Shelly Silver

Now that the gay marriage bill passed the Assembly 85 to 61, what’s next?

“It goes to the senate,” Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver told me on his way into the elevator behind the Assembly Chambers. “I’d like them to consider it. They might have the votes.” He went on to say, “There are a lot of issues that take time. Plain and simple.”

Here is Alan Van Capelle, executive director of the Empire State Pride Agenda and his thoughts on what happens next.

Eliot Spitzer has a message for Shelly Silver: pick a comptroller "from among the three."

Errol Cockfield gets his hands on NARAL's lit, which says that Republican Maureen O'Connell's stances "changes with the weather."

Chuck Schumer's book got a nice review from Michiko Kakutani, who Norman Mailer swears "disdains white male authors."

Ralph Nader is unimpressed with the Internet. "I don't think the electronic media is very motivating for people to really act."

Chris Cillizza plays the expectations game (already!) with Hillary Clinton in Iowa. "She doesn't need to leapfrog Edwards, but she does need to show movement."

Kerry Eleveld gets an earful from comptroller candidate Martha Stark about social investment.

The Brooklyn Paper editor in chief responds, politely, to Errol Louis. [Response in the comment section, at the 1:42 mark]

And above is my month-old photo of a happy Roberto Ramirez.

-- Azi Paybarah

What's going on with Shelly Silver and the independent comptroller screening panel?

In the Buffalo News, Silver said:

"They can give me whatever they want," Silver said of the three-member panel. "We don't have to listen to them, either."

Asked if that meant the Legislature could deviate from the list the panel recommends, he said, "I'm just saying there's no statute here, and if they don't want to follow the rules, nobody has to follow the rules."

Spitzer's office declined to comment on Silver's remark, and I'm waiting on a call back from Silver's office to get some clarification. But it seems a little weird to pre-emptively declare that the screening process that he and Eliot Spitzer agreed to be, in essence, pointless.

Silver may be putting himself out there to shield members from the criticism they're sure to face if they do, in fact, select a colleague instead of a financial expert. Or he could be sending a stern message to the panel about how displeased he'd be if the group they recommend includes no legislators at all.

But there's another factor in play. Money.

Spitzer's first budget is due out next month, and numbers are being crunched now. Mike Bloomberg just presented a budget which is relying on billions of dollars in state aid for city schools. And Spitzer also has to live up to his 'no new taxes' campaign promise.

So he needs Silver. And Silver, perhaps, is simply using this occasion to remind him of that fact.

-- Azi Paybarah

Here's a picture to keep on the mantle: Andrew Cuomo, Joe Bruno and Shelly Silver chatting at Silver's reception in the capitol after Eliot Spitzer's speech.

-- Azi Paybarah

Alan Hevesi is going to resign in order to stave off indictment.

The first word of Dicker's story: "Disgraced."

Liz Benjamin says he will plead guilty to a criminal charge, not higher than a Class E felony, whatever that is.

The Times, weirdly, seems to have missed the story. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Newsday handicaps the possible successors: Brodsky, DiNapoli and Mulrow.

Shelly Silver will pick the replacement. He will also decide if you get into heaven.

Joe Bruno's land deal partner is named Featherstonhaugh, "pronounced feather-stun-HAW," says the Times. You may need to remember that.

Republicans are worried.

Atlantic Yards is approved. Next stop: the courts.

Rudy's planning a visit to New Hampshire.

John McCain is becoming a "punching bag" for Dems says Chris Cillizza.

Christmas card analysis: out. Thank-you note dissection: in.

The City Council approved the 421a bill.

An elderly part-time employee in Joe Crowley's constituent service shop got in a car accident after leaving the congressman's Christmas party. Her friend, a passenger, was killed. The driver was apparently drunk. This story is very sad.

Tom Delay is now blogging. This thing could catch on.

Virginia Republican Virgil Goode has some problems with the Koran.

Turkmenbashi is dead. Don't feel bad. -- Andrew Rice

I don't see anything up on the wires yet, but WNYC is reporting that the Public Authorities Control Board (that is, Shelly Silver) approved the Atlantic Yards project. As expected. --Andrew Rice

Eliot Spitzer seemed to have made it clear that his self-imposed reform package - not attending fund-raisers in Albany and capping contributions at $10,000, among other things - is intended to have the effect of politely shaming other lawmakers in Albany into following his example.

