Free Republic

2014 is the Year of the Liberal Lie By Kyle Smith Bowe Bergdahl. The IRS’s missing e-mails. Lena Dunham. “Hands up, don’t shoot.” Jonathan Gruber. GM and that faulty ignition switch. Andrew Cuomo and that anti-corruption commission. The Secret Service and that White House intruder. Rachel Noerdlinger and her “disabled” son. Rolling Stone and gang rape. 2014 was the year when truth was optional. 2014 was the year when convenient fabrication was the weapon of choice for celebrities, activists, big business and politicians. 2014 was the Year of the Lie. In each case, the liars used their powerful positions to...

Officials and various candidates for office joined in the flood of outrage tonight following the not guilty verdict in the racially-charged trial of George Zimmerman for the killing of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin. Former Comptroller Bill Thompson, the mayoral race’s only black candidate, released and tweeted a terse, one-line statement slamming the decision, which was read tonight just before 10 p.m. “Trayvon Martin was killed because he was black,” declared Mr. Thompson. “There was no justice done today in Florida.” City Council Speaker Christine Quinn further slammed the acquittal as “a shocking insult to his family and everyone seeking justice...

Bill de Blasio, the New York mayor, says he knows why Democrats lost the 2014 election. Income inequality defines our times, he said during a visit to Washington this week, and his party did not talk about the issue enough. De Blasio needs a hearing aid. Democrats speak of little else. Dodging questions about Hillary Clinton, de Blasio praised Elizabeth Warren. He called the liberal heroine “one of the indispensable voices” among Democrats, and appeared with her at a Center for American Progress event later that day. The policy conference featured other darlings of the left: Julian Castro, Tammy Baldwin,...

Mayor Bill de Blasio says he won't reimburse the taxpayers for personal trips when his security detail is at the wheel, even though New York City's other top elected officials have said they would. For the first time Monday afternoon, Mr. de Blasio addressed criticism from government watchdogs and former elected officials who have questioned his ethics for allowing the public to fund out-of-town private travel, an issue raised in report published last week in The Wall Street Journal. Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat, said he would abide by a March 2009 advisory opinion from the city's Conflicts of Interest...

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is maneuvering to run for president in 2016 and will use his progressive credentials to derail former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s expected bid for the White House, according to a prediction from the chairman of the Republican Party in New York. Ed Cox, the New York state GOP chairman, also said de Blasio’s plan will be successful, according to the New York Post. “It’s like Barack Obama; he was a brand-new freshman senator, and he ran for president and won. I think de Blasio is going to do it,” Cox said at a...

Taxpayers pay their salaries — but that hasn’t stopped two Bronx public defenders from appearing in a vile online rap video that urges black people to kill NYPD cops. The sickening video, for a rap called “Hands Up,” shows black men holding guns to cops’ heads and features the disgusting lyric, “For Mike Brown and Sean Bell, a cop got to get killed.”

With only weeks before New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s first year in office comes to a close, the Big Apple’s voters are starting to sour on their famously progressive mayor. While a majority of voters continue to approve of the job the mayor has done in office (52 percent, according to the latest New York Times/Siena poll), a figure that remains largely unchanged from an April Siena poll, voters are turning on how the city is managed. 52 percent say that de Blasio’s New York City is on the “wrong track.” Only 41 percent disagree. That is a...

New York City’s mayoral mansion has gotten a higher fence after White House fence-jumping incursions raised security concerns. A spokeswoman for Mayor Bill de Blasio said Friday that the head of the mayor’s security detail decided to raise the fence around Gracie Mansion. It sits in a public park. …

--SNIP-- The new fence — constructed just inside an existing red brick wall and a wrought-iron fence ringing the historic property — was actually dubbed a “privacy fence” by de Blasio and first lady Chirlane McCray, sources told The Post. “So much for being mayor of the people. That brick fence was good enough for Rudy Giuliani and his family, and for Ed Koch and all the mayors before him,” a law enforcement source said. “They didn’t need a taller fence. That’s the same house where everybody else lived for years.

A 22 year old Israeli Jewish man was stabbed Tuesday morning (roughly 2:00 am EST) in Crown Heights, outside the Chabad-Lubavitch building at 770 Eastern Parkway in New York City. The man’s condition is defined as stable, but serious; he was reportedly stabbed in the neck. The public has been asked to pray for him; his Hebrew name is Levy Yitzhak ben Raizel. Police arrived at the scene and apprehended the perpetrator, now revealed to have been a 40-year old African American man. He may have also been Muslim, but this has yet to be confirmed. The attacker died after...

