Following are excerpts from the dozens of editorials that have been issued by the Sun in respect of Eliot Spitzer:

From “Spitzer v. God,” June 17, 2002

No sooner had the Bush administration announced that it will modernize regulations governing older coal-fired power plants than the New York State attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, rushed out a press release threatening legal action. The ambitious AG says he wants to prevent the federal government from “gutting the Clean Air Act.” He’s upset that the administration’s planned changes will significantly reduce the hassles for existing power plants to perform routine maintenance and expansions. The administration’s modernizations will also undercut a pet lawsuit of Mr. Spitzer’s, which accuses a number of Midwestern power plants of letting their pollutants waft downwind to New York.

Mr. Spitzer might as well sue God for creating these air flow patterns.

From “Blue Sky Justice?” September 4, 2003

Watching Attorney General Spitzer plunge ahead in his high-profile prosecutions under the Martin Act, we start to get the feeling that many of us had during the era when a United States Attorney named Rudolph Giuliani was abusing the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Both cases featured a politically ambitious young prosecutor using an extraordinarily vague law for purposes other than its original intent. No doubt that in both campaigns some cases resulted in real abuses being stopped. But little doubt, too, that in other cases the main end served by the aggressive use of a vague law was the advancement not of justice but of a political career.

From “Waiting for Susan Berresford,” November 19, 2003

In a stunning development yesterday, the Ford Foundation capitulated to critics and agreed “to strengthen the oversight and transparency of Ford programming” to put an end to its funding of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic activities in the Middle East. The foundation’s announcement followed its own denials over several weeks that there was a problem, despite gathering concern triggered by a series of dispatches by Edwin Black of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. … why, once the JTA report was out, was Attorney General Eliot Spitzer of New York so flatfooted.”Until the Bush administration shows it is willing to do the job,” Mr. Spitzer boasted in an op-ed piece in the Monday New York Times,” … it appears the public will have to rely on state regulators and lawmakers to protect its interests.” Mr. Spitzer was talking about oversight of the securities industry, for which he has only tangential responsibility. Oversight of public foundations such as Ford couldn’t be more central to his primary responsibilities (as Mr. Spitzer’s Web site makes clear). Yet, while the Ford Foundation is headquartered under his nose on 43rd Street in Manhattan, New Yorkers had to go to the Senate to get action.

From “Gigot for Governor,” March 18, 2005

Attorney General Spitzer’s recent speeches suggest the lanky lawman seems to think he’s running for governor not against George Pataki or Rudy Giuliani or Randy Daniels but against the Wall Street Journal. The thin skinned prosecutor has taken to making snide remarks about the Journal at nearly every speech he gives, including one the other day at the National Press Club, where he called a Journal editorial “Ridiculous, flat out ridiculous.” No doubt this is triggered by the fact that Mr. Spitzer has come under trenchant criticism on the editorial page of the Journal, which lately been referring him as the Lord High New York Executioner. … Let’s get it out in the open. Why not have the Wall Street Journal run its celebrated editorial page editor, Paul Gigot, for governor? Mr. Gigot might be a mere commoner, but, unlike Lord Spitzer, he would have an understanding of the role of the press and of the need for genuine reform of the litigation that is making health care more expensive and capital raising more difficult. He would understand the concept that law enforcement involves quaint proceedings like, say, trials. We understand it’s a long shot, but Mr. Gigot would get our endorsement.

From “Spitzer Spin,” June 15, 2005

A jury on Thursday dealt Mr. Spitzer a stunning setback in rejecting his case against a Bank of America broker. This after a season of financial filings by Mr. Spitzer, which we wrote about on Friday, showing that he’s been pursuing a practice of fund-raising in enormous chunks of campaign cash — tens of thousands of dollars, in some cases — from the interests he is regulating. Mr. Spitzer even raked in a $10,000 campaign contribution from a law firm suing AIG while the attorney general was pursuing a case against the company’s former chief executive, Maurice “Hank” Greenberg. On Sunday, the New York Post weighed in with an editorial suggesting, as we did on Friday, that Mr. Spitzer should either stop taking this kind of lucre or step down from his regulatory role.

