Tag Archive for: Andrew Cuomo

Former Staffer Accuses New York Governor Cuomo of Sexual Harassment

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In a blog post published Wednesday at Medium, a former aide has accused embattled, lethally incompetent New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo of sexual harassment.

Lindsey Boylan, the former deputy secretary for economic development and special adviser to Cuomo, claimed he repeatedly touched her body, attempted to kiss her on the mouth, invited her to play “strip poker,” and overtly objectified her. She documented these claims in the blog post with screenshots of emails and texts.

Boylan added that Cuomo’s top female staff members “normalized” the governor’s conduct. In 2018, she says, after Cuomo allegedly kissed her without consent, “I came to work nauseous every day. My relationship with his senior team — mostly women — grew hostile after I started speaking up for myself. I was reprimanded and told to get in line by his top aides, but I could no longer ignore it,” so she resigned.

These damning allegations come as Cuomo’s career is already going down in flames. After spending all of 2020 falsely blaming former President Trump for mishandling the coronavirus, and publishing a book touting himself as a hero of the pandemic, Cuomo has been exposed for trying to suppress the truth about skyrocketing nursing home coronavirus deaths in his state for fear of a federal investigation — which is now underway.

He has also been exposed by a fellow Democrat, New York Rep. Ron Kim, for threatening to destroy Kim’s career over revelations of the coronavirus scandal. NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio has thrown Cuomo under the bus, siding with Rep. Kim, and New York state lawmakers are calling for Cuomo’s emergency powers to be stripped from him. Even fellow Democrats are beginning to call for Cuomo’s resignation or recall.

“Governor Cuomo has earned his title as Worst Governor in America, and now every New Yorker knows that he is a criminal sexual predator,” NY Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Republican, declared in a statement.

Andrew Cuomo

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Former Aides Reveal Details of Cuomo’s Toxic Personality

In November 2020, former Cuomo aide and consultant Alexis Grenell described the governor as a “snarling attack dog who gaslights fellow Democrats and deploys staff to call his female critics ‘f—-g idiots.’” She characterized Cuomo’s promotion of his new book in which he discussed his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic — even as the pandemic continued to claim many victims across New York State — as an act of hubris. “St. Andrew, our savior of the spring, is now milking his 15 minutes of fame for an extra 30,” said Grenell. “The book is an undignified victory lap by the facts-first persona that won him legitimate praise to begin with, underscoring the point that for Cuomo it was always more about presentation than substance.”

Grenell called it “genuinely depressing” that Cuomo, who had recently won an Emmy Award for his televised news conferences about the coronavirus during the spring and summer of 2020, was now “so eager to be flattered by Ben Stiller,” one of the celebrities who had praised Cuomo for his award. “It’s almost hard to remember how he ridiculed two-time Emmy Award–winner Cynthia Nixon back in 2018 for being an unqualified celebrity,” Grenell said in a reference to Cuomo’s opponent in the 2018 Democratic gubernatorial primary. “Turns out he just wanted to trade places all along.”

“The self-described ‘cool dude in a loose mood,’ threw a Trump-style tantrum,” Grenell added, describing how Cuomo, during a recent press conference in Albany, “blew a gasket” when he called reporters “obnoxious and offensive” after they asked him if New York City’s public schools would be shut down because of rising numbers of COVID-19 infections in the city. Asserting that Cuomo is “more about presentation than substance,” Grenell said: “It’s why he and his staff reflexively insult anyone who criticizes his handling of the pandemic or insists on returning to the normal system of democratic governance as Jefferson envisioned it.”

To learn more about Andrew Cuomo, click here for his profile.

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Why Cuomo’s Latest Tax Hike Proposal Would Accelerate New York’s Decline

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New Yorkers had a rough, rough 2020. Governor Andrew Cuomo’s latest proposal would make 2021 even worse.

“New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo proposed raising taxes on the wealthy to a combined level of 14.7%, which would be the highest state-and-local tax rate in the nation,” CNBC reports. “The tax increase would raise $1.5 billion for the state, Cuomo said Tuesday in an address unveiling his 2022 budget proposal.”

The tax increases would apply to those who earn more than $5 million a year. If implemented, New Yorkers would officially beat California for the top state and local tax rate in the nation; the Golden State currently comes in at 13.3 percent.