Here's what he said earlier today:

"What we are doing is trying to change the paradigm, and by changing the paradigm and leading by example and saying to the legislature, this is the way we believe state government should function."

Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno has already balked at the idea, and Sheldon Silver, as far as I can tell, is still formulating his reponse.

But Democratic consultant Evan Stavisky has an alternative take: that the proposals are intended chiefly to serve as a contrast with the practices of George Pataki, rather than as any implicit rebuke of Silver and the rank-and-file lawmakers who Spitzer actually has to work with.

"Some of the issues in there are unique to the executive branch. Its not directed at Shelly Silver. It's directed at George Pataki, who found new and innovative ways to enrich his cronies. "The state legislature has been dysfunctional, but the Pataki administration has been disgraceful."

-- Azi Paybarah

Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn has collected 3,600 form letters, online and on the street, urging the Public Authorities Control Board to postpone its vote on Atlantic Yards until after "the courts" rule on its eminent domain lawsuit -- which, frankly, could take a few years, especially if the case goes all the way to the Supreme Court.

Most of them, spokesman Daniel Goldstein said, were collected in Brooklyn, but there are 400 signers from state Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver's Lower Manhattan district among them. Silver, Gov. Pataki, and state Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno control the votes on the authorities control board.

The letters will be delivered Tuesday.  read more »

- Matthew Schuerman

Hakeem Jeffries, the state Assembly member-elect for the 57th district, which is ground zero for Atlantic Yards, did not sign on to his future colleagues' demands to scale down the Forest City Ratner project, but he is speaking to Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver about it.

Jeffries told The Real Estate on Tuesday that he had a conversation about a week to 10 days ago to express many of the same concerns as Assembly members Jim Brennan, Joan Millman and Annette Robinson did. In the order Jeffries mentioned them, his concerns are: building more affordable housing early on as part of the project, the lack of transparency regarding the project's financing, the lack of public involvement, and, upon prompting, its density. Jeffries said that he would speak with Silver again soon.

Jeffries is known to be hard to read (some would say slippery) on Atlantic Yards, and he refused to compare his position with that of Brennan's camp.

"I have always felt that eminent domain is one of government's most exceptional powers. I don't believe that a private developer should be able to use it to build a basketball arena." But he also said that the courts should be allowed to decide the issue.

That, of course, is axiomatic: you don't need a first-term assemblyman saying that one should obey a court order. He clarified: "If they decide it is constitutional, then we have to find out other ways to make it tenable to the community."

Jeffries, like his colleagues, does favor slowing the approval process down, starting with the Empire State Development Corporation. "I'm not particularly clear they have done all they were supposed to do to make sure they included all the public comments."

- Matthew Schuerman

Charles Gargano must be thankful that this week is finally ending: The Atlantic Yards blunder, Shelly Silver's barbs, and, now, from the other end of the state, The Syracuse Post-Standard uncovering a scheme whereby poor upstate towns sold tax breaks to developers for a fee.

State Senator Liz Krueger says Gargano and other appointees to the Empire State Development Corporation, which is in charge of the Empire Zone tax break program, "either lack the most basic understanding of the very laws they are charged with implementing, or worse, they simply do not care."

Over the past several weeks, The Post-Standard has painted a bleak picture of the Empire Zone program: "None of the 10 businesses that claimed the biggest property tax refunds for 2003 created more than 20 jobs," the paper reports. The whole investigative series can be found here.  read more »

- Matthew Schuerman

A few weeks ago, in the course of reporting a story about Albany's "three men in a room" dynamic, Tom Suozzi suggested to me that he he had become increasingly "encouraged" by Eliot Spitzer's intentions of cleaning up Albany because of his refusal to bend on the "Hevesi thing." Well the Alan Hevesi thing is still around, and it increasingly looks like a power struggle between Spitzer and his fellow Democrat in the room, Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver.

I spoke to one astute Assembly Democrat today who spoke on the condition of anonymity, because, well, do you really want to start the session off making an enemy out of Spitzer or Silver? The member's take is that the longer Hevesi stays in office, the more it emboldens Silver.