This is the context in which Mr. Spitzer called his press conference in Albany … to call for improvements in ethics in Albany. … It seems that Mr. Spitzer would have us believe that, when he regulates the financial industry, he is unswayed by $62,407 in campaign contributions from a hedge-fund operator and his wife. Yet he’d prevent lawmakers from accepting a $10 plate of scrambled eggs from a lobbyist. He’d have us believe that his position on tort reform is unswayed by the more than $135,000 in campaign contributions he has received from plaintiff’s side trial lawyers. Yet he’d prevent lawmakers from accepting a $10 bottle of wine from a lobbyist. …

From “Milberg, Weiss, Hevesi, & Spitzer,” June 30, 2005

Mr. Hevesi isn’t the only one whose campaign has received contributions from Milberg Weiss. Attorney General Eliot Spitzer’s gubernatorial campaign has already received $15,000 from the firm, and another $35,000 from partner Melvyn Weiss as an individual, according to state campaign-finance records and Cynthia Darrison, managing director of Mr. Spitzer’s campaign. That’s on top of at least $3,000 the firm contributed to Mr. Spitzer’s 2002 campaign for attorney general.

Milberg Weiss, incidentally, was one of the law firms that sued insurer Marsh McLennan while Mr. Spitzer’s office was investigating the company in the fall of 2004. The firm also filed dozens of suits against the mutual fund companies Mr. Spitzer investigated so vigorously. Ms. Darrison says that, since neither the firm nor Mr. Weiss has been indicted, the campaign has no plans to return any of the donations. She declined to speculate on what the campaign might do if an indictment is issued down the road.

From ” Spitzer v. The First Amendment,” November 25, 2005

In a most unusual campaign promise, the state’s attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, said if elected governor he would try to pass legislation making it harder for anyone to challenge him. Or as he put it in a recent speech: “we should adopt a blanket ban on contributions to state candidates from those who do business with the state.” According to Mr. Spitzer this is to clean up politics. The real effect, meantime, is to ensure incumbents reign, or that only very wealthy challengers, like Mr. Spitzer, have a shot at office. … If Mr. Spitzer thinks campaign finances in the state are in need of reform, he could start voluntarily with his own campaign. It’d be a more constructive move than one that runs afoul of the Constitution.

From “Beware of the Ghost of James G. Blaine,” January 20, 2006

Is Eliot Spitzer hostile to Catholics? Does he have a grudge against religious Jews? The answer to both questions is no. But it would be understandable if New Yorkers had doubts after his initial comments on Governor Pataki’s proposal for a modest test of tuition tax credits for private schooling, including parochial schooling and Jewish day schools. The program, involving modest but important credits of $500, is designed to help children of all religions trapped in failing public schools in the state.

From “Spitzer Tax Shift,” June 19, 2006

Mr. Spitzer may figure he is so popular — and he’s a wonderful fellow to talk with — and so far ahead in the polls that he doesn’t have to worry about the details of tax policy, because few voters will. It’s the same assume-the-average-voter-or-consumer-is-easily-duped worldview that informed Mr. Spitzer’s crusades as attorney general against music promotion on the radio and against Wall Street stock “research.” Our own view is that New Yorkers, who are anything but dumb, will figure it out.

From “Spitzer Tacks Right,” June 22, 2006

The big news in the governor’s race is that the Democratic frontrunner is tacking to the right on policy issues. … We wouldn’t want to fail to acknowledge it. We interpret the attorney general’s newfound outspokenness on taxes and charter schools to be a sign that Mr. Spitzer is concerned about the impression that is rapidly forming in voters’ minds of him as a tax-and-spend leftist. It is a sign that he takes Mr. Faso’s challenge seriously and that Mr. Spitzer senses that the voters of New York State overall are not advocates of more taxes, more spending, and more regulation of business. New Yorkers are overtaxed as it is. They are receptive to tax cuts and competition in education. So Mr. Spitzer’s shift to the right is a sign that both the Faso campaign and the broader ideas of the free-market movement in New York are succeeding and having an influence. Even in the public sector competition has positive effects.

