"Yaaaay! Ha-ha! Hooray! Wee! Woo! Why are we laughing and congratulating ourselves? Because we, Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos, Governor David Paterson, and Assembly Majority Leader Sheldon Silver had an emergency meeting all day, and it's finally over. We were supposed to come to some sort of agreement about $2 billion in desperately needed budget cuts, to save New York State's balance sheet before it starts to spiral into a more than $16 billion deficit. But we didn't! We didn’t do anything. Skelos didn't want to have the cuts on the hands of his Republican majority, so he maneuvered Paterson politically into delaying the vote until January, when the Democrats will take over. Isn't he clever? And you know the best part? The only loser in this expensive waste of time is the taxpayer! Schools, hospitals, public-safety and mass-transit programs are now going to have to face deeper cuts later, and everyone's probably going to get way higher taxes. Yaaay! Whoopee! Skittles! Smile for the cameras!"

Albany Fails to Reach Deal on Budget Deficit [NYT]
A Victory for Senate Republicans, but Tough Decisions and a Reckoning Await [NYT]
You paid for tax session but got circus tix instead [NYDN]
WHY ARE THESE MEN SMILING [NYP]