Gov. David Paterson and Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi have just announced another series of hearings across the state to discuss lowering property taxes. After a bruising deadlock over the 4 percent school property tax cap last month, you have to give them points for persistence.

The pro-cap forces count Long Island as their strongest base. But the problem is that they have not been able to pull together a coalition that includes other expensive suburbs. Westchester and Rockland are "vehemently opposed," says Assemb. Chuck Lavine (D-Glen Cove).

Lavine supplied this account of a mid-August meeting of Assembly's Democratic caucus.

Those who favor a cap pushed for a bill that would combine a cap and a so-called circuit-breaker. (A circuit-breaker would limit how much lower-income families pay in property taxes, to somewhere between 6 and 8 percent of their household income.) Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver wanted to print a bill with these twin proposals.

Among the many questions that have been raised about John McCain's choice of running mate, the one that is most galling is whether Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin can handle a big job while raising a young family. Nobody asks such questions of people like John Edwards -- who has young children -- or Mitt Romney or Jack Kemp. Both have large families. The question simply breaks along gender lines.

What's worse, the commentaries are fashioned to pretend that they are not asking such a sexist question. A Daily Kos blogger frames it as concern for the 5-month-old Trig Palin, the governor's youngest child, who was born with Down syndrome. Another popular frame is whether Bristol Palin, the second-eldest of the five Palin children, will receive adequate help from her own mom now that it has been revealed that she is unwed and pregnant at 17.

It is certain that the underlying insinuation is that if Palin is a family values conservative, she is also a hypocrite for taking on an all-consuming public job when home demands are raging. But inescapably, the stories also suggest that moms can and should be held accountable for stepping outside the home in the name of ambition. Dads just don't have to answer the same questions.

The Long Island Rail Road is in the midst of a program to replace manual signal switches, like the one this man in the photo is operating. This photo was taken in the train tower on the east side of Jamaica Station. Railroad engineers must actually move the levers to switch a train onto a given track. The LIRR is replacing manual switches with computers.

LIRR Photo

Here's a creative way to attract city-dwellers to Long Island for a day.

The American Airpower Museum at Republic Airport in Farmingdale is partnering with the Long Island Rail Road to offer railroad passengers free trips via vintage Army truck. People who use the service over Labor Day Weekend will receive gate discounts to visit the museum's air show, featuring a squadron of World War II fighters, bombers and patrol planes flying throughout the weekend.

Posters, video ads and re-enactors dressed in WWII garb will distribute discount passes at Penn Station, Jamaica Station and stops throughout Brooklyn.

It's a good way to ease people's concerns about being stranded without public transit once they're on the Island.

American Airpower Museum Photo

An Albany update, as promised.

No surprises here. The Assembly has introduced bills that would enact a property tax circuit breaker and would raise income taxes for people who make more than $1 million a year. A circuit breaker holds down property taxes for households earning below a certain income. Assembly Democrats supported both measures during their regular session in the spring.

Sisa Moyo, a spokeswoman for Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, says the Democrats will conference on the bills in the morning, prior to the opening of the special legislative session.

Talks about budget cuts continue, Moyo says.

Gov. David Paterson presented the State Legislature with an interesting choice when he laid out $1 billion in proposed spending cuts last week. One of the easier cuts to make -- politically -- is $200 million for legislators' grants to groups and institutions in their districts. The $200 million in pork projects is allocated among Assembly members, state senators and the governor.

Unlike, say, the hospitals and nursing homes that depend on Medicaid, the usually small organizations that receive legislative grants often don't have statewide lobbying arms. That's why they're an easier political target for the budget axe. Cutting growth in Medicaid by $506 million was the single biggest budget reduction Paterson suggested last week, and predictably, the Greater New York Hospital Association (GNYHA) and the state's largest health workers union, SEIU 1199, cried foul. They are waging a significant public campaign against the cuts.

Newsday's James Madore is reporting that legislative grants are a focus of talks by Senate Republicans and Assembly Democrats. And Liz Benjamin at The Daily Politics blog agrees that there is bipartisan support for pork cutting.

Meanwhile, state leaders continue to work on a compromise to reduce the current budget by $1.2 billion -- or about 1 percent of the $122 billion overall budget -- in time for a special session of the legislature tomorrow. We'll post updates as they happen. Stay tuned.

The Working Families Party and the Alliance for Quality Education are airing ads this week -- and possibly over the weekend, if they can raise the money -- to fight a proposed 4 percent statewide cap on school property tax increases.

The ad dismisses the cap as a "gimmick," when in fact it is probably a reasonable upper limit on how much homeowners contribute to school budgets. Some anti-tax activists privately argue that the cap should be much lower, or that some method should be found to roll back property taxes.

The WFP and AQE are hoping to influence the State Legislature, which convenes in a special session on Tuesday. But the ad specifically attacks Gov. David Paterson and says he is out to hurt the state's schoolchildren, which is absurd.

The State Senate has already passed the cap, and today the New York State United Teachers says it will withhold re-election support from all 38 senators who voted for it.

Clearly the teachers' representatives believe this is a fight that calls for hardball tactics. Are they going too far?

Guard booths and barriers are needed around the World Trade Center site, the NYPD says. Police want to screen all vehicles entering the site, even though it is supposed to include public streets and retail shops. Assemb. Speaker Sheldon Silver (D-Manhattan), who represents the district, opposes the idea. He is calling it a plan for a "war zone."

