Bill de blasio

The radicals are now in charge of NYC. Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has unveiled his transition team and voters who agreed with his diagnosis that “everything is too expensive” will now have to live with the anti-police activists, anti-merit educrats and anti-Zionist radicals running the show. The moderate center is in for a shock.Take Alex Vitale, Mamdani’s “safety advisor” and author of The End of Policing, who seeks to abolish police departments, viewing them as “a tool of white supremacy.” Vitale will collaborate with convicted armed robber Mysonne Linen on Mamdani’s public safety plan. They support Mamdani’s plan to replace the NYPD with a “Department of Community Safety” for a range of police calls.

Of all the people to go as for Halloween, why would you choose Bill de Blasio, an undistinguished Mayor of New York and flame-out 2020 presidential candidate?  That’s a plausible explanation for the recent howler from the Times of London – Great Britain’s newspaper of record – whose veteran US correspondent Bevan Hurley quoted a man identifying himself as de Blasio on his misgivings about Zohran Mamdani. “While the ambition is admirable, the cost estimates – reportedly exceeding $7 billion annually – rest on optimistic assumptions... about eliminating waste and raising revenue through new taxes,” this total imposter told Mr. Hurley, with strange eloquence. “In my view, the math doesn’t hold up under scrutiny, and the political hurdles are substantial.

Has Bill de Blasio become Bill de Blasé? Details regarding the former New York City mayor’s so-called “non-divorce” from Chirlane McCray, his lesbian wife of twenty-seven years, seem weird. For instance, their “trial separation” involves them continuing to live in the same house while they date other people. Still, compared to the headline-grabbing track record of de Blasio’s life, this latest revelation made Cockburn yawn. Even the way the couple arrived at the decision, “after another stale Saturday night of binge-watching television at their Brooklyn home,” is disappointingly run-of-the-mill.

I saw the look on the Uber driver’s face as he dutifully started putting on his mask. “You don’t have to do that for me, buddy,” I let him know. “Thank God,” he smiled, and we were off. Sitting on the parking lot we New Yorkers ironically call the Brooklyn Queens Expressway I thought back to a hungover morning in the winter of 2020, when an email popped up amid my coffee and cigarette. It was from Lyft: there was a picture of me in it, maskless, and a stern warning not to do it again. What a difference two years makes. Today in Gotham, for all intents and purposes, Covid is over. To any sane person, this sounds like good news, but not to the New York Times: the Gray Lady is worried.

Last spring, Yiatin Chu joined a series of protests against the spike in unprovoked assaults on Asian Americans in New York City. Prominent New York Democrats, including Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, were in attendance and spoke at the rallies. Senior party figures expressed their solidarity with the Asian community. They drew connections between the violence on New York’s streets and the xenophobic language of former president Donald Trump. And sometimes they blamed the violence on something less specific: white supremacy. After a while, Chu, a politically active Democrat, stopped going to the protests. “I was just really turned off by the messaging,” she tells me.

At the stroke of midnight on January 1, Bill de Blasio — New York’s bumbling, mildly sinister but profoundly incompetent mayor — got laughed out of office as his second term came to an end. Don’t let the door hit ya, the city collectively sneered...despite voting for the man twice. The new administration couldn’t even wait until morning to flip the official @NYCMayor Twitter account. One minute after midnight, it changed all its pictures over to ones of Eric Adams, before the man had even been officially sworn in. An image of the smiling new mayor loomed over de Blasio’s final message: a photo of he and his wife walking in shadow down a long hallway with their backs turned on a city they abandoned long ago.

As we near the final days of his term, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is taking his final shot at children by implementing an indoor vaccine mandate. This means that kids will not be able to dine indoors at restaurants, visit museums or do any number of other cultural activities around the city. Additionally, children ages five to eleven will no longer be able “to participate in high-risk extracurriculars including sports, band, and dance.” The new rules are as cruel as they are pointless. Twenty percent of New York City children ages five to eleven are vaccinated against COVID-19. That number is actually pretty high as kids face an extremely low risk of any kind of poor COVID outcome.

During the presidential election, there was a lot of talk about unifying the country. Seven months later and the restoration of norms and return of civility remain on hold. Bringing people together in today’s polarized world is a tough task. It requires a certain je ne sais quoi. However, certain rare politicians can bridge the partisan divide. One such statesman is Warren Wilhelm Jr, who trades under the stage name Bill de Blasio. Through his abysmal governing of New York City over the past eight years, the New York mayor has managed to unite Democrats and Republicans alike. As Michael Scott noted in The Office, ‘Sometimes what brings the kids together is hating the lunch lady.

