• On Wednesday, January 16, Republican political consultant Michael Caputo re-launched PoliticsNY.net, the stump on which the late Joe Illuzzi stood to spew his often incoherent mix of political gossip and venom. In his first post, Caputo recalls how he first became aware of Illuzzi’s site:

In April 2011, a friend called me with truly surprising news. “Are you okay?” he asked, as if I lay in a hospital bed. I told him I was fine and wondered why he sounded so worried. He asked if I was upset because a local Web site had written a story claiming I was a drug addict and that I was extorting a bribe of tens of thousands of dollars from a local politician. That was my introduction to PoliticsNY.net. I had heard just a bit about the Web site and it’s putrid purveyor, but I had never bothered to visit the page. Needless to say, I visited the site that day and was stunned at what I saw.

Caputo bought the domain name after Iluzzi’s death last year, intending to prevent anyone of Illuzzi’s ilk from using the site to continue his mud-slinging. Instead, upon noting the number of visitors the site continued to receive even after Illuzzi’s death, he teamed up with a Democrat, Pete Herr, to revamp the site. “Yes, I do take great pleasure in the fact that the previous owner once libeled the present owner,” Caputo write. “That’s revenge, baby. La vendetta é un piatto che va servito freddo.”

• On Thursday, January 17, 5:30-7:30pm, New York State Assemblyman Sean Ryan will host a community meeting to discuss the future of the current Women and Children’s Hospital campus located in Buffalo’s Elmwood Village. Women and Children’s Hospital will move to a new location at the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus by December 2015 and will be renamed the John R. Oshei Children’s Hospital. The meeting will focus on community ideas for what should be done with the current Women and Children’s Hospital campus when it becomes vacant. The meeting will feature presentations by the Elmwood Village Association, Excite Elmwood, Kaleida Health, architect Clinton Brown, dean of the UB School of Architecture Robert Shibley, and a representative from Preservation Buffalo Niagara. The forum takes place at Lafayette Presbyterian Church (875 Elmwood Avenue).

• It’ll be quite an evening at the Lafayette Presbyterian Church, in fact: At 6pm, the Partnership for the Public Good presents a talk by Dr. Andy Coates, president of Physicians for a National Health Program, who will discuss a single-payer health insurance system, a reform that would allow all Americans to achieve the basic human right of access to healthcare. “The US spends twice as much as other industrialized nations on health care, $8,936 per capita, but still leaves millions without health coverage and millions more inadequately covered,” says the PPG. “This is because private insurance bureaucracy and paperwork consume 31 percent of every healthcare dollar. Streamlining payment through a single non-profit payer would save more than $400 billion per year, enough to provide comprehensive, high-quality coverage for all Americans.”

Take your pick, or hop between meetings.