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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; de blasio</title>
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		<title>Frontpage&#8217;s 2014 Person of the Year: The American Police Officer</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/frontpages-2014-person-of-the-year-the-american-police-officer-1-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=frontpages-2014-person-of-the-year-the-american-police-officer-1-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 26 Dec 2014 05:59:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=248229</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The soldier of civilization fighting to keep it alive.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/nypd2.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-248045" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/nypd2-450x300.jpg" alt="nypd2" width="306" height="204" /></a>As we sit here in our homes with our families and loved ones around us, tens of thousands of children wonder if their parents will come home tonight.</p>
<p>Their fathers and mothers aren’t stationed in Iraq or Afghanistan. They’re on duty in places like Englewood in Chicago where there are <a href="http://crime.chicagotribune.com/chicago/community/englewood">2 violent crimes for every 1,000</a> people in one month, Columbus Square in St. Louis or Bedford-Stuyvesant in New York City where two police officers were just murdered.</p>
<p>The men and women of law enforcement are on the front lines of the war at home. From the mugger on the block to the terrorist on the hijacked plane, they are the first ones there.</p>
<p>41 law enforcement officers were shot and killed in 2014. That’s in line with the number of Americans killed by hostile fire in Afghanistan. There’s a reason that Chicago has been nicknamed Chiraq. Some parts of the country are a war zone and after the latest shooting of two police officers in New York City, a statement circulating among cops states that the NYPD has become a “wartime police department.”</p>
<p>The war at home has been going on for a long time and by some accounts has claimed the lives of 20,000 law enforcement officers. Since 2001, more than 700 officers have been killed by gunfire. During the Gulf War, more officers were killed on the streets of American cities than in combat against Saddam.</p>
<p>Even as the murders of NYPD cops Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu fill the news, <a href="http://www.odmp.org/officer/22311-police-officer-charles-kondek">Officer Charlie Kondek has been shot</a> while pursuing a suspect in Tarpon Springs, Florida.</p>
<p>Officer Kondek had been a former member of the NYPD. He leaves behind five children. His killer, Marco Antonio Parilla Jr, had been repeatedly arrested for the possession and sale of cocaine before being released just this August. Officer Kondek and his children paid the ultimate price for his release.</p>
<p>All three police officers were casualties in the war against human evil that never ends. It’s an even dirtier and more unglamorous war than Iraq or Afghanistan. And police officers are hated in a way that it’s still socially unacceptable to hate soldiers. Ramos and Liu were the latest casualties of that hatred.</p>
<p>The police officer is the handyman of the welfare state. His job is to put his life on the line to plug the social leaks that the sociologists, consultants and social planners who made this mess had not foreseen. It’s his job to be there for a domestic violence complaint in a Florida motel at two in the morning or a failure of multiculturalism between two warring gangs in Oakland. He goes to places that the politicians don’t like to think about and deals with issues that the welfare state created and walked away from.</p>
<p>Progressives don’t believe in evil. It’s the beat cop who has to believe in it and clean it up.</p>
<p>The planners and politicians who allocate funds for new housing projects don’t have to patrol them at night. They don’t have to walk down a narrow concrete block hallway lined with dirty doors any of which can open at any minute with a gun behind it. The drug sentencing reformers have never had to carry a deranged screaming figure through the rusting doors of an emergency room. They have never had to get their soft shoes dirty walking through puddles of blood in an alleyway.</p>
<p>When liberalism fails, it’s the cop who gets the call. And when he does get the call, it’s the liberals who will be the first to call for his head.</p>
<p>It’s not enough that the cop has to clean up for the welfare state. He also has to be its scapegoat.</p>
<p>The chants of “Black lives matter” aren’t aimed at the gangs and drug dealers who rack up an astronomical number of black deaths; it’s aimed at the cops who put their lives on the line saving black lives. It’s the very people whose messes they clean up who hate them the most.</p>
<p>The police officer has come to embody America, abroad and at home, the nation that risks its lives to free peoples only to be despised for it, the nation that extends every benefit and privilege to its own criminals only to be shot and stabbed, raped and robbed for its endless generosity.</p>
<p>The American police officer was never supposed to be venturing into neighborhoods where no one speaks English and the locals see him as a member of an occupying army or patrolling in communities where gang members number in the thousands and could take down the entire local police force.</p>
<p>He was never supposed to be a social worker, a mediator, a medic and the commander of an invading army negotiating truces and treaties with the local tribes. And yet he is expected to be all these things and more. Every time he goes out he knows that he may face a choice between his life and his career.</p>
<p>If cops seem touchy, isolated or out of control it’s because they have been left hanging by a system that uses them to dam up the breakdown of a society without ever acknowledging that this is their job. Many urban police officers operate in environments where crime is not an aberration, but the norm. Like the American soldier, the police officer is better trained and more effective than ever before, but like the soldier he is also haunted by the sense that his work and his sacrifices are futile and unappreciated.</p>
<p>The police officer isn’t spending years in Iraq or Afghanistan; he’s spending decades in Chiraq. When his time ends, there will be no victory parades. Just the knowledge that he tried to make a difference and that unlike many brother officers, at least he made it to retirement.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.youcaring.com/memorial-fundraiser/remembering-daryl-pierson/228970">Officer Daryl Pierson was shot</a> and killed leaving behind a wife and two young children. Pierson had been an experienced officer. His killer, Thomas Johnson III, had been paroled after serving three years for an attempted armed robbery.</p>
<p>Officer Justin Winebrenner tried to get Kenan Ivery to leave a bar. Ivery drew a gun and shot and killed him. Officer Winebrenner was a second generation police officer. He left behind a 4-year-old daughter.</p>
<p>Officer Perry Renn responded to shots being fired and encountered Major Davis Jr. who was carrying a semi-automatic rifle. Davis Jr. had an extensive criminal record. He fired killing Officer Renn who had survived twenty-two years on the force.</p>
<p>Patrolman Jeffery Westerfield responded to a fight between Carl Le&#8217;Ellis Blount Jr. and his girlfriend. He never even got a chance to draw his gun or leave his squad car before Blount shot him in the head.</p>
<p>Deputy Sheriff Allen Bares was off duty when he saw a gold Lexus crash into a ditch. He approached the vehicle and was shot and killed. The two men inside, Quintylan Richard and Baylon Taylor, stole his truck and took off.</p>
<p>The police officers in all these cases were white. Their killers were black. But the police officers in many of these cases were trying to protect black people and black communities.</p>
<p>The killings all took place in a matter of months in 2014. And their numbers will only continue to grow.</p>
<p>While the wars abroad expand or contract, this is the war that will go on. Its soldiers will serve their tours of duty for decades on the streets of our own cities without having anywhere else to go home to. And when their time is up, they will never receive the thanks that they deserve because most of us will never understand the difference that they made.</p>
<p>When the left took over, it was the police officer who kept everything from going under in our major cities. It was not the politician or the planner, the sociologist or the social worker who kept the crime and chaos from sweeping everything away. It was the man in blue who did what had to be done.</p>
<p>Under Obama, when the criminal is king and the progressive planners are changing the country in ways unprecedented since the seventies, it’s still the lonely figure in the squad car that does his duty and holds the line in a thousand dark and dirty neighborhoods where gunshots and screams sound in the night. The American police officer has become the soldier of civilization fighting to keep it alive.</p>
