New York City

Rudy Giuliani may sometimes carry himself like the Grinch, but the former New York City mayor loves Christmas enough to try his hand at ornament making. Even following a $148 million defamation judgment, Giuliani hasn’t given up the season's spirit. On Wednesday’s episode of his livestreamed program, America's Mayor Live, Giuliani seemed to have more on his mind than his financial woes. He shared a clip of his Christmas tree adorned with Nature’s Promise bottles, a fruit and vegetable supplement targeted at elderly conservatives. Still looking for that perfect stocking stuffer? Consider Nature's Promise: not only does it makes a great gift, every purchase helps Giuliani to "fight the traitors.

Why apologize when you can just wait and hope people forget what you did wrong? As we enter the season of goodwill and gratitude, that’s the question posed by disgraced former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who this year is thankful for the complicity of his allies as he attempts to stage a comeback.While New York City mayor Eric Adams chokes on a different kind of Turkey, Politico writes that Cuomo has “begun in recent days to gauge the viability of a potential mayoral bid.”Cuomo resigned as governor in ignominy back in August 2021 after an investigation by New York attorney general Leticia James claimed that he had sexually harassed as many as eleven women.

Over the last couple of weeks, the FBI has been ramping up a corruption investigation of New York mayor Eric Adams. The mayor is a political newcomer who was formerly a senior police official in New York, elected, in part, to restore public safety. He has failed to do so. Now, he’s the center of a federal corruption investigation, centered on illegal foreign contributions. No one has been indicted yet. The first shoe to drop publicly was a raid on the Brooklyn home of Adams’s top fundraiser, Brianna Suggs. She was only twenty-three when she headed that major effort. The FBI conducted a surprise search of her home and seized documents and electronic devices. Although the search warrant has not been released, the New York Times reports that they obtained it.

Lady Gaga’s dad is giving New York City a Million Reasons to tackle the 90,000 migrants and asylum-seekers who have descended on the city since last spring. Sixty-six-year-old Joe Germanotta is fed up with “all the mayhem” some 500 illegal migrants staying at the Stratford Arms Hotel are inflicting on his Upper East Side neighborhood, he told the New York Post “If it was like this when my girls were growing up, I wouldn’t be living in New York,” Germanotta said. According to the Post, he’s also “compiling a list of local residents’ concerns to take to lawmakers, the NYPD and the homeless services in protest.” Germanotta said the influx of migrants was carried out as a rapid “stealth operation” because “they didn’t want anybody to know what was going on.

New York mayor Eric Adams is discouraging asylum seekers from coming to the Big Apple by emphasizing the city's expensive cost of living.  The mayor’s office released flyers Wednesday asking asylum seekers to consider cities other than New York when choosing where to settle in the country. The flyers, which will be handed out to migrants at the border, warn that “cost of food, transportation, and other necessities in NYC is the highest in the United States.” They also say there is no guarantee of “shelter and services to new arrivals.”  In addition to the flyers, Adams announced a new mayoral directive Wednesday that requires single, adult migrants to reapply to stay in the city’s shelter system after sixty days if they cannot find alternative housing.

Daniel Penny is heading back to a New York courthouse today to face charges for the murder of Jordan Neely. Penny, with the help two other bystanders, held Neely, who had a criminal history and mental health issues, in a chokehold after Neely made repeated threats to other passengers on a subway car. Neely died during the incident — and Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg chose to indict Penny for second-degree murder, despite downgrading over 50 percent of felonies to misdemeanors in 2022. Crime has risen in New York City since 2020, and the city has done precious little to address it, though Mayor Eric Adams has been slightly more proactive than his predecessor, Bill de Blasio. Go back a few decades, however, and you find the Big Apple in an almost unimaginably worse situation.

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.

There was nothing new about springtime wildfires in Canada until the wind shifted unexpectedly last week. That shift blew smoky air all over the northern and eastern US, producing memorably apocalyptic-like orange air in New York City. Not wanting to waste a crisis, the lamestream media jumped right in with both feet. They blamed the wildfires on the much-dreaded “climate change,” scared the daylights out of everyone about the air quality and then warned that more like it was on the way unless we changed our fossil fuel-burning ways. Not unexpectedly, the media’s knee-jerk take was all wrong. Wildfires and smoky air have always occurred wherever there are forests. At least eighteen of these dark or “yellow days” occurred in the US and Canada from 1706 to 1910.

Jordan Neely was given a hero’s funeral in Harlem last Friday, eulogized by New York’s most prominent race activists before an audience of the city’s Democratic elite. Neely died on May 1 on a New York City subway car, after being restrained by a Marine veteran who was trying to protect his fellow passengers from Neely’s psychotic outbursts.   Neely has been turned into a symbol of a racist system of law enforcement and of civilian values that exaggerate the threat of mentally ill vagrants to keep minorities down. Three weeks after Neely’s death, on May 21, another homeless man in New York City slammed a woman’s head into a subway car, likely paralyzing her for life, if she even survives.

New York City seems like a gag that’s gone too far. "First, we’ll release all the criminals because too many black bodies are in prison! Then we’ll denounce the police as Nazis and refuse to prosecute any suspects they arrest. The city will be overrun with violent criminals — raping robbing, assaulting and killing at will... But if anyone steps up to protect the citizenry from the mayhem that’s been intentionally inflicted on them, well, gentleman, then we’ll prosecute the hell out of that douchebag." This exactly how things are playing out right now with twenty-four-year-old Daniel Penny, the Marine veteran who subdued a deranged lunatic on the F train at the Broadway-Lafayette Street station in Manhattan on May 1.

Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg officially indicted Donald Trump on April 4 on thirty-four counts of “falsifying business records in the first degree... with the intent to defraud and intent to commit another crime and aid and conceal the commission thereof.” This makes Trump the first president in US history to be indicted on a criminal charge. Not willing to let any opportunity — however ignominious — go to waste, Trump is already selling t-shirts on his website featuring a digitally-created mugshot with the words “Not Guilty” emblazoned below and the prisoner code "45-47" (get it?). The former president was not required to take an actual mugshot by Bragg's office.