He is the worst mayor of my lifetime. He is dumping the male homeless, many of whom are mentally ill and violent, in hotels and shelters in our residential neighborhoods. People in my community, Kew Gardens, as well as neighboring Forest Hills, have been assaulted.
Now he wants to put jails in our communities. We are having a protest and march this Saturday, April 13, 1:00 pm at Queens Borough Hall, 120-55 Queens Blvd, Kew Gardens.
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How much money is he getting from developers to close Rikers? Mr. and Mrs. Crook.
If anyone could be worse than Trump it would be DeBlasio. No thanks.
Because when you are like him you are better than anybody else at whatever you desire. He is a poor mayor, he would be a disaster as president. That said let him run, the more the better.
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Warren Wilhelm should prove he can run a city of 8 million before trying to run a country of 327 million.
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I'm so glad nobody likes DeBlasio because he's legitimately a communist. This is a verbatim quote: "I think people all over this city, of every background, would like to have the city government be able to determine which building goes where, how high it will be, who gets to live in it, what the rent will be,"
No we wouldn't! Planned economies look like Venezuela. Market economies with social safety nets look like Denmark. DeBlasio wants even more power and that's terrifying.
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@Peter, thanks for citing that quote. I'd never read that article. If anyone else is interested, here's the link to the whole thing from 2017.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/09/bill-de-blasio-in-conversation.html
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@ Peter
Well you could be mistaken..
The bigger the ego, the harder the fall.
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Q: why is...
A: that’s easy. Cause he’s amazingly tone deaf.
But seriously, our Mayor suffers under the delusion that’s he’s progressive when he is instead anti-elitist, which is an entirely different thing.
A progressive for example would embrace education reform, look for innovative ways to fund transit improvements. An anti elitist would make a fetish of commuting to the broken down treadmills at the Park Slope Y, thereby avoiding the Equinox that’s a quarter mile from Gracie Mansion.
If I sound bitter it’s because my property taxes have increased an average of 10% per year over the past five years, and I’ve noticed if anything a decline in services.
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CDC should investigate. It appears a raging virus is infecting an ever larger portion of our politicians. Never fear. They'll recover sometime around mid-2020.
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Forget it DiB, what we have now is bad enough.
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This column posed the most plausible reason for why DiBlasio would think of running. I like him more than most New York Today readers and I didn't understand. But OK, he wants to influence the dialogue. Maybe raise his profile and put himself on the radar for a White House Administration position.
Was anyone else let down by the story about the pizza-and-beer train, thinking it was some great undiscovered venue?
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@Lifelong Reader - I liked him in his first term, but it FEELS even more from his recent statements that us liking him enough to vote him in for the second term pretty easily (even with all our kvetching) has made him feel, rather than doing more of the same balance, it was OK to try to get away with more of the bad stuff. Crazy logic. I'd never have happily cast a vote for the de Blasio we knew a year into that second term. If he hadn't changed for the worse, somehow we knew more about the arrogant side.
Had he kept that arrogance in check first term? Maybe Trump made him feel he didn't have to hide that arrogance any more? Who knows? There's an expression in Hebrew "Taiku" which basically means when
the Tishbi / Messiah comes, he'll help explain these inexplicable things. When Elijah visits during the seder to drink from his cup of wine, I'll try to grab a few seconds and ask this de Blasio enigma. Luckily, there are two seders, so if he slips in and out too quickly one night (he has a lot of seders to visit), at least I have two tries. I understand the psychology of Trump and his loyal base better than I understand what happened to de Blasio, who then confidently tries to sell this "new" Bill to the national stage!
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@Lifelong Reader
Agree, the De Blasio 2 sequel is a step down from the original. But what worries me is the publics penchant for electing the opposite of the previous office holder. Voters seem to vote against someone or something, instead of for someone. If this trend holds true, we will not elect another progressive for a number of years, and that is too bad.
