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Attorney Thomas Burton has revealed more details of a fatal Amherst shooting. Burton says his client, David D’Amico, warned the intruder that he was armed with a shotgun and would use it, if the man didn’t leave D’Amico’s Millbrook Court home.  David Park of Albany was shot to death early Sunday morning. Police say Park had been at a party at a house next door earlier in the day. Burton says his clients woke up at about around 1:00 a.m. Sunday after hearing a crashing sound downstairs. The lawyer says David D’Amico yelled for the man to leave then went to get a shotgun, while his wife called 911. Burton says D’Amico instructed Park to leave numerous times but when Park started to walk up the stairs, D’Amico fired a shot.

A Buffalo man faces at least five years in federal prison after admitting that he tried to bomb a church last summer.  29-year-old Richard Blonski pleaded guilty to throwing a homemade pipe bomb into the Redeeming Fire Fellowship Church on Lewis Street last July 4th.  Blonski will be sentenced on July 7th.

A Chautauqua County man will spend 25 years behind bars for killing his stepfather.  21-year-old Daniel Hyers was handed that sentence for gunni

ng down 51-year-old Dean Nagel in the family’s Town of Villenova home in September, 2008. Authorities say Hyers has a history of mental problems.  Two months ago, he pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of manslaughter.

The Chautauqua County Republican chairman has thrown his support behind Rick Lazio for Governor.  John Walker says Lazio has visited Western New York many times and knows local issues.  Walker says Lazio has the right plan to cut taxes and slash spending.    Lazio has already picked up the backing of Niagara County Republican chairman Michael Norris.

“The Drive That Never Fails” wrapped up its Appeal Week three-quarters of the way to its goal .  Nearly eight-million dollars has been raised in support of Catholic Charities’ 2010 fund drive.  That’s 77-percent of its ten-point-five-million-dollar goal.  The appeal runs until the the last day of the Catholic Charities fiscal year, June 30th.

The city of Buffalo and its firefighters union have extinguished a flare-up over funeral expenses.  The city had been refusing to reimburse the union for alcohol-related expenses from last year’s funerals for Jonathan Croom and Charles McCarthy.  The union was threatening to take the matter to an arbitrator after accusing the city of not meeting its obligations.  Both sides have now agreed to a settlement in which the city will pay for additional catering costs while not paying for any alcohol.  The union will be reimbursed 25-thousand dollars for the two funerals.

Talks are continuing between Buffalo and the Olmsted Parks Conservancy over the long-term future of of the city’s major parks. Thomas Herrera-Mishler, CEO of the Conservancy, told the Common Council that the city has sent his orgainiztionan offer, and the non-profit group has submitted a counter-proposal. Herrera-Mishler says that cautiously optimistic that a final agreement will be announced soon.  The city reclaimed control of its parks this year, terminating a maintenance agreement with the county.

A group of local college students chose to skip the beaches and sun during their spring break.  Student volunteers from Buffalo State College have been spending their time helping out with different causes in the area, such as the planting of garden beds on Harvard Place.

Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

A new poll finds Democratic U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand could have a real fight on her hands if former New York Governor George Pataki decides to challenge  for her Senate seat.  The Marist Poll finds that 47 percent of respondents say they would vote for Pataki if the election was held today, compared to 45 percent for Gillibrand.  Should Pataki decide not to run for the U.S. Senate, Gillibrand’s chances become much brighter.  Gillibrand holds commanding leads over Joseph DioGuardi and David Malpass, both of whom are running on the GOP ticket.

Governor Paterson is calling on the federal government to help out Empire State counties hit by a ig storm earlier this month.  Paterson says he’s asked President Obama to provide a major disaster declaration for Nassau, Orange, Richmond, Rockland, Suffolk and Westchester counties as a result of the March 13th through 15th storm that caused heavy flooding and severe beach erosion.  The storm also left over 270-thousand people without power, some for over a week.  State insurance officials say over 45-million dollars in claims have been submitted so far by homeowners for private property damage caused by the storm.

The region is about to shake its chill — at least for a few days. Sun and near-record highs are forecast for Friday and Saturday. For more, go to BuffaloNews.com Live at http://blogs.buffalonews.com/live.

In yesterday's "Monday Mystery-Where is it?" post, BRO readers were asked to identify this building:

The Buffalo Bills got an up-close-and-personal look at the most headline-grabbing prospect in the NFL Draft on Monday.

