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| Joe Lhota (R) and Bill de Blasio (D) debate NYC's future under each other |
According to an NBC 4 New York/Wall Street Journal/Marist Poll released Monday morning, de Blasio has a 41-percentage point 65%-24% lead over Republican Joe Lhota among likely voters.
De Blasio, the city Public Advocate, has enjoyed the commanding lead virtually since he won the crowded Democratic primary in early September, edging out once-dueling frontrunners City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and scandal-plagued former Rep. Anthony Weiner.
Lhota, a businessman, deputy mayor under Republican Rudy Giuliani and former head of the New York City transit authority, has been unable to close the gap with attacks blasting de Blasio for a perceived lack of executive experience, being soft on crime and his seeming eagerness to tax the wealthy.
None of the attacks have stuck with voters, leaving de Blasio poised to be the first Democrat elected mayor of the heavily liberal-leaning city in nearly a quarter century. He's run by promoting the idea of a New Yorker split in two between the haves and have-nots, while attacking Lhota for "extreme" Republican ideology.
The winner will succeed outgoing three-term independent Mayor Michael Bloomberg.The de Blasio campaign scored big over Democrat primary leader, Christine Quinn, employing this TV ad featuring his mixed-race son, Dante- produced by David Axelrod's consulting firm.
"When Mayor Rudy Giuliani took office in 1994, there were 1.1 million people on the (welfare) dole, including many full-time college students, and (previous Mayor David Dinkins’ team assumed the total would hit 1.5 million. They saw welfare as compassion and didn’t have a clue about its corrosive effects on families and the work ethic.
Giuliani knew better, and pushed for workfare and anti-fraud reforms that became part of the historic legislation President Bill Clinton signed. Mayor Bloomberg continues the approach, and now there are fewer than 400,000 city people getting welfare grants. ... Joe Lhota is right to sound the alarm about a Mayor de Blasio, who is actually far more radical than Dinkins ever was.
The attacks from the Dem goon squad are predictable, but more troubling is the silence of many people who know better. Terrified of de Blasio in City Hall, they are terrified to say so. They act as if they live in a police state, which is what they’ll deserve if they forfeit their right to pick a side.
Conditions under the liberal administrations of Mayors Ed Koch and David Dinkins' in the 1980's increased crime to 3 times the current rates. In 1981, muggers robbing Bernhard Goetz, a NYC electronics entrepreneur, in a subway station left him with permanent injuries to his leg and torso. NYC authorities then denied his application for a pistol license, but he purchased one in Florida. which enabled him to stave-off another gang threatening to mug him on a subway 3-years later. The pre-Giuliani crime conditions which created the "subway vigilante" came back into focus since the Friday before the election, when for selling just $30 of marijuana to a lady decoy, Mr. Goetz was arrested and jailed overnight. Despite the small amount of pot involved, Goetz was ordered held overnight Friday due to the lone charge that stuck to him — felony gun possession — from the notorious vigilante case. See "Goetz hit on pretty cop who busted him for pot" NY Post Nov 2, 2013In the dystopian"It's DeBlasio Time," by Daniel Greenfield ("Sultan Knish"), NYC returns to its bad old days under liberal governance- but this time with a soft-eye towards Islamic militantism under the multi-cultural, Mayor de Blasio.
"Bill de Blasio promised that he would shut down surveillance of mosques. And he kept his word. And the terrorists kept theirs. They say ten thousand people died. But a hundred thousand were affected by the gas pouring through the subway tunnels all the way down to Times Square. Some of them may die. A lot of them have scarred lungs.
President Clinton has promised that she will get those responsible. Meanwhile there are jets overhead and soldiers in the streets. They help keep down crime a little. But it's been a year now and Mayor de Blasio wishes they would leave. They're upsetting everyone in the mosque that the terrorists visited before they loaded up their canisters into backpacks and took the A train.
The NYPD could have stopped them. It would have stopped them under Giuliani and Bloomberg. But the terrorists were smarter than you. They waited for De Blasio time." Read more . . .