Governor Cuomo says the tax increases are necessary because unless the federal government passes a full bailout for the $15 billion state budget hole New York has created, it will have a large deficit to plug.

“New York cannot manage a $15 billion deficit,” Cuomo said. “It’s beyond what we can do.”

The governor favors hiking taxes on “the rich” rather than closing the budget gap solely by cutting spending.

Even before these proposed hikes, the Empire State already has the highest overall tax burden—beyond just income taxes—nationwide and one of the highest costs of living. The situation has only worsened during the COVID-19 crisis, with huge losses of life, in part due to the governor’s mandate forcing nursing homes to accept COVID-19-positive patients. And, drastic lockdowns imposed irrespective of actual pandemic data have ruined New York City’s economy and the cultural vibrancy that made it so appealing pre-pandemic.

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that people are fleeing in droves.

More than 300,000 people have left the city, according to official filings. Informal measures like U-Haul data similarly show New Yorkers moving elsewhere en masse. An astounding $34 billion in income left the area in 2020.

Over the summer, Governor Cuomo was literally reduced to calling up wealthy residents who’d fled and begging them to come back to New York City—even offering to cook for them and buy them drinks.

New York state officials should be doing everything they can to reverse this troubling trend; cutting taxes; removing regulations; expanding education options. If Cuomo successfully implements his tax hikes, though, it will only result in more people leaving the Empire State.

Why? It’s simple.

A tax proposal cannot be evaluated simply on its raw numbers. One must also take into account how it would change people’s behavior.

Successful people are not automatons; if anything, they are the most responsive and mobile members of society. And other thriving states like Florida and Texas offer not just warmer weather than New York, but zero state income taxes. It’s only natural that increased tax rates will prompt more people to leave the Empire State; nobody likes paying taxes or wants to have more of their money taken away. Even the super rich.

This will hurt the entire state, which will lose not only residents, but also their wealth, spending, investment, and businesses (aka jobs).

Ironically, the tax increase may not even raise the $1.5 billion in revenue that Cuomo hopes. Sometimes, an increase in income tax rates can actually decrease income-generating activity so much that overall tax revenues fall. This was the famous insight of economist Art Laffer, who served on Ronald Reagan’s board of economic advisors. We can’t know for sure whether it would apply here—taxes always disincentivize income earning, but only sometimes result in less tax revenue—but it’s certainly cause to be skeptical of Governor Cuomo’s revenue projections.

However, Governor Cuomo’s backward policy proposal has implications that reach much wider than just New York state and its most successful citizens. It’s another reminder that when it comes to government policy, incentives matter.

“Our economic verities have remained forever,” Laffer once explained. “They go back to caveman, pre-cavemen. Incentives matter: If you reward an activity, then people do more of it. If you punish an activity, people do less of it.”

This is why progressives often promote cigarette taxes or carbon taxes. They, at least in this setting, acknowledge that taxing something naturally discourages its consumption and production—you get less of it. Why does anyone want to do that for income?

The timeless economic reality of incentives doesn’t just call Cuomo’s tax hike on high earners into question. It ought to make us reconsider whether we should be punishing wealth-creation through taxing income at all.

COLUMN BY

Brad Polumbo

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a libertarian-conservative journalist and Opinion Editor at the Foundation for Economic Education.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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FORMER REP. BOB BARR: ‘The Dumbest Generation’ Grows Even Dumber

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In 2008, Mark Bauerlein wrote “The Dumbest Generation, How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.” Judging by events in the intervening dozen years (and especially in recent months), it appears that assessment was premature and perhaps even too kind.

Bauerlein correctly identified overreliance on the internet and social media (then still in its infancy) as the primary culprits for Millennials losing their ability to think, learn and communicate coherently. What his analysis perhaps did not anticipate is the number of adults who have come to encourage, empower and support Millennials in these efforts. It is almost as if adults in government, the news media and academia are competing with Millennials for the title.

Consider, for example, the issue of providing college students with “safe spaces,” where they can shelter from the horrors of people, ideas and principles they consider “offensive.” The students may be the ones pushing for these accommodations, but it is the adult college administrators who cave in and make it happen.

Young protesters in Seattle may “occupy” a sector of that once-respected city; they may scream “police brutality” and call for the police department to be “defunded.” Their  demands, however, would amount to little were it not for the city’s clueless Mayor Jenny Durken, who lauded the young occupiers as “patriots,” and her namby-pamby police chief, Carmen Best, who decided that barricades which had protected one of her department’s precinct headquarters should be removed as a “gesture of trust” to the mob.