<p>And somewhere a family wonders if their father or mother will come home tonight.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>Support Heroic Police Officers</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronn-torossian/support-heroic-police-officers/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=support-heroic-police-officers</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronn-torossian/support-heroic-police-officers/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 29 Aug 2014 04:36:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronn Torossian]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Crime]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=239761</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[New York City returns to the bad old days. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/NYPD.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-239762" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/NYPD-450x337.jpg" alt="NYPD" width="320" height="240" /></a>Police nationwide are feeling unsupported by elected officials and government – and that is simply awful and terrible. Nationwide, in the great United States of America, thanks should be constant to heroic police officers who risk their lives to keep us safe.</p>
<p>In America’s biggest city, <a href="http://observer.com/author/ronn-torossian/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">New York City</span></a>, Mayor Bill de Blasio has not been supportive of the police department.  As Sergeant Ed Mullins, President of the Sergeants Benevolent Association (SBA) of the NYPD said this week when calling for the 2016 Democratic National Convention to not come to New York City,</p>
<blockquote><p>The Mayor has provided a public platform to the loudest of the city’s anti-safety agitators, instead of giving voice to the millions of <a href="http://nypost.com/author/ronn-torossian/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">New Yorkers</span></a> who want to live and work in safety.  Why would you kowtow to demagogues who push a political agenda?  Do you really think people in the city care more about politics than quality of life?</p></blockquote>
<p>Mullins noted,</p>
<blockquote><p>The degradation of our streets is on the rise.  As reported widely in the media, shootings have increased by 13% percent citywide since last year.  At the same time, the squeegee people are reappearing on the streets, and aggressive panhandlers and con-men are populating the subways and Times Square.  Why?  Because diminished support for police officers translates directly into crime spikes and drops in quality of life.  And right now the number of cops on the streets is insufficient to address the city’s growing problems.  The NYPD is understaffed and overworked, and underpaid.  Morale among police officers is low, and there are few signs that it will get better any time soon.  Our Mayor can’t be a leader in the fight against crime without supporting his police force.</p></blockquote>
<p>While perhaps it is baffling that countless elected officials blame the police constantly, perhaps the answer as to why comes from former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani who said some months ago that the lack of support for our boys in blue “comes more from this very left-wing ideology, which is an anti-police ideology.”</p>
<p>Being a police officer is a very difficult job – it has to be so much harder when people do not feel the support of elected officials and government – the very people who should be supporting law and order.</p>
<p>Mullins noted that when De Blasio “ran for office last year, he spoke of a &#8216;Tale of Two Cities.&#8217;  Indeed, the City is heading toward a very real division: one part of the city consisting of citizens who respect the rule of law, and the other led by anti-safety political opportunists and blowhards pursuing a personal and political agenda.” People want safety – not politics.</p>
<p>Police officers wake up, do their jobs and go home to their families.  Nothing is perfect in anyone’s life – or profession – and unfortunately in law enforcement mistakes happen.  That doesn’t mean that elected officials can throw the baby out with the bathwater. Police officers remain committed to enforcing the law and improving the quality of life of Americans nationwide.</p>
<p>As a <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/author/ronn-torossian/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">native New Yorker</span></a>, I remember a different city.  There was crime, violence,  squeegee men and drug pushers on every corner. New York needs strong law and order in this concrete jungle which I love so much. Police officers remain committed to making cities safe – and elected officials must stand side by side with them.  Supporting the police department should not be a political decision.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>De Blasio&#8217;s War on Minority Education</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/de-blasios-war-on-minority-education/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=de-blasios-war-on-minority-education</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 13 Mar 2014 04:50:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[charter schools]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=220912</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Democratic political machine versus the students. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/winters13e-1-web.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-220913" alt="winters13e-1-web" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/winters13e-1-web-448x350.jpg" width="269" height="210" /></a>One of the biggest challenges to the miserable status quo of public school education is taking place in New York City. On one side are leftists like Mayor Bill De Blasio, Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña, and NAACP President Hazel Dukes. Along with their allies in city government and the teachers unions, they want to keep city children, especially minority children, in the failing, Democrat-run public school quagmire. On the other side are the advocates of school choice and charter schools that have provided poor minority students with superior educations that threaten the status quo. Their champion is Eva Moskowitz and her Success Academy Charter Schools. The former group embraces the status quo of languishing students and bleak futures. The latter group embraces hope and change.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">We begin with the Mayor. De Blasio, who promised to close some charter schools during his election campaign, made good on that pledge in February, when he </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://politicker.com/2014/02/chancellor-says-we-are-turning-the-page-while-pulling-plug-on-some-co-locations/">closed</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> three charter schools run by fellow Democrat, but arch-nemesis, Eva Moskowitz. Moskowitz&#8217;s crime? The 6,700 students at her 22 Success Academy Charter Schools </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304434104579382993628994458">scored</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> in the top 1 percent in math and top 7 percent in English on the most recent state test. These are students who come overwhelmingly from poor, minority families, who overcame the achievement gap progressives regularly bemoan. Even &#8220;worse,&#8221; four in five charters in the Big Apple outperformed comparable schools, posing a dire threat to the aforementioned status quo of dismal results. Dismal results that would be held up as a national disgrace were it not for campaign contributions provided to Democratic politicians who continue to con New Yorkers and other Americans with promises of &#8220;reform&#8221; that never happen.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">De Blasio didn&#8217;t stop with Moskowitz. Since becoming Mayor, he cut off funding for </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">all</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> charter school construction that was to occur after 2015, and announced a &#8220;moratorium&#8221; on co-locating charters in existing schools. He is also looking for a way to roll back 25 of those co-locations that were already approved for next year. Ten of them involve Success Academies. He did all of this despite the reality that there is a waiting list of 50,000 New Yorkers determined to get their kids in charter schools. A lottery process that literally determines the city&#8217;s educational winners and losers.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Or at least it did. Public Advocate Letitia James, who along with City Council Speaker Melissa Mark Viverito is already planning a lawsuit to shut down co-located charter schools, is now </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://nypost.com/2014/03/09/public-advocate-wants-to-suspend-charter-school-lottery/">asking</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> a judge to suspend the admission lottery for the 2014-2015 school year while that lawsuit proceeds. “We may ask the court to push the deadline back,” said lawyer Arthur Schwartz who is leading the effort on behalf of James. Unsurprisingly the suit is being backed by the teachers union. Incredibly, both James and the union claim De Blasio isn&#8217;t doing enough to inhibit the growth of charter schools. “We’re moving forward with the litigation because, clearly, the process is broken,” James said at a parent forum in Downtown Brooklyn. “The mayor did not engage parents today on this issue, so we’re looking for an expedited review.