How much time you got, buddy?

New York, New York!  If you’re a cross-eyed, blind bigot and you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.  However, if you’re a white, 26-year employee of the state then you’re going to have to settle for $300 large on your way to the unemployment office:

The settlement ends a civil-rights action first filed in 2005 by Joseph Maioriello, 56, of Schenectady, a 26-year Senate employee who originally sought $1.5 million.

He was fired from his $34,000-a-year job as a photographer two years earlier and replaced by a black employee, El-Wise Noisette. The shakeup happened after Paterson ousted then-Sen. Martin Connor (D-Brooklyn) as the minority leader.

…

In the lawsuit, Maioriello claimed he was told by John McPadden, then Paterson’s chief of staff, that he was being fired because a number of minority senators wanted to replace him with “a minority photographer, a black photographer.”

He said he was also told, “You got to remember who Sen. Paterson is. Sen. Paterson is black.”

Paterson, who is legally blind, claimed in a sworn deposition that he didn’t see well enough to have fired Maioriello because of his race.

A spokesman for Paterson later said the comment was “a quip, a joke.”

This story makes no sense to me at all.  If Paterson wanted to really level the playing field he would have hired a blind photographer.  The walls of the governor’s mansion could be adorned with beautifully framed, off-center pictures of a shoe and the sidewalk or blurry handshaking ceremonies where everyone’s heads are cut-off.

New York Governor, David Paterson

Dave Chappelle must be rolling over in his grave when his classic comedy sketch of a blind, white supremacist who happens to be black [(NSFW - ed. Not Safe For Whitey) UPDATED: link fixed] is outdone by the reality of a blind, black supremacist who is also a sitting governor of the State of New York who looks half-white.  Fact truly is stranger than fiction.

In related news, there’s an opening in the Supreme Court coming soon and although I’m sure there are plenty of highly-qualified liberal judges for the position, the cynic in me thinks that it’s going to turn into a racial, gender, sexual orientation panderfest instead of just choosing an activist constitutional scholar whose views on every subject are simply abhorrent to me.

But that’s what I get for not being blind.

From Bill in the comments:

“The first time I saw Patterson I thought Mel Brooks was reprising his role from Blazing Saddles..”

Much like Paterson, I don’t see it!

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