...
... the size of the settlement means "that the state wouldn't have made out very well if it had gone to trial," said a source close to the lawsuit. "If nothing wrong happened, why is the state paying out this kind of money?"...
In the lawsuit, [the photographer] claimed he was told by John McPadden, then Paterson's chief of staff, that he was being fired because a number of minority senators wanted to replace him with "a minority photographer, a black photographer ... You got to remember who Sen. Paterson is. Sen. Paterson is black."
Paterson, who is legally blind, claimed in a sworn deposition that he didn't see well enough to have fired Maioriello because of his race ... [NY Post].