From “Air Spitzer,” August 29, 2006

One of the intriguing questions as New Yorkers go into the final weeks of the gubernatorial campaign is how Attorney General Spitzer might have approached the story of his use of a lobbyist’s private plane if he approached it the same way he approached his suspicions of malfeasance on Wall Street. He used the aircraft to move across the country on a fund-raising junket in May. Mr. Spitzer flew from Phoenix to Tucson to Cincinnati to New York in the company of Richard Fields. Mr. Fields, as our Jacob Gershman has reported, is a lobbyist and part of a consortium bidding for the right to operate horse-racing tracks in the state. And who will be instrumental in selecting a winner in that contest? Why, the next governor, who could well be Mr. Spitzer. … Our sense is that voters would like Mr. Spitzer to get tough on corruption in Albany. But what kind of signal does he send when his own campaign cuts corners and, for all his crusading on Wall Street, he applies a different standard when he or one of his friends is involved.

From “Spitzer’s Rent,” August 18, 2006

Eliot Spitzer’s gubernatorial opponents have accused him of not offering any actual ideas and, well, New Yorkers are starting to see why: Whenever he does venture a proposal, it turns out to be a bad one. The latest example? Rent control. Mr. Spitzer thinks the city needs more of it. His desire to perpetuate rent regulation comes disguised as a proposal to index to inflation the ceiling beyond which rent regulations no longer apply.

From “Spitzer Shock,” August 30, 2006

No sooner had Air Spitzer been grounded than the attorney general-cum-gubernatorial candidate found himself caught in an electrical storm. Eliot Spitzer has said that from now on he’ll pay full price for flights in private jets, as the law has required all along. Mr. Spitzer had previously attempted to take cover behind a haze of technicalities to obscure his campaign’s troubles with state lobbying and campaign finance laws when it comes to air transportation, as our Jacob Gershman has reported over the past week. Then the lightning started. The electrical storm centers on the fact, reported by the Associated Press, that Mr. Spitzer accepted a $50,000 campaign donation from the company proposing to build a 200-mile electricity transmission line into Westchester. New York Regional Interconnect wrote the check to Mr. Spitzer’s gubernatorial war chest on Christmas Eve in 2003. Well, wouldn’t you know, but the Office of the Attorney General now happens to be involved in the project as one of the state agencies exercising oversight. … General Spitzer was never as forgiving of his victims as Candidate Spitzer is of himself. Big campaign donations and accusations of pay-to-play may be par for the course in politics, but “pay-to-play” isn’t the issue here. It’s the low criticality. The danger to him is not any “stench of corruption” that might exude from the shocking discovery that a politician accepted a large donation. It is the establishment of a double standard that raises the bar beyond the law for Wall Street and lowers the bar beneath the law for Mr. Spitzer himself.

From “Spitzer’s Straddle,” September 5, 2006

Give the Democratic candidate for governor, Attorney General Spitzer, some credit for skipping this morning’s event calling for “smaller class sizes” — i.e., more dues-paying members for Randi Weingarten’s United Federation of Teachers. But don’t give him too much credit; his running mate, Senator Paterson, will be there, marking the first day of school by pledging fealty to the union’s agenda.

From “Faso for Governor,” September 25, 2006

Election Day may be six weeks away, but it’s not too soon to say that John Faso is the right choice for governor of New York. We carry no grudge against Attorney General Spitzer. His campaign has been refusing to speak with reporters of The New York Sun, following our Jacob Gershman’s reporting on how the Democratic candidate has been using a jet provided by an individual who will have gambling interests awaiting a decision by the state. But we don’t mind saying that we think a lot more of him than he does of us. He’s a brilliant individual and made a wonderful visit with our editorial board. This election, however, is about principles of political economy, and over many years, Mr. Faso has displayed an adherence to the principles we value. He is the candidate who can be expected to do so once the pressure starts building in Albany.

From “The Spitzer Mystery,” December 1, 2006

The big mystery in Albany is which Eliot Spitzer is going to show up in January to take over as governor. Is it going to be the hard-left Eliot Spitzer or the centrist Eliot Spitzer? … Mr. Spitzer’s two personalities have played out through his history as politician and as the state attorney general. The hard-left Mr. Spitzer made Wall Street a target for his enforcement operations. But the centrist Mr. Spitzer disposed of cases not, for the most part, by sending businessmen to jail or by indicting entire companies and shutting them down, but rather by reaching settlement agreements that the hard-left critics complained were only a slap on the wrist. … Mr. Spitzer financed his gubernatorial campaign with contributions from the city’s finance and real estate communities but also from the trial lawyers. They — and all New Yorkers — are waiting to see which Mr. Spitzer will show up to govern.