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Which parents would that be? Last fall, when De Blasio looked like he was going to be elected, Moskowitz amassed a crowd of 2,000 parents, teachers and students for a pro-charter rally at the Brooklyn Bridge. At least 4,500 families scheduled to enter next year&#8217;s charter class would be put in limbo by James&#8217;s lawsuit &#8212; along with the thousands of parents with kids already in the charter school system whose lives would also be thrown into turmoil if James and the union prevail.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">New York City Charter School Center CEO James Merriman got to the heart of the issue. “The destructive tactics . . . would create havoc and uncertainty for tens of thousands of New York City families from low-income communities,” he explained. He also blasted James. “She would do well to remember that her title is public advocate, not advocate for the teachers union,” he added.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Queens Councilman Daniel Dromm, who heads the City Council Education Committee, is a staunch advocate for the teachers union. He has </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://nypost.com/2014/03/12/councils-education-head-ask-charter-network-boss-about-corruption/">scheduled</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> a hearing next month aimed at pressing Moskowitz and other charter school executives to explain how they spend public funds. His real agenda is transparent. A spokeswoman told the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">New York Post</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that Moskowitz has not received an invitation to testify, even as the paper itself noted that it &#8220;isn&#8217;t clear&#8221; that Dromm has any jurisdiction over Moskowitz, who is not a city employee.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Dromm remained undaunted. &#8220;We need accountability, we need transparency, and we need to know who is giving them the money and what they’re doing with that money,” he contended. “This is an opportunity, if corruption were to exist . . . I can’t just let it go.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">No one has ever accused Moskowitz of corruption, and this is not Dromm&#8217;s first effort to defame and single her out. On March 1, he </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/city-hall/2014/03/8541138/dromm-hold-hearing-moskowitzs-rally-day">announced</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> he would hold an oversight hearing to investigate whether Moskowitz acted illegally when she closed her schools on March 4 so that her students could participate in a pro-charter rally in Albany. &#8220;I am deeply concerned about the legality of a school leader closing schools for entirely political purposes,&#8221; Dromm said in a statement, adding, &#8220;no educator should be allowed to use children as pawns for their political agenda.&#8221; That would be a rally </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://politicker.com/2014/03/cuomo-joins-charter-advocates-at-rally-critical-of-de-blasio/">attended</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> by Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo, who said he was “committed” to making sure charter schools will succeed. </span></p>
<p>A competing rally for universal pre-kindergarten was <a href="http://www.wgrz.com/story/news/education/2014/03/04/albany-new-york-state-education-rally/6020581/">held</a> by De Blasio and his supporters on the same day. As this <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=Albany,+rally+for+pre-K&amp;client=firefox-a&amp;hs=Sc7&amp;rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&amp;channel=sb&amp;tbm=isch&amp;tbo=u&amp;source=univ&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=E4AgU7m-C4mokQexyYGYBA&amp;ved=0CGwQ7Ak&amp;biw=1552&amp;bih=830#facrc=_&amp;imgdii=_&amp;imgrc=Xa0-o4nZPYzWWM%3A;LYV85PlkQrTrsM;https%3A%2F%2Ffbcdn-sphotos-c-a.akamaihd.net%2Fhphotos-ak-prn2%2Ft1%2Fs403x403%2F1900065_10152273957080970_1643039222_n.jpg;https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2FOpportunityToLearn%3Fref%3Dstream%26hc_location%3Dstream;403;302">picture</a> indicates, it also included student &#8220;pawns&#8221; advocating on behalf of a political agenda.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">With regard to political agendas, perhaps nothing makes the Mayor&#8217;s unstinting support for the miserable status quo clearer than his reaction to the results of the latest entrance exam for the city&#8217;s elite public schools. Tragically, but predictably, the achievement gap of black and Hispanic students relative to their white and Asian peers made itself evident once again. Out of the 5,096 students accepted by eight top-end schools, only 5 percent were black and 7 percent were Hispanic, despite an increase in the percentage of black and Hispanic students taking the test from 43 percent in 2012, to 46 percent last October.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Did De Blasio demand accountability from the public school system for failing these students? No. The Mayor&#8217;s answer is lowering standards &#8212; yet more degradation of the education children are entitled to. De Blasio has called for an overhaul of admissions system, insisting that one exam shouldn&#8217;t be the sole criteria that determines admission to the city&#8217;s best schools. He was echoed by David Jones, CEO of the Community Service Society of New York. “We have to come up with an admission system that is wider than this one-size-fits-all exam,” he contended, further suggesting that schools consider grade point averages and teacher recommendations along with the test. Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña played the diversity card. “We must do more to reflect the diversity of our city in our top-tier schools&#8211;and we are committed to doing just that,” she said.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Mona Davids, head of the New York City Parents Union, cut right through the blather. “Leave the exam alone and help our students meet the standards,&#8221; she said. &#8220;The solution is to improve the elementary and middle schools in neighborhoods of color so the students can perform and pass the exam.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It is precisely that kind of improvement </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">already</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> demonstrated by Success Academy Harlem 4, where the same minority students achieved some of the highest math scores in the entire state and 55 percent passed English exams last year. Both rates far exceeded city averages. For reference, only about a <a href="http://www.wnyc.org/story/311178-fewer-one-third-new-york-city-students-pass-state-tests/">quarter</a> of New York City students in third through eight grade earn passing scores on English and math tests; 26.4 percent passed in English proficiency and 29.6 percent passed math proficiency, according to statistics from last year. Moreover, there is compelling </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.calcharters.org/understanding/research/africanamericanreport/?utm_source=africanamericanreport&amp;utm_medium=go">evidence</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that some charter schools are closing that very same achievement gap reflected on the entrance exams. Yet late last month, Success Academy Harlem 4 was one of the charter schools De Blasio </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/28/nyregion/de-blasio-seeks-to-halt-3-charter-schools-from-moving-into-public-spaces.html?_r=1">kicked</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> out of its space in a New York City public school building.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">This is a tragedy with real victims. “We’re lost right now,” said Tisha Hatch, 38, whose son Robert Loveless, 9, would be unable to attend fifth grade there next fall. “I refuse to let my son go to any public school in New York City because you have failing schools that need to be closed.” Maria Rodriguez&#8217;s three children share the same fate. “This is the future of my children they are playing games with,” she said, explaining that nearby traditional &#8212; and failing &#8212; public schools were not an option.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Chancellor Fariña&#8217;s initial reaction revealed that her commitment to diversity did not breach the boundaries of union loyalty. “They’re charter schools. They’re on their own now,” she </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/education/charter-school-families-left-searching-article-1.1712379#ixzz2vC1qiSse">said</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">. “That’s part of what they do. They’re an independent structure, and that’s how they function.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It&#8217;s exactly that independence &#8212; coupled with success &#8212; that is utterly anathema to the teachers unions and their political puppets. Yet both De Blasio and Fariña were unable to withstand the firestorm they created. Two days after Farina made her callous remarks the city backed down and said it will find space for the charter school.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Regardless, Moskowitz and her supporters are taking no chances. They are </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://nypost.com/2014/03/10/de-blasio-faces-three-new-charter-school-lawsuits/">filing</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> three lawsuits of their own against the Mayor on two separate fronts. The Success Academy is filing a federal civil rights lawsuit to overturn De Blasio&#8217;s decision preventing them from co-locating in a public school building. They are also filing papers in Albany with state Education Commissioner John King, seeking a reversal of De Blasio&#8217;s decision to prevent two elementary schools from opening at all. They had been approved by former Mayor Mike Bloomberg before De Blasio axed them. </span></p>