They used to hang horse thieves — now they elect them mayor. As many know, New York City’s new commandant, Bill de Blasio, has sworn that one of his first acts upon taking office will be to ban Central Park’s iconic horse-drawn carriages. He claims that forcing horses to work in downtown Manhattan is inhumane, but is he really just kowtowing to a big real-estate developer who heavily supported his campaign? Interestingly, there was a time when de Blasio was more blasé about these animal-rights concerns. In fact, when he had the chance as a City Council member to support...

A startled carriage horse took a jaunt around Central Park without any passengers or its driver. The horse became detached from its bridle on Monday evening and ran into the Manhattan park, following its usual route, the union that represents carriage drivers said. It was unclear what startled it. […] Advocacy agency NYCLASS, which is seeking to end the carriage horse industry, released a statement saying carriage horses and city streets don’t mix. “It’s time to retire the carriage horses and replace them with something that doesn’t spook or dart dangerously through traffic and pedestrians,” it said. …

Wednesday, March 12, 2014 The Left's War on Horses Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog At Grand Army Plaza, beneath the golden equestrian statue of General Sherman, the horses stand, lazily flicking their ears, tasting the grit of 59th street and occasionally glancing about as a yellow taxi driven by an angry Pakistani wheels around past the Plaza Hotel, brakes squealing, an Al Qaeda friendly Nasheed or a little  Atif Aslam, either sounding more unpleasant than the brakes, blaring through the open window. Feathered plumes, scarlet red, sapphire blue, electric purple, matching the colors of the plush...

While Bill de Blasio backer Steve Nislick plots to grab the stables once his boy follows through and outlaws carriage horses in Central Park, Liam Neeson visited the actual stables whose “64,000 feet of valuable real estate” Nislick has been drooling over and is plotting to seize under the cover of animal rights. And taught smirking liberal Jon Stewart a thing or two about horses. . .

Rush Limbaugh has come out swinging in defence of the heavily Irish horse and carriage industry in New York’s Central Park after new mayor Bill de Blasio promised to put them off the streets. Over half the drivers of the 200 horses are Irish, but they are fighting a rearguard action against de Blasio, who had major support from animal rights groups. De Blasio stated that one of his first acts would be to end the horse and carriage trade and replace it with electric car tours. "We are going to quickly and aggressively move to make horse carriages no...

Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio vowed to act quickly to abolish horse-drawn carriages in the city. "We are going to get rid of the horse carriages. Period,” de Blasio said in response to a question at his press conference announcing his schools chancellor pick Monday. “It’s over,” he said.

Bill de Blasio, New York’s incoming mayor, apparently loves animals more than people. He thinks horse-drawn carriages in Central Park are “inhumane.” But abortions in New York City, which is the abortion capital of America given its ridiculously high abortion rates? No problem.Fox News reports on de Blasio’s concern about horse-drawn carriages: New York City Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio has vowed to move quickly to outlaw the horse-drawn carriages that pull tourists around the city’s famous Central Park.“We are going to get rid of the horse carriages. Period,” de Blasio, who takes office New Year’s Day, said at a news...

New York City’s brand-new mayor Bill de Blasio has an ambitious progressive agenda that includes tax increases, much talk about somehow crushing inequality and punishing “the elite.” Two issues high on de Blasio’s agenda are the creation of more abortion clinics across the five boroughs and an outright ban on horse-drawn carriage rides in Central Park. De Blasio’s animosity to the horse-drawn carriages runs deep, apparently. “We are going to get rid of horse carriages, period,” he said at a news conference Monday, according to CNN. He added that he believes the tourist attraction — popular since 1858 — is...

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio's bill to ban horse-drawn carriages reached the City Council on Monday, in a move to phase out the carriages that often give tours around Central Park. The legislation says that as of June 1, 2016, "it shall be unlawful to operate a horse-drawn vehicle in the city of New York or offer rides to the public on a vehicle drawn or pulled by a carriage horse." ... It also boosts the penalty for breaking horse-carriage rules to a maximum of $25,000 instead of the current $500. The proposed ban was introduced one day after...

Suffering from a clear lack of intellectual honesty, the morally bankrupt progressive socialist mayor of New York City seems to have a knack for tax avoidance. (And remember: despite what Harry Reid would have you believe, tax avoidance is not a crime.) According to public records, Bill “punish the rich” de Blasio paid a mere 8 percent of his income in federal taxes. Just to put that in context for any liberal that has accidently stumbled across this paragraph: That’s less than that capitalist pig, Mitt Romney paid in prior years. Of course, to be fair, it is possible...