Free Republic

It would be great to see what some of the creatives here can do with our great governor's self-flagellation poster he made for his Covid response.

Both chambers of the New York state legislature have passed a bill to limit Gov. Andrew Cuomo's emergency powers granted in the pandemic. The Friday vote fell along party lines in the Senate with 43 Democrats voting in favor against 20 Republican votes. The Assembly voted 107-43 several hours after the Senate’s approval to require more legislative oversight before directives are modified or extended. Cuomo will have to sign off on it for it to take effect. If he doesn't, state Democrats have a veto-proof majority in the legislature to override his vote. The bill, which was introduced Tuesday by...

All throughout the viral craziness of the past year, we have incessantly heard references made to the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918-1919. The implication of many of these comments is usually something to the effect of: “Even during the Spanish Flu, they knew that the places that enforced mask mandates on the healthy did much better than those places where such mandates were not in place.” Would it surprise you to learn that this bit of now conventional wisdom is most likely not true? One city where a mask requirement was enforced most stringently during the Spanish Flu was San...

**SNIP** “At long last, will you and the Cuomo Administration admit to your culpability in these deaths and finally issue an apology to the thousands of families impacted?” asked Sen. Jim Tedisco (R-Glenville). Zucker, who accused critics of pushing “a lot of fiction” around the order, argued that data supports the Department of Health’s July report which found thousands of Covid-19-related long-term care deaths in New York - and across the country - were largely driven by community spread from infected staff or visitors in the early days of the pandemic. “There were 37,000 staff who ended up having Covid...

NEW YORK - It was like a classic episode of "Perry Mason," with an FBI agent charged with murder, a mouthy mob moll and a twist at the end: The FBI guy walked after a reporter with a secret tape exposed the gangster's girlfriend as a liar who couldn't keep her story straight. In a stunning finish to one of the worst law enforcement corruption cases in U.S. history, former FBI agent Lindley DeVecchio was cleared Thursday of giving up confidential information that a Colombo family hit man used to kill four fellow mobsters — either rivals or potential rats....

When New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was first accused of undercounting nursing home deaths from Covid-19, his administration offered a simple explanation: The state did not include nursing home residents who died in the hospital in the publicly posted tally of coronavirus deaths linked to long-term care facilities, officials said, because it wanted to avoid a “double count” of those deaths in the statewide total. But New York stands apart from other states in taking this approach to counting nursing home deaths, research experts said - a decision that made New York’s tally of nursing home deaths appear lower than...

New York Assemblyman Ron Kim (D), who last week said he was threatened by Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) for seeking answers on the handling of coronavirus outbreaks in the state's nursing homes, said on Monday to "follow the money" in the scandal. "Back on March 25, the governor issued a mandate that sent 9,000 COVID patients back to nursing homes without being tested. That's when I started getting involved, when I saw the impact of that on the ground," Kim told Hill.TV. "I believe part of the reason they suppressed the number of deaths and decoupled the data was to...

When he was talking about his daughter’s boyfriend, or making meatballs for the family dinner, or yukking it up with his brother on CNN, it was easy to forget Gov Cuomo’s prickly side. But when the criticism cascaded with allegations that his administration was covering up the number of coronavirus deaths in nursing homes, the shine began to wear off. The bully was back. To hear Cuomo — who faces a federal investigation over the crisis — tell the story, he’s just a Queens tough guy, forged in the outer borough fire of political and personal survival. But his detractors...

New York Democrats are lining up alongside Republican lawmakers to accuse Governor Andrew Cuomo of controlling the state through fear, intimidation and very personal threatening phone calls. Lawmakers from both political parties are piling on long-held criticisms of Cuomo Saturday as his office responds to accusations they covered up nursing home deaths from COVID-19. **SNIP** State Senator Alessandra Biaggi joined the steady stream of Democratic dissent against Cuomo being shared this week across Twitter threads and cable news outlets. Biaggi told The New Yorker Cuomo has threatened her career "so many times" through thinly veiled remarks. Additionally, two-time Democratic House...

Amid reports of a federal probe into Democratic New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's handling of COVID-19 nursing home deaths, Democrats from New York's General Assembly and Senate have begun discussing the possibility of stripping Cuomo of broad executive powers granted to him last March to oversee the state's COVID-19 response efforts. The U.S. Justice Department has been probing Cuomo's COVID-19 task force to determine whether the state had purposefully manipulated data on nursing home deaths, two unnamed people familiar with the matter told the Associated Press. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity as they weren't allowed to publicly discuss...