In Albany, educators and students are mourning the shooting death of a popular, award- winning elementary school teacher.

I hate to admit it, but … I think I might be getting old.

I’ve been pretty proud of myself to this point in not having used phrases like “when I was young” or “used to be” or “back in the day.” Unfortunately, those phrases seem to be slipping forth more and more frequently.

Ironically, they slip forth considering something I was once on the cutting edge of – the Internet. Now don’t get me wrong here, I’m not about to spew some crazy rant about how the Internet is just full of smut and garbage and should be outlawed. Heck, those are two of it’s best qualities. No, my issue with the “series of tubes” is that it’s impersonal.

I’ve been doing a lot of hunting lately. Not the type of hunting friend and fellow columnist Bob Confer does. I’ve been job hunting. And apartment hunting. And … well, we’ll just leave it at job and apartment hunting.

The Internet makes it easy to find potential jobs. And potential pads. But finding and securing are two totally different things.

I think I got the apartment thing set. I think. Please, God, let this apartment thing work out.

Anyway … it’s really the job thing that I’m frustrated with. See, the problem with job hunting on the Internet is there’s no personal contact. How can I dazzle someone with my personality if they never get to actually talk to me?

Typical job hunting experience goes like this:

N Check craigslist for jobs.
N Send resume to unknown person concerning some unknown job at an unknown company because it sounds like I might be qualified.
N Hope the unknown person emails back and asks for more information.
N They don’t.
N With no idea who it is I’ve sent the email to or how to get them on the phone, it’s basically impossible to check up … so … Start back at the top.

Maybe I’m no good at creating resumes. Or maybe it’s the cover letter. Or maybe I’m just easier for people to understand in person.

For those of you who text, have you ever gotten a text message and wondered if it was meant to be sarcastic or not? Or just wondered the tone in general?

Since sarcasm is my true native tongue, it’s impossible to really know me without a face-to-face. And I’d guess it’s really impossible to know anyone without a face-to-face.

So why are employers doing it this way? All impersonal like?

I have to wonder if maybe they don’t want people working for them. By that, I mean they don’t want real people. With personalities. They’re more interested in automatons. Robots. Or, at least their human equivalents.

If that’s the case, I’m kind of up a creek. And the paddle factory replaced everyone with robots who don’t care if I’m up a creek or not.

Is it possible that the Internet – designed by Al Gore to keep us connected – will actually just push us further apart?

(For those of you who don’t know me … the Al Gore bit in the previous paragraph was sarcastic. See how that might not come across so well in print?)

Anyway, it’s hard for me to admit it, but I might not like the way the Internet works these days. I liked it better when I was younger. Walking uphill to school. Both ways. In the snow. Without shoes.

One could credibly make the argument that Casey and Brown are, politically, the same person.  As Colin Eager put it, Casey is Willie Tyler to Brown’s Lester.

Since Casey and Brown’s political histories are so tightly wound together, who is more responsible for the FAIL?

Is it Byron Brown, the likeable guy who rose from Grassroots activist to Gorski aide to Councilman to Senator to Mayor?  Or is it Steve Casey, who has gone from Gorski aide to Brown aide?  Is it Byron Brown, whose Senate career highlight was a few streets being re-named, or Steve Casey, whose entire career can be summed up as: Steve Pigeon wannabe.

The best analogy to pop culture I can make is to suggest to you that Steve Casey is Grima Wormtongue to Brown’s Theoden.  Not a perfect analogy, and exquisitely nerdy, but it takes up the issue of evil, which the Lester/Willie example doesn’t.

Casey’s misdeeds are legion, and they are the stuff of Buffalo political legend.  Live in his neighborhood and dare to put up a political sign in support of a candidate whom City Hall doesn’t support?  Watch out.  Piss him off at City Hall?  You could find your computer vandalized.  Write something unflattering about the Mayor?  No soup for you.  He allegedly managed Brown’s mayoral campaign on the state’s dime, on state time.  He led city inspectors to harass a neighbor whose garden he didn’t like.  He took a good idea – Citystat – and made sure it was thoroughly politicized beyond all recognition, thus rendered toothlessly useless.

Like the portrayal of soup guy Al Yeganeh in Seinfeld, Casey’s the Byron Nazi.

This is all a long-winded way of saying Steve Casey is a Volkeresque, Pigeon-flavored asshole, and one wonders why Byron Brown lets it happen.  Unless Byron Brown is also an asshole.  In which case, who’s the bigger asshole?