<p>NAACP President and union water-carrier Hazel Dukes was enraged by the Success Academy’s efforts. “This lawsuit is an outrageous and insulting attempt by Wall Street hedge fund managers to hijack the language of civil rights in their shameless political attack on Bill de Blasio,” she wrote.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Duke’s class warfare rhetoric is transparent. Moreover, the irony of her position is breathtaking. The president of the nation&#8217;s foremost civil rights organization &#8212; ostensibly tasked with advancing the agenda of black Americans &#8212; is upset that someone is fighting tooth and nail to save the educational future of black American children. If there&#8217;s a better indication of the poisonous influence exerted by the the teachers union, one is hard-pressed to imagine what it is.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The children of New York City are up against enormous foes. The pipeline of taxpayer money flowing to De Blasio and the Democratic Party through the teachers union will not be parted with willingly. Powerful allies like the NAACP are circling the wagons as well. Only a substantial public outcry will be able to right this ship, but it remains to be seen if such a backlash will emerge. </span></p>
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		<title>The Phantom Establishment of the Jewish Anti-Israel Left</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-phantom-establishment-of-the-jewish-anti-israel-left/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-phantom-establishment-of-the-jewish-anti-israel-left</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 20 Feb 2014 05:51:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Arlene Alda]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[de blasio]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[eve ensler]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gloria Steinem]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=219169</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[No one cares what Alan Alda’s wife thinks about Israel.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/arlene.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-219171" alt="arlene" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/arlene-253x350.jpg" width="253" height="350" /></a>Alan Alda&#8217;s wife signed a letter denouncing the newly elected left-wing mayor of New York for doing AIPAC&#8217;s bidding. The Sandinista supporter had been accused of many things, but being an Israeli stooge wasn&#8217;t one of them. Signing the letter, along with the spouse of that guy from MASH, were Martha Weinman Lear, the wife of the cousin of liberal producer Norman Lear,  Eve Ensler of the <i>Vagina Monologues</i> and diet guru Jane Hirschmann author of <i>Overcoming Overeating</i> who took a break from obsessing over food to sail on a Jihad cruise to Gaza.</p>
<p>Signing on to the attack on Bill de Blasio for being a dirty Zionist were such faded celebrities of the literary left as Erica Jong, who hasn&#8217;t written a single book that anyone can name in the forty years since <i>Fear of Flying</i> first came out and Gloria Steinem, who peaked around that same time.</p>
<p>These familiar names of the Manhattan cocktail party circuit who grind their teeth every time they hear Netanyahu&#8217;s name, give way to the professional activists, the board members of the toxic American Jewish World Service, the Nathan Cummings Foundation and Dorot, the Rabbis for Gaza and Rabbis for Obama and the men and women like Peter Beinart of Open Zion and Rebecca Vilkomerson of Jewish Voice for Peace who have built their lives around the war on Israel as much as any Islamic Jihadist tinkering with a Kassam rocket in Gaza.</p>
<p>The radical clergy sign on; Rachel Brown Cowan, a Unitarian who married a Jewish writer for the Village Voice, added &#8220;Rabbi&#8221; to her name and began attacking the Jewish State after her husband&#8217;s death, Rolando Matalon, who has yet to find a Latin American Marxist group he wouldn&#8217;t embrace and <a href="http://calneocon.typepad.com/blog/2011/06/meet-j-street-rabbi-and-lesbian-sharon-kleinbaum-fasting-for-gaza-where-they-kill-gays-defending-new.html">Sharon Kleinbaum</a>, a lesbian supporter of the Fast for Gaza that aids and abets the not particularly pro-lesbian Hamas.</p>
<p>Reading these names feels like reviewing the membership of a small familiar club. Everyone knows everyone else and everyone in the club hates Israel.</p>
<p>Between Erica Jong and Alice Kessler-Harris (the biographer of Anti-Israel Communist playwright Lillian Hellman, whom Kessler described as having a &#8220;streak of Jewish anti-Semitism”) is Peter A. Joseph who pays for this whole dance, funding everything from Peter Beinart&#8217;s Open Zion to the Manhattan JCC whose anti-Israel turn has led to a pitched battle among members.</p>
<p>Peter A. Joseph revived the Israel Policy Forum, which had originally been folded into the Center for American Progress, and turned it into a machine for churning out anti-Israel letters. Before the IPF merged into CAP, it put out a letter urging the United States to work with Hamas. Afterward, its tactics have become slightly subtler, its letters appearing to be pro-Israel while advocating anti-Israel policies.</p>
<p>The Israel Policy Forum put out a letter in support of Obama&#8217;s nomination of Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense, despite his ties to the Iran Lobby, signed by Peter A. Joseph, hedge fund manager Neil Barsky, Marcia Riklis, the daughter of corporate raider Meshulam Riklis (not by his second wife Pia Zadora), Jack C. Bendheim, the president of a company that <a href="http://articles.courant.com/2005-05-23/news/0505230317_1_drums-phibro-philipp-bros">once dumped toxic waste</a> in a Connecticut town, and Risa A. Levine, a real estate lawyer from New York.</p>
<p>Why was anyone supposed to listen to Pia Zadora&#8217;s stepdaughter and a guy who once made a documentary about Ed Koch when it came to nominating a Secretary of Defense? The same reason that Bill de Blasio was supposed to listen to Alan Alda&#8217;s wife and a diet guru who hates Israel.</p>
<p>Hating Israel has become a small petty club for the wealthy left. The Jewish Anti-Israel left likes to pretend that it&#8217;s a grassroots movement being squelched by the “Jewish establishment” when in reality it is an unelected establishment using its wealth and lingering fame to shout over the majority of American Jews who support Israel.</p>
<p>These fading Feminist writers, Wall Street millionaires trying to buy social relevance, hippie social scientists who hit it big with books about food, sex or childrearing, radical rabbis holding forth to congregations who believe in religion as little as their preachers, are a phantom establishment; community leaders without a community except their own mutual approbation.</p>
<p>Every few weeks the Israel Policy Forum churns out another letter headlined &#8220;Prominent Jews Urge Someone To Do Something&#8221; signed by Pia Zadora&#8217;s stepdaughter, a hedge funder, another hedge funder, the guy whose company left drums of toxic waste in Connecticut, the Rabbi who loves the Sandinistas even more than Bill de Blasio and a retired Democratic congressman who attends the same cocktail parties.</p>
<p>Some of these letters are anti-Israel. Others pretend to be pro-Israel. All the letters assert the importance of the signers, the self-proclaimed &#8220;100 Prominent Jews&#8221; or &#8220;150 Prominent Jews&#8221;.</p>
<p>These antics are not limited to the Israel Policy Forum or even the United States.</p>
<p>A year after British comedian Stephen Fry appeared on a genealogy show to trace his mother&#8217;s Jewish roots, he signed on to a letter by British Jews, a group that he had never considered himself a member of, declaring its &#8220;independence&#8221; from the British Jewish establishment. The list included the expected collection of fading feminist authors, Marxist playwrights, historians and philosophers, as well as radical sociologists, pop psychologists and professional activists.</p>
<p>The &#8220;coming out party&#8221; of Independent Jewish Voices consisted of Marxist Jews who were notorious for hating Israel, the UK, industry, facts, mirrors and human civilization announcing that loudly in a letter that was covered by their media friends.</p>
<p>There is a long history of such letters going back to the founding of Israel, the names of forgotten self-proclaimed leaders mixing with a few more notorious figures whose unfortunate legacy has survived into this time. None of these letters however have counted as much as a bullet in the rifle of an Israeli soldier standing watch in the night.</p>