Nine Democratic members of the New York State Assembly on Tuesday accused Gov. Andrew Cuomo of federal obstruction of justice in a letter seeking support to strip him of his COVID-19 emergency powers. The move followed last week’s exclusive Post report that revealed Secretary to the Governor Melissa DeRosa admitting to Democratic lawmakers that Cuomo’s administration covered up data about the total number of nursing home residents killed by the coronavirus. The letter, sent Tuesday to members of the Assembly, said, “It is now unambiguously clear that this governor has engaged in an intentional obstruction of justice, as outlined in...

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo defended himself Monday against accusations that his administration covered up the actual COVID-19 death toll among the state’s nursing home residents, blaming politics and miscommunication for the controversy. The third-term Democratic governor acknowledged at a press conference that his administration’s opacity regarding the scope of coronavirus deaths among residents of long-term care facilities was a mistake. Cuomo suggested that the state’s delay in answering questions about the data from lawmakers and the press had led to “a void” that was “filled with skepticism, cynicism and conspiracy theories, which furthered confusion.” “In retrospect, should we have...

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio called for an investigation into an alleged cover-up by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration over how many patients died in nursing homes early in the COVID-19 pandemic. "It's very troubling. We've got to know more. We now need a full accounting of what happened," de Blasio said during a radio interview on Friday. "Think about seniors, who their lives were in the balance and their families, you know, just desperate to get them the help they needed," de Blasio continued. "We need to know exactly what happened here. We need to make...

Last call is getting a little later. Gov. Cuomo on Sunday issued an executive order pushing the statewide curfew for bars, restaurants and other establishments with liquor licenses from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. “Hospitalizations and the positivity rate continue to decline, and with the holiday surge now in our rear-view mirror, we must keep taking steps to further re-open the economy safely and responsibly,” he said in a Sunday statement. The later curfew also applies to gyms and fitness centers, casinos and pool halls, his office noted. **SNIP** Cuomo’s new executive order comes as a growing number of Albany...

Former Gov. Pataki thinks New Yorkers should take a hard look at recalling Gov. Cuomo over the “reprehensible” cover-up of nursing home deaths. On Thursday, Cuomo’s top aide, Melissa DeRosa, admitted to lawmakers that her boss concealed data about the coronavirus death toll among nursing-home residents to avoid having to share it with the federal government. Even before The Post exposed that scandal this week, roughly 40% of New Yorkers said they would favor a recall effort to oust the three-term incumbent if a recall mechanism existed in the Empire State. “I think it would be appropriate to take a...

Calls continue to mount to prosecute New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and his staff for their handling of the COVID-19 pandemic after a top aide admitted their administration hid damning information about deaths among nursing home patients, amid fears that it would be used against them in an investigation by Donald Trump's Department of Justice. In a remarkable confession made during a conference call with New York state Democrats, obtained by The New York Post, Melissa DeRosa admitted that officials 'froze' in August when the state legislature asked for the data, before rebuffing the request. DeRosa told lawmakers: 'We were...

...The Batavia Police Department in upstate New York on Tuesday joined hundreds of local law enforcement agencies in asking both potential victims and concerned residents to report allegations of unemployment benefit fraud directly to the state's Department of Labor. Police in Avon Lake, Ohio, in Whitman, Massachusetts, and in Evanston, Illinois, say frustrated taxpayers have called or even shown up at the station holding 1099-G tax forms which show someone is fraudulently reporting income in their name. ..

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said on Monday he is going to investigate hospitals that aren't working their way through their vaccine allotment after a pitiful weekend at the end of January where healthcare workers failed to show up for their appointments. The state has so far only been offering the vaccines to people aged over 65 and healthcare workers. But thousands of appointments that are reserved for them have gone unclaimed. In some instances, people have reserved their appointment then not shown up for it. Over the last weekend in January, vaccine sites should have been swarmed with eligible...

“When I say ‘experts’ in air quotes, it sounds like I’m saying I don’t really trust the experts,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo said of pandemic policies. “Because I don’t.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic congresswoman from New York, flashed a double white-power symbol during a Zoom conference about New York City’s crime uptick. Perhaps it was just an “OK” sign or even just a mindless gesture, but that doesn’t matter these days. During the Zoom video, which The Hill uploaded to its YouTube channel Sunday, Ocasio-Cortez spoke to constituents and answered press questions about rising crime rates in the Big Apple. She pointed to the Wuhan virus, financial instability, and police brutality as reasons for the rise in crime, failing to mention anything about the violent riots that swept the...