Hold on to your cat and mind your chardonnay; you New Yorkers ain't seen nothing yet

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Holy compost bucket, catwoman, look what’s coming to gotham!

Zohran Mamdani’s other baggage — bringing a socialist army to City Hall

Zohran Mamdani may be a lightweight in his own right, but as mayor he’d bring an entire extremist movement along with him to City Hall, with dire consequences for the city.

Mamdani can hedge and haw all he likes, but he’s the face of a truly radical movement, the Democratic Socialists of America — which boasts of being truly anti-capitalist and indeed looking to “seize the means of production,” which is as Marxist as anyone could ask.

Zohran himself just a few years ago lectured about how socialists needed to be honest about these goals; that he’s changed his tune merely means he’s now more interested in winning elections.

After all, this is a guy who’s said that identifying himself as African-American just because he was born in Uganda would be fundamentally “misleading” — but did just that when applying to Columbia.

As mayor, he would at the very least bring a host of fellow DSA believers to the highest reaches of city government.

And the DSA is a lot harder left than the Working Families Party, which has always been mainly a vehicle for unions and other “progressive” special interests to boost their influence. 

The DSA’s constitution is frank about the party’s beliefs: “We reject an economic order based on private profit”; it seeks a “social order based on popular control of resources and production” and “economic planning.” 

…

Already, ex-Rep. Jamaal Bowman is rumored as Mamdani’s pick for schools chancellor. As an “educator,” Bowman stood four-square against standards and rigor, and for DEI nonsense.

Imagine cop-hating Queens City Councilwoman Tiffany Cabán — an early Mamdani supporter — replacing Jessica Tisch as police commissioner. 

Or other lefty radicals running the Department of Finance and the Economic Development Corp.

The DSA has been leveraging its way to power ever since its first marque triumph: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s ouster of Queens boss Joe Crowley, then the No. 4 House Democrat, in the 2019 primary. 

Now, exploiting the city’s ridiculous public-campaign-finance system and now the ranked-choice primary-voting rules as well as the establishment’s social-media cluelessness, it’s poised to seize City Hall behind Mamdani’s disarming charm and puppy-dog head tilt.

Beware: Even if the voters fend off this takeover attempt, the DSA will keep on pushing.

Click the links for details, but here’s one small part of Mamdani’s proposed “reforms”

Defund the police by rejecting any expansion to police budgets or scope of enforcement while cutting budgets annually towards zero

  • Fire officers with excessive force complaints and freeze new hires

  • Eliminate funding for police public relations campaigns

  • Suspend paid leave for cops under investigation

  • End investment in police training or facility renovations

  • Remove police from all hospitals and care facilities and prohibit law enforcement access to private patient information

  • Repeal the Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights, which protects police from discipline, nationwide

  • End qualified immunity

  • End all police contracts with social services, care services, and government agencies providing care

  • Decertify police unions and associations

    • Make police union contract negotiations public

    • Expel police unions from labor federations

    • Withhold pensions and disallow rehiring of cops fired for misconduct

  • End the criminalization of working-class survival

    • End all misdemeanor offenses, accounting for 80% of total court dockets, reduce jail churn by reducing arrests, and cut funding to prosecutor’s offices

    • End all fines and fees associated with the criminal legal process, including ticketing, cash bail, court costs, and parole and probation fees

    • Abolish all asset forfeiture programs and laws

    • End mandatory arrest and failure to protect laws that lead to the criminalization of survivors of gendered violence; grant clemency to criminalized survivors

  • Freedom for all incarcerated people

    • Free all people from involuntary confinement

    • Stop all funding of prison expansion, stop funding of new buildings, and close local jails

    • End pre-trial detention, civil commitment, and imprisonment for parole violations

    • Remove and repeal all restrictions on the organization, demonstration, and labor action of incarcerated people

    • Make all communication to and from prisoners free

    • Reject “alternatives to incarceration” that are carceral in nature, including problem-solving courts and electronic monitoring and coercive restorative justice programs

