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Gentle Reader:

Our good Governor, David Paterson, has a life coach.  Would you like to guess the coach’s gender?  Would you like to guess whether he or she would be considered attractive by most people’s standards?

If you ventured a guess, the correct ones would be a) female and b) yes.  Meet Sandra Tate — according to The New York Daily News:

As a state senator, Gov. Paterson spent $4,500 in campaign money on a woman who bills herself as a “life coach.”

Sandra Tate, who calls herself a “life coach” and is sometimes known as “Reclaimurlife Diva,” got the money in 2006. Paterson aides said she did campaign work; her Web site version is a little more vague.

(snip)

On Valentine’s Day 2006, Paterson issued seven $500 campaign checks for “wages” to Tate. He later sent two more. All told, she was paid $4,500.

Paterson spokesman Errol Cockfield said Tate was a staffer at Paterson’s state Senate office from July to December 2005 and “did some campaign work.”

Records show Tate was hired as a “special assistant” to the Senate in June 2005, left in December, and was rehired for two months in November 2006 at a higher pay scale - again as a “special assistant.”

(snip)

The Tate expense was one of several whose purpose was difficult to discern.

For example:

- Paterson twice hired his then-girlfriend, Lila Kirton, who got more from the campaign than Paterson originally revealed. Records show Kirton had the power to write campaign checks.

In explaining a $500 payment to Kirton in July 2002 for “campaign wages,” Paterson’s aides said she’d been hired to keyboard in names of voters to the campaign’s computers - a legitimate campaign expense.

They did not mention a $1,000 payment to Kirton in November 1995 for “preparation of mail lists database.”

A Paterson aide said, “Kirton was paid for work she did on the campaign’s database and administration work.”

- Three days before Christmas 2003, the Paterson campaign gave a woman named Evelyn McCall a $2,000 loan “to be repaid,” records show. There is no indication the loan was repaid.

McCall attended a gala at the New-York Historical Society with Paterson in March 2006. She could not be reached. Cockfield called it “an advance on her wages.” He said that’s the only way to record it on the disclosure forms.

- Since the 1990s, Paterson has received a handful of illegal donations totaling about $3,000 from nonprofit groups, some of whom he gave taxpayer money.

That includes $1,600 from nonprofits connected to the Museum of African American Cinema, a planned museum Paterson has repeatedly funded. It has not been built.

In July 2005, museum organizer Gregory Javan Mills announced Harlem would “be the home of a new state-of-the-art cinema museum.”

Records show Paterson sponsored $60,000 in taxpayer dollars for the museum. Paterson said the museum received only $15,000.

In a brief interview, Mills said he’d been unable to find a suitable location.

A Paterson aide said the nonprofits should not have donated the money and the campaign should not have taken it. “The funds will be returned or directed to charity,” the aide said.

This is all quite astonishing.  It’s hard to believe all of these “mistakes” are just mistakes.  There is a pattern emerging with our Governor.  More and more questionable behavior. Let’s see if our friends over at the Democrat and Chronicle find any of this newsworthy.

Tags: Articles, David Paterson, Democrat and Chronicle, New York State, Prudence Izguhde //