"He is Hevesi's strongest backer, and if Hevesi stays he has a powerful ally in the comptroller's office, one who is of course not very happy with Spitzer."

In other words, it's an old-fashioned Albany power play.

"As it relates to this particularly move, I think the Speaker has the upper hand."

"Either Hevesi survives -- in which case Shelly is dramatically empowered -- or Hevesi does not make it and the legislature and Shelly get to appoint his replacement."

And what about Spitzer's much-discussed popular mandate?

"There is always room to maneuver on the margins."

--Jason Horowitz

Charles Gargano, the chairman of the Empire State Development Corporation, is sometimes portrayed as a developer's best friend, but Wednesday morning, in his first extensive comments after the failure of Moynihan Station (and mixed in with much less passionate words about Atlantic Yards), he spat out the word "developer" like it was an unripe persimmon. He also didn't seem to care for Shelly Silver too much.

Here are his choice words:

"The notion that we presented a project that the developers didn't want to build -- who's in charge here, the developers or the public sector? We are in charge and we put a project out in RFP [request for proposals], and we got responses to the RFP that what we presented to the [Public Authorities Control Board]. We did not present a project that included a six to eight order of magnitude larger than the project that was put out in the RFP."

And later:

"The comments that were made by [state Assembly] Speaker Silver were, 'This is not the project the developers want to build.' What does that mean? What the hell does that mean? We put out an RFP. The next thing is, 'Well, we'd like to see the whole project.' Well, we did present the whole project, the Moynihan Station project. So there is no really sound reason not to approve this project. It was just a lot of talk in my opinion to reject the project for personal reasons -- whatever, Madison Square Garden. I don't know what it might be, but we do know, and all of you in the media do know, some of the associations with Madison Square Garden and Speaker Silver."  read more »

Gargano wouldn't say whether the state would pay another $10 million to extend the option to buy the Farley Post Office from the feds -- a step that would be required to keep the Moynihan Station project alive. He didn't say the project was dead, either, though he did say that the incoming Spitzer administration would need to "revive" it, and wished them well.

- Matthew Schuerman

In announcing his transition team this morning, Eliot Spitzer also explained that he thinks his strongest weapon in dealing with Sheldon Silver and Joe Bruno will be Tuesday's mandate.

"The numbers Tuesday night I think reflect a breath of support I will use to my advantage, I hope, when I sit down with Shelly Silver, Joe Bruno and many other legislative leaders and say to them and say 'Here is the mandate that has been given to us. It's not a mandate I carry as an individual. It's a mandate the public has imposed upon us.'"

Spitzer went on to say that the mandate "is the greatest strength the governor has and I intend to use it."

It's the same argument being made, interestingly, by Alan Hevesi, who is arguing that the number of voters that chose to return him to office should sort of inoculate him from being removed from office -- by, say, Eliot Spitzer --for his chauffeur indiscretions.

I asked Spitzer spokesman Christine Anderson if she felt Hevesi was deliberately appropriating Spitzer's argument.

Her answer: "We don't speak for him."

-- Azi Paybarah

Gov. Pataki had a few choice words for Shelly Silver this afternoon, opening his statement on the Moynihan rejection with a quote from the real Moynihan: "The single most exciting thing you encounter in government is competence, because it's so rare."

He also, for the first time, brings up the burning question that has lurked behind this project since trouble started brewing earlier this year: Would going ahead with the partial Moynihan plan now have put the state and city government in a better negotiating position vis-a-vis tax breaks for Madison Square Garden and the contribution for a redeveloped Pennsylvania Station--than it would be if it were to wait until everything came together before breaking ground?

Pataki says yes: "New Yorkers and visitors from around the world should not be held hostage to an effort to finance a new Madison Square Garden on the backs of taxpayers."

Full statement after the jump.  read more »

-Matthew Schuerman

Tonight, George and Libby Pataki will host a reception for Jeanine Pirro at the Marriott Eastside Hotel.

Tomorrow, Shelly Silver speaks at the Association for a Better New York Breakfast at the Ritz Carlton New York-Battery Park.

The U.S. Court of Appeals will hear an argument from lawyers representing a Muslim man who is suing federal officials for alleged abuse and mistreatment suffered while in federal detention. Christine Quinn and Eric Gioia discuss a new City Council report on prescription drug price disparities on the steps of City Hall.

