SamPratt.com

Jr. on the good Dr.

Kinderhook resident and Wall Street Journal columnist Ralph Gardner, Jr. has a lively piece in today’s WSJ about Alan Chartock and the WAMC fund drive, at this link.

Now that's big news

The Columbia Paper reports that AM radio station WCKL is going back on the air next month, but buries the lede: namely, that it’ll be carrying WEEI’s Red Sox broadcasts. (There are more BoSox fans in these parts than one might expect.) WCKL is at 560 on the “dial.”

Lo, how the mighty have fallen

Once influential and stealthy, American Freemasons have taken lately to advertising heavily on sports radio to drum up new members. The ads, featuring “Ben Franklin,” can be heard and seen here.

Eliot's Wasteland

Alan Chartock of WAMC has recorded a lengthy conversation with former Governor Eliot Spitzer, which aired Tuesday the 12th at 1 pm and will be repeated (but not be archived, at the moment, on the station's website).

Here's a link to the first segment, in which Spitzer talks about the undue pressure from the Obama administration to chase out Paterson while protecting Gillibrand from a primary.

It's truly a loss for New York and the cause of reform that Spitzer torched his own reputation the way he did... There are few politicians alive with both the structural understanding of what ails our society, the ability to articulate it, and the guts to pursue real reform.

Now, I'm not among those progressives who blame the Bush administration for his demise; he may have been watched more carefully than most, but he had to have known that, and in any case no one forced him to see prostitutes. I'm also a former support who was furious at him when the devastating news broke. 

But look at the ethical and literal bankruptcy of New York government in his absence... (even as equally troubled figures like David Vitter remain in office; and of course in a place like France the news would have been met with a shrug). Our state and country can't afford to have a brain like Spitzer's wasted on condo management for the next 30-40 years; one wishes there were some way to rehabilitate him.