Free Republic

ALBANY, Oct. 16 — Back in May, in the private dining room of his Park Avenue office building, Peter S. Kalikow marked the end of his six-year reign as chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority with a heartfelt news conference. It was time to open a new chapter in his life, Mr. Kalikow said, and he would step down as soon as Gov. Eliot Spitzer named a successor. Five months later, Mr. Kalikow, 64, is still on the job. Mr. Spitzer picked a replacement, H. Dale Hemmerdinger, in June. But the State Senate has yet to vote on the nomination....

ALBANY, Aug. 18 — Gov. George E. Pataki nominated an upstate Republican on Friday to be his fifth appointee on the seven-member Court of Appeals, moving to assure that his imprint on the state’s highest court will last long into the next governor’s term. The governor appointed Eugene F. Pigott Jr., the presiding justice of the appellate division in Buffalo, to fill the seat that is being vacated by Judge George Bundy Smith, whose 14-year term ends next month. Judge Smith had applied to be reappointed to a second term, but several legal experts said that his prospects were harmed...

OP-ED COLUMNIST WASHINGTON — Lord knows I have tried, over the years, to keep Colin Powell on the grammatical strait and narrow. And yet, announcing his resignation, the departing secretary of state said that after the president and he had "fulsome discussions on it, we came to mutual agreement. ..." Fulsome means "offensively excessive," and when two people agree, it's always mutual. This otherwise good man is incorrigible. We have had more substantive run-ins. After I recalled his mistake in failing to overthrow Saddam when he had the chance in 1991, Powell retorted, "Safire is getting arrogant in his old...