and we love andrew cuomo becsuse he keeps the rif faff infidels mudlims and people that bet horses out of the church ehile the boss prays
ny pml sec 109 to hell
Claude Solnik
Long Island Business News
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Ronkonkoma, NY 11779-7348
Home > LI Confidential > Stop scratching on holidays
Stop scratching on holidays
Published: June 1, 2012
Off Track Betting in New York State has been racing into a crisis called shrinking revenue. Some people have spitballed a solution: Don’t close on holidays.
New York State Racing Law bars racing on Christmas, Easter and Palm Sunday, and the state has ruled OTBs can’t handle action on those days, even though they could easily broadcast races from out of state.
“You should be able to bet whenever you want,” said Jackson Leeds, a Nassau OTB employee who makes an occasional bet. He added some irrefutable logic: “How is the business going to make money if you’re not open to take people’s bets?”
Elias Tsekerides, president of the Federation of Hellenic Societies of Greater New York, said OTB is open on Greek Orthodox Easter and Palm Sunday.
“I don’t want discrimination,” Tsekerides said. “They close for the Catholics, but open for the Greek Orthodox? It’s either open for all or not open.”
OTB officials have said they lose millions by closing on Palm Sunday alone, with tracks such as Gulfstream, Santa Anita, Turf Paradise and Hawthorne running.
One option: OTBs could just stay open and face the consequences. New York City OTB did just that back in 2003. The handle was about $1.5 million – and OTB was fined $5,000.
Easy money.
Judge Kavanaugh’s Former Clerks: Diverse, and Deployed to Vouch for Him
WASHINGTON — Part of the White House public relations campaign to win confirmation of Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court began only seconds after President Trump nominated him, when Judge Kavanaugh gave a shout out to his former law clerks and effectively called on them as character witnesses.
“As a judge, I hire four law clerks each year,” Judge Kavanaugh said Monday night in remarks at the White House. “I look for the best. My law clerks come from diverse backgrounds and points of view. I am proud that a majority of my law clerks have been women.”
Of the 48 clerks who worked for Judge Kavanaugh over 12 years on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, 25 were women, said Katie Wellington, who worked for him in 2014, when all four clerks were women, including Usha Chilukuri Vance, who now clerks for Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.
The Class of 2014 “was the first year that any judge on the D.C. Circuit had hired four female law clerks,” said Ms. Wellington, now an associate at Hogan Lovells in Washington. “It was important to him. His mother was a judge,” she said, adding that 20 of Judge Kavanaugh’s female law clerks have clerked on the Supreme Court.
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Many of those women — and men — are now deployed to vouch for Judge Kavanaugh in a campaign coordinated by CRC Public Relations, a Washington firm whose conservative clients include the Federalist Society, according to its website. The Federalist Society, which functions as a conduit for conservative appointments to the federal courts, supplied Mr. Trump with a list of two dozen reliable conservatives from which he chose Judge Kavanaugh and before him, Neil M. Gorsuch.
By 9:07 p.m. Monday, while Mr. Trump was still introducing Judge Kavanaugh to the country, a query from CRC landed in reporters’ inboxes: “Would you be interested in speaking with any of the former Judge Kavanaugh clerks? Below are statements for your stories.”
The quotes resembled book jacket blurbs, praising Judge Kavanaugh’s “herculean work ethic,” “deep and nuanced understanding of the law” and “overriding commitment to do justice in every case.” They depicted Judge Kavanaugh as “thinking more rigorously and working more ferociously than any of us,” laboring “on the 100th draft of an opinion (literally) while we both split a Domino’s pizza,” and giving a clerk who gave birth to a son “a copy of ‘Good Night, Gorilla,’ with a thoughtful note.”
Sarah Pitlyk, a former clerk who is now special counsel for the Thomas More Society, a nonprofit law firm that litigates on behalf of anti-abortion groups, said in her statement that Judge Kavanaugh was “an exemplary judge: brilliant, principled and faithful to the text.”
Some of the statements went beyond jurisprudence. “The last time I ran in a 10K with Judge Kavanaugh, I was 30 and he was 47, and he smoked me! He’s run two Boston marathons — which is two more than I’ve run,” said Justin Walker, a clerk from 2010 to 2011 who is now an assistant professor of law at the University of Louisville.
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Another touched on fashion advice. “Early in my clerkship, the judge called me into his office and said he noticed that my collar was curling up in front,” wrote Eric Hansford, a clerk from 2011 to 2012 who is now an assistant United States attorney in Washington. “He pulled down his tie, took the collar stays out his own shirt, and handed them to me. The next morning, I came in to find a pile of collar stays on my chair. I still use those collar stays.”
An endorsement letter signed by 34 former clerks — “every single one of Judge Kavanaugh’s clerks not prohibited by their current or pending employment from signing,” according to the letter — was also sent to Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa and the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, who is the committee’s ranking member.
“We never once saw him take a shortcut, treat a case as unimportant, or search for an easy answer,” the letter reads. “Instead, in each case, large or small, he masters every detail and rereads every precedent. He listens carefully to the views of his colleagues and clerks, even — indeed, especially — when they differ from his own.”
The letter points out that the former clerks now serve as “prosecutors, professors, state and federal public officials, and attorneys at private law firms, corporations, and nonprofits,” adding, “Our ranks include Republicans, Democrats, and independents.”
Two of Judge Kavanaugh’s former clerks are married: John Bash, a clerk from 2006 to 2007, finished his year with Judge Kavanaugh a month before his wife, Zina Bash, signed on. Mr. Bash went on to clerk for Justice Antonin Scalia, and Ms. Bash, for Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. Mr. Bash is the United States attorney for the Western District of Texas, and Ms. Bash is senior counsel for Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general. Ms. Bash was previously Mr. Trump’s special assistant for regulatory reform, legal and immigration policy.
Mr. Bash’s statement praised Mr. Kavanaugh’s “personal integrity, intellectual rigor, fairness, open-mindedness and fundamental decency.” Ms. Bash called Judge Kavanaugh “an enthusiastic role model to so many women.” In emails, the couple said they were not speaking in an official capacity.
Brian Fallon, the executive director of Demand Justice, a progressive group urging Democrats to vote against any nominee on conservative groups’ list of preferred candidates, said the focus on Judge Kavanaugh’s staff is part of “a purposeful effort to cast himself in a light that is favorable to women because he’s anticipating that his views on abortion and contraception are going to be major issues in his confirmation.”
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Mr. Fallon added that “the whole reason for the Federalist Society short list was to ensure that Trump is adhering to their key views, including on abortion.”
Ms. Wellington sidestepped the politics.
“It’s a unique relationship,” she said of the bond between Judge Kavanagh and the four women who were his clerks in 2014 and 2015. “You spend an entire year with just five people, and you work quite closely with the judge, you learn his writing style, the way he approaches cases and precedent. You get to see him as a pre-eminent figure in the legal community, but also as an everyday person.”
A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: Phalanx of Former Clerks Rushes Into Action. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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