While adult elected enablers of today’s young mobs predominate in west coast cities such as Portland, Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles, counterparts are found across the country. New York’s dynamic duo of Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio repeatedly praise and encourage the demonstrators, even as they offer virtually no support for police who are left to deal with the looting, arson and violence in the streets. Meanwhile, Cuomo’s narcissistic brother, CNN commentator Chris Cuomo, muses on air that protesters need not be either polite or peaceful.

On the ground in Seattle’s mob-occupied zone, a collegiate-type “safe space” was set aside, but only for individuals with “black ancestry” or who “have experienced oppression because [they] are black.” In an interesting role-reversal, news reports noted that this open-air “Black Healing Space” was enforced against non-black interlopers by young whites.

The profound historical and cultural illiteracy of these young mobs repeatedly is confirmed by actions such as their indiscriminate destruction of public statues simply because they are, well, public statues. Reasoning with demonstrators who have shown themselves incapable of distinguishing between statues of musicians like Stevie Ray Vaughan and those memorializing Confederate civil war generals would be an obvious waste of time.

In Lincoln County, Oregon, officials decreed that black Americans do not have to wear medical masks otherwise required for all citizens, because requiring African Americans to do so would in some way perpetuate “racial stereotypes.” Truly, there would be little point in arguing with adults spouting such nonsense; they have thrown in with the children.

The depth to which these “adult Millennials” and their “true Millennial” cohorts have descended in their drive to protect themselves (and our country) from reality, is perhaps most clearly illustrated by the wrath just recently directed against “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling.

Rowling’s “sin” was to publicly explain that only biological women menstruate, not men who had “transgendered” to women. Adult detractors were not only angered by Rowling’s refusal to kowtow to the New Age gender orthodoxy; they reportedly were deeply “devastated” by the horror of her words.

One such person is a teacher at the highly regarded Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Devin Michelle Bunten. Ms. Bunten penned a New York Times op-ed declaring that people, like Rowling and President Trump, who employ terms such as “male” and “female” are “erasing” transgendered individuals and simply perpetuating what she considers our disgraceful social “patriarchy.”

With adult teachers at institutions of higher learning like MIT spouting such nonsense, it is hardly surprising we have now two generations of illiterate snowflakes who cannot distinguish between Stevie Ray Vaughan and Stonewall Jackson.

COLUMN BY

FORMER REP. BOB BARR

Bob Barr represented Georgia’s 7th District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003 and served as the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia from 1986 to 1990.  He now serves as President of the Law Enforcement Education Foundation based in Atlanta, Georgia.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

VIDEO: Completely Mental. Touched. Off his rocker. Out to lunch.

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TRANSCRIPT

New Yorkers have a local expression, “That guy’s mental” — as in, “Hey, Louie’s mental.” It’s not a compliment. It means pretty much what it sounds like, that there’s something wrong upstairs.

Well, for the record, Cardinal Dolan’s mental. His reaction and media comments following Governor Cuomo signing the new state abortion law reveals some serious issues upstairs with His Eminence.

He says Cuomo shouldn’t be excommunicated because it would be giving ammo to the enemy — that the Left would seize on the excommunication and portray Cuomo in a sympathetic light. Yeah, they probably would — so what? Is that worse than allowing the world to think — or actually realize — that U.S. bishops are lily-livered cowards when it comes to the hard truths.

Dolan claims it would be counter-productive. What a stupid analysis; counter-productive to what, exactly? What’s counter-productive is letting the world think leaders in the Church don’t think this is a big deal, and what’s worse, other Catholics think it’s not a big deal.

But then again, based on decades of inaction, the world already thinks that. So here’s an opportunity to actually begin to turn things around and set the record straight. The reality is Dolan is an emasculated wimp who looks for excuses to avoid teaching Church teaching.

For example, when he was on FOX & Friends answering questions from the hosts about all this, FOX actually took down and edited out part of the live interview where Dolan simply got it wrong about Church teaching.

He said, in sum, that those involved in an abortion are not excommunicated, in direct defiance of existing canon law. Here’s the exchange:

Steve Doocy: “Have the rules changed inside the Catholic Church, because it used to be pretty black and white about ‘yes, no,’ now you’re saying, ‘Come back.'”

