Known by the company you keep (Part III): Carl Paladino

If you don't live in New York State, you may have overlooked this little Tea Party sweetheart.  Dubbed "Crazy Carl" by the New York Daily News (whose standards for "crazy" are pretty stiff), Carl is the Tea-Party-supported Republican candidate for Governor of the Empire State. 
Like me, Paladino is a second-generation Italian-American from Buffalo.  I grew up with guys like Paladino - think "Jersey Shore" with substantially more brains and less charm.  Paladino, supposedly a devout Catholic and the product of Catholic high school and university education, flaunts both his "family values" and his upstate prejudices with equal enthusiasm.  He has said that "Obamacare" will kill more people than 9/11.  He's also said that no mosque should be built within the area covered by the dispersal of the ash cloud of the 9/11 dead.) 
Paladino is one loud and angry hombre - and a rich one, too.  Paladino founded and owns Ellicott Development Company (strip malls and Rite-Aid Drug Stores) and several related holding and real estate management entities) and is a name partner in a Buffalo law firm specializing in corporate and real estate law. He has pledged to spend $10 million of his own money to fund his gubernatorial campaign.  (The New York Daily News reports that $1.9 million of the campaign's spending has been funneled into companies formed and owned by Paladino specifically for this purpose, including the newly formed "Ellicott Advertising Co.)
Paladino's campaign platform emphazises fiscal and educational reform, and many of his proposals are good ideas taken to illogical extremes.  There is no doubt that the state's spending needs to be curtailed, but Paladino proposes to dissolve the NYS Board of Regents, the SUNY Board of Trustees, the Lower Manhattan Authority, the Empire State Development Corporation, the Adirondack Park Agency, and the New York Power Authority.  (Meanwhile, he would have the state take over the currently independent NYS Thruway and Bridge and Tunnel authorities, as well as NYC's Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which currently operates at a $1.5 billion deficit.)  He proposes to cut the state's Medicaid budget by $20 billion, or roughly 30%, while eliminating state capital gains and corporate franchise taxes (costing the state an estimated $1 billion annually). 
Paladino also plans to declare a fiscal state of emergency (based on a debatable interpretation of the NYS Constitution), so that he can freeze compensation of state, municipal and school system employees throughout New York and cut the state budget by 10-20%.  (I haven't checked the numbers on this one, so I don't know how much of the state's expenditures goes to employee compensation.)  Paladino's focus on employee compensation most likely reflects his outspoken animus toward public employee unions, which he has likened to pigs ("Just because the pig lifts its snout from the trough and says 'I'm full' doesn't mean it won't get hungry again real soon").  Paladino has pledged to take a hard line in negotiating against the unions, and vows to give them nothing.  He is an outspoken critic of state laws which give the unions negotiating advantages to offset the prohibition against public employee strikes, and which set prevailing wage requirements for public employees.  He hopes to eliminate at least 60,000 state employee positions, and favors furloughs and shut downs to balance the budget.
One can debate the merits of Paladino's positions on fiscal issues - as I said, many of his positions contain the germs of good ideas.  The real problem is that the guy is a hypocrite and a thug.  He is a self-proclaimed devout Catholic who opposes abortion under almost any circumstances, and has been outed for distributing racist and grossly pornographic emails (think women and horses) to his business cronies.  (His company is also reported to have leased propsety to an abortion clinic.)  He is a family values proponent who fathered an out-of-wedlock child, now 10, with one of his employees, even while he was a married man with three legitimate children.  He has been an outspoken  homophobic (warning that our children must not be "brainwashed" into thinking that homosexuality is a viable alternative lifestyle, and deploring gay pride parades as displays of men dressed in "speedos . . . grinding against each other"), whose companies have collected big rents from popular gay bars in downtown Buffalo.  (He also has a gay nephew working for his campaign.)  He supports repeal of New York's ban on assault weapons; he carries his handgun "wherever it is legal"; and he famously threatened to "take out" a New York Post reporter who asked about his bastard daughter.
Paladino is an angry, angry man who personifies, in my opinion, much of what is wrong with the Tea Party.  His parent were immigrants, and his dad worked in the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal program put in place by Franklin D. Roosevelt.  Thanks to America's open immigration policies and the Federal government's intervention in a time of economic disaster, Paladino's family was able to establish itself and sent Carl to good private schools.  Through substantial measures of hard work and good fortune, Paladino has prospered.  Now, when he is called upon to pay taxes to help others during hard times, he angrily refuses, and sets about to severely limit opportunities for people less fortunate than himself.  He has his - everybody else can just go pound sand.  Or screw a horse.
A final piece of information: Paladino has stated that he will lift the moratorium on fracking the Marcellus Shale pronto.  Although the NYSDEC and the Federal EPA are still studying this environmental impact that fracking has had elsewhere and would have here in New York, Paladino says that the science is in and we should "drill baby drill."   He says that anyone who opposes drilling on the basis of environmental concerns is a "numbhead," and characterized a state legislator who proposed a formal ban as "just this side of plant life."  Thoughtful debate indeed.