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after his 1st election dB was doing things like appointing 'Mayor Sharpton' in an effort to placate his wife - now he is 'running' to get away from her - seeing that he is polling with NYers at about the same level as Xrump, I'm sure we will ensure that all the 'baggage' from the 1st election will be firmly attached to him in the unlikely event that he even polls 1% nationally
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All he is doing is raising money to stick in his own pockets. Nothing new here for DiBlasio.
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SPRING FAVOR
I'm waiting without waver
For my annual spring favor,
A slash of brilliant gold
Thrilling to behold,
Along the garden's edge
Abutting the planted hedge,
The star of the vernal club,
That heart-lifting shrub,
Forsythia!
I seek it twice a day
My attention never astray
Hoping to see it blossom.
Walking my dog, who's bosssome,
And when I do, I'll sing.
It's spring! It's spring! It's spring!
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The mention of your dog, who's bossome,
Took you rhyme from off-topic to awesome.
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@Leon Freilich, another beauty, which makes me wish I knew how to turn these (with every line seeing to carry wit and resonance) into one of those fun family "picture books" two lines to a page that we all loved and have a ball with to this day. Thank you, Leon.
May as well try for another job! He sure has no idea what he’s doing in NYC!! He’s making a muck of everything he touches.
He might demonstrate the Peter Principle. Rising to the highest level of his incompetence!!
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The good thing about Mr. de Blasio running for president is that he spends even less time here in New York --not that he's really been doing anything here of interest anyway.
The bad thing is if he actually wins.
So chances are looking good that he'll soon be gone one way or the other.
Time for a new Mayor...
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Well, why not, said Billy deB. ? Why let the mayor of Newark out-fame me? Why let a senator with questionable dna out-pace me? For goodness sake, the mayor of that small city in Indiana is running! What about ME? I'm the mayor of the most important city in the world! Why shouldn't I be a candidate? Bernie and Beto have taken my steam, I will admit, and that leaves only my popularity in New York and my record as a big city executive I can lean on. End of story.
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Color me unsurprised. From his days in the city council (I used to live in his council district) until now, Diblasio has always been utterly uninterested in doing the jobs that voters hired him to do, and instead only using those positions as stepping stones to higher office. He is the quintessential political hack.
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DiBlasio didn't do anything good for NYC. What makes him think he can run an entire country?
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Remember in 1968 when our worst-mayor-ever John Lindsay, tried to run for president and an entourage of regular New Yorkers followed him around to campaign stops to demonstrate against him and point out how horrendous and ineffectual he was?
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@MIKEinNYC
John V. Lindsay may have been the worst mayor during your life in your opinion but he was far from the worst in NYC history.
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Fair enough. But lets remember that Lindsay deserves credit for walking the streets of Harlem in shirtsleeves that hot summer (1967?), thereby staunching the riots and fires that hit many other cities. A situation that many of them have still not recovered from.
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@MIKEinNYC
If memory serves Lindsay was one of the very few to vote against the Gulf of Tompkin (sp?) resolution. We Vietnam era people will always have a warm spot in our hearts for that, even though his performance as Mayor rates a big "meh?".
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Please follow-up on the plight of the news stand that is being threatened by the city. It will be interesting to see if the publicity causes the city to back-off, or if we are now at the stage where business interests are no longer adversely affected by negative public opinion. Tnx.
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Well, I suppose it's just too much for tall Mr. de Blasio -- self-promoter extraordinaire, glad-handing camera hog -- watching every Tom, Dick, and Harry tossing hats into the ring. And indeed, the field is so crowded with left-leaning inexperience, why not another candidate?
(Which is not to say that the GOP has experienced, moderate statesmen ready to topple the demented, right-leaning camera hog currently debasing our White House.)
I love the article on forest cameras catching wildlife. Beautiful creatures.
Here in Brooklyn, my security cameras catch raccoons, possum, squirrels, and cats passing to and fro. (Sometimes other, usually nocturnal, creatures going about their business.)
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