  • Demilitarize the police and end colonial policing of our cities and neighborhoods

    • Cease police occupation of Black and brown communities, ceasing and defunding all iterations of “quality of life” policing programs

    • Disarm law enforcement officers, including the police and private security

    • Decarcerate our schools by repealing truancy laws, ending all zero tolerance disciplinary policies, suspensions and expulsions, surveillance of students, and removing police — both public and private — from all schools, colleges, and universities

    • Decarcerate our hospitals and care facilities, removing police and prohibiting law enforcement access to private patient information prohibit law enforcement access to private patient information

    • End police surveillance and cease all funding for contracting, procurement, and in-house development of technologies including CCTV, biometric capture and databases, predictive policing platforms, AI, and risk profiling algorithms

    • End all data and resource sharing with ICE, end immigration detention, end family separation, and let our undocumented community members come home

    • Cease all police militarization programs and end federal grants that entangle municipal police entities with the Department of Homeland Security, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, and the FBI

    • Prohibit training exchanges between U.S. law enforcement and global military and policing entities

This is who they are, this is what they do: when liberals say they hate you and want you dead, believe them

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David Strom, HotAir:

The Party of Empathy...

I have a bookmark folder on X called "Democrat hate." 

When I think about it, I toss especially hateful posts into the folder as potential fodder for articles. I rarely dip into them unless some particularly prominent person utters some particularly hateful thing. Still, it is striking how many posts I find of Democrats wishing death or suffering on people for the crime of seeing things differently than they do. 

What prompted me to dip into this well was the liberal reaction to the flash flood tragedy in Texas. 

Strom starts off with a sampling of the predictable “Blame Trump” pronouncements from Democrat politicians and their media monkeys, but then turns to the churning, personal hate and glee expressed by ordinary run of the million leftists:

Note: “Chris Tina” is no mere pediatric clinician, she’s a full doctor, Christina Probst.

UPDATE: Dr. Probst is no longer employed by Blue Fish. but that’s because her post went viral, I suspect, and the heat down there, already uncomfortable because it’s Texas summer, became unbearable.

David Strom concludes his post with this reminder:

The glee with which a certain kind of liberal responded to the tragedy is not an outlier--during COVID, liberals were quite open about their desire for conservatives to die. Democrats wanted to put vaccine skeptics in camps, take away their children, deny them health care (and in many cases did deny them health care--in many places you still can't get an organ transplant without getting a COVID vaccine). Jimmy Kimmel famously joked that unvaccinated people with heart attacks should be left to die. 

And then, of course, there’s just your usual pervasive race hatred directed not just at conservatives but at all whites, even the wokest of the woke; put up by a “Non-resident Princeton Fellow” - not sure what that is, but not surprised that an Ivy has her/it.

Former Houston appointee claims flood-ravaged Camp Mystic is 'Whites-only' in viral video

Sade Perkins, a former member of the Houston Food Insecurity Board, made the claims about Camp Mystic in Hunt, Texas, in a TikTok video this weekend.

The office of Houston Mayor John Whitmire confirmed to Fox News Digital that Perkins posted the video. She was appointed by former Mayor Sylvester Turner in 2023, and her term expired in January 2025.

In her video, Perkins began by predicting that she was "probably gonna get canceled for this."

"But Camp Mystic is a Whites-only girls Christian camp," Perkins continued. "They don't even have a token Asian, they don't have a Token Black person, it is a all White, White-only conservative Christian camp."

"If you ain't White, you ain't right," she claimed. "You ain't getting in, you ain't going, period."

Perkins added, "It's not to say that we don't want the girls to be found, whatever girls that are missing… but you best believe, especially in today's political climate, if this were a group of Hispanic girls….this would not be getting this type of coverage that they're getting. No one would give a f--k."

The former appointee said that she intended "no shade" for the girls who were missing or killed due to the flood, and said that she "hope[s] they all get found," but suggested that there was too much sympathy for them.