Who is our political goatse?

There are no stories, necessarily, about Byron Brown doing similarly petty things.  By all accounts, Byron Brown is not just a guy who you want to like – he’s a guy most people do like.  He has stumbled with the handling of his kid’s joyride, and the BERC disaster was truly epic, and one gets a very strong sense that it was just the tip of a corrupt iceberg.

The problem here pivots back to Casey .

Part of the reason for Byron Brown’s presence this far in the tournament is that he is an enabler.  He’s like the wife who knows that daddy beats the kids when he gets drunk, but keeps buying booze anyway.  Petty power plays are like crack to Steve Casey, and Byron Brown is the guy who gives him a lift to buy his shit.

The rumor going around this past year had to do with the fact that the city suddenly found itself without a lot of department heads and key appointees – they saw City Hall as a mere stepping stone.  Byron would sit in as like a caretaker mayor for a term, not make any big mistakes, and then move on to Congress, thus paving the way for Antoine Thompson to become mayor.

A more arrogant and chilling scenario, I could not paint.

So, the issue is: who is more at fault for the general disappointment – the failure, the broken promises and crushing of the high expectations people had for the Brown administration?  Is it the puppet or the puppetmaster?  Is it the shrewd, sharp-elbowed, tactician, or the mild-mannered, likeable enabler?

This one, dear reader, is harder than it seems.

The decision here comes down to this: do you vote for the guy who’s been in office for 40 years and been instrumental in fucking up the State of New York in general, and WNY in particular? Or do you vote for the guy who aspires to do just that?

Thompson’s problem is that he makes stupid mistakes, which makes people pretty much think he’s stupid. You don’t gain the confidence of voters by railing against a bill you co-sponsored. You don’t inspire a lot of confidence by being flip-floppedly incoherent on Hiram Monserrate’s expulsion.

In a normal place, Thompson would be so easily defeated in any fair election that it would make people’s heads spin. But this isn’t a normal place, and our voters are a bit askew, as well.

I’ll bring this up again because it’s so telling. When asked why we even need a State Senate, this is the best Thompson could come up with. Not good enough:

Ah, but dear reader, if there were any other competitor, it would be a blow-out for Antoine. His opponent, however, is Dale Volker – a malignant cancer; a polyp in the colon that is Western New York.

Volker is a veritable piece of shit who has been in office probably since before you were born. He’s that old fart going 30 in the left lane, driving the tan Buick of our politics. His tough-guy pandering to cops and corrections officers stems from the fact that without Attica and other correctional facilities, his district would cease to exist.

His political survival is dependent on murderers and rapists.

A renowned asshole, Volker dispatches sycophants and surrogates to bully and threaten political opponents on a regular basis. He is so bad that even the Republicans and teabaggers hate him.

He is so odious, in fact, that even Jim Domagalski – the chairman of the Erie County Republican Committee is considering a primary run against him.  Primaries are like kryptonite to Republicans.

That’s as if Len Lenihan decided to run against Bill Stachowski.

Both of these guys are useless entities in a useless legislative body. Good luck choosing the guy close to retirement vs. the guy who’s just getting started.

Erie Community College plans to drop its cross-country, indoor and outdoor track and golf programs in a money-saving move that comes in response to deep cuts in the college's state funding.

A Brooklyn Assemblyman writes in to the Buffalo News to explain to us semi-literate rubes why it’d be bad for Wegmans to sell wine. Like a fifth grader’s book report, he begins by establishing his themes: Won’t somebody think of the money?! Won’t somebody think of the children?!

The whole thing is merely an emotional re-working of the liquor store industry’s own talking points.

When evaluating Gov. David A. Paterson’s proposal to legalize wine sales in 19,000 new outlets, including grocery stores, delis, gas stations and bodegas, I considered two factors: the impact on jobs and our economy, and the impact on our teenagers. The plan fails on both counts.

Some wine store owners say 40 percent of the stores will go out of business. Even if that number is twice as high as reality, that still means more than 2,200 people would be put out of work. That doesn’t make any sense, especially considering that grocery stores will not create a single new job just because they add a new product.

I am telling you that those numbers are the uninvestigated regurgitation of propaganda. The idea that liquor stores that sell wine would suddenly go out of business ignores the simple fact that they’d still retain their exclusive rights to sell hard liquor. There are a lot of very knowledgable wine shops in town that place a premium on education and service – something that wine sales at Tops simply won’t be able to match.