Minuteman Project founder Jim Gilchrist speaks to students at Columbia University. Meanwhile, immigrant rights supporters will protest his speech outside.

Andrea Stewart-Cousins and David Paterson announce their Albany reform plan at Yonkers City Hall.

John Faso will attend the American Wind Energy Association Wind Power Finance and Investment Workshop at the New York Marriott Financial Center. Later, he will host a Town Hall Meeting in Bay Ridge.

Liz Kruger hosts a fundraiser.

—Nicole Brydson

Comptroller Hevesi waited until this morning to publicly state he still wasn't satisfied with the Moynihan Station project, giving cover to Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver in case he wants to put off the scheduled vote today by the Public Authorities Control Board, the final approval needed to release state funds for the project. He has already expressed reservations about the project, which would renovate Farley Post Office as a train station.

The item is, as of right now, still on the agenda, according to P.A.C.B. spokesman John Sweeney, but that could change by the meeting's start at 2 p.m.

-Matthew Schuerman

It wasn't just Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver who got cold feet over today's scheduled vote on Moynihan Station. It turns out state Comptroller Alan Hevesi sent a letter yesterday declaring "there are too many unanswered questions." Among them: "How is it possible to approve part of the project when the new Madison Square Garden proposed for the western half of the Farley Complex will probably require that the entire plan be revised?" -Matthew Schuerman

Okay, so Tom Suozzi is in trouble by any measure. The polls show him trailing Eliot Spitzer by 60 points. And, as Liz Benjamin reported yesterday, his media adviser has just bailed out - hardly an indication that Suozzi has built the sort of ruthlessly disciplined operation of dedicated believers that make for a credible insurgency.

But the one argument he ought to be making with the straightest face that he can muster is the insider-outsider one: Suozzi challenges Spitzer, as many times as he humany can between now and the primary election, to prove that he can bring the hammer down on his institutional Democratic allies.

Though he may not have much to show for it at the moment in terms of public recognition, Suozzi is still the guy who took the extraordinary step of engineering the defeat of a sitting Democrat in the Assembly, leaving just about everyone in his party mortified for the sake of a reformist gesture.

Though Spitzer is anything but a pushover by temperament, the fact remains that he's spent eight years as state official with investigative powers. And Albany, I think most of our readers will agree, still stinks as a model of democratic governance.

Yesterday, Suozzi took a break from his fruitless pursuit of face-to-face debates to try to convey the message, once again, that the attorney general is a captive of the state's political institutions, calling on Spitzer to recuse himself from an ongoing investigation of the teacher's union, which has endorsed him in the past.

Suozzi must have been listening to 'Tom,' who offered him the following free advice yesterday in the comments section: "You have a powerful message...stick to it, and force Spitzer to defend Albany..."

UPDATE: The Suozzi campaign just brought to my attention a release sent out this morning that hews to the same theme of Spitzer's ties to the powers that be in Albany:

MINEOLA, NY - Democratic candidate for Governor Tom Suozzi today called on his opponent, Eliot Spitzer, to break his silence and take a stand on the sex offender bill that top Spitzer backer Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver is blocking.

"Once again, Eliot Spitzer is missing in Albany, standing silent on the sidelines while his strongest political supporter, Shelly Silver, is gumming up the works, double-crossing women around our state, and disrespecting our democracy. If that's Eliot' s idea of leadership and reform, no wonder every Albany insider and lobbyist is behind his campaign," said Suozzi.

Read the whole thing after the jump.  read more »

That Shelly Silver and his long memory.

He welcomed Mike to the fight for city education money today with a letter, Capitol Confidential reports, that included this line:

"While we are certainly pleased that Mayor Bloomberg has decided to join us as an ally in our fight, it is hard to understand why he has chosen not to get involved until now and why even today, he will not join us in publicly calling upon the governor to drop his appeal of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit."

Also on the Albany blog today: an obscure challenger for Hevesi and former Lieutenant Governor candidate Dennis Mehiel heading the fundraising for the State Senate Democrats.

For a candidate in early March, Eliot Spitzer was surprisingly willing to respond to specific policy questions at a forum hosted by the Metropolitan Coordinating Council on Jewish Poverty last night.