<p>American Jews who worry over these letters from the phantom establishment of the cocktail party ought to look back and see how futile the rantings of I.F. Stone, New Dealer Joseph Proskauer, the rabid Elmer Berger and FDR speechwriter Samuel Rosenman proved to be.</p>
<p>Before J Street or the Israel Policy Forum, there was Jewish Alternatives to Zionism headed by &#8220;Rabbi&#8221; Elmer Berger who had claimed that the Communist revolution in the Soviet Union meant that Jews no longer needed &#8220;Palestine&#8221;.</p>
<p>Does anyone remember Lewis Affelder or Mr. and Mrs. Noel A. Buckner whose names appeared as sponsors on Jewish Alternatives to Zionism&#8217;s stationary? Their names are smeared ink on yellowed paper while children play in the streets of Jerusalem.</p>
<p>The phantom establishment is rootless; it has no links to a people or to a religion. Its aims are destructive and like all destructive forces, it carries its own futility with it.</p>
<p>American Jews should contend with them, but should not be too impressed by them. Their kind has been at it for generations and, despite all the venom and fury, the boycotts and screeds, have made less of an impression on Israel than a single Jewish family in the hills of Shomron.</p>
<p>The phantom establishment is money and words. There is no blood in its veins or heart in its chest. It does not go on the way that the Jewish people do because it is not of them, only against them.</p>
<p>When its anger is spent and its letters are signed, the children will play on in the hills and fields of Israel, neither knowing nor caring that there was once a Jane Hirschmann, a Mrs. Noel A. Buckner, a Rachel Brown Cowan or a Rebecca Vilkomerson that sought to do them harm.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Ann-Marie Murrell</strong>&#8216;s video interview with <strong>Daniel Greenfield</strong> on <em>Robert Gates’ Revelations Confirm Horowitz&#8217;s “Party of Defeat,”</em> <em>Abandoning Iraq, </em><em> How Americans Died For a War Obama Didn&#8217;t Believe In</em>, <em>The Release of Terrorist Lawyer Lynne Stewart</em>, <em></em>and much, much more:</p>
<p><strong>Part I:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/xwp_CUfwAss" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Part II:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/TywIVHDnwxc" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe> <b></b></p>
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		<title>The Totalitarians of New York</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-totalitarians-of-new-york/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-totalitarians-of-new-york</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-totalitarians-of-new-york/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 23 Jan 2014 05:56:36 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[de blasio]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[jaywalking]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[New York City]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[plow]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Snow]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=217108</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Choosing between freedom and tyranny in Obama’s America and de Blasio’s New York.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/article-addonsnow-0122.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-217111" alt="article-addonsnow-0122" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/article-addonsnow-0122-428x350.jpg" width="308" height="252" /></a></span><b></b></p>
<p>New York City mayors excel at banning everything from salt to carriages, but they are not very good at cleaning up the streets after a snowstorm.</p>
<p>There are two ways of looking at any major city; as a mechanical problem of buildings, streets and sewers whose infrastructures need to be maintained or as a social problem of misbehaving people. The mayors of the mechanical problem understand that they need to clean the streets, but the mayors of the social problem think that they have to fix the people.</p>
<p>Mayor Bloomberg flubbed the snow challenge badly. Instead of preparing road salt, he banned salt in restaurants. Instead of having a snow strategy for the winter, he had a Global Warming strategy for the next fifty years. Instead of doing his job, he kept trying to transform the people.</p>
<p>And his successor is no better.</p>
<p>Bill de Blasio&#8217;s focus after his mean-spirited inauguration was a ban on carriage horses in Central Park at the behest of a real estate developer who backed his campaign and has his eye on their stables, a tussle over who will get the credit for Pre-K with Governor Cuomo and the beating of Kang Wong, an 84-year-old man, over a jaywalking ticket.</p>
<p>The media had lavished praise on Bill de Blasio after his first photo op shoveling snow and celebrated his call to implement Vision Zero, a Swedish plan to cut traffic fatalities to zero, even though there was no remote possibility of reducing traffic fatalities to zero in a major city filled with cars, pedestrians, cyclists and even pedicabs.</p>
<p>Instead of preparing for the snow, Team De Blasio launched a crackdown on jaywalking in Manhattan where three-quarters of the residents don&#8217;t own cars. And so the Upper East Side, which didn&#8217;t vote for Bill de Blasio, became a snarled and unplowed mess and the jaywalking enforcers <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/bill-de-blasio-crackdown-on-jaywalking-leads-to-beating-of-84-year-old-man/">put an 84-year-old man</a> in the hospital after arresting him for the tall order of &#8220;jaywalking, resisting arrest, obstructing governmental administration and disorderly conduct.&#8221;</p>
<p>Jaywalking is as much a part of New York as salty pretzels and the carriage horses of Central Park. While Bill de Blasio claimed to be inspired by Mayor La Guardia, the latter had an entirely different view of the relationship between the people and the city government.</p>
<p>“I prefer the happiness of our unorganized imperfection to the organized perfection of other countries,” La Guardia said after vetoing a jaywalking bill, and added, referencing the growing fascism in Germany that was then admired by many progressives, “Broadway is not Unter den Linden.”</p>
<p>The happiness of unorganized imperfection is about as close to expressing the contrast between the American and the European way of life as any phrase can. It&#8217;s also a foreign idea, not just to Bill de Blasio or Bloomberg, but to the larger political culture of urban progressives who are less interested in making the trains run on time, than in making the men and women run on time.</p>
<p>Mayor La Guardia was responsible for much of the city&#8217;s network of roads, bridges and tunnels that were built around the social changes in how people lived. From the disastrous ObamaCare websites to California&#8217;s light rail project, modern progressives squander billions on unworkable infrastructure that is supposed to fix social problems by changing how people live.</p>
<p>Modern progressives think that it is easier to change people than to change infrastructure. The classical city shaped infrastructure to accommodate how people lived, while progressives use infrastructure as a tool of social change to bully urban residents into changing how they live.</p>
<p>Bloomberg did this in blunt fashion by eliminating elevators to force people to get in shape by using the stairs and by blocking off streets to force people to abandon cars and use public transportation. Instead the number of cars in the city increased and so did the obesity rate.</p>
<p>Progressives are adept at politically manipulating people with propaganda, but this skill doesn&#8217;t translate well at the policy level. Obama won over younger voters, but can&#8217;t get them to enroll in ObamaCare. Politics is an abstract for most people. Policy is a reality. Politics is the image they want to have. Policy is how much money they have in the bank.</p>
<p>Bill de Blasio unrolled his Vision Zero plan for eliminating traffic fatalities by the year 2024 surrounded by the grieving mothers of dead children. It was a shameless performance that would have made even Piers Morgan wince. No one in the media pointed out that Bill de Blasio, like Obama, was using human shields to silence questions about a result that he can&#8217;t deliver.</p>
<p>Team De Blasio could have stopped far more accidents if it had prioritized the snowstorm. Instead there were dozens of accidents as cars slipped on sheets of ice. But the dirty business of cleaning the streets is never as appealing to progressives as glamorously rolling out a new policy.</p>
<p>Accepting unorganized imperfection is not a progressive trait and the assault on Kang Wong won&#8217;t be the last collision between Bill de Blasio and the ordinary people who will have to live through four years of his incompetence and abuses. The victories of the left are a master class in totalitarian tyranny and progressive failure, but too many voters disassociate politics from policy, judging candidates based on their media profiles, until they feel the effects of their policies.</p>