"They want you to have sympathy for these people. They want to get out of your bed and to come out of your home and to go find these people and to donate your money to go to find these people," Perkins said in the video.

"Meanwhile, they are deporting your family members. Meanwhile, they're setting up concentration camps and prisons for your family members. And I need you all to keep that in mind before you all get out there and put on your rain boots and go find these little girls."

Speaking to Fox News, Whitmire's office said that Perkins would not be reappointed to the board, and called her comments "deeply inappropriate."

Maybe so, but I'll believe these "experts" only if and when Putin actually dies and, like the Generalissimo, stays dead (Updated)

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Saying goodbye — again — to Generalissimo Franco

Expert warns Xi's summit snub signals 'turbulence at home' as China's grip loosens

Xi Jinping’s surprise no-show at BRICS Summit fuels speculation about China's global standing

The first-ever absence by Xi from the key emerging economies gathering raises questions about China's dominance in the fractious alliance

These same “experts” have been confidently predicting Putin’s demise and being on death’s door for two decades now, and so far as I hear, he’s still with us, more’s the pity.

Not that it’s a particularly reliable source, but Wikipedia’s summary of those claims jibes with my own personal memory, so I’ll trust them this once; at that, it’s only a partial list: the Daily Mail has been killing off Vladimir on its front page since Stalin was playing with his a pup, Hector.

Claims of Vladimir Putin's incapacity and death

For approximately 20 years, multiple sources have regularly reported that the president of Russia Vladimir Putin is weeks or months away from death or medical incapacity.[1] At various points, it has been rumored that he is suffering from terminal thyroid cancer, blood cancer, abdominal cancer, Parkinson's disease, leprosy, serious surgery complications, the aftereffects of a stroke, or that he is, in fact, already dead.[2][3][1]


Selected reports

2005 report of stroke

In 2005, The Atlantic published an essay, based on observation of film footage, alleging Putin had suffered a stroke and was dying.[1][4]

2014 report of cancer

It was reported according to an unnamed German doctor, that Putin was receiving treatment for an "often terminal form of cancer".[5] Russian government spokesman Dmitri Peskov denied the claim.[5]

2015 report of cosmetic surgery complications

Mainstream media outlets in the United States reported that Vladimir Putin might be seriously ill due to complications from a secret cosmetic surgery procedure it was claimed he'd undergone.[6] The rumors originated after the Russian president postponed a scheduled meeting from 11 to 18 March, as well as analysis of background objects in official photographs by Russia observers.[6]

Vox reported that "the idea that Putin would schedule plastic surgery for a week when he was supposed to have multiple public meetings seems highly implausible" and Russian government spokesman Dmitri Peskov denied Putin was suffering any type of medical issues.[6] Asked to comment on the report Putin was dying of surgery complications, the Brookings Institution's Hannah Thoburn said "for all we know, he probably has the flu, or just wanted to hang out with his daughters or something".[6] Russian television later aired footage of Putin attending a separate meeting on 13 March.[6]

2017 and 2020 reports of leprosy and Parkinson's disease

In 2017, Russian historian and political analyst Valery Solovei asserted Vladimir Putin was about to resign for health-related reasons.[1] Putin did not resign.[1] In 2020, Solovei and others variously claimed that Putin had cancer, Parkinson's disease or leprosy and would imminently resign, a claim which also did not transpire.[1]

2022 reports of multiple illnesses

  • Following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, according to The New York Times, rumors of Putin being seriously ill became "a subject of lurid speculation, internet video forensics, and potential wartime propaganda, even though U.S. officials say there is no evidence the Russian leader is dying".[7]

  • In May 2022, Ukrainian military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov reported that Vladimir Putin was simultaneously suffering from "several serious illnesses, one of which is cancer".[8] Christopher Steele also alleged Putin was "dying".[1]

