Bill de blasio

New York City is crumbling into shambolic lawlessness and its citizens are growing more afraid and frustrated by the day.Why?Because Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio have once again proven to be categorically incompetent leaders incapable of working effectively together in a time of crisis.On Tuesday, the Governor was forced to confront the glaring issue that the state’s top concern had shifted from COVID prevention to the demolition of its biggest metropolis by unruly riots. During his daily press conference, Cuomo took the opportunity to chastise the Mayor and the NYPD for the turmoil, calling Mayor de Blasio’s handling of it a ‘disgrace’.

Some steal their luxury leisure goods, but others take their leisure by the luxury of right, and all of it is wrong. While gangs using luxury vehicles and lookouts cross the bridges into Manhattan for targeted looting — as opposed to looting Target, which is how the George Floyd riots began — the children of the elite parade their virtue and distract the police by acting out fantasies of violent revolution. How proud Mr and Mrs de Blasio of Yorkville, Manhattan must be of young Chiara, arrested on Saturday night in Manhattan for unlawful assembly.

Andrew Cuomo is having the time of his life. His approval ratings are through the roof and he’s being talked about as a replacement for Joe Biden should Joe wander off somewhere without his Visiting Angel, never to be found again. Hipster merchandise featuring his face is exploding on Etsy and he’s getting a nightly hour with his own brother on CNN to chat about oh, this and that, and whatever is happening in his day at the given moment. It’s quite the arrangement!

Bumbling Bill de Blasio is all thumbs, and not just on Twitter. Slow to respond when Orthodox Jews suffered an unprecedented wave of violence on his streets, the mayor of New York City quickly ejaculated a blanket warning of mass arrests to ‘the Jewish community’ after several hundred members of a Hasidic sect attended a funeral — a funeral, de Blasio now admits, that his office and the NYPD’s commissioned knew of in advance. https://twitter.com/nycmayor/status/1255309615883063297?s=21 COVID-19 is full of nasty surprises. But who would have put ‘mayor of New York City rounds up the Jews’ on their pandemic bingo card? The mayor now threatens to ‘summons or even arrest’ Jews if they gather in ‘large groups’.

No matter where in the apartment I am, if I sit very still, I hear a siren. Over the 18 days I’ve spent in quarantine here, they’ve grown more frequent. I worked late yesterday and finished up at about 1:30 this morning. I pulled my headphones out and listened. There was the briefest moment of calm, before I heard the familiar squall. From what I could make out, it sounded like a convoy of ambulances, careering towards the hospital about a mile from me. Woodhull Medical Center is a block of brutalist concrete planted imposingly at the junction of Broadway and Marcus Garvey Boulevard. A tent outside is my closest COVID-19 testing site.

This is a story about some kittens and a groundhog, and a politician who should not be allowed to go near kittens and groundhogs. Or anywhere near politics, for that matter. We begin in a very liberal enclave of very liberal Brooklyn, whereupon this Thursday evening, I hosted a group discussion in my backyard to talk about climate change. Because there are still a bunch of Democrats running for president, including several that I am very sick of hearing about, I instituted a ground rule: anyone who derailed the discussion by hyping up a presidential candidate had to put a dollar in the ‘Bill de Blasio Jar’ and it would be donated to his presidential campaign. I took this very seriously.

Millions of Americans could get a pay hike if a Democrat wins the White House. Most of President Trump’s 20-plus challengers have vowed to raise the minimum wage to $15, up from $7.25 today. Front-runner Joe Biden said the move was long overdue. Elizabeth Warren opined that doing nothing threatens the survival of the American family. And Bernie Sanders – who has long championed raising national pay standards – said it’s time companies pay their workers, 'a living wage.' The idea isn’t new. Wage hikes have already been approved by lawmakers in several blue states including California, Illinois and Massachusetts (Massachusetts’s minimum wage is set to always be higher than the federal average).

Bill de Blasio is the only candidate running for president whose entry into the race is perhaps a tad surprising. With the others, even those with miniscule odds of actually securing the Democratic nomination, there is some modicum of sense: get your name out there, promote your pet issues, accrue some political capital to burnish a future bid for another elected office, and if worst comes to worst you’ll still have ‘former presidential candidate’ in your title – which is sure to bring forth generous speaking fees and book deals. MSNBC might even give you a TV show. But with de Blasio, at least at first blush, the logic gets much hazier. His liabilities are so manifestly obvious that even his own staff reportedly begged him not to run.