First, on the commuter tax: "It's not coming back. It's just simply not on the agenda."

(If he's said this before, I missed it. But the stance didn't seem to be aimed as a snub at Mike, who wants the tax; in fact, he offered praise to Bloomberg, unprompted, a couple of other times, unbothered by the Mayor's apparent, tacit support for Suozzi.)

On housing, he said he's looking for capital in the state budget, and suggested the best way to use it would be to subsidize the acquisition of property for housing; he suggested canvassing state- and municipal-owned property as well to find sites that could be bulit on.

On the tea-leaf-reading front, the event's host, Metcouncil chief Willy Rapfogel, called Spitzer "courageous" for backing education tax credits; this is interesting because Rapfogel is close to Shelly Silver, whose vote on this is crucial. After the meeting, Willy said he spoke only for himself.

The Sun (subscription required) has a bit more from the forum.

George Pataki tells the Times that he is sick of being sick and now, at least two groups have taken shots at our recovering governor.

First, a former FDA official joined Shelly Silver and two of his colleagues to call for the governor to rethink his position on emergency contraception.

"Last year, our so-called 'moderate' governor took a hard turn to the right when he vetoed bipartisan EC legislation," said Shelly. "In doing so, he placed his own political ambitions ahead of the health-care needs of New York women, medical science and the ideals of the pro-choice movement."

Then, New Yorkers for Fiscal Fairness launched a campaign against what they call Pataki's "reckless" budget. They allege that the budget contains $16 Billion in tax cuts and loopholes mostly benefiting large corporations.

—Nicole Brydson

The decision by the Jewish Press, the politically conservative, denominationally Orthodox Brooklyn weekly, to endorse Eliot Spitzer in February raised some eyebrows. Like most papers, they usually endorse a few days or weeks before an election.

But one person familiar with the paper's workings said the endorsement didn't just come out of the blue. Spitzer and Shelly Silver met with the paper's editors last Friday, and pushed hard for the early endorsement. Part, it seems, of a strategy of trying to cut Tom Suozzi off at every pass.

The Politicker has learned that Tom Suozzi's been talking to political consultant Dan Gerstein, a longtime advisor to Joe Lieberman with a reputation like his old boss's for crossing some of the traditional Democratic interest groups, notably the teachers' unions, and who is not a favorite of the people he likes to call the Democrats' "angry activist base."

"He's given us some advice, but we don't have a campaign at this time," Suozzi aide Kim Devlin said when asked if Gerstein was on the campaign.

The connection makes some sense. Suozzi, along with Shelly Silver (an odd couple), was one of the early, prominent supporters of Senator's 2004 presidential bid.

"Senator Lieberman is a big fan of Tom Suozzi's and through my exposure to Tom under Sen Lieberman I became a big fan as well," Gerstein says. "I'm interested in helping him advance his reform agenda in New York in any way I can."  read more »

Gerstein has a new blog, on which he's been recently clashing with the "angry activist base." The folks on DailyKos, it seems, weren't thrilled with a recent op-ed of his in the Wall Street Journal.

The alliance forming around Education Tax Credits could make them hard to stop, and it's worth noting that this may be the most successful campaign by religious groups in secular New York in a while.

How religious? Well, a key meeting was held yesterday at the headquarters of the Orthodox Jewish group Agudath Israel in Manhattan. Along with Governor Pataki's Jewish liason and a Spitzer deputy who has been working on these issues for years were leaders of the Catholic, African-American, and Hispanic clergy. It was arranged, a correspondent writes, in part by George Klein, a real estate developer who is active in the Republican Jewish Coalition.

Now, the policy seems arguablem, and rather broadly targeted. Are private school parents the most needy of state education aid? Parochial school parents? At the same time, the combination of "tax break" and "education" and "God" is a politically potent one.

An Orthodox reader points out that Shelly Silver is probably the last obstacle to the plan.  read more »

"Dillema for Shelly: Is he loyal to the Unions or to the Tribe?"

UPDATE: Teach NYS's Michael Tobman was among those calling to disagree with the interpretation of yesterday's meeting. His group, "a coalition of public school parents and lay leaders from the Catholic, Jewish and independent school communities" wanted "to point out that this is a tax credit that will benefit public school parents more than any other group." I should add that there are income caps for parents to qualify for the $500-per-kid credit, and that the money goes to the parents, not the schools.