  • The New Statesman reported there was "no verifiable evidence that Putin is seriously ill"; Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov denied the allegation; William Burns, the director of the United States Central Intelligence Agency said "as far as we can tell, he's entirely too healthy"; and Richard Moore, the head of MI6 said there "is no evidence that Putin is suffering from serious illness".[2] [8][9][3]

  • On 28 May 2022 the Daily Star even speculated that Putin might have already died of blood cancer.[3] The Sunday Mirror published its own story the next day also reporting that Putin may have been dead.[3]

  • In July 2022, the Toronto Sun and other media outlets reported Putin had lost use of his right arm due to an unexplained medical crisis. The Toronto Sun cited, as evidence of the allegation, that a video showed Putin swatting a mosquito with his left arm instead of his right.[10]

Neurologists have previously noted that several Russian officials such as Anatoly Sidorov and Sergei Ivanov who, like Putin, have specialized training by Soviet-era military and intelligence services and typically make limited use of their right arm, often holding it unnaturally stiff to the side of the torso in what is called gunslinger's gait.[11] A 2015 study by Dutch physicians published in the British Medical Journal which compared video of the various officials against body movement instructions in a KGB training manual, suggested this was a learned behavioral adaptation to allow quick access to a firearm in response to a sudden threat and probably not a signifier of any medical condition in either Putin or other Russian political leaders.[12]

In December 2022, Solovei announced Putin was being treated with cancer drugs for an unspecified, advanced stage cancer and "the end is already in sight".[13] Several years prior, in 2017, Solovei suggested that Putin might resign due to ill health.[1]

January 2023 claim by Zelenskyy

In January 2023, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy publicly "questioned whether Vladimir Putin was still alive" during a virtual address to the World Economic Forum and suggested that Putin might have already been replaced by his body double.[14]

October 2023 claims of death

In October 2023, Russian Telegram channel "General [of] SVR" and Solovei said that Putin had died on 26 October from complications of cancer. According to Solovei, a body double was successfully used to replace the real Putin in many public activities and meetings during the last several months.[15][16] Earlier, the Kremlin denied media reports which claimed Putin was suffering from a serious illness, citing "General SVR".[17][18]

UPDATE 7/7/25: Heard this Willie song this morning and realized it belongs in this post

Speaking of disappearing people …

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EPA Suspends over 140 Toxic Employees Who Wrote Letter Denouncing Trump Policies

The agency has placed 144 staffers on paid leave and launched an inquiry into their participation in signing a letter that accused the Trump administration of politicizing the agency.

The agency said its actions were warranted because the employees had signed the letter using their official titles and because the letter had denigrated the agency’s leadership.

“The Environmental Protection Agency has a zero-tolerance policy for career bureaucrats unlawfully undermining, sabotaging and undercutting the administration’s agenda as voted for by the great people of this country last November,” the E.P.A. press secretary, Brigit Hirsch, wrote in an email.

The 144 employees received emails on Thursday saying they had been placed on leave for the next two weeks “pending an administrative investigation,” according to a copy of the email reviewed by The New York Times.

“You are required to provide a current email address and phone number so that we can contact you as part of our investigation,” the email said, adding that the staff members would continue to collect paychecks while on leave.

[The employees’ public letter] outlined five key concerns, including that the Trump administration was dismantling the EPA office of research and development, canceling environmental justice programs and grants, making employees fearful, undermining the trust of the public, and “ignoring scientific consensus to protect polluters.”

“These actions directly undermine EPA’s capacity to fulfill its mission,” the letter said.

And here’s a surprise:

The employees placed on administrative leave are planning to sue.

More than 170 EPA employees put their names to the document, with about 100 more signing anonymously out of fear of retaliation, according to Jeremy Berg, a former editor-in-chief of Science magazine who is not an EPA employee but was among non-EPA scientists or academics to also sign.

At least 31 workers were escorted out of the Chicago office. A union leader told ABC7 Chicago they will sue the administration for violating their right to freedom of speech.