And think about this – Consumers’ Beverage sells beer and soda. Amazingly, beer and soda sales at convenience stores and supermarkets didn’t run them out of business.

No word yet on whether the bill would prevent Nutcracker sales to tweens and teens in local New York bodegas.

I would also fully expect the more upscale supermarkets to hire people to enable them to compete better with a Premier. I wouldn’t be shocked to see Wegmans and Whole Foods employ someone with a basic wine knowledge to help customers select wines to best go with the meals they’re going to prepare with the ingredients in their carts.

Proponents contend it will help upstate by bolstering New York State wineries, but that argument falls short. There are about 100 state wineries opposed to this legislation because it will hurt their industry, not help it. These small businesses make a limited amount of wine each year and could never sell to grocery stores simply because they don’t have enough supply.

Grocery stores look to buy in bulk, and will go for the discount wines so they can sell them quickly. That means cheap, imported wines will get shelf space, while New York wines will be left out. New York wineries count on the small wine retailers to reach customers, and will suffer a double insult as these stores go out of business and they find themselves shut out of grocery stores.

But don’t the big liquor stores buy in bulk? We’ve retarded the whole liquor store industry in New York to prevent the three local Premier outlets from even being part of the same company. All people want to do is grab a cab to go with their steak. The way I figure it, the more places sell wine, the more wine gets sold, the more attention is paid to New York wines, and the more New York wine gets sold.

The idea that expansion of wine sales would contract sales of New York wines is mind-bogglingly stupid.

Also,

A few winery owners, who did not wish to be named, said they felt pressured to support the liquor stores.

So, there’s that.

So from a jobs perspective, and economic development perspective, this plan doesn’t measure up. Any plan that reduces jobs and doesn’t deliver real economic growth is simply a non-starter.

Clearly, we also have an obligation to first “do no harm” as it relates to our teenagers. Our young people face enormous challenges today, much more than when I was growing up, and they need our help and support. Because this plan would make wine more accessible to teenagers, it must be rejected.

Wine is not a food and it is not beer. Wine has three to four times more alcohol in it than beer. And we know from a Columbia University study that teenage girls who have tried alcohol would rather drink wine than beer if given a choice. That’s a recipe for trouble.

The best thing to do would be to lower the drinking age back to 18 and eliminate the rebellion aspect of binge drinking. Part of the allure is that between the ages of 18 – 21, when most kids are of college age, they’re not legally allowed to drink. Can you name a single, solitary college student who was dissuaded from drinking beer because the law said you had to be 21? Let’s stop pretending that college kids don’t drink, and let them have it. If a college freshman was able to order a few pitchers with his friends on a weekend, so what? It’s the prohibition that leads to excess.

New York already spends $3.2 billion every year to deal with the impacts of underage drinking, from accidents and violence, to teen pregnancies and diseases. In fact, officials at the State Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services say that underage drinking is the No. 1 substance abuse problem in New York State today.

It is a hard truth that teens will have an easy time getting wine if it’s available in every deli, gas station, bodega and corner store, rather than limited to small, owner-operated wine and liquor stores. That is where it belongs and where it should stay.

We need to do more to protect our young people, and create jobs and opportunity for all New Yorkers. That’s why I oppose Paterson’s wine in grocery stores plan.

Premier is “small”? Give me a break. We should protect our young people by lowering the drinking age to 18, and basically do what we did when we let states raise speed limits – legalize behavior that was already happening with the overwhelming majority of the population. Furthermore,

Also, Assemblyman Abbate – Chairman of the Labor Committee – should probably disclose his campaign contributions from Anheiser-Busch, the NYS Beer Wholesalers’ Association, Phillip Morris, all of which harm the economy and drive kids to drink.

The address listed for the anti-wine-sales-in-supermarkets group is that of Mercury Public Affairs.

Leading up to the 2010 NFL draft, Buffalobills.com will be sharing the memories of some of the Bills most memorable draft choices as we ask you the fan to pick your top 10 all-time draft choices in...

Smokey, an 11-year-old sea lion who had entertained spectators at the Buffalo Zoo since 2007, died of a respiratory ailment Saturday.

U. S. Sen. Orrin G. Hatch of Utah outlined his principles for what makes a good judge during a lecture Monday at Canisius College as part of its Frank G. Raichle Lecture Series on Law in American Society.

The University at Buffalo's vice president for research is leaving to take the same position with the Indiana University system.