Jason examines Mike's resurrection of the very dead commuter tax. Is this an act of mayoral vengeance against Shelly Silver, who killed the tax and the mayor's ambitious stadium plan? Whether Mike gets it or not (probably not), wonks wonder whether the Mayor's move is an opening salvo in a new, aggressive stance towards Albany.

I talk to Bill Weld about the collapse of Decker College, the Kentucky for-profit trade school he ran before launching his campaign for governor of New York. In the school's ashes, his opponents see an opportunity.

Matthew Schuerman explores Bruce Ratner's old allegiances with local elected officials in Brooklyn, which are being strained by vocal neighborhood opponents.

Over in the Wise Guys column, Terry Golway tackles the Ramirez doctrine, asking: Can bigotry alone really be blamed for Freddy's defeat?  read more »

And Anna Schneider-Mayerson looks at Harvard Law School, which is listing rightward at the hands of Dean Elena Kagan.

After Shelly Silver killed the West Side Stadium, there was a quick round of muttering that Bloomberg would take his revenge by supporting a challenger in Silver's Lower Manhattan district.

That speculation dissolved when nobody could name a serious challenger.

But now, The Politicker hears, Bloomberg's circle has a favorite: City Councilwoman Margarita Lopez.

Lopez is now running for Manhattan Borough President, but if she doesn't make it through that crowded field, it's easy to see Bloomberg would backing a woman he's long had a personal liking for. She's also shown her political strength against Shelly by beating his chief-of-staff, Judy Rapfogel, in a 1997 Council race.

In a quick interview this morning, Lopez said she returns the affection -- "He is truly, truly a gentleman," she said -- but called the suggestion she would run against Silver "ludicrous."

"If people would like to challenge the leadership of the State of New York, people should do it themselves," she said.  read more »

Lopez added that she and Bloomberg never talk politics. They talk issues, and they talk about their personal lives.

"Sometimes we talk about Diana Taylor, his partner," she said.

It's getting cheaper and cheaper to rent offices downtown--at least relatively speaking. Cushman & Wakefield's second-quarter statistics show that financial district asking rents lag almost $17 a foot ($31.20, for all classes) compared to Midtown ($47.87). The tax breaks and Freedom Tower redesign that were meant to bolster Shelly Silver's district came so late in the spring as to make little difference.

C&W's New York executive managing director says the mayor is still not doing enough. "Without the city redirecting efforts to downtown and a renewed commitment to infrastructure," he said in a press release, "downtown is in danger of continuing to lose large scale relocations and not realize its potential to become a true world-class business environment." But hey, if you're renting down there, what's there to complain about?  read more »

- Matthew Schuerman

We see the beginnings of a romance between Hillary and Rupert Murdoch.

Also, Conason blows the embargo on the scummy new Hillary bio, and Sheelah Kolhatkar profiles the author.  read more »

And we talk to Shelly Silver, and find him back in his shell.

And Matt Schuerman catches up with Doctoroff at his 25th Harvard reunion.

The apparent death of the West Side Stadium, and the 2012 bid, are full of ironies -- bitter to some, sweet to others.

Here are the top two:  read more »

Mike's first real defeat will make Kevin Sheekey's job a whole lot easier.

The New York Times editorial page seems to like Albany gridlock -- and Shelly Silver -- a lot more in practice than it did in theory.

Thinking about the continuing Freddy "freefall," as Shelly Silver had it this morning, one wise observer made the following point to us:

"This is Al Sharpton's town, and you're either with him or against him," he said. "You can't have it both ways. That's what Mark Green learned in 2001, and what Freddy's learning now."  read more »

Also today, Joyce Purnick dares to suggest that racial politics might be rather complicated. She thinks black politicians are shying away from Freddy because Billy Thompson is their horse. We don't entirely disagree, but think that less calculated factors -- longstanding enmities, the usual competition between groups -- are also relevant.

The city is in the midst of its second fiscal crisis since the Big One of the mid-1970's, leaving Ma  read more »

Introducing the latest entry on the roster of endangeredspecies: the white, male, Democratic member  read more »

His youthful face illuminated by the glow of red lights and scented candles, Raymond Dowd crouched o  read more »