Yeah, good luck with that; lower courts will undoubtedly side with these insubordinates, but theirs is not the final say (or final stay, so to speak).

Do svidaniya, comrade Joseph

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(Or, and more accurately …)

fuzzy thinking, fading dreams

When courts won't act to protect communities, the DIY crowd will

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Vigilantes deliver street justice to brute who grabbed, attacked woman on NYC subway platform

Wild new video shows the moment a crew of vigilantes delivered street justice to a brute who grabbed and bear-hugged a young woman at a Brooklyn subway station — only for the menace to be cut loose in court a day later.

Fredrick Marshall, 42, a complete stranger, allegedly followed the 20-year-old woman onto the Manhattan-bound J train platform at Norwood Avenue in Cypress Hills around 9 a.m. Sunday, when he started arguing with her.

Now-viral video posted by TikTok user @nicabori5 shows the hulking brute, wearing all white, grabbing the woman as she tried to walk away.

The victim began to scream for help, prompting several men to gather on the elevated platform. 

“Let her go!” one yelled. 

But that didn’t deter Marshall, who allegedly shoved the woman to the ground and bear-hugged her as she attempted to run away a second time, according to cops and prosecutors.

That’s when the bystanders jumped in and pulled the victim away from the violent menace, police said. 

They appeared to pummel him on the platform as one of the vigilantes yelled, “I’m gonna f–k you up!”

Their intervention allowed the shaken victim to escape, and she could be seen crying on the phone with her mom as she ran to the other end of the platform. 

“Get that, n—a!” one of the Samaritans yelled as he backed off, according to the video.

“Somebody try to tell you something, chill the f–k out? Now you got it!”

The woman was treated on scene by EMS for shoulder pain and minor injuries to her stomach and arms, police said. 

And of course …

Marshall was [eventually] arrested at the scene and found to be carrying a knife and a blackjack, cops said. 

He was charged with third-degree assault, fourth-degree criminal possession of a weapon, third-degree attempted assault and second-degree harassment, according to a criminal complaint.

Marshall — who cops say has no prior arrests — was granted supervised release during his arraignment the next day, as the charges are not bail-eligible, according to the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office.

It’s a fine video — check it out at the link — but here’s the point as I see it: no cops were there to protect her, and there are no longer laws in NY and similar jurisdictions that will keep this crazy from doing it again. Perhaps the defund the police advocates like AOC and Mamdani have a point: abolish the cops and the court system, and bring back the Statute of Winchester circa 1285. I especially like the part that requires every man to keep and maintain arms, though I’d modernize it to include women now, too.

The Statute of Winchester was enacted in response to rising crime rates in medieval England. The law established a system of local law enforcement that required each county to appoint a group of officials known as the “hue and cry” to pursue and apprehend criminals. The hue and cry consisted of ordinary citizens who were required to respond to the call for assistance by raising an alarm and chasing down the criminal.

In addition to the hue and cry, the Statute of Winchester introduced other important provisions to improve law and order. It required every man to own and maintain arms, such as a longbow or a crossbow, in order to assist with law enforcement efforts. It also established a system of watch and ward, which required every town and village to have a group of citizens who would keep watch and protect the community from criminals.

Demagoguery is so much fun, and so easy!

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“Here is our alternative plan, detailing exactly how we will balance the budget, attack waste and fraud, secure our borders, and provide housing, medical care and free education to all and every deserving world citizens we have invited into our country”

“We have our own plan”, Democrats promise, “we do! We just can’t tell you about it, ‘cause it’s like, super secret”

Governor Ned Lamont on the passage of Beullah’s Busty Budget:

“This bill is going to have devastating impacts on millions of Americans for years to come and was passed for the sole purpose of giving tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires. It will amount to a massive income transfer from the poorest and most vulnerable Americans to the wealthiest. ….

“Not only does this plan bankrupt the federal government, but it slashes critical safety net programs … And to top it all off, this bill will saddle our children and grandchildren with trillions in additional debt.

