His initial impression? “Albany is an unfriendly place for a principled conservative,” he said in a fundraising appeal today.

In the fundraising email, Lalor knocks Albany’s attempts to enact tougher gun laws, saying, “We need to stand fast against the left-wing attack on the Second Amendment. I promise you I will not waver as I work to protect our Second Amendment rights in Albany.”

He criticizes the re-election of Sheldon Silver as Assembly speaker, saying it was a shock to see in person and that Silver “is at ...

And even though Gov. Andrew Cuomo is 1) sitting on $19.3 million worth of political cash as of mid-July; 2) fresh off hosting one of his biggest fund-raising events of the year – his 55th birthday bash at the Waldorf Astoria for which tickets ranged from $1,500 to $50,000 a pop; and 3) pushing for campaign finance reform; he’s still interested in squeezing some additional dollars out of his donors before reporting his latest haul to the Board on Jan. 15.

The governor’s campaign committee ...

The county administration and the town of Greenburgh are seeking approval to tear down 108 apartments so Ferncliff Manor can build a complex for developmentally disabled children.

“I have no position on this,” said Noonan, executive director of the Housing Action Council.

Joan Arnold, who chairs the Westchester Non-Profit Housing Coalition, said that “in principle,” the group opposes tearing down affordable housing, but neither she nor her ...

The comments, contained in dozens of boxes bearing the names of the environmental groups formed to oppose the controversial natural gas drilling technique, are in response to the DEC’s latest set of draft regulations, released in early December. The 30-day comment period on the regs ends Friday.

Anti-fracking activist and physician Sandra Steingraber, representing Concerned Health Professionals of NY, criticized the release of the new regs before the completion of the latest version of the DEC’s mammoth environmental impact statement, especially the chapter devoted to the potential health impacts of fracking — a key section now under review by the Department of Health, with assistance from outside experts.

“The regs are thus arbitrary placeholders as part of a legal maneuver that allowed the DEC to avoid missing a rule-making deadline,” Steingraber said. (The DEC has admitted as much.) She called the composition of comments “the writing assignment from hell,” due to what she described as the lack of transparency in the process and the brevity of the comment period — which overlapped with the December holiday season.

Although many of the advocates on hand doubt that any regulatory framework can make fracking safe, Steingraber believes the comment-writing exercise was useful both to put DEC and the Cuomo administration on notice of public opposition (“Silence is consent,” she said) and to encourage close study of the new regs.

Lennon said that concern for his family’s farm upstate got him interested in fracking, and noted that even the possibility that fracking could cause earthquakes has appeared in major media outlets such as the New York Times and was “not just heebie-jeebie hippie nonsense.” He said the process threatens an “unparalleled industrialization” of the state’s rural regions.

Ono pointed to the many green-energy proposals in Cuomo’s State of the State address, contrasting them with his utter silence on frtacking in that speech.

“Fracking kills,” she said, adding that allowing the process could be another step on the path to a sort of global suicide.

“The state of New York is not going to be crazy,” said Ono, despite her being a longtime resident.

Asked about the fact that the Dakota — the famous Upper West Side apartment building where the Lennons live and where John Lennon was shot by a deranged fan in 1980 — had switched to gas heat, Lennon said that consumption of fossil fuels didn’t require support for every kind of extractive industry.

It’s not clear whether these comments will get the same close eye the DEC devoted to more than 60,000 comments received after the release of the most recent environmental statement — a pile that took months to review by both DEC staff and a private contractor.

Responding to an e-mail seeking information on that question, the agency’s spokeswoman Emily DeSantis said she would get back to us.

Update: DeSantis did so: “DEC will review, carefully consider and respond as appropriate to all comments received on the revisions to the regulations,” she wrote.

Here’s video of the delivery of the letter to Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi:

Here’s the letter to Cuomo, signed by Ono, Lennon and Steingraber, plus Jill Wiener of Catskill Citizens for Safe Energy and Julia Walsh of Frack Action:

Sean Lennon, Yoko Ono letter to Gov. Andrew Cuomo by

Comments on the regulations are being accepted until 5 p.m.

Ono and Lennon, the wife and son of late Beatle John Lennon, respectively, traveled to Albany as part of their Artists Against Fracking initiative, which has targeted Gov. Andrew Cuomo with billboards and newspaper advertisements as his administration weighs whether to allow shale-gas drilling in upstate New York.

“We formally request a ...

The practice gives the chamber the opportunity the chance to return and hold session beyond currently scheduled session days without needing a proclamation of an extraordinary session from the governor.

Read Jimmy’s terrific account of McEneny’s last gavel.

Assemblywoman Patricia Fahy, who represents most of McEneny’s former district, has now taken on the job — though she’ll get periodic assistance from other Capital Region Democratic Assembly members such as Phil Steck, John McDonald and Angelo Santabarbara. (Fahy noted, for example, that her elderly mother in Chicago could need her at short notice.)

Weekend duty could be required to assist in “aging” a given piece of legislation.

Here’s video of her first stab at it from Thursday at noontime, when she was joined by Assembly staff and incoming Majority Leader Joe Morelle:

Today is the last day for comments to be lodged with the DEC on its most recent set of regulations for the controversial natural gas drilling process known as hydrofracking.

Predictably, the well-organized and vociferous anti-fracking crowd has seized on this opportunity to make yet another public plea to Gov. Andrew Cuomo that he reject the idea of drilling in the Marcellus Shale (or anywhere else, for that matter).

Artists Against Fracking, the organization formed by Sean Lennon and Yoko Ono, will be demonstrating at the Capitol at ...