Sunday 29th of June 2025
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gotham goes up and down the tube.....

I was born and raised in Maryland, which is a pleasant way to be, but I’ll happily admit that New York is the center of gravity for my way of thinking. My father’s family was from the outer boroughs, and the city—New York, that is, unless you say it with capital letters, The City, which only ever means Manhattan—has been the distant background for me since my childhood in the DC suburbs. I lived in the city while I was in grad school and still try to make it back when I can. It’s a fine place.

 

The Great Mamdani Freakout

BY Jude Russo

 

So it always depresses me to see the city going down the tubes—something it admittedly does from time to time, without lasting ill effect, but still no fun in the interim. The last time the city went down the tubes was the mayoralty of the weird, hateful Clinton crony Bill de Blasio (whom, I hasten to note, was notactually Italian, but adopted from a family of German extraction). De Blasio was an ideal study in how to be a bad mayor. 

A New York mayor has to do only four things well to be considered a winner: don’t mess with the public schools; keep the subway basically safe and in basically good repair; support the police as they crack down on sickos and crooks, even when that entails a little light brutality; and keep the city solvent. De Blasio, who was the most hated mayor of my own lifetime, did the opposite of all those things. He introduced race-based admissions to the city’s magnet schools; the subway got so bad the state took it over from the city; the police were discouraged from doing anything about street-level disorder; and he strained the city’s fisc with novel, budget-busting welfare programs like universal pre-K. In addition to all this, de Blasio was a titanically off-putting weirdo who had come to power basically thanks to his longtime connection to the Clinton machine. No wonder New Yorkers hated the bum.

 

De Blasio was followed by the current Hizzoner, Eric Adams, who is running for reelection as an independent. Adams is also extremely weird. He swore an oath to get an ear-piercing if he won the mayoralty, which he fulfilled on camera; he is a vegetarian; he is a single gentleman who is no stranger to the club; he has a distinctive rhetorical style that is—well, you have to see it to understand it. On the other hand, he reversed de Blasio’s school wokeness, has backed the cops (he’s a former police captain), and generally has gone about the business of being a C+ mayor. The fact that he was sort-of, kind-of accepting bribes from the Turkish government in a federally prosecutable way cannot diminish Hizzoner’s success qua mayor. 

So anyway, New York’s cretinous, washed-up former governor, Andrew Cuomo, tried to take advantage of Hizzoner’s late difficulties to make a comeback as the Democratic nominee for the mayoralty (who invariably wins against the perennial Republican candidate, Curtis Sliwa, a kindhearted eccentric who runs a neighborhood watch group that wears red berets). The problem is that everyone—including normal, cynical New Yorkers who work for moving companies or accounting firms or the MTA—hates Cuomo, so he lost. He lost to the embarrassingly dated, 2018-style “scumbag left” tribute act Zohran Mamdani, a Ugandan-born Muslim of Indian extraction who supports rent control, LGBT rights, state-owned and -operated grocery stores, and all that jazz. Indeed, Mamdani seems in large part to define himself by opposing the Four-Point Way for mayors laid out above. So much more the humiliation for Cuomo.

What next for Gotham? Well, Cuomo can run again as an independent against Mamdani alongside Adams, although reporting has it that he is unwilling to repeat the ordeal; the polling suggests that Cuomo would functionally tie with Mamdani, Adams in the third position. If Cuomo does not run, polling suggests that Mamdani will clobber Adams—I am actually skeptical of that, but the numbers are the numbers. If Adams withdraws and Cuomo runs in the general, polling suggests he’d beat Mamdani pretty thoroughly. Of course, poor, noble Sliwa’s quixotic Republican campaign hasn’t a chance.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-great-mamdani-freakout/

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

blows....

 

Joe Lauria

Three blows against Zionism in a single day

 

The impunity with which Zionism invades and bombs its neighbors and shuts up its critics in Western nations was thrown into question perhaps as never before on Tuesday as Zionism suffered a legal, a political and a military defeat all in one day. 

