The Judge Game is one that can be played by both sides.
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani learned that the hard way yesterday. The New York Post reports:
The reign of pied-à-terror is on pause.
Big Apple homeowners fighting the controversial pied-à-terre tax notched an early victory Monday, when a judge stunningly blocked Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s tortured rollout of the new levy.
Staten Island Supreme Court Justice Wayne Ozzi issued the temporary restraining order, effectively putting the luxury second-home tax on ice until at least an Aug. 31 court hearing about the peeved property owners’ lawsuit.
The judge barred the city from taking any further action on the 17,000 notices sent by the Department of Finance to homeowners, which declared they could face a five-figure tax bill unless they requested an exemption.
Mamdani quickly vowed to fight the Judge’s ruling. Mamdani, as you may recall, published the names and addresses of the 17,000 property owners, proving potential malefactors with a searchable list of targets.
Mamdani, who has been ordered to remove his “shame the rich” list, made the feisty New York Post’s cover this morning: “Hold It Right Terre.” Alas, Hizzoner will have to do without wifely consolation next month:
Rama Duwaji [who is married to the Mayir] will be jetting to the Middle East for a trip beginning Sept. 20 to the countries on the State Department’s “Do Not Travel” list for Americans because of dangerous conditions, a source said.
But don’t worry. Ms. Duwaji will be taking along the cops assigned to the first couple’s taxpayer-funded NYPD detail. Harry Sussex, call your office. Meanwhile, the Mayor is being uninvited to the New York ceremony commemorating 9/11. Republican Senators and 82,000 petition signers tell the Mayor to stay away. “It might be appropriate if he goes while wearing a paper bag over his head,” said Republican Sen. John Kennedy.
Move over, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. As you no doubt remember, Justice Jackson was stumped when Senator Marsha Blackburn asked her if she would define what a woman is during her confirmation hearing. Now the NBA is grappling with the question.
“WNBA Asks: What Is a W?” is the headline of Bill McGurn’s Wall Street Journal column. The issue revolves around men who say they identify as “trans” women. McGurn writes:
The key to understanding this fight is recognizing that as much as progressives want men who say they are women to be allowed in women’s sports, they don’t have to get that to win. The activists will be happy enough if they can simply ruin the game for those fighting to keep women’s sports for women.
For what this movement really opposes is truth and the norms based on truth. If all they achieve is to advance the idea that norms are arbitrary expressions of personal preference, they win big.
McGurn rightly identifies Sophie Cunningham, the Indiana Fever star who has taken a commonsense approach to men in women’s competitions, as the target in the WNBA’s latest public spectacle. Kristen Fleming has the latest on this fracas, in which Chicago Sky’s DiJonai Carrington bandied about the words “white privilege.”
Male athletes are finally “speaking up for women,” writes Jo Bartosch of Spiked OnLine, referring to Enes Kanter Freedom, who is calling the “trans” movement’s bluff by saying he is a woman and wants to play for the WNBA. Shame Corner: Ms. Must owes Mr. Freedom an apology. I somehow called him Freeman instead of Freeman yesterday.
It increasingly appears that Dr. Fauci owes an apology to the world. GOP Senators released Fauci’s texts and there are discrepancies between what Fauci told the public and what he said in private. Fauci was an avid (some might say authoritarian) advocate for the safety of the vaccine:
In one message, according to screenshots the senators released, Fauci wrote: “Since many people have significant cytokines storm and fever after the 2nd dose. this theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.”
But as epidemiologist Vinay Prasad reported at The Free Press (“Anthony Fauci’s Vaccine Deceptions”):
A few days later, Fauci noted that pregnant women had to evaluate “the potential risks versus the benefits” of taking the vaccine. But then, in a public discussion with Howard Bauchner, the editor in chief of The Journal of the American Medical Association, Fauci said flatly that the CDC had found “no red flags” in a Covid vaccine study that included 10,000 pregnant women. His public confidence, of course, was at odds with the private hypotheses he had discussed with Murthy and Walensky.
Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, who obtained the text messages, says that Fauci’s apparent deception about vaccines is “the tip of the iceberg.” Not mincing words, Matt Margolis of PJ Media writes that the newly available texts show “what a monster” Fauci was.
Vaccines are back in the news. President Trump yesterday signed an Executive Order laying out new recommendations for childhood vaccinations. The order called for spacing out vaccines and has drawn criticism from the American Academy of Pediatrics and Senator Bill Cassidy, who is a physician.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon is racing to buy more missiles, and the President is putting a renewed emphasis on Iran’s wretched economy. “Trump’s Blockade Keeps the Economic Pressure on Iran” is the headline of a Wall Street Journal editorial. The editors argue that this may be the best answer to the regime’s rising demands.
We’re just learning that Iranian threats caused President Trump to sneak out of Turkey in catering cart after the NATO summit:
The president was secretly transferred to a military aircraft to leave last month’s Nato summit in Ankara, with Air Force One used as a high-profile decoy, according to US intelligence sources.
“Immigration Becomes a Global Powder Keg” is the headline on Walter Russell Mead’s Wall Street Journal provocative column this morning. Mead puts for the novel idea that the modern era of mass immigration is ebbing and that countries must act or risk a backlash. Mead writes:
History suggests that opposition to immigration rises as migration becomes more common. The U.S., where immigration had largely been permitted since the Revolution, began to shift to more-restrictive immigration policies in the late 19th century as the share of foreign-born Americans passed 14%….
For Americans, the question is how to achieve a rational and humane immigration policy that is also politically sustainable. Our current legal framework likely will need to change. Total numbers (including refugees and anyone already illegally present who is legalized) would be capped, and the ceiling would drop when unemployment rates among Americans are high. …
… Reasonable action to restrict and control migration today will, one hopes, avoid the excessive crackdowns, to say nothing of mob violence, that the world has seen. But time is short.
To attract normal voters, our friends on the left are trying to pretend they never said the goofy things they said. Defund the police? Did I say that? “The tactic of AOC and her allies to giggle away the ‘craziness’ of Woke-era abuses should not be tolerated” is the headline on the invaluable Glenn Greenwald’s latest Substack piece.
“The so-called ‘Woke 1’ period is not something to laugh off. It was a repressive and destructive mob rule which unjustly destroyed careers and requires a reckoning,” Greenwald argues. He writes:
Many Democratic Party candidates emerging on what one might call the populist left are finding success in primaries across the country. But most of them have a shared liability: they were fully on board with the worst excesses and abuses of the “peak wokeness” that emerged in the wake of George Floyd’s 2020 killing, enduring and contaminating most of our institutions for several years after.
AOC, on Sunday, went on ABC’s morning news program with Jonathan Karl, where she was asked about some of Hong’s statements, including her call for “abolishing prisons” and “[defunding] the police,” policies and phrases that have proven to be deeply unpopular. AOC, who herself aggressively advocated those policies, sought to laughingly dismiss this all as just some momentary, harmless frenzy of “craziness” that never really meant much and that everyone has all just agreed to move beyond.
Byron York responds with “You Can’t Erase Woke:”
[W]oke was indeed crazy. So now, it’s entirely reasonable for voters to ask why those candidates believed it so fervently.
One for the Road. “Why the Left Won’t Leave Nuns Alone” in the WSJ’s wonderful Free Expression section. The latest progressive is the Hawthorn Dominicans, founded by Nathanial Hawthorn’s daughter.