Yet at the same time, federal agents have arrested a Pakistani neuroscientistwith ties to al-Qaida who who made a list of potential terrorism targets: the Statue of Liberty, Times Square, the city subway system and the North Fork's Plum Island. Aafia Siddiqi was arrested last month in Afghanistan, but she is being held in New York without bail.

It seems creepy to cordon off the World Trade Center site, but maybe it's what we need to do to protect ourselves. Newsday will be editorializing about this over the next few days. Leave a comment if you want to voice an opinion.

There's a fine line between taking an interest in people's safety and making money from tragedy. This summer, the tally of people drowned off Long Island and city beaches -- along with a high number of pool deaths -- has prompted swim instructors to post on Craigslist and send advertisements by e-mail.

"Don't you think it's time to finally learn how to swim this summer?" asks a Craigslist poster named Jen on the Long Island "childcare" page. This post went up Aug. 4, after a particularly bad weekend during which seven people drowned in the ocean.

One company, Saf-T-Swim, sent helpful information to subscribers about rip tides, which were a concern in Long Beach. One e-mail blast carried the subject line, "Long Island Drownings." The content was all very tasteful, but the subtext was unmistakable: If you don't know how to swim, you should stop by for lessons.

One of the Long Island pool drownings involved a nanny who jumped in to save the 3-year-old in her charge. Should she really have been working in a home with a backyard pool if she couldn't swim?

What do you think? Is it irresponsible, somehow, to never learn to swim? Are parents obliged to see that their children -- and the caregivers watching them -- have the basic skills?

Following an unprecedented address to TV audiences last week, Gov. David Paterson barely had time to remove his lapel microphone before Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver was on the radio, questioning whether the state budget is actually in crisis. Silver said, "Let's sit around for a few more weeks and analyze a little more data before we act precipitously."

Since then, the question Paterson had hoped to place front and center -- what to cut and by how much -- has morphed into a debate over how bad the emergency really is. A story today in the New York Times says governors have hit the crisis button frequently in the past. Other stories, including Newsday's, say that Silver and others are taking a cautious approach before wielding the axe.

The Regional Plan Association, a nonprofit think tank based in Manhattan, is only now recovering from a financial hit over the Jets stadium fight, which ostensibly ended three years ago. The RPA sided against the stadium with many West Side neighborhood groups and Cablevision (full disclosure: Cablevision is the new owner of Newsday). The anti-stadium coalition won, and the plan to build a Jets stadium died in 2005.

But one person in the know says the RPA has since been snubbed, financially, by the New York business community. IRS forms accessible online show the RPA's donations dipped 7 percent, or about $250,000, from 2004 to 2006. The pro-stadium contingent included New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, construction unions and the Partnership for New York City, the city's big business group.

Revenge, as they say, is best served cold.

NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg has found a ready source of cash for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority -- he says the state should enforce cigarette tax collections on New York's Indian reservations. The idea has a spotty history, as the mayor surely knows.

And in any case, Bloomberg's suggestion would be only a partial solution. The MTA is facing a $700 million shortfall next year, and state budget experts estimate that between $120 million and $140 million could be had by enforcing the court decision saying that non-Indians must pay taxes on cigarettes purchased from a reservation.

The Ravitch Commission is reportedly hard at work, and it's a good thing, too. Because MTA Chief Lee Sander is going to update the Metropolitan Transportation Authority board next Wednesday on the state of the MTA's finances, and it ain't gonna be pretty. So, the fact that Sander can add that the legendary Richard Ravitch and crew are working on a solution will soften the blow.

Gov. David Paterson came up with the idea for Ravitch to head a commission shortly after congestion pricing failed. So, it's a good bet that some sort of alternative congestion pricing idea will come out of the commission's deliberations, which are scheduled to finish by Dec. 5. Congestion pricing was supposed to produce $400 million to $500 million a year for mass transit upgrades. Without it, there is a huge hole in the MTA's proposed 2010-2014 construction budget.

But don't let them fool you. Even with congestion pricing money, the original $29.6 billion construction, or capital, budget was $9 billion short.

The district attorney in Boulder, Colo., concluded yesterday that JonBenet Ramsey's killer was someone outside of her family, based on newly available DNA technology. This conclusion only adds to the string of tragedies that befell the family of this 6-year-old beauty queen, who was killed in 1996.

First, the Ramseys lost their daughter. Then they had to live with police and public suspicion hanging over them -- in mother Patsy's case, until her death from cancer in 2006. There was quickly-dashed hope for closure a few months later, when John Mark Karr made a sick play for publicity by falsely confessing to the murder. And now, whoever the killer is, he -- the DNA samples belong to a man -- remains at large.

The current DA apologized to the family, according to an AP story:

"To the extent that we may have contributed in any way to the public perception that you might have been involved in this crime, I am deeply sorry," Boulder County District Attorney Mary Lacy wrote in a letter to the little girl's father, John Ramsey. "No innocent person should have to endure such an extensive trial in the court of public opinion."

The public judged the Ramseys because they played up their daughter's looks by entering her in beauty contests. Apparently, the myth survives that girls and women are asking to be assaulted if they display their beauty. People may disagree with the choices the Ramseys made for JonBenet. But that did not make a family member guilty of murder.