So Bill de Blasio (D) is going to have to put up with this guy once he gets into office:
http://www.nydailynews.com/...
In his sharpest criticisms of Bill de Blasio’s plan to raise taxes on the wealthy, Gov. Cuomo on Tuesday raised the concern that it could force mobile millionaires to leave the state.
Cuomo, during a meeting with the Daily News Editorial Board, said he is looking to cut taxes next year — not raise them — arguing it’s important that the “arrow is pointed down.”
He argues the tax rate for all New Yorkers is lower now than when he took office. And even if the 41,000 mostly city residents earning more than $2 million are not ecstatic about paying a state income tax rate of 8.82%, “they feel better that the arrow’s pointed down.”
“What they fear is that they’re in a place where the taxes will continually go up and there will be a ceiling and they’ll say, ‘I’m going to Florida,’” he said of the wealthy. “I believe that.”
De Blasio, the Democratic front-runner for mayor, has proposed raising the city income tax on those making more than $500,000 to help fund pre-kindergarten and other education programs. - New York Daily News, 10/15/13
But de Blasio ain't having any of that and even shot down Cuomo's argument:
http://www.nydailynews.com/...
Bill de Blasio won’t take no for answer.
Though Gov. Cuomo was clear Tuesday when he told the Daily News editorial board that de Blasio’s plan to raise taxes on the rich will be dead on arrival in Albany, de Blasio insisted that Cuomo still has an “open mind” on the issue.
“The fact is there’s not a study, there's not hard evidence of people leaving,” he said. “We know a lot of people are also coming in.” - New York Daily News, 10/16/13
By the way, here's another issue de Blasio is with us on:
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/...
According to Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger (NYCCAH), if the planned November cuts are not fixed, New York State's 3.12 million SNAP recipients will lose $332 million in SNAP benefits over the course of a year, and his organization estimates that that will include a $205 million bite out of the Big Apple, where there are 1.8 million residents relying on food stamps. While New York State spends about $30 million from its own coffers to feed the hungry through the Hunger Prevention and Nutrition Assistance Program, Berg says, "There is no way that states, localities, or charities could come even close to picking up the slack for these federal cuts."
Advocates throughout the state are banding together to fight the pre-planned cuts, including church leaders, non-profits like NYCCAH and City Harvest, and local and state politicians including U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. According to the senator, dependents on SNAP, including "hungry children, seniors, troops and veterans, who are just trying to figure out how to keep the lights on and put food on the table," should not fall victim to the House Republicans. "They deserve better."
New York City mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio has also joined the effort, calling the impending cuts "a dereliction of duty." Keeping with his theme of A Tale of Two Cities, he adds, "Nearly half of New Yorkers are living in or near poverty. We have a fundamental obligation to help them through this economy." - The Village Voice, 10/17/13
By the way, de Blasio is continuing to build his support from a very reliable constituency:
http://www.tabletmag.com/...
De Blasio had years of experience dealing with the various ethnic factions that still make up New York City’s political power structure, first as an aide to former Mayor David Dinkins and then as a regional director for federal housing programs. His first call was to Rabbi Yitzchok Fleischer, the founder and executive director of Bikur Cholim D’Bobov, the aid organization of the ultra-Orthodox Bobover sect. They dealt with the Arafat business—though she never secured an outright endorsement, Clinton wound up doing well among ultra-Orthodox voters and won the Senate race in November 2000—and then turned their conversation to de Blasio’s career. Already a member of his school board in Brooklyn, de Blasio was planning to run for an open City Council seat in Brooklyn’s 39th District, which straddled liberal Park Slope and Borough Park, a stronghold of conservative ultra-Orthodoxy.
“‘I don’t want to go to Washington,’” Fleischer remembers de Blasio telling him. “‘I need your help.’”
Fleischer was more than happy to provide his support. A self-described socially conservative liberal Democrat, he convened a cabinet that met regularly in his living room, among other secret locations, as de Blasio’s campaign got under way in the wake of Clinton’s Senate victory. There was no reason to expect a lapsed Catholic who grew up in Cambridge—the so-called “People’s Republic”—to be at ease in the world of black hats and payot, and at first de Blasio wasn’t. But with Fleischer’s guidance, he spent the months before the 2001 City Council election working the midnight Borough Park synagogue circuit, a savvy bit of retail politicking that paid off in a crowded field whose presumed front-runner was Steven Banks, an attorney for the Legal Aid Society who, unlike de Blasio, was Jewish. De Blasio won the primary by 1,500 votes and never looked back.
