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It will be one of Rockland County Executive C. Scott Vanderhoef’s last budget proposals. And it may also be one of his toughest.

Ugly, painful and drastic are also words that come to mind in a spending plan that is due to the Board of Legislators by 5 p.m. Tuesday.

The Republican, who has served at the helm in Rockland since 1994, has announced that he won’t seek re-election next year....

Above ground, within feet of the Federal Reserve Bank in Lower Manhattan, lies a busy neighborhood of 310,000 workers, 60,000 residents and 8,400 businesses. Below ground, beneath the Fed, lies the largest accumulation of gold bullion in the world—priceless ingots belonging to governments, central banks and other international entities.

On Wednesday, says the New York Police Department, a...

The misbegotten federal Defense of Marriage Act took another hit today when a federal appeals court in Manhattan ruled that its discrimination against same-sex couples is unconstitutional.

The U.S. Supreme Court will have the final word, maybe as soon as next year. But in rejecting a section of the law that says “the word ‘marriage’ means only a legal union between one man and one woman,”...

Just hours after President Barack Obama and Gov. Mitt Romney exchanged blows at Hofstra University on Tuesday, the conventional wisdom among the morning talk-show set was that the debate was no game-changer. There were new soundbites on Libya, gender equality, immigration, jobs and the economy. But the morning spin was that the debate didn’t change the needle, even if many gave an edge to Obama...

When it comes to issues of fair pay for women, Gov. Mitt Romney says his administration in Massachusetts launched a big effort to find women for his cabinet, emphasizing that groups “brought us whole binders full of women.”

That was the first blow-up of the evening and you have to wonder whether the clumsy phrasing can help him with those independent women voters he needs so much to win.

Within...

The second presidential debate is in the books, and it's time for first impressions. And second impressions. Anything deeper than that will have to wait until I've fully digested this evening's contest.

President Barack Obama won Tuesday's meeting at Long Island's Hofstra University, but not so overwhelmingly that Republicans will be forced to admit it, as Democrats had to when the president...

The spontaneity-smothering memorandum of agreement negotiated by the two campaigns and the Commission on Presidential Debates, the scientific selection of the undecided voters chosen to ask the questions, the to-the-second timing, and the carefully crafted debate rules helped make sure there was very little unexpected at Tuesday night's second event at Hofstra University.

One comment that...

A questioner at the Hofstra debate brings up gun control, something that's essentially been a non-issue in this election thus far. President Barack Obama has mostly angered liberals more than conservatives on this one during his term, doing pretty much nothing to stop the assault weapons the questioner wants stopped, or any other guns either.

There isn't going to be a lot of daylight between...

And this one's a real setup for Barack Obama, "I voted for you in 2008, why should I vote for you again?"

It's an opportunity for Obama to share a memorized laundry list of what he thinks has gone right, auto industry, job creation, health care, financial reform, but I assume Mitt Romney will also have a memorized, hot response.

Obama then uses about half...