Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa will officially launch his long-anticipated bid for the Republican nomination for mayor on Monday morning, his campaign said.
Sliwa plans to use the appearance outside Penn Station on Monday to call on all other mayoral candidates to sign onto a letter demanding Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s immediate resignation.
Sliwa, who registered as a mayoral candidate on Feb. 17, plans to run on a slogan of “Save our City,” the campaign said.
His platform will include the reversal of budget cuts enacted against the NYPD in the aftermath of anti-cop protests last year.
Other campaign priorities include “cleaning up the subway, and bringing businesses and tourism back to New York,” a release said.
Sliwa launched the crime-fighting Guardian Angels group 40 years ago to patrol the subways and the streets in the days when Gotham was overrun by crime.
He told The Post last year that he worries those dark days are rearing back.
“It took us a long time to crawl out of the belly of the beast of the 1970s through 1990s. Bill de Blasio and the Democrats are bringing us back in,” he said at the time.
The longtime New York City fixture and WABC talk-radio host has the backing of the Staten Island Republican Party and Brooklyn GOP, but won’t face an easy primary: The Queens, Bronx and Manhattan GOP committees have all endorsed opponent Fernando Mateo, an advocate for taxis and bodegas.
Financier Sara Tirschwell is also competing for the GOP nod.
The title of this article may sound dramatic, but it’s sadly and terrifyingly accurate. The fact is that New York City is now at a point where we’re either going to make some kind of change in how our government is run, or we’re going to continue our rapid slide into bankruptcy, lawlessness, and despair. This is a hard truth everyone needs to come to terms with.
The de Blasio era has been catastrophic for NYC, there’s no denying that. We have seen our economy destroyed, skyrocketing homelessness, open hostility to small business and homeowners, and a crime rate that has spun completely out of control. And all these trends were firmly in place before COVID hit.
Post-COVID, our single-party government took a difficult situation and turned it into a generational tragedy. The incompetence, ignorance, and naked malevolence of de Blasio, Cuomo, and our ruling party was on full display. They immediately and enthusiastically used the excuse of COVID to claim extraordinary dictatorial powers over our lives, and then used those powers to make everything worse. We’ve seen riots, looting, murder, and the total unplugging of our economy. Meanwhile ordinary citizens who resisted these destructive policies were targeted for prosecution, even as the doors of our prisons were swung open to release violent criminals back onto our streets scot-free.
New York is now hemorrhaging jobs, money, and taxpayers as citizens wake up to the fact that red states like Florida and Texas could be better options for people seeking a life of prosperity, security, and liberty. Needless to say, this is unsustainable for our city and our community.
We have one final chance to begin the hard work of turning things around. Our local elections in 2021 will quite literally determine whether our city returns to its former glory, or if we become another Portland, Seattle, or San Francisco — a once great city, now wracked with nightly riots, homelessness and drugs, and utterly paralyzed with corrupt single-party authoritarian rule by a bizarre quasi-religious progressive cult too obsessed with malignant identity politics and hatred of western civilization to solve even the most basic of municipal issues.
This is not an exaggeration. This is the choice we face. That’s where we’re headed. And I’m running for City Council along with other great candidates like Curtis Sliwa for Mayor to help bring about the change we all so desperately need.
It won’t be easy, and it won’t happen overnight. We have a lot of work to do, and we expect a fight every step of the way.
The GOP may not ever be a majority party in New York City — at least not anytime soon — but even relatively modest success in 2021 will be massively significant in the direction this city takes, in terms of desperately needed police funding, crime prevention, economic development, and tax relief for small businesses and homeowners. We must break the monopoly. I hope you’ll join me in our fight.
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Vickie Paladino is a Republican candidate for New York City Council, CD #19, and President of the Whitestone Republican Club.
Editor’s Note: This is syndicated columnist Robert Golomb’s latest column as published in the news and media outlet, The Published Reporter
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announcing updates on the spread of the coronavirus during a news conference at the state Capitol. Albany, New York, March 15, 2020. Photo credit: Hans Pennink / Shutterstock.com, licensed.
QUEENS VILLAGE, NY – The reason that Mickey King can name every Governor of New York State starting from Thomas Dewey, the state’s 44th chief executive who served from 1943- 1954, up until the current Governor Andrew Cuomo, the state’s 56th leader who has served from 2011 to the present, is that the names of every one out of the total of 12 appears on the 75 year old guest book list of Antun’s- an iconic Queens catering hall founded in 1945 by its eponymous owner, Frank Antun, and bought by Mickey’s father Joe in 1996.