As he’s made his way from the council to the public advocate’s office and now to his pole position as the presumptive successor to Michael Bloomberg as mayor of New York City, de Blasio has been helped along by a cadre of politically connected leaders in the ultra-Orthodox community who, like Fleischer, saw in the left-wing Ivy Leaguer with the Italian name someone they could work with. “This is a guy who’s as comfortable at a Shabbas tisch as he is at the Democratic National Convention,” says David G. Greenfield, the Orthodox city councilman who currently represents Midwood, Bensonhurst, and Borough Park.
In September, with Fleischer’s help, de Blasio won the endorsement of prominent members of Agudath Israel, the central organization of the ultra-Orthodox community, including the real-estate powerhouse Leon Goldenberg—a member of the recently formed Flatbush Jewish Community Coalition—and Shlomo Werdiger, a scion of the Gerer Hasidic dynasty. While leaders in Williamsburg’s Satmar Hasidic community backed former city Comptroller Bill Thompson, who had courted them assiduously, in the primary, de Blasio won by 15 points among Jewish voters citywide. - Tablet Magazine, 10/17/13
By the way, Joe Lhota (R) isn't having an easy time winning over Jewish voters:
http://nymag.com/...
Joe Lhota is campaigning hard to catch up with Democrat Bill de Blasio, but the Republican candidate's spontaneous, shoe-leather approach took an awkward turn on Tuesday when he dropped in on a Hasidic synagogue in Brooklyn during services, and a female reporter and two aides were asked to leave. The reporter, New York Daily News City Hall scribe Erin Durkin, tweeted on Wednesday that the women had been ejected. WNYC's Andrea Bernstein, who was not there, asked others about the scene. "Lhota was walking from block to block and he got to this big synagogue in Borough Park. He went inside and the rabbi asked the females to leave," The Observer's Ross Barkan told her. "Durkin of the News and two female Lhota aides, including a press aide, were expelled, in Lhota's presence," Bernstein reported.
The brief visit sounds like a case of extremely poor timing, made worse by Lhota's poor decision. "It wasn't a planned event but a spontaneous entry as Mr. Lhota was asked by a rabbi to enter the Shul," Yeshiva World News reporter Jacob Kornbluh told Bernstein. Orthodox synagogues sometimes hold separate services for men and women, and as it happened, Lhota visited during the men's service. But it was Lhota's own call to go ahead and check out the service after members of his party had been removed because of their gender. - New York Magazine, 10/17/13
Oh, in case you were wondering, de Blasio's internal polling shows him continuing to crush Lhota:
http://www.nydailynews.com/...
A poll commissioned earlier this week by New York Progress PAC -- a coalition of labor unions raising money independently to support mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio -- shows de Blasio trouncing Republican candidate Joe Lhota 66% to 21%.
Lhota has been telling New Yorkers that in order to close in on de Blasio's lead, he needs to get his message out. But the new poll, which surveyed 801 likely voters on Monday and Tuesday and had a margin of error of 3.3%, shows only a small shift in the numbers when voters learned positive things about Lhota and hear more attacks against de Blasio.
When voters were read a positive biographical introduction of Joe Lhota, followed by attacks he has lobbed at his opponent, the Republican candidate moved from 21% to 28% support, according to the poll.
The new poll was paid for by the pro-de Blasio PAC and conducted by a little-known pollster, Clarity Campaigns.
It showed Democrats more consolidated behind de Blasio than Republicans are behind Lhota: about 8% of Democrats said they support Lhota, while 15% of Republicans said they support de Blasio.
Younger voters under the age of 35 prefer de Blasio 70% to 15%. And de Blasio maintains a double-digit lead over Lhota among independent voters.
De Blasio enjoys the support of 9 out of 10 Black voters, 7 out of 10 Hispanic voters, and 6 out of 10 White voters. - New York Daily News, 10/17/13
And those poll numbers are making Glenn Beck shit his pants:
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/...
On his radio show this morning, Beck watched footage from Tuesday night's mayoral debate between de Blasio and Republican candidate Joe Lhota, and offered his apocalyptic pronouncement for what it means for the city: "Yeah, the Communist will win."