Cardinal Dolan: “Yes, you would say, yeah, you would say that it used to be pretty, pretty clean that an abortion would cause the excommunication not only of the one who did it, people who encourage it and the one who had it. The Church, in the last 50 years, beginning with Pope John Paul II and especially intensified under Pope Francis, has said, ‘I don’t know if that’s Gospel values here’ because mercy trumps everything.”

And this is where we can freely say: Dolan’s mental.

What he said is simply incorrect. Here is canon law — existing, on the books right now — canon law 1398: “A person who procures a completed abortion incurs a latae sententiae excommunication” — meaning, kill the unborn baby and you are automatically excommunicated as well as the “doctor” other personnel and friends or family who conspired in the killing.

Sorry, Cardinal Dolan, you’re wrong — flat out wrong. There are exceptions to the canon — for example, someone physically forced against her will, or a child, but those are exceptions. The rule is the rule, and Dolan seems to have no knowledge of it. And he doesn’t get to say unchallenged that “oh, we are more merciful than that now.”

First of all, that’s wrong, so either he is flat out lying, which can’t be taken off the table, or he is woeful, this prince of the Church, woefully malformed in what the Church actually teaches. Neither option is good.

Secondly, the implication is that for the past 2,000 years the Church has been unmerciful. After all, in a first-century teaching manual — 1900 years old — the Didache, willful abortion incurred expulsion from the sacraments for 10 years.

The Didache was the first recorded teachings of the Apostles themselves. So Dolan says the Apostles were unmerciful. The man is flat out mental. And then, he writes an opinion article in the New York Post where he asks the question, “Why are Cuomo and Democrats alienating Catholics?” — again proving he’s gone completely mental.

The answer, Your Eminence, is because you and so many of your worldly emasculated brethren in the episcopate have been so busy watering down the Faith and confusing them that there aren’t really that many of them left.

Cuomo, being a prime example of that, has done the political calculus and the answer is they don’t give a rip about alienating Catholics because there are so few left that they make no difference at the polls in New York as well as many other places.

Secondly, Dolan and the rest of his mental crowd are the ones who actually helped get these guys elected and keep them elected by their constant sucking up to them and wanting to be seen in pictures with them and rubbing elbows with them and hobnobbing. It’s disgusting. Have some dignity for the love of God. Know your office.

For 10 years in New York, Dolan has been on a PR tour of the local media with his stupid bombastic laugh and “aw shucks” fake persona, thinking he could somehow charm people into believing the truth.

Dolan is viewed as a huckster, a snake oil salesman or a bad used car dude who has nothing to sell that anyone is interested in.

But he has had the prestige of his office — which has eroded tremendously under the weight of his reign — which still has another five years to go — talk about people needing mercy; resign already.

And because of his office, the media love to play him and follow him around and put his picture on the papers; and being mental, he’s believed all of that is good and helpful to the Faith. It reinforces his own bloated self-importance, which is the butt of jokes behind his back.

But — and this is the problem when someone is mental — they don’t understand the world around them. They aren’t plugged in because they lack the capacity to understand the obvious.

Dolan is 0 for 4 in his political dealings. He has been played and used in every political cause he has gone after. First, he lost — if he ever really cared about it — the gay marriage fight in the state back in 2011.

Second, he lost the state funding for Catholic education initiative, something lawmakers, including Cuomo, were never going to give him. And for that deal, he allowed gays into the St. Patrick’s Day parade — and they stabbed him in the back anyway.

Dance with the devil and, well, you know what happens.

Next, Dolan and the gang claiming to care about the abortion law, and he loses that in staggering fashion — unanimous vote in the New York state senate and almost unanimous vote in the state assembly.

And then the fourth “rock his world” defeat is the new law extending the statute of limitations for suing the Church for all their sodomite priests raping altar boys — which they deserve.

Dolan is completely mental, and the reason he is is because he long ago gave up the only job he is supposed to be doing: defending souls. He has been a boy in a man’s game with New York’s Killer Catholic politicos, and they have chopped him to pieces.

Dolan is owned by Cuomo, so much so that Dolan believes the teachings of the Church have changed — completely mental.

EDITORS NOTE: This Church Militant column with video and images is republished with permission.