“Right here in our guest books are the names of 12 governors who have attended at least one event at Antun’s,” said King the long-time chief operating officer and the current president of this tightly knit family business, at the start of a recent interview with me.
As any serious student of New York State government would know, the 10 former governors whose names can be found in between the appellations of Dewey and Cuomo on the thousands of pages of Antun’s guest books are Averell Harriman, Nelson Rockefeller, Malcolm Wilson, Hugh Carey, Mario Cuomo, George Pataki, Eliot Spitzer and David Patterson.
At Antun’s, right to left: Joe King, US Attorney General William Barr, Mickey King, Police Commissioner Dermot Shea. Photo credit: Mickey King.
I was not surprised, as you will soon discover why, that it was the 56th Governor, Andrew Cuomo, whom King, 40, the married father of two young children, wanted to discuss. “I had met Governor Cuomo at several past events at Antun’s… He seemed pleasant, and I respected the job he was doing as governor,” stated King.
Beginning, though, shortly after the COVID epidemic struck the world in February 2020, King explained that his respect for Cuomo descended into the deepest level of contempt.
“By issuing edicts that totally closed restaurants down and later edicts that reduced capacity to a mere 25%, Governor Cuomo has declared war against the entire hospitality industry, which includes restaurants, bars, hotels and catering halls, employing in total approximately 900,000 women and men, pre-COVID,” King charged.
Noting that since last March more than 1300 restaurants and bars in NYC alone have permanently closed, leaving more than 160,000 people unemployed, King elaborated,
“The sight of goodbye messages on so many bar and restaurant doors thanking customers for their many years of patronage tells the tragic story of so many hardworking owners and employees who have been the victims of Andrew Cuomo’s arbitrary and non-scientific based policies.”
While calling Cuomo’s policies “arbitrary and non-scientific” might sound hyperbolic, King offered strong evidence to support that accusation. Citing data from independent research on the reported transmission of COVID showing that only 1.3% of new COVID infections can be traced to restaurants and bars, King stated,
“It’s a cruel joke for the governor to say that his severe restrictions are based on science. Rather, research proves that the opposite is the case. “The reason,” King then added, “that catering halls are not included in that data is because of Cuomo, they have not been able to do enough business to be statistically relevant to be included in those studies.”
Referring to the same studies, King noted that 74% of new COVID infections come from private in-home gatherings.
“It’s as if the governor is too busy praising himself on TV, including his narcissistic seemingly nightly guest shots on his brother’s show, and spending countless hours writing a self-praise book, that he doesn’t have the time to read the actual studies and base his policies on them,” he charged.
King elaborated that he sees a deadly cause and effect connection between the governor’s edicts restricting the guest capacity of bars, restaurants, hotels and catering halls and the alarming spread of COVID at large private home gatherings.
“Because people are not allowed to hold group social events at previously commonly frequented dining venues, which have meticulously followed all state mandated safety protocols, many people instead held the gatherings at their own homes, which, of course, are unsupervised,” stated King.
“The result,” he inferred, “has been a mammoth increase in the comparative rate of infection. For that, just as in the deaths of more than 12,000 seniors in nursing homes, Governor Cuomo must be held accountable.’’
King actually is doing just that. In addition to running Antun’s, he has served for the past seven years on the board of the New York State Restaurant Association, which has vociferously opposed many of Cuomo’s COVID related restrictions on the state’s hospitality industry.
“I first became involved with the association with the goal of helping them continue serving the then prosperous and growing hospitality industry,” King recalled. “But now, because of Cuomo’s war against the entire industry, our job has solely become to prevent him from causing even further damage.”
A wedding ceremony at Antun’s pre-covid. Photo credit: Mickey King.
Still, King explained that even with “Cuomo’s war against the entire industry,” his own Antun’s has remained in business, but not without him and many of his former staff suffering great financial loss.
“We have,” he stated, “managed to remain in business. But it has been a great struggle. What has made it particularly difficult for us and other catering halls is Cuomo’s arbitrary and onerous rules from banning dancing, to limiting the maximum guest capacity to 150 – we by the way previously had a 1200 person maximum – to mandating that all events end no later than 11pm.”
“As a result of these and other onerous Cuomo regulations,” King continued, “We are doing only 9% of the pre-Covid business. And at the same time, our monthly overhead has remained the same, our taxes are still due to the city and state, and if they are not paid on time we face a 20% penalty. What troubles me most, though, is the plight of the more than one hundred of our employees whom we were forced to let go under these dire circumstances.”