<p>Obama&#8217;s approval ratings did not implode until the voters actually experienced ObamaCare for themselves. Every conservative warning had fallen on deaf ears as Americans kept supporting a celebrity politician until the consequences of his policies caught up with them.</p>
<p>In Toronto, Rob Ford&#8217;s approval ratings have lifted after a snowstorm and he is on track to win reelection despite admitting to drug and alcohol abuse. The voters are making their decision based not on his ugly media profile, but on how well the snow got shoveled. It&#8217;s something that Bill de Blasio, who is better at posing for the cameras with a snow shovel than actually managing a snowstorm, ought to keep in mind.</p>
<p>Progressives are only popular until the people realize that the men and women offering them everything for free can&#8217;t clean up the snow, but can beat them bloody and can&#8217;t fix their healthcare, but can destroy it. The left wins at politics, but fails at policies. It&#8217;s learned to stop looking like Carter, but it hasn&#8217;t figured out how to stop governing like him.</p>
<p>When Americans realize that the political choices they make are also policy choices between large sodas, salty pretzels, open market health care and open streets on the one hand or food fascism, DMV health care and bloody faces on the other; they will choose the unorganized happiness of freedom over the disorganized tyrannies of Bloomberg, De Blasio and Obama.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Immigrant Taxi Drivers Targeted in De Blasio&#8217;s New York</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronn-torossian/immigrant-taxi-drivers-targeted-in-de-blasios-new-york/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=immigrant-taxi-drivers-targeted-in-de-blasios-new-york</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronn-torossian/immigrant-taxi-drivers-targeted-in-de-blasios-new-york/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 03 Jan 2014 05:06:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronn Torossian]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[de blasio]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[New York City]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Tax]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[taxi drivers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Union]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=214521</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Marxist city planners will make the American dream that much harder for new arrivals. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Bill-de-Blasio.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-214528" alt="Bill-de-Blasio" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Bill-de-Blasio-426x350.jpg" width="298" height="245" /></a>Now that Mayor Bill de Blasio has taken office, he can reassure the nervous business community by curbing some of the election rhetoric, which some among his supporters have taken to new levels.  Mayor de Blasio told his tale of two cities from an economic standpoint, suggesting that the gap between the wealthy and poor was vast and growing exponentially.  Yet, during his inauguration the Sanitation Department’s chaplain, Rev. Fred Lucas Jr. compared New York City to a “plantation” when he delivered the invocation. The turn from a debate on economics to racism is indicative of how some will attempt to divide the people of this great city. The race-baiting began as Lucas said, “Free us from the shackles of partisan politics, political correctness and personal egos and agendas,” continuing, “Let the plantation called New York City be the city of God, a city set upon the hill, a light shining in darkness.” Is New York City a plantation where the poor are oppressed and enslaved and treated as black people were in the South prior to the Civil War? This is the atmosphere that Mayor de Blasio must oppose.</p>
<p>In today’s New York City, there is the taxi driver union&#8217;s Moses, <a href="http://www.bhairavidesai.com/">Bhairavi Desai</a>, the head of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA), an organization which represents approximately 15,000 NYC taxi drivers.  Desai is the de-facto partner of the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission, and together they have conspired to take hard earned money from what is really the last vestige of easy-to-find work for new immigrants.  They created what amounts to a multi-million dollar slush fund, supplied with a six cents per fare tax from every ride – about $600 per year.  This is said to be for “disability insurance and health-care navigation services.”</p>
<p>There is no law governing this tax, but drivers cannot refuse it.  Is that fair?  Even worse is that the fund is overseen by Desai and her group, not by healthcare experts or investment advisors.  Desai, who has always claimed to be a populist and has routinely decried capitalist values, has done what she claims big business does – takes advantage of the poor and naive.  Cab drivers work very hard; many of them came to this country to pursue the great opportunities which exist here, but are not aware of their rights and due process.</p>
<p>When Desai was a presenter at the Brecht Forum’s 29th Annual Intensive Introduction to Marxism, she suggested capitalism was part of the destructive waves that “mark our times and even threaten life on this planet.” She further bewailed the “complicity of capitalism in perpetuating these ills.” Yet, she readily took the near $10M deal in exchange for total acquiescence to the former TLC Chairman and former Mayor Bloomberg’s poorly devised attacks on the taxi industry. A lawsuit filed by drivers objecting to this forced tax said: “In exchange for the forced $10 million in contributions to the NYTWA’s coffers, the drivers receive &#8216;healthcare&#8217; services that include neither true healthcare coverage nor services that the drivers are force to pay for.&#8221;</p>
<p><a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/tag/bhairavi-desai/">Bhairavi Desai</a> is also a devoted advocate for the “Cuba, Palestine, and El Salvador solidarity movements.”<b> </b>These “solidarity” movements are largely anti-American &#8212; and the types of places many of her member drivers run away from to pursue their American dream. Hard-working cab drivers of New York City, often immigrants, come to this country to make a better life for their families, not to rail against the greatness of capitalism, but to pursue it.  They are subject to a policy that lines the leadership coffers at their expense, much like the reasons Marxism failed globally.</p>
<p>Mayor de Blasio should take the helm as a strong captain and put every New Yorker on notice that racism – and Marxism – is out of bounds.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Bill de Blasio’s Communist Pals</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/paul-kengor-and-spyridon-mitsotakis/bill-de-blasios-communist-pals/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bill-de-blasios-communist-pals</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 04 Nov 2013 04:33:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Paul Kengor and Spyridon Mitsotakis]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[communists]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[de blasio]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[New York]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sandinistas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[stasi]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=209487</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Who will train New York’s finest — Sandinistas or former Stasi? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/blasio.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-209493" alt="NYC Leaders Hold Press Conf. Urging New Iranian President To Carry Out Reforms" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/blasio-450x313.jpg" width="315" height="219" /></a><strong>Reprinted from <a href="http://spectator.org/">Spectator.org</a>.</strong></p>
<p>When the <em>New York Times</em> revealed that New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio had been an enthusiastic supporter of Nicaragua’s communist Sandinista regime, old arguments from the 1980s were suddenly rekindled, with renewed debate over the nature of that regime. The left once again emerged from the woodwork to insist that the Sandinistas were never bad guys (or even communists) — quite the contrary. The <em>Times</em> quickly published letters-to-the-editor whitewashing the Sandinistas’ tyranny, and one Times’ blogger went so far as to publish a post declaring: “Whatever their failings, the Sandinistas did not impose a repressive regime on their impoverished Central American nation. There was no mass jailing of opponents nor mass execution of opposing soldiers.”</p>
<p>Gee, that’s good — assuming that it’s even true. Of course, it isn’t true.</p>