A Military Defeat in the Morning

On Tuesday morning Washington time, President Donald Trump announced that Israel and Iran had agreed to a cessation of hostilities after an 11-day war that saw Israel seriously deplete its air defenses, undermine its economy and suffer the worst damage from enemy fire in memory.  

A war that Israel — and especially its prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu — had lusted after for three decades had finally been launched. Netanyahu at last found an American president willing to join him in unprovoked aggression against Iran to extend Israel’s regional dominance well beyond the Jordan River. 

That would require the destruction of Iran’s nuclear enrichment program and the overthrow of the Iranian government to be replaced by a puppet regime led by Israel and the United States.  

Instead, Israel had to cut short the operation despite U.S. involvement because it was not going to plan.  U.S. intelligence says the so-far merely civilian nuclear program was only set back a few months and the Iranian government has never been made more secure.

As it touts itself as the most invincible (and “moral”) army, the failure to achieve its goals in Iran and the physical damage it took from Iranian missile and drone attacks makes what just transpired a humiliating military defeat for Zionism. 

And though U.S. presidents have privately groused about Israeli leaders before, never has Israel been cursed out before in public by a president, as Trump did on Tuesday morning.

A Legal Defeat in the Evening

Then at 8:15 pm Tuesday, U.S. East Coast time (10:15 am Wednesday in Australia), a federal judge in Sydney found the courage to stand up to the organized thuggery of Zionist lobbies by ruling that the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) had succumbed to intense pressure from Israel lobbyists to sack a radio presenter because she shared an instagram post from Human Rights Watch which accurately reported that Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war. 

That is the exact charge formally leveled in Netanyahu’s arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC). The Australian judge ruled that the presenter, Antoinette Lattouf, was wrongly dismissed and that the ABC must pay her restitution.

Judge Daryl Rangiah said the ABC had “appease[d] … pro-Israel lobbyists” because Lattouf “held political opinions opposing the Israeli military campaign in Gaza.” Rangiah said that “the complaints [to the ABC] were an orchestrated campaign by pro-Israel lobbyists to have Ms Lattouf taken off air.”

ABC managing director Hugh Marks apologized to the public on air, saying, “Any undue influence or pressure on ABC management or any of its employees must always be guarded against.”

It was a major setback for a powerful Israel Lobby in a Western nation. These lobbies have been untouchable until now no matter what underhanded tactics they employ to create cover for genocide and wars of aggression by smearing and silencing legitimate critics of Israel. 

A Political Defeat in the Night

Still on Tuesday, at around 11 pm in New York City, a Muslim politician who has vowed to arrest Netanyahu based on the ICC warrant if he steps foot in the city while he is mayor, defeated a Democratic Party machine politician in the party’s primary election for mayor. 

Despite being repeatedly smeared as an anti-semite, Zohran Mamdani has refused to renounce his strong support for Palestinians, including refusing to retract his labelling of Israel’s war on Gaza “genocide.”

Mamdani’s electoral victory has incensed Zionists everywhere, setting off gnashing of teeth. “NY Democrats have fully embraced Marxism, antisemitism, anti-capitalism, and sheer insanity,” said fanatical Zionist Congresswoman Elise Stefanik. U.S. Rep. Mike Lawler called Mamdani “a radical, antisemitic socialist.”

The election result shows that a sizeable number of voters in the city with the largest population of Jews after Tel Aviv don’t care anymore about the taboos constructed and enforced against criticizing Israel.  Israel has their live-streamed genocide to thank for that. 

A Beginning, Not an End

Anyone of these events alone would signify a momentous turning of the tide against decades of built-up injustice committed by Israel and its lobby. The baseless smears of anti-semitism are losing their effect. The image of an all-powerful Israeli military is tarnished. 

June 24, 2025 may be seen as the day in which fear of Israel was overcome on a scale not seen before. There is a long road ahead filled with enormous obstacles, but this day could usher in an era in which Israel and its enablers are at last held accountable for their many crimes. 

Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange. 

 

https://consortiumnews.com/2025/06/26/three-blows-against-zionism-in-a-single-day/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=14b28a9e-2bfc-4685-ac2b-7b8d4dd8491b

 

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.