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Appropos of nothing, but something which needs to be said in any case; there has been a tendency on the part of some here to characterize all New Yorkers as liberals. This is patently false.

Here in my neck of the woods (Staten Island, the fifth borough of New York) we have sent republicans to Congress for the last 20 years (Vito Fosella, and prior to him, Susan Molinari -- who gave the Keynote address at the Republican National Convention in 1996). The voters of this island also put both Giuliani and Bloomberg into office after decades of the likes of Beame, Carey, Koch and Dinkins.

Staten Island also engaged in a committed campaign to secede from New York City in the late 1980's-early '90's. This effort was stonewalled by upstate REPUBLICANS in the Assembly (who feared that if Staten Island left the City, they would have to send even more of their tax dollars to NYC), and finally torpedoed (no pun intended) when the cabal of Cuomo, Dinkins, the No Nukes crowd and Clinton, conspired to close the $300 million Naval Station Staten Island in 1994, which had only been officially opened six years before -- this naval base would have had 5,000 sailors and their families living here, and pumped $2 billion into the local economy. More than enough for a population of 400,000 to support their own city and city services.

What many here refer to as the "NY limousine liberal" is the popular characterization of the Manhattanite, not the majority of the citizens of the Outer Boroughs. The sad part is that nowadays, most Manhattanites are not even native-born New Yorkers anymore, but transplants from other parts of the country who come here to work. You are just as likely to find the San Francisco suburbanite, the Farmer's daughter from Kansas, the Pacific Northwest tie-dye and sandals set, and the southern belle living in Manhattan as you are natives. These, incidentally, are the people who become "limousine liberals" because it's what's expected of them; the image of the Manhattanite, the latte-sipping, culturally sensitive, oh-so-worldly is the image they have been force fed by movies, novels and television, and when they get here, they do their best to "fit in". Which typically involves adopting more socially-liberal attitudes as part of the fairy-tale "New York Experience".