Assemblyman Sean Ryan (A-144) held a press conference yesterday to protest the way in which Industrial Development Agencies in Erie County do business. Specifically done in response to the Amherst IDA’s granting of an incentive package to facilitate Premier Liquor & Gourmet’s move from Kenmore to Amherst, Ryan issues three documents outlining the cost/benefit to [...]

Why don’t any qualified people want the job of interim Erie County Comptroller? Is it the pay, the politics, or something altogether different? This isn’t the kind of job where you just insert some ex-politician or hack as a patronage “thank you”; it requires a genuine and deep understanding of government finance. Suffice it to [...]

Seldom a recipient of millions of federal or state dollars for renovation, and being carefully preserved – literally – by a dedicated group of loving volunteers, the Central Terminal is competing against other local historical architectural marvels for a $10,000 grant from the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Please click here and vote – and [...]

All the news and views fit to consume during your “morning grumpy”. 1. Yesterday was “UB2020″ day in Western New York. Dozens of local politicians lined up to take partial credit for or share in the glow of the UB2020 milk and honey festival. It’s always humorous to see self-described anti-government spending pols like Pat [...]

Brad Riter is a radio talk show host who most recently hosted the afternoon drive slot on WECK 1230-AM before it switched to a music format in July.  He wrote one of our “Daily Five” about a week or so ago. He’ll be filling in for Tom Bauerle today on WBEN 930-AM and 107.7-FM from [...]

All Giants Fall by Flickr user CamWall To have your image seen here, join the AV Photo Daily group on Flickr.

Sgt. Carter’s ’55 Dodge Royal Lancer I guess I would have expected straight-laced Sgt. Carter to own a more boring car than this 1955 Dodge Royal Lancer V-8 hardtop, but, here it is. Well, I guess he did pass on the white-wall tire option. You would think Carter would have known better by now (the eighth [...]

All the news and views for you to consume during your “morning grumpy”. 1. The local post offices have averted a manufactured crisis which would have led to the closure of the local mail processing facility on William Street, and dozens (if not more) of branches. The U.S. Postal Service announced it will delay closing [...]

Inch by inch, block by block, the city of Buffalo is getting ready to correct what’s turned out to be a mistake that hastened downtown’s demise. The federal government has given the city a $15 million grant to return vehicular traffic to Main Street’s 500 block, approximately Mohawk to Huron – Lloyd‘s downtown corner to [...]

The Palinist wing of the so-called “tea party” is just a front group for superwealthy conservatives. As further proof of that, their favored Presidential-candidate-of-the-month, Newt Gingrich, is proposing a reformation of the tax code to codify a lower marginal income tax rate on millionaires than on middle-class families earning $40 – 50,000. It’s all part [...]

I have no idea how these guys thought they could steal this much money from city meters and get away with it, especially given the huge discrepancy between what the pay & display meters were raking in versus these jerry-rigged old-fashioned meters. Yet something tells me this is just the tip of a very corrupt [...]

The Administration Building, the Towers looking from the southwest by Flickr user Kevin Hayes. To have your image seen here, join the AV Photo Daily group on Flickr.

Although many mourned the passing of the two-seat T-Bird after the 1957 model year, most of them weren’t buyers. When the four-seaters hit the market the following year, just like this 1958 Ford Thunderbird did, sales saw a huge increase, which would continue on for years. So went the rallying cry: “The Thunderbird is dead; long [...]

This past weekend, home improvement megachain Lowe’s caved in to pressure from some reactionary Christianist organization in Florida to pull its advertising from a new TLC series called “All-American Muslim.” The show is especially designed to show people that the overwhelmingly vast majority of American people of Muslim faith are perfectly normal, just like any [...]