Will the Beret Walk Away? Sliwa Pressure Intensifies. Why the Shutdown Might Be Long. MSM Can’t Fathom Why Anyone Thinks They Are Biased. And More
Can victory be snatched from the photogenic, 33-year-old socialist who is favored to become the next Mayor of New York?
New York’s mayoral race got shook up yesterday when an AARP poll gave a glimmer of hope that Andrew Cuomo could win in a two-man race. It seems that older voters are less susceptible to Zohran Mamdani’s charms. (The findings of the poll are fascinating, by the way.)
That’s why candidate Curtis Sliwa, who polls third, makes the cover of the New York Post this morning—but not in a good way. The feisty tab demands:
Just Walk Away, Beret!
The headline adds that Sliwa’s allies are urging him to “drop mayor bid—don’t let Zohran win.” Inside the newspaper, an editorial begs Sliwa to “swallow the bitter pill” and end his campaign, and inside there is a story saying that Sliwa’s “checkered past” has finally “caught up with him”:
He’s far from an angel.
While Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa has been enjoying the limelight on the campaign trail, his colorful past is catching up to him.
Former independent mayoral candidate Jim Walden, who dropped his own long-shot campaign and backed ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s bid, rehashed a slew of scandals, allegations and sagas from Sliwa’s decades in Big Apple politics Monday.
The story highlights tax problems of the Guardian Angels, events that were apparently publicity stunts rather than crime-fighting, and the four-time married Sliwa’s private life. The story alleges that, despite having Jewish children, with Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz, he has made colorful antisemitic remarks for which he apologized. Ms. Katz is not one of The Four. One might wonder if Sliwa’s spine will be stiffened, and the beret will refuse to walk away.
Meanwhile, Dalia Ziada, Coordinator and Research Fellow at the Institute of the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy in Washington, DC., didn’t like the pictures of a smiling Mamdani palling around with radical Imam Siraj Wahjah, a character witness for the Blind Sheik convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. An editorial in the Wall Street Journal is headlined “Zohran Mamdani and the Democrats.” The editors argue that “the socialist insurgency will keep growing unless the party center stops it.”
In a big win for the Trump administration, an appeals court ruled yesterday that President Trump is within his legal rights in deploying the National Guard to Portland. The Washington Post reports:
A federal appeals court Monday said President Donald Trump could deploy the National Guard to Portland, Oregon, blocking a judge’s ruling that prohibited his administration from sending troops into the city….
Hot Air (here) and Powerline (here) have analyses of the ruling. Powerline’s Bill Glahn quotes a line from the ruling that he found “notable”:
“Under that tradition, Founding Era Presidents used federal militias to quell domestic disturbances in cases the district court’s definition would render impermissible,” the majority wrote.
The Trump administration says it has deported 500,000 illegal aliens since the president took office. This ruling helps the administration go forward. Of course, elites would like to stymie this. You must see this New York Times presentation (it’s cartoon style in more ways than one) headlined “SEPARATION, A Teenager and His Parents Navigate the Threat of Deportation.” The teenager writes in his journal:
I am worried about the status of my family because some of them are undocumented.
Turns out in one of the last frames that both the teenager’s parents are illegal aliens who have had children in a country that they entered illegally. Texas has found thousands of illegal immigrants on its voter rolls. Ned Ryun of American Majority explored the possible consequences of Trump’s cleaning up blue cities on Jesse Watters’ Prime Time last night.
Day 21 of the partial government shutdown. Charles Lane has an explanation in The Free Press for why Congress won’t end the shutdown. “Members of the House and Senate in each party fear that their base will not accept compromise, even though that’s what the general public wants. As the saying goes, ‘incentives influence behavior,’” Lane argues.
CNN’s Harry Enten has some bad shutdown news for Democrats. “This shutdown hasn’t eaten into Donald Trump’s support at all,” Enten says.
Axios has other news for Democrats in a story this morning headlined “Enraged Democratic Candidates Turn on Their Own Leaders.” From the Axios story:
“I am not a ‘when they go low, we go high’ [person]. I’m not that kind of girl,” Texas state Rep. Jolanda Jones, who is running in a November special election for a safely Democratic U.S. House seat, told Axios. “If they go low, I’m going to the gutter.”…
What was consistent across many of those interviews was a notion that the Democratic party establishment has not met the moment since President Trump returned to office in January.
Meanwhile, Fox sage Brit Hume said last night that Trump is all Dem activists care about to the exclusion of policy ideas. This will not stop when Trump leaves office. Veteran journalist Joe Klein has tips for the Dems, but his prescription would seem to have them running in the midterms on Republican policies.
It was a delight to see Bill McGurn’s column this morning in the Wall Street Journal. McGurn is back after a serious heart attack seven months ago. His column is on Rep. Mikie Sherrill’s “helicopter campaign” for Governor of New Jersey—Sherrill, a former helicopter pilot, ”is seeing challenges to her account of her Naval Academy record.”
Meanwhile, Lauren deBellis Appell muses on “Virginia’s obscene spectacle of a Democrat ‘mom’ candidate who isn’t family friendly.” Gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger stammered about Virginia’s low math scores when asked about a boy in a girls’ locker room and voted against the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act. She is also backing an AG candidate who fantasized about the deaths of children of a political figure.
White House Press Secretary “Karoline Leavitt slammed lefty reporter’s ‘bulls–t’ questions” in fiery text response. It was an incredibly condescending question. The Huff Post reporter wanted to know if the White House was “aware of the historical significance” of Budapest and why it might not be the proper place for a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Speaking of the mainstream press’s lack of self-awareness, CBS’s “60 Minutes” crew was stunned when new boss Bari Weiss asked them why the public considers them biased. Gerard Baker addresses Weiss’s question in his Wall Street Journal column (“Biased Media Needs a Complete Culture Change”) this morning:
Contrary to the fevered imaginings of MAGA partisans, editors and reporters and anchors don’t sit around concocting progressive talking points, checking in from time to time with the Democratic National Committee, and handing out the approved line to take on all the important topics.
It’s more organic than that. The people who have held the commanding heights of news—from editors down to reporters—may not be quite Kaelesque in their remoteness from their less refined fellow citizens. But their philosophical outlook reflects a degree of convergence in their shared metropolitan, expensively educated, narrowly focused minds.
Pauline Kael was the New Yorker movie critic who couldn’t understand how Richard Nixon was elected President because she’d never met anyone who voted for him.
Are you blown away by the heist of Napoleonic jewels in the Louvre?
The Federalist has a different take on cultural heists in a story entitled “The Real Plunder Of Europe’s Crown Jewels Was An Inside Job, And It Wasn’t At The Louvre.” Elle Purnell writes:
I’m talking about the plunder of Canterbury Cathedral, in which a church founded by St. Augustine of Canterbury and famed as the site of Thomas Becket’s martyrdom was defaced with irreverent graffiti accusing God of being “indifferent to suffering” and “creat[ing] hate.”
Unlike the Louvre heist, it wasn’t done by bandits with angle-grinders. It was done by a man who describes himself as an “agender goblin-thing,” with the enthusiastic blessing of the cathedral’s curator, Jacqueline Creswell, and its dean, David Monteith, because it catered to “marginalized communities.”