Reached on his yacht off Nantucket and informed of Governor Lamont’s response, Connecticut’s junior senator Murphy refused to take second place to anyone in the hysteria section of the political arena: “Oh, yeah? Ned’s upset? Well I’m more than that, I’m literally shaking with fury. Look at my trembling hands: that’s not morning-after rum fingers, that’s genuine, sincere anger! Whoo, boy am I mad!”

The Democrats ran a campaign promising that, if elected, they would change nothing, that the policies of the previous four years would continue exactly as they were. The voters rejected that vision, and idiots like Murphy and Lamont still haven’t gotten over their hurt feelings. Suck it up, boys.

Would a nice house in Rock Ridge be acceptable, or will this program be restricted to just NYC luxury co-ops and condos?

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welcome!

Resurfaced video shows NYC mayoral hopeful saying he wants to replace private homes with communal living

Zohran Mamdani's 2021 video reveals plans for communal housing with shared laundry, kitchens and bathhouses

Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist candidate for New York City mayor, has come under fire from critics who label him a "communist" – a charge he dismisses as a distraction.

However, the criticisms may not be as unfounded as Mamdani claims. Videos show the NYC mayoral candidate espousing language and theories rooted in communist revolutionary language. 

In one 2021 video, Mamdani urges fellow socialists at a conference to not compromise on goals like "seizing the means of production." In a second video, released on YouTube by progressive advocacy group The Gravel Institute that same year, Mamdani discusses the need to turn housing from a private commodity to a public one, calling for luxury condos to be replaced with communal style living that would include things like shared laundry facilities and food co-ops.

POLITIFACT DECLARES ZOHRAN MAMDANI IS NOT A COMMUNIST IN FACT-CHECK OF TRUMP

"Why do so many people end up homeless?" Mamdani asks in the video. "It's not because there aren't enough homes to go around, there are plenty of empty homes. No. It's because housing people is not a primary goal of developers or landlords. Their goal, simply put, is to make a profit."

According to Mamdani, this is a problem. He lamented in the video that housing is "a consumer product, just like clothes or cars" that private businesses sell on the market to make a profit. As a result, Mamdani complains, there is plenty of housing for "the rich" but not nearly enough opportunities for poor and working-class people.

"[It's] not efficient or beneficial for the rest of society," Mamdani says. "Housing doesn't have to be seen as a market at all."

In the video, Mamdani points to post-war communist Vienna as an example of how removing privatization from the housing market can be good for society. However, he does concede that currently in Vienna, "residents still pay part of their earnings in rent to cover operational costs and a sizable chunk of the population lives in private housing."  

After describing the so-called Vienna model, during which he puts forth a vision of communal living with shared laundry, kitchens, food co-ops, bathhouses, pharmacies, lecture halls, swimming pools and more, he suggests a way forward that includes establishing "community land trusts to gradually buy up housing on the private market and convert it to community ownership."

"If we want to end the housing crisis, the solution has to be moving toward the full de-commodification of housing," Mamdani says. "In other words, moving away from the status quo in which most people access housing by purchasing it on the market and toward a future where we guarantee high quality housing to all as a human right."

PJMedia’s Robert Spenser is not impressed:

…. The abolition of private property and the confiscation of private homes were a cornerstone of the Communist Party’s program in the Soviet Union. On Aug. 20, 1918, the Central Executive Committee of the new Soviet state issued a decree mandating the “abolition of private real estate.” It stated: “The right to own a tract of land… within a city is abolished without exception,” and “the right to own buildings located in cities with a population of ten thousand or over and having… a value… in excess of the amount fixed by local authorities is abolished.” That included private homes, which were seized wholesale and, if large enough, converted into collective residences for the new slaves of the state.

Rock Ridge’s John Cooper returns home after a busy day attacking Nazi Trump supporters and waving his “Ashamed to be an American” banner and finds a wonderful surprise awaiting. Justice at last! Oh, hooray!