Do an experiment today: ask any New Yorker whom you know or meet randomly on the street who their state representatives are. The odds are very good that they won't know. This is because that knowledge makes little pertinent difference in their lives.

The ramifications of that simple fact are laid out in two Daily News pieces today that should make you cringe. One is headlined Ex-staffer says top Shelly aide raped her and Silver did nothing about it, the other, New York burns while Albany fiddles.

The first piece deals with an alleged rape incident in the State Assembly.

[Alleged rape victim Elizabth] Crothers, 32, was a young staffer for an upstate Republican assemblyman when she brought an internal complaint in 2001 with the Assembly that she was raped by Silver's then-counsel Michael Boxley.

Crothers and her boss met directly with Silver, who she said was callously eating pretzels as she recounted her story.

Boxley later in an unrelated incident pled guilty to misdemeanor sexual assault.

Wow. And on a Monday, too: Bruno won't seek re-election.

"He will not run for re-election. It's still open as to whether he will serve out the term until Dec. 31 or leave early."

UPDATE: Another GOP Senate source tells DN Capitol Bureau Ken Lovett that Bruno will definitely remain in the Senate through the end of the year because if he leaves, the chamber will be tied. The fate of his leadership, however, remains unclear.

This source told Lovett Bruno decided to tell his members today because it's the last day of session and he wanted to inform them of his decision when they were all together.

Bruno, who has served in the Senate since 1976 and has been leader since early 1995, when he took power from Ralph Marino in a coup with then-newly-minted Gov. George Pataki's support, has been coy of late about whether he would run this fall.

Here's what's fun: this morning, Albany Project noted that it sure looked as if Bruno was clearing the gangways.

Several people will have their situations drastically altered by Bruno's retirement. One, the older republican Senators, the Trunzos of the world, will now head for the exits. Bruno's kept them in office to preserve his majority. That's over, and this will not be the last retirement to come.

Two, Sheldon Silver in the Assembly, first elected the same years as Joe Bruno, 1976, now faces the near certainty of a Democratic Senate that will operate under different rules than Silver's own chamber.

Three, New York republicans might as well hand in the towel. It's over for them. Done.

Yes, it's time for another installment in the expanding file about media stories marked "Who the hell cares?".

In this case, the story - here's an extended discussion of it - that David Paterson supposedly

described Mayor Bloomberg in private as a volatile, Spitzerian, untrustworthy, out-of-touch, self-destructive billionaire bully.

Even if true, who. The. Hell. Cares?

Seriously?

This is the kind of media circus that prompts voters to despair. It's not as if there's a war on, and maybe the economy isn't really collapsing, maybe we don't have over 4,000 dead Americans (and dead Iraqis in their thousands, but we don't even count them), a President who broke the laws of the land with impunity, global warming, 4,000 kids in Brooklyn who don't even know whether or where they'll be going to school next year, the list goes on.

The Federal Reserve today confirms the economic underpinnings of a gloomy NYT/CBS poll yesterday that found high levels of economic anxiety among New Yorkers; expectations weren't high for the manufacturing sector to begin with, but they've been underperformed.

Manufacturing in the New York region shrank more than forecast in June as customers reduced orders because of the slowdown in consumer spending and business investment.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York's general economic index dropped to minus 8.7 from minus 3.2 a month earlier, the bank said today. Readings less than zero signal contraction. [...]

The New York Fed began its Empire State gauge in 2001. It provides one of the month's earliest pictures of the state of manufacturing. The region's general economic index averaged 17.2 in 2007 and reached a record low of minus 22.2 in March. This month's survey was taken from June 2 through June 12.

Economists forecast the Empire State index would rise to minus 2 this month, according to the median of 51 projections in a Bloomberg News survey. Tomorrow, the Fed publishes its report for national industrial production in May. On June 19, the Fed's Philadelphia branch releases its own factory data.

Now, it would be easy for City people to shrug this off as immaterial to their own immediate circumstances, since everyone knows nothing is manufactured in New York City. This assumption, however, is false: the five boroughs contain 7,000 manufacturing enterprises employing roughly 100,000 workers.

The New York Times reports on the next round in the ongoing feud between the legislature and the state's judiciary over pay raises; in an earlier iteration of the fight, judges had refused to hear cases involving counsel from Speaker Silver's law firm, Weitz and Luxenburg.

Weighing in on a longstanding tug of war between New York’s jurists and lawmakers, a State Supreme Court justice ordered the Legislature on Wednesday to give the state’s 1,250 judges their first pay raise in 10 years.

The ruling, by Justice Edward H. Lehner, came in response to a lawsuit filed last September by Patricia M. Nuñez of New York City Criminal Court, Michael L. Nenno of Cattaraugus County Family Court, Susan R. Larabee of New York City Family Court and Geoffrey D. Wright of New York City Civil Court. Justice Lehner gave the Legislature 90 days to increase the current salary of $136,700 for all New York State trial judges.[...]

The government has used “judicial pay as a pawn in dealing with the unresolved political issue of legislative compensation,” he wrote. He said the link was “an abuse of power by defendants and constitutes an unconstitutional interference upon the independence of the judiciary.”

