Criticism
During the budget process in 1995, Bruno, who was new to the Majority Leader role at the time, made a comment about Blacks and Hispanics who "got their hands out" pressuring the legislature to avoid cuts to social services. According to the Syracuse Post-Standard, "Bruno said he was referring to the Black and Puerto Rican Caucus, which is a major force in the Democratic majority in the Assembly." Bruno's defense was that he was referring to political caucuses, not all blacks and Hispanics; he offered a blanket apology for offending some people, but refused to take his words back.
Fiscal conservative pundits originally were very supportive of Bruno's agenda in the State Senate. In later years, they expressed concern over Bruno's willingness to cooperate with Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver on budgets deemed to be excessive, over endorsements Bruno received from state employee labor unions, including health care union Local 1199, and over Bruno's recruitment of former Democrats to run as Republicans for swing Senate districts in Syracuse and the Bronx.
In December 2006, Bruno disclosed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had been looking into business associates of Bruno's who had received state grants. The FBI investigation appeared to lead Bruno to end one of his long-time consulting jobs in 2007.
Read more about this topic: Joseph Bruno
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Good criticism is very rare and always precious.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)