Welcome to the Monkey House - They Make the PolitBuro Seem Right Wing - Council of Crackpots

Here is a collection of Loons who (much like Obama) never had a real job and could never get one outside politics. Imagine the homeless lunatic on the street dictating the course of the City. That is what the Council has as their majority. m/r

"In an effort to reduce the “significant stress” that getting arrested
can cause, [Council Member Jumaane] Williams sponsored a resolution calling on police to “stop
arresting people for committing minor infractions in the transit
system.” According to the text of the resolution, being arrested for
littering, gambling, or urinating in the subway can be “very disruptive”
to the arrestee."

Council of Crackpots by Seth Barron, City Journal Winter 2015

Bill de Blasio built his 2013 campaign for New York City mayor around unapologetically progressive policies: an end to the NYPD’s “stop-and-frisk” practices, loosened restrictions on welfare availability, universal prekindergarten, and various other initiatives designed to reduce the economic inequality that, he claimed, had made Gotham “a tale of two cities.” De Blasio’s victory has quickly given him a national profile as one of liberalism’s standard-bearers, and he appears to have broader ambitions. Realizing any such aspirations will depend, of course, on how he performs as mayor, but de Blasio came into office with an advantage that his recent predecessors lacked: overwhelming support in the city council, whose members, as one lawmaker put it, are like a “cult of true believers,” eager to follow their leader. In New York, the mayor makes most of the news, and it’s easy to ignore the city council. That would be a mistake. Not only did de Blasio himself come from its ranks, where he spent years building alliances; New York’s next mayor may well be a sitting council member today—and, if so, judging by the views of some of the council’s leading figures, the de Blasio years might be ironically remembered for how moderate they were….

...

Insiders had considered Mark-Viverito a long shot for the speakership. She grew up in privilege in Puerto Rico, where her ophthalmologist father, who owned his own dual-engine Cessna, founded a hospital that, after his death, sold for $165 million. She and her family own properties in San Juan and along the coast that provide them with a stream of rental income. Under the auspices of a program aimed at middle-income, first-time home buyers, Mark-Viverito purchased her current home, a three-family structure on East 111th Street, for $350,000, and paid off the mortgage after only ten years. The property is now estimated to be worth $1.2 million. Despite appearing at Zuccotti Park during the Occupy Wall Street sit-in and announcing on camera that she belongs to the “99 percent,” Mark-Viverito has the real-estate portfolio of a 1 percenter.

Curiously, Mark-Viverito, like de Blasio (who grew up as Warren Wilhelm, Jr.), changed her name in adulthood: Melissa Mark added her mother’s maiden name, Viverito, after graduating from Columbia University. It’s no stretch to infer that political considerations drove this decision, as they probably did de Blasio’s. The Teutonic resonances of “Wilhelm” would not likely attract votes or donors in the heavily Jewish or persistently Italian precincts of Brooklyn where de Blasio launched his career. Likewise, “Melissa Mark” lacks the tongue-tripping sequence of vowels that Mark-Viverito exploited for ethnic appeal when she moved to East Harlem from Greenwich Village to run against Philip Reed, her black predecessor, in 2003. She lost that race, but assumed Reed’s seat two years later, when term limits forced him out.

-go to link-