<p>To cite just once source, the Russian-born scholar, <a href="http://jamieglazov.com/2013/11/01/video-jamie-glazov-on-jihad-denial/">Dr. Jamie Glazov</a>, who came to America as a child when the KGB forced him and his pro-democracy, dissident parents into exile, is among those who beg to differ. Glazov wrote in his book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/United-Hate-Romance-Tyranny-Terror/dp/1935071602">United in Hate</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>The Sandinistas quickly distinguished themselves as one of the worst human rights abusers in Latin America, carrying out approximately 8,000 political executions within three years of the revolution. The number of “anti-revolutionary” Nicaraguans who disappeared while in Sandinista hands numbered in the thousands. By 1983, the number of political prisoners inside the new Marxist regime’s jails was estimated at 20,000. This was the highest number of political prisoners in any nation in the hemisphere — except, of course, in Castro’s Cuba. By 1986, a vicious and violent Sandinista “resettlement program” forced some 200,000 Nicaraguans into 145 “settlements” throughout the country. This monstrous social engineering program entailed the designation of “free-fire” zones in which Sandinista government troops shot and killed any peasant of their choosing.</p></blockquote>
<p>Not long after the <em>Times</em> exposé, the <em>New York Post</em> published a column reminding New Yorkers of the Sandinistas’ ugly anti-Semitism — <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/bill-de-blasio-future-mayor-of-new-york-supported-anti-semitic-marxist-terrorists/" target="_blank"> another undeniable truth</a>. That was too much for the old “Sandalistas” (the sandal-wearing Sandinista fellow travelers who haunt the halls of American academe). The Nicaragua Network, of which de Blasio was once a leading member, issued a press release warning its faithful followers that the “New York Post resurrects lies about Nicaraguan revolution!” The Nicaragua Network assured the faithful that the information about Sandinista anti-Semitism were (naturally) just a bunch of CIA fabrications, and urged them to “Send letters to the editor!”</p>
<p>That battle cry was sounded. Sandalistas, unite!</p>
<p>Fortunately, some of those who know better are speaking up. Leading the charge is the former leftist-turned-conservative and Cold War scholar Ronald Radosh. “In the wake of a short Post article noting that Bill de Blasio ignored (at best) the anti-Semitism of the rulers of Nicaragua during his 1988 visit there,” Radosh wrote, “his supporters have insisted the Sandinista junta wasn’t anti-Semitic. In fact, the record is clear — and ugly.” Radosh also notes that “The official Sandinista newspaper, <em>Barricada</em>, ran an editorial in January 1990 in which it attributed distrust of their country by the ‘Yankee bureaucracy’ to the ‘traditional “Jew-style” with which the U.S. Congress manages the taxes of the taxpayers.’”</p>
<p>That newspaper, <em>Barricada</em>, which made those anti-Semitic remarks (and they weren’t the only ones), had American subscribers. One of them was Bill de Blasio, who, the <em>New York Times</em> reports, spent time and energy “hawking subscriptions” to other New Yorkers. <em>Barricada</em>, as Paul Berman reminds us, “was the most hardline of the Sandinista publications,” and was controlled by Sandinista Ministry of the Interior, Tomás Borge.</p>
<p><em>American Spectator</em> readers will remember that infamous name from the 1980s. Here is what Radosh reminds us about this character:</p>
<blockquote><p>Borge had been from the start, even in the period of pretend moderation, the regime’s enforcer. He was made minister of the Interior. He named the building which housed state security — something that Orwell might have dreamed up in his novel <em>1984</em> — the “Sentinel of the People’s Happiness,” which was proclaimed in a loud banner over the building’s front.</p>
<p>In his post, Borge contracted with the East German government to send a team of Stasi — that country’s hated secret police — to come to Nicaragua to train his own ministry’s agents in the type of techniques they used to control the populace. From East Germany and other Communist regimes in Eastern Europe he obtained advisors, communications equipment, uniforms, and other supplies. But what interested him most was concrete advice on how to use his spies to help concentrate power and give the FSLN complete control of the country. East Germany’s Stasi chief sent him a specially selected group of agents who, he promised Borge, would give them the ability and know-how to crush potential civilian opposition to the Sandinista regime.</p>
<p>He also liked to show the press how adept he was at fooling gullible Western fellow-travelers. Borge met them  as he did me at one time in the 1980s — in his would-be office, behind which was a display of Christian crucifixes and a Bible sitting at his desk. Many would remark when they wrote about him how the hated security chief was really a believing Catholic and a religious individual. When they left, Borge would retreat to his actual office, which is the site at which he worked and which had no visible religious symbols of any kind. Of course, Borge used his ministry to regularly attack the Church, to deport opposition priests, and to give his support to an officially sponsored liberation church whose clerics backed the FSLN.</p></blockquote>
<p>Liberation Theology, so backed and pushed by the KGB that it was practically a KGB-invention, famously became the center of a major clash between the Sandinistas and Pope John Paul II. When the Pope visited Nicaragua in 1983, the Sandinistas organized a mob to harass him at an open-air Mass in a failed attempt to embarrass him. (The Pope deftly countered them with style and panache and truth.)</p>
<p>Bill de Blasio, not surprisingly, is a follower of Liberation Theology.</p>
<p>Of course, the academy has come out in full-throttle defense of de Blasio. He is their product; he’s one of them. He has a degree in Latin American studies, which is no surprise to the two of us. Both of us have rich experiences in dealing with Latin American Studies departments, so we automatically see a red flag. That’s something we could vent about for hours. But, alas, that’s another subject for another time.</p>
<p>A subject for the here and how, however, is Bill de Blasio — almost certainly New York’s future mayor — and his support of a repressive Marxist regime. That regime was a Soviet/Cuban proxy in America’s backyard.</p>
<p>Fortunately, despite the likes of Bill de Blasio and the Sandinistas’ fellow travelers in their American lobby, Ronald Reagan’s support of the Contras in Nicaragua worked. A democratic election eventually took place, and the Sandinistas lost, as communists always do when they dare to (rarely) hold elections. Communism was halted there, as it was elsewhere in Latin America in the 1980s, from Grenada to less-known places like <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/224326/secrets-suriname/paul-kengor" target="_blank"> Suriname</a>.</p>
<p>While the people of Latin America rejoiced in their freedom, Bill de Blasio wept for their enslavers. New Yorkers, should take note — assuming they even care.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Josh Brewster</strong>&#8216;s video interview with <strong>Jamie Glazov</strong> about the Left&#8217;s romance with tyranny and terro</em>r:</p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/SNJg6w6CB0o" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>De Blasio&#8217;s Marxist Romance</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/spyridon-mitsotakis/de-blasios-marxist-romance/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=de-blasios-marxist-romance</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 07 Oct 2013 04:12:53 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Spyridon Mitsotakis]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Bukovsky]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[de blasio]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[documents]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[literacy program]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=206484</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Sandinista literacy program admired by NYC's mayoral candidate was a Soviet creation.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/db.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-206521" alt="db" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/db.jpg" width="259" height="194" /></a>The <em>New York Times</em>, in its <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/23/nyregion/a-mayoral-hopeful-now-de-blasio-was-once-a-young-leftist.html?hp&amp;pagewanted=all&amp;_r=0" target="_blank">article</a> on New York mayoral candidate Bill De Blasio&#8217;s work in Nicaragua during the Communist Sandinista dictatorship, reports that: &#8220;To this day, he speaks admiringly of the Sandinistas’ campaign, noting advances in literacy and health care.&#8221; The Sandinistas&#8217; literacy campaign was in fact a creation of the Soviet Union, according to a <a href="http://www.bukovsky-archives.net/pdfs/com-com/ct211-80.pdf" target="_blank">document</a> secretly copied from the Kremlin&#8217;s archives by dissident Vladimir Bukovsky.</p>
<p>The May 20, 1980 document, labeled &#8220;Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Central Committee&#8221; and &#8220;Top Secret,&#8221; is headlined: &#8220;Help to Nicaragua regarding the liquidation of illiteracy.&#8221;</p>
<p>The orders, according to a translation provided to FrontpageMag, were:</p>
<blockquote><p>I. Ministry of Education of the USSR together with the Department of Economic Cooperation, send in 1980-1981 to Nicaragua 15 instructors/administrators who have experience of foreign work and speaks Spanish for organization of work for liquidation of illiteracy.</p>
