"Suffolk and Wonderland, which are essentially a single entity, and which have pumped a combined $3 million into gambling lobbying since 2005, are especially troublesome. They’re basically the speaker’s tracks. They’ve long been the odds-on favorites to win a casino license. If they’d won one last year, the deal would have looked wired and unseemly, but also not all that unexpected. Things are different now."

"Racing is more than about people sitting in betting parlors. It is about the sport -- making the tracks viable as racing entities -- not just places where VLTs are played. We need to focus on helping the breeders and horsemen since they are the infrastructure that develops a successful racing product. We then need to market racing in a manner which brings fans to the track and generates interest in the sport overall."

"As is often the case in New York, politics trumped logic."