From “Rip Van Spitzer,” January 2, 2007

Governor Spitzer reached for Washington Irving for the central metaphor of his inaugural speech, declaring yesterday in Albany: “Like Rip Van Winkle, the legendary character created by the New York author Washington Irving, New York has slept through much of the past decade while the rest of the world has passed us by.” The central question for his administration, we predict, will be whether it comprehends who has been asleep and whether the Democrats have really awakened to all the changes that have taken place in the competing states — and in political economy generally — in the years of slumber. …

From ” One Spitzer?” January 4, 2007

The big question after Governor Spitzer’s State of the State speech is not so much whether there is going to be “one New York,” to use the phrase the governor used as a marvelous mantra throughout his speech, but rather whether there is going to be one Spitzer. …Watching the bizarre scene of the legislature and outgoing administration cheering the new governor as he talked about the failure of leadership lo these last years in Albany, New Yorkers could be left in little doubt that their new governor is going to have to stand on principles — and the right ones — or lose the fight he’s started.

From “What a Coincidence,” March 8, 2007

These columns have been supportive of Governor Spitzer in his battle with Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union and the Greater New York Hospital Association, two interest groups that have overreacted to Mr. Spitzer’s plans to slow by a modest amount the rate of growth in New York’s Medicaid budget. The battle grew more heated this week with the release of a letter by Mr. Spitzer to hundreds of hospital trustees arguing that “New York’s health care system is broken” and that “New Yorkers pay far too much and get far too little in return” for health care. …We don’t suggest it’s anything but coincidence that the hospital fight pits the new governor and at least some figures he confronted when he was attorney general. But if Mr. Spitzer is serious, in his letter, about inviting the hospital trustees to join him as partners, maybe he should start by ringing up the Greenbergs, Mr. Weill, Mr. Komansky, Mr. Langone, and Mr. Weill, and asking them personally. It could be the beginning of an interesting conversation.

From “Tantrums in Albany,” June 28, 2007

Say what you will about the Senate Majority Leader, Joseph Bruno, he certainly can turn a phrase, referring to Governor Spitzer as “some little rich kid having a tantrum.” It was the day after our Jacob Gershman reported that Mr. Spitzer intended to embark on a statewide “shaming tour” dedicated to the proposition that it was Mr. Bruno and his Republicans in the Senate who stood in the way of progress in Albany. It struck us as a strange direction for Mr. Spitzer to lash out in. … Our own sense is that there is a growing fatigue in the state for these sorts of squabbles, and a wish that the lawmakers in Albany all around would stop running around the state insulting each other and begin instead to tackle some of the challenges that confront us. It might make for less lively headlines but at least there would be some light by which to read them.

From “The Spitzer ‘Steamroller’,” February 1, 2007

There was so much to admire about Governor Spitzer on display this week and so much to cause one to shake one’s head in dismay over his weaknesses that it’s hard to know where to begin. … but the budget is the ground that, as the Court of Appeals has made clear, belongs to the executive under the system in New York State, and that’s where it makes sense for the governor to make his stand.

From “Spitzer’s Next Fight,” March 6, 2007

It looks like Governor Spitzer’s next big fight is going to be with the teachers union known as New York State United Teachers, and it’s the third showdown in a row in which this newspaper is firmly in the governor’s corner. He is right as rain in the fight with the hospitals, and he has opened an important front in the campaign to reform workmen’s compensation, a point that was marked over the weekend by the Wall Street Journal, whose editorial page has not — how shall we put it? — made a habit of supporting Mr. Spitzer. The fight with the teachers is being brought by the teachers themselves, who are launching an advertising campaign against the governor in respect of the governor’s support for expanding charter schools. … We’d like to think that, being a Democrat, Mr. Spitzer will be able to do what Governor Pataki couldn’t. It’s analogous to President Nixon recognizing Communist China … or President Clinton and welfare reform. Mr. Spitzer is in a position to prove that it takes a Democrat to do fiscal and education reform in the Empire State.