<p>Establish salary in foreign currency according to 5th group of salary ranks for Soviet specialist working abroad, and instructor by 6th group.</p>
<p>2. Ministry of Trade of the USSR provide funding to buy notebooks and pencils &#8212; 500,000 units in the second and third quarters and 500,000 units in the fourth quarter of 1980 as a donation.</p>
<p>The Ministry of Paper Production to produce for delivery to Nicaragua the mentioned 500,000 units of notebooks and pencils.</p>
<p>3. The Ministry of Radio to prepare and deliver in 1980 as a donation to Nicaragua the 1,000 radio transistors with the trademark &#8220;Sokol&#8221; in tropical design.</p>
<p>4. The Ministry of Foreign Trade provide delivery to Nicaragua of pencils, notebooks and radio transistors that were mentioned in Paragraph 2 and 3 of this document, and Ministry of Air Transportation deliver to Nicaragua the specialists and goods, mentioned in paragraphs 1, 2, 3 of this document, delivery will be made by Airflot by route of Moscow &#8211; Managua with payment in Soviet rubles.</p>
<p>5. Expenses related to the production and delivery of notebooks, pencils and radio transistors as well as salaries of 15 instructors for the length of 1 year including the Ruble equivalent of foreign currency, allocate to the budget of the USSR as charity help to foreign states, and in foreign currency at the expense of the foreign fund for the Department of Economic Cooperation.</p>
<p>6. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR should inform the government of Nicaragua about measure taken by Soviet Union in helping the Nicaraguan in implementation of liquidation of illiteracy.</p></blockquote>
<p>It is signed: &#8220;The Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR &#8211; A. Kosygin.&#8221;</p>
<p>There was nothing benign about what the Communists were doing. According to Humberto Belli, a former Sandinista who was in charge of the editorial page of <em>La Prensa</em> before turning against the repressive regime, it was <a href="http://s3.amazonaws.com/thf_media/1987/pdf/bg558.pdf" target="_blank">known</a> back in the 1980s that:</p>
<blockquote><p>Nicaragua&#8217;s educational system under the Sandinistas was designed to equate Western-style democracy and capitalist economic systems with evil U.S. &#8220;imperialism&#8221; while portraying Soviet-style Marxism-Leninism as the benefactor of mankind. The Sandinista Ministry of Education, for example, made it mandatory for all high school students to study Marx&#8217;s theory of dialectical materialism, which is officially regarded as the &#8220;basis of all scientific endeavor.&#8221; The Sandinistas stated that one of the main objectives of their &#8220;new education&#8221; was &#8220;to form new generations in the values and principles of the Sandinista people&#8217;s revolution.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>De Blasio&#8217;s enthusiasm for the Soviet-created education program stands in stark contrast to his opposition to the charter schools relied upon by the city&#8217;s poor for a quality education, which would otherwise be unavailable to those trapped in the city&#8217;s failing, unionized school system. The editors of the <em>New York Post</em> <a href="http://nypost.com/2013/09/27/de-blasio-using-public-office-to-help-out-friends/" target="_blank">report</a> that De Blasio, in a move backed by the city&#8217;s powerful teachers unions, is &#8220;threatening to end co-location. That’s the practice of giving charters — which are public schools, remember — unused space in other school buildings, because charters get no capital funds to build. End co-location, and you will kill many charters.&#8221;</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>Occupy Wall Street May Soon Occupy New York’s City Hall</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ronn-torossian/occupy-wall-street-may-soon-occupy-new-yorks-city-hall/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=occupy-wall-street-may-soon-occupy-new-yorks-city-hall</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 03 Sep 2013 04:02:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronn Torossian]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=203018</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The sad state of politics in the Big Apple. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Occupy_Wall_Street_Anonymous_2011_Shankbone.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-203019" alt="Occupy_Wall_Street_Anonymous_2011_Shankbone" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Occupy_Wall_Street_Anonymous_2011_Shankbone-412x350.jpg" width="247" height="210" /></a>I love New York. Yet, the city in which I was born and raised, today raise my children in, and where I <a href="http://www.5wpr.com/about5wpr/management.cfm">founded 5WPR</a>, is headed into the gutter.  Opinion polls seemingly indicate that whichever candidate can show themselves to be the most extreme liberal and anti-business is the candidate most likely to win. The most recent opinion polls which have shown the most liberal, left-wing candidate, Bill de Blasio, as the clear front-runner in the New York mayoral race is an event which will put this city in a very bad place.</p>
<p>The seeming inevitability of a Democratic mayor is bad for the great city of New York. Those of us who remember the dangerous, dirty streets, the corruption and chronically broken system know indeed how quick it can return.  Policies the Democratic candidates nearly universally support &#8212; bigger government, more regulation and an end to “stop and frisk” &#8212; are policies which will set this city backwards in terms of crime, the economy and quality of life.</p>
<p>It mustn’t be overlooked that New York is already the lowest ranking state on the “Small Business Survival Index,” and The Tax Foundation, a non-partisan Washington, D.C tax research group, ranked New York as the worst place in the nation for establishing a business based on taxes. Raising New York City income taxes for anyone who succeeds will undoubtedly cost many business interests in the city. Between federal, state and local taxes, after Medicare, unemployment, commercial taxes and all the rest, I already pay close to 50% in taxes. Absurd.</p>
<p>De Blasio’s warm feelings for Occupy Wall Street, vowing to &#8220;build spaces&#8221; for Occupy Wall Street protesters to “share ideas” is asinine. That shouldn’t come as a surprise given the fact that the biggest backer of Occupy Wall Street, financier George Soros, endorsed de Blasio. Competing for Soros’ endorsement alone shows how bad this race is. Soros has said that European-style socialism “is exactly what we need now.” Soros manipulates currency worldwide, and believes the totalitarian Chinese government is “a better-functioning government than the United States.” Joe Lieberman – no radical right-winger — says Soros’s views on America are “so negative, so critical, and so often anti-American.” If Soros endorses something, you know it’s bad. Soros’ endorsement should be something political candidates in this great Republic run away from. After all, the man said: “The main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States.” Could one imagine the uproar if a conservative accepted an endorsement from someone with such radical extreme views?</p>
<p>De Blasio discussed his economic policy recently by focusing on the “inequality” between what he described as the city&#8217;s &#8220;millionaire&#8217;s club,&#8221; peopled by suits who scuttle between boardrooms and white-tablecloth restaurants, and the “single mothers who can&#8217;t afford groceries.”</p>
<p>I was raised in the Bronx by a single mother and I remember our struggles well.</p>
<p>Not a day passed in our home where money wasn’t a consideration, and I have worked since the age of 12. My mother raised us well, and I am a graduate of the New York City public school system.  Today, I live in an Upper West Side luxury condominium; send my kids to private schools, and today, at the age of 39 I employ more than 100 people.  I am proud to have been named <a href="http://www.5wpr.com/about5wpr/management.cfm">PR Executive of the Year</a>, won numerous awards, and I work very long hours to better my family.</p>
<p>The struggles we had growing up strengthened and inspire me.  I am proud to have established the <a href="http://ronntorossianfoundation.com/">Ronn Torossian Foundation</a> through which I give charity – because I want to. Indeed, I sit in boardrooms and white-tablecloth restaurants which de Blasio attacks – isn’t that what every poor kid dreams of? Making it big and succeeding? Is it not something to be proud of sitting in boardrooms and fancy restaurants? That’s the greatness of America.</p>
<p>Parents, as my mom did, should encourage their children to work hard and strive for the sky.  Not to expect handouts.  In this new-version of New York (much like Obama’s America) handouts are expected and provided. Rather than look at successful entrepreneurs as role models, we are looked at as the horse to ride to get ahead. Simply un-American. These extreme liberal, anti-American, liberal positions are better off at street protests than inside <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/ronn-torossian/new-york-city-focus-on-real-issues-2/">New York City</a> City Hall.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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