Paladino rallies Hicksville crowd

Carl Paladino took his fiery stump speech to Long Island Tuesday for the first time since he won the Republican primary for governor more than a month ago, asking a boisterous Hicksville crowd: "Are you mad as hell?"

"Yeah!" yelled back the audience of about 100 at American Defense Systems, a defense contractor on Duffy Avenue.

With less than a week until Tuesday's election and lagging in the polls, Paladino is sprinting through campaign stops downstate, sticking close to a message of tax cuts and cutting government waste while escalating attacks on his Democratic opponent, Andrew Cuomo, the state attorney general.

Paladino said Cuomo "started a worldwide recession" by encouraging subprime mortgages when he was secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the 1990s.

Paladino also criticized Cuomo for not investigating the Aqueduct Racetrack bidding scandal, which the state inspector general last week found appeared rigged for a politically connected company. "That one stunk from the beginning," Paladino said. "Where was Andrew on it?"

In response, Cuomo's campaign pointed to several studies exonerating Cuomo in the subprime crisis and blaming the Bush administration. On Aqueduct, Cuomo spokesman Josh Vlasto said: "Voters are sick and tired of Paladino's campaign of lies."

Meanwhile, Cuomo Tuesday was endorsed by former Gov. Hugh Carey, who said Cuomo would be able to achieve "bridge building" to "return New York to the Excelsior State."

Cuomo triggered a sharp retort from the state's largest public employee union later in the day, after he told the Albany Times-Union editorial board that he agrees with Gov. David A. Paterson's stance that laying off unionized public employees this year is legal. He agreed, the paper said, that the state's fiscal crisis voids an agreement Paterson signed last year not to lay off public employees, whose support Paterson needed at the time to advance a planned reduction of the pension tier for new hires. Cuomo said he would "defend that position in court."

The Civil Service Employees Association's president, Danny Donohue, replied the union was "shocked" that Cuomo, "the state's top law enforcement officer, would advocate breaking the law."

In his 25-minute speech in Hicksville, Paladino changed course again on his plan to cut spending, returning to a pledge of slashing 20 percent from the general fund budget in his first year in office.

A day earlier, Paladino, in accordance with a new position paper on his website, said the 20-percent spending cut would actually take place over two years - casting doubts over how he would pay for a promised 10-percent tax cut, experts said.

After the speech, Paladino said the spending cut plan was in flux: "Things changed a little bit, but they're changing for the positive, not the worse." He said he would explain more Wednesday.