From “The Spitzer Inversion,” March 14, 2007

One of the great political lessons in New York has been what we call the Giuliani inversion. When the future mayor was United States attorney for the Southern District here, he committed what many considered outrageous abuses in cases such as Princeton Newport, Michael Milken, Marc Rich, and others. Mr. Giuliani used the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act for purposes it wasn’t intended. He showboated. He abused his office as prosecutor, many of us felt, to prep the ground for his political career, only without the charm of, say, Thomas Dewey. The inversion came when he got elected mayor. Suddenly all his vices started to look like virtues as he battled — successfully — to prove that New York was, in fact, a governable city. And many of his critics became his cheerleaders and are among his cheerleaders today.

That’s a lesson we’ve been bearing in mind as we watch Governor Spitzer settle into Albany. …

From “The Education of Eliot Spitzer,” March 30, 2007

The speaker of the Assembly and the leaders in the Senate may be all the negative things Mr. Spitzer said about them during his steamroller phase, but they danced, as the saying goes, with those that brought them. It strikes us that if Mr. Spitzer wants to make his mark by cutting spending, establishing educational accountability, expanding school choice, making a serious attack on Medicaid abuses, and curbing the growth rate in spending on the public hospitals, he would have done better to campaign on those issues and establish his bona fides with the reform-minded idealists who have been nursing those issues in the wilderness.

From “Spitzer’s Latest Turn,” June 1, 2007

Who would have thought it? Eliot Spitzer appointing a commission of executives from Citigroup, AIG, the Bank of New York and JPMorganChase to identify “ways in which regulatory powers could be integrated, rationalized, and changed in order to promote economic innovation.” Now that Mr. Spitzer is governor of New York rather than a politically ambitious attorney general, he wants to “rationalize” New York’s regulation of financial markets to promote economic innovation. The only thing missing is for him to appoint Maurice Greenberg, Kenneth Langone, and Richard Grasso to the commission. It’s amazing how a politician’s agenda can change depending on what office he holds.

From “Spitzer Plays the Ponies,” September 18, 2007

We would not suggest that the average New Yorker suddenly sits up in bed in the morning worried about what’s going on at the racing association. But they do worry about whether the swamp in Albany is going to be drained. Millions of New Yorkers placed their bets on Mr. Spitzer, but as he goes into what Jacob Gershman, in his column yesterday called the club house turn, they have a sense of disappointment. He is now back in the field of politicians to whom New Yorkers are looking for a sense of leadership in cleaning up state government. Before long voters will start throwing away their metaphorical tickets and looking for another nag on whom to bet.

From “After Spitzer Talks,” September 20, 2007

Less than a year after the election that installed in Albany a governor who was supposed to change things on day one, Eliot Spitzer was being interviewed by a criminal prosecutor in respect of the troopergate scandal. … The big vacuum that we sense at the moment is not in all these investigations, though New Yorkers don’t have all the answers they’re going to need to return confidence to Mr. Spitzer’s badly damaged administration. The big vacuum we sense is on the Republican side. It’s one thing to spend all this energy tearing down a Democratic governor who brought his own troubles on himself. But what is the point if the Republicans are not going to also mount an effort to build up their own party as a party of principle and reform.

From “Spitzer’s Pay Raise,” November 29, 2007

Is Governor Spitzer trying to set a record for most tone-deaf politician? Straight off the debacle of his plan to issue driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, the governor now reportedly is offering pay raises to state lawmakers, who already earn $79,500 a year in salary plus a “per diem” of up to $154 for each night spent in Albany. With the state facing a $4 billion budget gap and the taxpayers groaning under one of the largest state and local tax burdens in the country, lavishing a raise on lawmakers who are already overpaid strikes us as one of the worst ideas imaginable. … When the upstate New York economy stops resembling Appalachia in large part because of policy errors of the lawmakers, when the state’s population and economy start growing at rates that compete with Sunbelt economic powerhouses, when individual New Yorkers start seeing raises in their take-home pay because of tax cuts — then, and only then, might it make sense to consider pay raises for Albany lawmakers.