Beck also mock-urged all the staffers at his media company, The Blaze, to come to Texas, warning, "Your life is going to become a living hell in New York. I want you to know clearly: The company has 150,000 square feet of studio space in Texas where the taxes amount to zero, where freedom is running rampant in the streets, instead of people that are crazy, wetting themselves and wanting to stab all people with any kind of a job."
A few moments later, Beck added that de Blasio's election would amount to "a communist takeover in New York. And New York, you're going to get what you deserve. And I hate to say this, but look at what this city is already like compared to what it was five years ago." (That's right: de Blasio hasn't been elected yet, but he's already ruining the city. Such is the pernicious nature of socialist marxist leftist communism.)
Beck also recounted his time in New York in the '80s, a bit of a puzzling claim, considering that he doesn't appear to have lived here then, hopping from Corpus Christi to Louisville to Phoenix to Houston; the closest he came to New York was a gig at a station in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1996. But nonetheless, his memories of New York and how scary it was under Ed Koch are vivid.
"I was in this city, where you were afraid to stop your car in the 1980s," he said. "You never wanted to stop at a stoplight because there was somebody who was homeless that was brutal, that because you had a car, you owed them. And it started in the 1970s. And they would come and they would squirt water on your car, take a piece of newspaper that was on the floor, wipe it once and then slam on your windshield, 'Pay up.' And you just prayed every step of the way, 'Just don't let me hit any red lights. Please, please, please don't let me hit any red lights.' And if you did, you wanted to be about five or six cars back from the front."
And that, Beck added, is exactly where New York is headed: on the first communist train back to hell. "This city is going to be an absolute nightmare because they are pitting people against each other. This is the Occupy Wall Street attitude." - The Village Voice, 10/17/13
While were on the subject of fear tactics, Lhota is running into some complaints about his latest attack ad against de Blasio:
http://www.newsday.com/...
Joe Lhota's mayoral campaign scrambled Thursday to cut deals with photographers whose pictures of New York's crime-ridden past were used without their permission in a television ad against rival Bill de Blasio.
The 30-second spot, titled "Can't Go Back," was released Wednesday and features nine images, including graffiti-painted subway trains, rioters, corpses and an overturned police car. A narrator says de Blasio's "recklessly dangerous agenda on crime will take us back to" a violent time in the city.
Lhota spokeswoman Jessica Proud said the images came from the photo-sharing website Flickr, and the campaign believed they were tagged as royalty-free. "We did our best to find everyone we could," Proud said Wednesday. - Long Island Newsday, 10/17/13
Lhota is also vowing to crack down on one of the biggest menace in history: Banksy:
http://www.nydailynews.com/...
“Defacing property should never be considered art,” Lhota said after a campaign stop in Far Rockaway.
“It is what it is. It's a crime and it's defacing property,” he said.
“You want to do art work, you can do it, you can find a place to do it, instead of taking someone's property and defacing it. Using someone's private property, or even if it's a public building, and using it as a canvas is never the right thing to do."
Lhota said his views apply to all graffiti painters. "I don't know if it's specific to this character or not," he said. - New York Daily News, 10/17/13
But there is one issue that de Blasio and Lhota see eye to eye on:
http://www.nydailynews.com/...
No matter who is elected mayor next month, city kids will likely find two new vacation days on the school calendar: Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, the holiest days of the Muslim year.
Both Democrat Bill de Blasio and Republican Joe Lhota say schools should close on the two holidays, just as they do for major Jewish and Christian days.
It's a matter of "respect" for a religion practiced by an estimated 13 percent of city school kids, de Blasio said Wednesday at a campaign rally with Muslim groups in Brooklyn.
"The origins of this nation (are) people of many different faiths coming together … That's why we have to respect Muslim faiths by providing the Eid school holidays for children in our school system," de Blasio said. - New York Daily News, 11/17/13
Oh, here's something to think about:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/...
Failed New York City mayoral candidate and infamous sexter Anthony Weiner recently told GQ magazine that if the Internet did not exist, he would have been elected mayor.
“Maybe if the Internet didn’t exist? Like, if I was running in 1955? I’d probably get elected mayor,” Weiner said in an interview published Thursday for the magazine’s November issue. - TPM, 10/17/13
The election is Tuesday, November 5th. If you would like to donate or get involved with de Blasio's campaign, you can do so here:
http://www.billdeblasio.com/