King added that he is also troubled about the numerous restaurants, bars and catering halls owned by his counterparts in Queens that have closed this past year.
“There had always been enough business to keep us all very busy. So I have never considered the owners of businesses in the [hospitality] industry in Queens as competitors, but rather as peers and friends. So seeing so many for ‘rent signs’ on the windows of the dining establishments of my friends is very hard for me to accept. And for that I blame our governor,” said King.
It would be reasonable, I believe, to conclude that King is hoping that come the state’s gubernatorial election in November 2022, that “our governor” will be replaced with one far more to the liking of King, his fellow entrepreneurs in the hospitality industry and the tens of thousands of the men and women whom they once employed.
Robert Golomb is a nationally and internationally syndicated columnist. His work has appeared in The South Asian Times, The Epoch Times, The Long Island Jewish World group of papers, the Muslim Community Report, the Messenger and more. You can email him at MrBob347@aol.com.
Venue Moved To Sunshine State In Support Of Commonsense Leadership By DeSantis
By Alan Bergstein , Feb 22, 2021, as published in the news and media outlet, The Published Reporter
Donald Trump speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). National Harbor, MD, March 6, 2014. Editorial credit: Christopher Halloran / Shutterstock.com, licensed.
BOCA RATON, FL – Former President Donald Trump, fervent Israel supporter and defender of our Constitution, will speak, next week, at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), to be held, for the first time out of D.C., and in Orlando Florida. CPAC is the largest and most influential gathering of conservatives in the world. This yearly event brings together hundreds of conservative organizations, thousands of activists and untold millions of viewers to see, mingle with and hear the brightest leaders of the world expound on issues that impact all of us, liberals, progressives and conservatives. In addition to the move of the venue to Florida, obviously, as a thumb in the eye to the radical leadership of D.C. and its environs, Matt Schlapp, the group’s president declared it was in support of the Sunshine State’s Governor Ron DeSantis for his commonsense leadership.
“Florida has kept its economy, schools, and churches open – while balancing the health and safety of Floridians,” making it “the right state to host CPAC 2021.”
Our own fellow New Yorkers must look with envy at the moral and civic leadership of DeSantis compared to the ineptitude of their criminal, murderous, governor.
Trump, who lives just a few hours drive south of Orlando, will surely discuss the future of his own Republican Party which sadly is now in a bit of internal disarray. It’s also a good bet that he’ll focus on President Biden’s horrid, dangerous amnesty and border policy. Our nation, that is, those of us with some solid matter between our ears, are preparing for the worst news out of puppet-Biden’s mouth relating to his recent pleadings with Iran to come back to the “bargaining table” to make outrageous demands that we will surely fulfill. Such as removing all of Trump’s economic, diplomatic and military sanctions and the immediate thumbs-up for that terrorist-supporting state to complete its nuclear ambitions. And most probably, with a strong arm wielded by the radical House member, Ilahn Omar and her growing crew of Progressive Jew haters, Joe will ignore the real threats by the Mullahs to incinerate the Jewish State. Biden’s staff of former Obama honchos, now controlling the White House are preparing the much feared “kiss Iran’s butt” script for Biden to blindly follow. And he will mindlessly do as directed. And don’t forget the tidal wave of hatred directed against all White people by radical blacks and mimicked by their robot-like progressive, dumb-as-dirt liberal, Democrat White lemmings. We want to hear Trump’s ideas and plans of actions to counter, educate and lead us regarding these dangerous moves and currents now imperiling us all.
Most assuredly, the Progressive politicos and their first line of defense, the mainstream media, will predictably bleat that a former president should disappear into retirement, not get involved with issues relating to his successor and should keep his mouth shut. Of course, the four years of string pulling and blueprinting by non-stop, by ex-President Obama are routinely omitted from their commentary. Trump, who has not appeared at any major event since January 20th will speak on the last day of the event, on Sunday, February 28th. Tune in. Listen. Be motivated and keep the faith. We wish him and his beautiful family the best.
Alan Bergstein is the current President of The Judeo/Christian Republican Club of Palm Beach County. He is also known as a lecturer, columnist and editorial writer for The NY Jewish Voice, a retired NYC school principal, father of four and Korean War veteran. Alan’s material appears in The Published Reporter® with his explicit permission.
Alan Bergstein