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| Barack Obama campaigns with Bill de Blasio at Junior's Cheesecake counter |
... Not even (de Blasio's) lack of singular achievements, his vague promises of income equality and his links to Communists have jeopardized his quest for City Hall whatsoever. Most of the public simply does not seem to be bothered by his unqualified status (as the nation as whole felt about Obama in 2008).
It remains to be seen, of course, if de Blasio will be good for the city or not. But if he follows the path taken by his political idol, Obama, New York City may be facing some dire times ahead.
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| NYC Mayor Ed Koch (Photo: NY Daily News) |
It was only three weeks ago when he (Mayor Koch) told me in an interview that he felt President Obama had betrayed Israel with his nomination of Chuck Hagel. “Frankly, I thought that there would come a time when he would renege on what he conveyed on his support of Israel,” Koch said, adding, “it comes a little earlier than I thought it would.”
Mayor Ed Koch (Courtesy: Vanity Fair)
We published Koch’s articles nearly every week, and it was clear to me, just by the sheer volume of those which focused on Israel, that the Jewish State, and his Jewishness for that matter, were topics that were very close to his heart.
“Why would you expect Israel to cooperate in its intended lynching?” he asked recently in a passionate letter to British Prime Minister David Cameron. He viciously defended Israel’s right to self defense and called out those who displayed hypocrisy in their dealings with Israel on a regular basis.
“I’m of the belief that the leaders of the Jewish community have to do more to make Jews aware, young Jews aware, of the importance of Israel,” he told me in another interview late last year.
It is therefore noteworthy and fitting to point out that besides the ‘Hear o Israel’ prayer, the only other quote that Koch has engraved on his tombstone is the final statement of Daniel Pearl, the Jewish journalist who was kidnapped and beheaded while in Pakistan investigating Al Qaeda back in 2002.
“My father is Jewish. My mother is Jewish. I am Jewish,” reads the defiant etching, attributed to “(Daniel Pearl 2002, just before he was beheaded by a Muslim terrorist.)”
Koch explained that “the sense of justice that Judaism teaches” was the reason he elected to have the words “He was fiercely proud of his Jewish faith,” etched on the gravestone he prepared for himself. ...
How befitting that the day of his passing, Feb 1st 2013 comes 11 years to the day after the brutal murder of Daniel Pearl, that icon of Jewish pride. They will forever share a yahrzeit, and in many ways a legacy."That Mayor Koch died on Daniel Pearl's yahrzeit draws deserved attention to Pearl's legacy- and the Islamic supremacism which so threatens the West and Judaism.
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| Photo courtesy Hiram 7 |
"Because anti-Semitism is the godfather of racism and the gateway to tyranny, fascism and war, it is to be regarded not as the enemy of the Jewish people alone, but as the common enemy of humanity and of civilization- and has to fought against very tenaciously for that reason, most especially in its current, most virulent form of Islamic Jihad.
Daniel Pearl's revolting murderer was educated at the London School of Economics. Our Christmas bomber over Detroit was from a neighboring London college - the chair of the Islamic Students' Society. Many pogroms against Jewish people have been reported from all over Europe, today as I'm talking. And we can only expect this to get worse. And we must make sure that our own defenses are not neglected.
Our task is to call this filthy thing, this plague, this pest, by its right name. To make unceasing resistance to it. Knowing all the time that it's probably ultimately ineradicable, and bearing in mind that its hatred towards us is a compliment, and resolving, some of the time (at any rate) to do a bit more to deserve it!"
Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch died the same day a new documentary about his life and legacy opened in New York.Here is the trailer:
"Koch," which will open in Southern California theaters beginning March 1, offers evidence that the combative mayor had mellowed little in his later years. Filmmaker Neil Barsky conducted extensive interviews with Koch in his Manhattan apartment in 2010 and early 2011, where the former mayor, who ruled New York from 1978 to 1989, spoke of his controversial time in office, offering no restrictions on subject matter or time.
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| Sentenced to life: Kareem Ibrahim pictured in 2007 leaving court in Trinidad |