For decades, the American Idol and Eurovision TV talent shows have calculated millions of votes during commercial breaks with barely a hitch. But it only took a few hours this week for New York City, the largest city in the US, to demonstrate just how incompetent local election bureaucrats can be. New York City’s Democratic primary for mayor was thrown into utter chaos on Tuesday after election officials withdrew their initial tabulation of the contest’s ranked-choice voting results, just hours after releasing a tally showing the clear frontrunner ex-cop Eric Adams was in a dramatically tighter race against Kathryn Garcia, the candidate endorsed by the New York Times. Ranked-choice voting allows voters to list up to five candidates on their ballot in order of preference.

New York governor Andrew Cuomo is finally getting his comeuppance. Oddly, however, it’s not for killing thousands of nursing home residents. Instead, the press has decided that the real story is Cuomo being slightly creepy toward to young women. Cuomo's comments to two former aides are icky, no doubt. However, the media has also piled on with other spurious accusations that they insist are proof of a pattern of abusive behavior. In one, a young woman says Cuomo touched the small of her back at a wedding and then grabbed her face and asked if he could kiss her. She is visibly uncomfortable in a photo of the incident, but what attractive woman hasn't had a weird old dude make a poorly strategized advance at an event with alcohol?

‘Follow the numbers,’ Gov. Andrew Cuomo likes to say, as if the numbers made a run for it and we all gave chase. ‘Follow the numbers!’ as if data can also make decisions. Follow the numbers. But what numbers? On October 6, during one of his regular scraps with Mayor Bill de Blasio in which the mayor wanted to implement shutdowns by zip codes and the governor wanted to use a color-coding system, Cuomo made the following remark about why he was shutting down schools in areas with elevated COVID positive test rates: ‘The schools are important because you will very often see the schools be a place of transmission.’ Gov. Cuomo never lacks for confidence so this comment was uttered with his usual certainty. You will very often see schools be a place of transmission.

In a sane world, Andrew Cuomo would be America's least popular politician, a welcome target for a primary campaign or a robust Republican challenge in 2022. Yet the anti-Cuomo chorus has included precious few voices this year. The New York Post has been unrelenting in its criticism, as have conservatives in publications such as this one. ProPublica and the Associated Press rigorously reported out the nursing home debacle. But Cuomo's performance has been largely been lauded by liberal New Yorkers and pundits in the mainstream media. In July the New York governor was the 'politician of the moment', according to the New York Times.

New York City was the center of the most severe coronavirus outbreak in the United States, with equally severe lockdown policies to match it. However, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio drew international attention for what seemed to be exceptionally strict enforcement of social distancing measures upon Orthodox Jewish communities.As the Mayor walked shoulder-to-shoulder with Black Lives Matter protesters and turned a blind eye to unfettered looting, his police officers patrolled Brooklyn, threatening Hasidic communities with arrest for attending evening prayers.De Blasio’s uneven enforcement of lockdown policies earned him a rebuke from Eric Dreiband, the US Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division.

Joan Didion wrote that New York is a city only for the very rich, the very poor and the very young. That was in her cult classic 1967 essay ‘Goodbye To All That’, in which she created the farewell-to-New York genre. It’s a quote I carried with me through my twenties, from one grim apartment to the next, each smaller, farther out and more expensive than the last. This is simply the nature of the place, I told myself. If you don’t like it, move somewhere else. Many of us emerged from Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s luxury dictatorship in the aughts with a sense of battle fatigue.

So now they have come for Teddy Roosevelt. The large bronze statue of TR on horseback, flanked by a black man and an American Indian, will be removed from the spot it has graced since 1940 in front of New York’s Museum of Natural History. Why? According to Warren Wilhelm Jr — known to some as Bill de Blasio — the statue is being moved (to where no one yet knows) ‘because it explicitly depicts Black and Indigenous people as subjugated and racially inferior.’ Does it? I don’t think so. I think both flanking figures exude strength and dignity. I also think they stand in solidarity with the jovially commanding figure of Roosevelt.

After weeks of state-mandated lockdown, thousands of preventable nursing home deaths and days of angry protests and looting, New York officially reopened today, all thanks to the so-called leadership of its Mayor and Governor. With the economy in tatters, store-fronts boarded up or broken and citizens in the street demanding justice, Bill de Blasio and Andrew Cuomo speak with one voice as they say to New Yorkers: you're welcome. 'New York City’s restart begins today,' tweeted Mayor de Blasio. 'It’s been a long road to get here. New Yorkers have earned it day by day.' 'New Yorkers bent the curve by being smart,' said Gov. Cuomo at his daily press briefing. 'We’re celebrating. We’re back. We’re reopening. We’re excited. Our mojo’s back.