In other news, impoverished legislator Diane Gordon was sentenced to two to six years in prison for her own efforts to expand her obviously inadequate salary. Perhaps legislative pay raises should be considered simply as an incentive to stop some rogue legislators from padding their benefices by demanding free houses from developers.

Via email from Matt Browner Hamlin comes this:

If you support gay marriage...

Governor Paterson has said that NY will recognize legal same-sex marriages from other states and countries. He's doing a poll on whether people support it. If you're interested in taking 15 seconds to lodge your support, just call 1-518-474-8390 and say 'I support the Governor's directive on marriage,' then give them your 5 digit (New York) zip code.

The number reaches the Executive Chamber. Let them know that you support equality for all New Yorkers.

(Of course, if you don't, that would be an opportunity to also air your case for whites-only drinking fountains. Your call, but it's the same principle.)

Why the New York Times even goes through the bother of individually writing up this recurring story is actually kind of mystifying, but here it is again.

Mr. Paterson, right, has sent 18 bills to the Legislature since taking office in mid-March, according to records provided by his administration late last week. Of those, three were budget bills that demanded attention and two more simply outlined the result of contract negotiations with public-sector labor unions. Those five were swiftly passed.

None of the remaining 13 bills, however, have been passed. Seven of them have not even been introduced in either chamber, though four of the seven were sent over at various points last week. Still, by comparison, Mr. Spitzer’s first five bills were all passed by both chambers within three months of his taking office, even though he had a fractious relationship with lawmakers.

More than half of the governor's bills haven't even been introduced, with a total of eight working days left on the legislative calendar. So what's going on, in case you as a citizen are concerned about this lack of effort, let alone progress?

Governor Paterson has instructed state agencies to begin recognizing same-sex unions performed in other jurisdictions, domestic and foreign, in the state of New York.

In a directive issued on May 14, the governor’s legal counsel, David Nocenti, instructed the agencies that gay couples married elsewhere “should be afforded the same recognition as any other legally performed union.”

The revisions are most likely to involve as many as 1,300 statutes and regulations in New York governing everything from joint filing of income tax returns to transferring fishing licenses between spouses. [Emph. added]

Think about that for a moment: everything from income tax returns to fishing licenses presently treats gay and straight New Yorkers differently. Think about that massive legal disability when next you see a republican election mailer complaining about the 'special rights' gay people supposedly seek.

People can be forgiven if they lose track of who exactly is running for which office in the newly fluid political environment of the state of New York.

In the Third Senatorial District, you have to assume that Jimmy Dahroug, the grassroots Democrat running against Caesar Trunzo, is tearing his hair out over a primary challenger that emerged last night, literally at the last minute. Per Albany Project, Brian Foley of Brookhaven declared for the seat last night at the Suffolk County Democratic Convention.

Speaker Sheldon Silver is getting challenged in the Democratic primary this year, itself an event of significance far beyond the borders of that district; now, of course, and perhaps due to a filtering down from the heights of the Presidential race, there's an irritating conversation going on as to which one of the two challengers, Paul Newell or Luke Henry, is more "electable".

In the Twenty-Fifth Senate District, we're seeing another generational contest between challenger Dan Squadron and incumbent Marty Connor, who for whichever reason seems to be a perennial target. There are many interesting things about the contrast between the two contenders, but chief among them is perhaps the hope-inducing interest in the State Senate among some really smart, young and energetic people now eyeing races against incumbents. If the Democrats retake the chamber, the Senate will instantly be transformed from a political backwater to the bleeding edge of New York political power, as far as Democrats are concerned. Squadron is many good things, not least among them a harbinger.

The contours of the general election are beginning to take form as Democrats near the end of our nominating contest; meanwhile, every sign we've seen, from record-setting turnout in every contested state to the astonishing floods of dollars flowing into the war chests of both Barack Obama and hometown hero Hillary Rodham Clinton indicate that this election has energized an electorate known for its passivity.

For obvious reasons, republicans have cause to be uneasy about the Democratic wave. Here in New York, where we have several republican House seats teetering on the brink of a Democratic takeover, and the State Senate ripe for the taking, that's especially true. One aspect of Obama's strategy that's been overlooked, however, has the potential to shake up the Democratic Party's own encrusted structures.

The New York Times writes:

To offset the voters who may rule out supporting Mr. Obama, because of his race or other reasons, the campaign is working to register new voters. In Georgia, for example, 600,000 black residents are eligible to vote but are not registered. In Virginia, there are 200,000 black residents not registered to vote.

From a strictly partisan perspective, the core of Obama's strategy, a massive new voter registration effort, is an unalloyed good. A wave is being created that New York Democrats would be wise to ride.

What should make New York Democrats, especially of the machine variety, sweat, is this: this effort is going to be managed by the national campaign, with little regard for local fiefdoms. Now, it's no secret that voter turnout in, say, the outer boroughs, is artificially and purposely kept low, with the express goal of maintaining in office the representatives of the machine.