Who's up and who's down this week?

Everyone from the Daily News to the New York Post is mad about the governor deflecting a reporter’s questions by trashing NY1’s corporate owner, but nothing seems to slow Cuomo these days. He's beating his primary opponent Cynthia Nixon by 31 percentage points in a recent poll, with less than 50 days left until Election Day. Perhaps some of his popularity stems from his heroic gestures this week. He said he would to pay for a $30 permit for the 7-year-old whose lemonade stand was shut down by the health department and even offered to officiate a wedding for a gay couple denied a marriage license in New York.

“No Drama Obama” jumped back in the spotlight this week with 81 endorsements, including two New York Democratic hopefuls: Antonio Delgado for the 19th Congressional District, and Anna Kaplan for the 7th state Senate District. Well, OK, certain outlets were able to find some drama. The Post ran a headline referring to Delgado, a Harvard Law School alum, as a “controversial rapper” for a mixtape he put out over a decade ago. Notably absent was the democratic socialist upstart Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

“What You Should Know” is that this city councilman got off easy, with his fellow New York City Council members dropping an ethics investigation into his quirky newsletter as long as he sends it from a private account. As you may have guessed, the man who dresses like a cowboy loved the attention. Diaz, a beneficiary of the cab industry’s largesse, also must be loving the City Council’s Uber-capping bill.

With more and more journalists and other media elites and executives facing sexual harassment and misconduct allegations, perhaps one silver lining is that some of the resulting firings and resignations are paving the way for a new generation to move up. One such instance is at The New York Times, which just promoted Cliff Levy to be its new metro editor. The promotion of the prize-winning journalist could also position him for even bigger things in the years ahead.

Here’s a shoutout to Rep. Lee Zeldin's actually competent communications staff for avoiding comedian Sacha Baron Cohen's antics. The secret to not getting fooled? A little thing called Google. His staff searched the Israeli TV station Cohen claimed to be from, which had minimal online presence. Other politicians got duped by Cohen, from Roy Moore getting subjected to a “pedophile detecting machine” to two congressmen endorsing arming toddlers with guns, while Zeldin steered clear.

When the state Public Service Commission abruptly called a meeting and took the dramatic step of banishing Charter Spectrum from the state, Burman, an outspoken PSC member happened to be out of town. Coincidence? Perhaps not – and the PSC isn’t answering questions about the possibility that it waited until she was on vacation to make the move to kick out Charter.

Was it worse than a typical week for the MTA and its leader? Here’s the evidence: an apparent miscommunication over the N line, including an inexplicable blue wall blocking the tracks and a long-term shutdown that nobody was warned about; reports of ridership declines that are cutting into revenues; and, as one outlet put it, the “mystery of the missing MTA ‘workgroup.’”

What’s the best part of being a bigwig in a political party? Cashing in on it, of course! It’s not entirely clear that’s what McGuire did, but the Conservative Party official’s efforts in garnering the third party’s backing for an Assembly candidate while also getting $20K for consulting for that candidate looks suspiciously like a pay-to-play scheme – which McGuire denied.

Albany may be corrupt, but hey, so is the rest of the state! Pettus, a Hempstead village trustee on Long Island, got arrested for alleged corruption and what sounds like an old-time mob shakedown. Prosecutors say he threatened to run Hispanic restaurant owners out of business if they didn’t pay him protection money. Pettus has now been accused of accepting $25,000 in bribes from those restaurateurs. Looks like he could use some protection himself.

Not only did the former Assembly speaker have to go on trial twice for the same crimes, but he didn’t do any better the second time around. At least this time the judge was somewhat more lenient with his sentencing, which was set at 12 years following his initial conviction. This time he’ll actually be locked up for seven years – or perhaps slightly less – but we don’t think he’s feeling lucky.