Tag: de blasio
De Blasio’s Wisconsin Reception Shows Potency As Election Force

De Blasio’s Wisconsin Reception Shows Potency As Election Force

By Mark Niquette and Henry Goldman, Bloomberg News (TNS)

MILWAUKEE — New York Mayor Bill de Blasio attracted the biggest crowd to Wisconsin Democrats’ annual dinner on Saturday since Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama attended seven years ago. The foray to the home state of expected Republican presidential candidate Scott Walker shows de Blasio’s determination to affect the 2016 election.

“I’m certainly going to be doing this with some regularity,” de Blasio said after getting a standing ovation for his speech in Milwaukee.

The 53-year-old mayor has in recent weeks ventured from the most-populous U.S. city into the Midwest to inveigh against tax breaks for corporations, attacks on unions, and income inequality. He has withheld a quick endorsement of Democratic candidate Clinton, emphasizing his power as leader of a city of 8.4 million and ensuring that his intentions remain a topic of speculation and conversation.

De Blasio’s rise as the first Democratic New York mayor in 20 years and appeal to progressives can influence his party’s broad agenda while also being a thorn in the side of Republican candidates, said Mike Tate, chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party.

“Outside of anyone named Obama or Clinton, I think Bill de Blasio and Elizabeth Warren are the two biggest draws in the Democratic Party,” said Tate, referring to the Massachusetts senator who also champions progressive issues. “People are really looking at what he did and what he is saying as a real path forward.”

De Blasio drew 360 people as keynote speaker at the $5,000- per-table fundraising dinner in Milwaukee, where Walker was a county executive before becoming governor in 2011.

The speech followed trips this month to Nebraska and Iowa, which holds the first presidential contest, to push progressive leaders to crystallize how they will fight income inequality and to make it an issue in elections at all levels.

After a jaunt to Washington in May to convene a group of mayors seeking a bill for transportation funding, the mayor said he expects to travel to California and other states where he’s invited and there are opportunities.

De Blasio said he’s trying to arrange a presidential forum in the fall where candidates of all parties would be invited as long as they come with specific proposals and policies for dealing with income inequality.

The mayor and other progressive leaders also are creating a new “contract with America,” a reference to the 1994 Republican set of limited-government proposals with the same name, to draw 2016 candidates to their agenda.

The policies include higher taxes on the rich, including elimination of preferential treatment that hedge-fund managers get on investment income, a push for early-child education, a $15 minimum wage, college scholarships, and job training.

“That does mean challenging people in my own party to come up with real solutions, and it certainly means challenging Republicans to reverse course on a lot of policies that have failed,” de Blasio told reporters in Milwaukee.

De Blasio in his speech chided Democrats for a “muddled message” in previous elections, while blistering Walker’s policies.

“I’m not saying Scott Walker set out to destroy Wisconsin’s middle class,” de Blasio said during his speech. “But if that were his mission, I can’t think of a damn thing he’d done differently.”

Julie Jansch, 62, a retired police evidence technician and president of a retiree local chapter of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, drove 120 miles from Green Bay to hear de Blasio. Jansch said that while she didn’t know a lot about the New York mayor, she wants a voice “for the common man.”

While de Blasio advocates positions that resonate, he’s untested on the national scene, said Steve Elmendorf, a Democratic strategist in Washington who was deputy campaign manager for presidential candidate John Kerry.

The mayor’s lack of an endorsement of Clinton, the presumptive front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, also has been a gamble. De Blasio managed Clinton’s successful 2000 bid to become a U.S. senator from New York and in 1997 he worked for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in her husband’s administration.

“What’s crucial is a vision, a very sharp, tangible vision of economic change,” de Blasio told reporters in Milwaukee when asked about Clinton. “I’m hopeful that we’ll hear that from her, but I think that’s what people are waiting for.”

The mayor’s non-endorsement took some Democrats by surprise.

“Bill de Blasio should have his head examined,” U.S. Representative Sean Maloney of upstate New York said in a radio interview. “I don’t understand why my friend Bill de Blasio would have any reservations about a person he worked for, about a champion for New York.”

By not immediately backing Clinton, de Blasio may boost his appeal as a critic of Walker and other Republicans, said Robert Shrum, a professor of politics at the University of Southern California who has advised Democratic presidential campaigns.

“A lot of people were scratching their head about why he didn’t endorse Hillary Clinton,” Shrum said. “But the truth is, not having endorsed her makes him a more credible critic, makes him more independent. He doesn’t look like a surrogate of the Clinton campaign.”

Photo: Mayor Bill de Blasio via Facebook

Secular de Blasio Sows Confusion As New York Pre-K Allows Prayer

Secular de Blasio Sows Confusion As New York Pre-K Allows Prayer

By Henry Goldman, Bloomberg News (TNS)

NEW YORK — For someone unaffiliated with any church, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has become an unlikely advocate for the religious, from supporting the right of Orthodox Jews to use oral suction during circumcision to closing schools on Muslim holidays.

The moves by de Blasio, who calls himself a “spiritual person,” have ignited criticism from civil libertarians who usually support his progressive agenda. They say he’s blurred the separation of church and state by advocating use of public facilities for Sunday services and, in the latest example, allowing Jewish yeshivas and Catholic schools to conduct midday prayer breaks in taxpayer-funded pre-kindergartens.

“New Yorkers would be well advised to think about how they would feel if their child was in a pre-K program when their kid does not belong to the same faith as the other kids, and all the other kids are herded in to go pray,” said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.

De Blasio, the first Democrat to run City Hall in 20 years, says he’s trying to respect New York’s diversity and promote inclusion. He’s also likely to reap political advantages by pursuing policies that send pre-K tuition funds to religious institutions and allowing practices that other mayors restricted.

“When partisan political organizations are weaker and weaker, religious groups turn out voters,” said Kenneth Sherrill, political science professor emeritus at Hunter College in Manhattan. “The mayor’s policies may be at odds with his base, but it’s a rational calculation because if he does well by religious groups, they are not likely to turn their backs to him in the next election.”

The issue hasn’t arisen on a national scale since the 1980s, when lawmakers debated subsidies for day care, said Rob Boston, a spokesman for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a Washington-based lobbying group. Advocates for child care considered it so important they were willing to disregard constitutional limits to achieve that goal, he said.

New York’s Orthodox Jewish population grew about 32 percent in the 12 years through 2011 and composed about 40 percent of the city’s 1.1 million Jews, according to the most recent demographic study by UJA-Federation of New York.

Hasidic, or ultra-Orthodox, rabbis traditionally influence the overwhelming number of votes of their communities. In 2013, when de Blasio courted Hasidim to win his party’s nomination, as much as seven percent of primary voters came from enclaves in those areas of Brooklyn, said David Pollock, who specializes in politics and government at the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York.

“Mayor de Blasio is a populist, and he is working to accommodate all kinds of groups,” Pollock said this week. “He understands that universal pre-K can’t be truly universal if there are groups that can’t access it in a way consistent with their religious beliefs.”

During the campaign, Orthodox rabbis and their constituents closely scrutinized how the candidates answered questions about limits the city had placed on the circumcision rite of metzitzah b’peh, in which the mohel who performs the procedure on an eight-day-old boy sucks blood from the cut penis to clean the wound.

Since 2000, at least 12 New York infants have become infected with the herpes virus following the ritual, and two died. De Blasio, 53, promised he would end requirements that parents sign informed-consent documents asserting that they had been made aware of the risks.

In February, de Blasio said he would ask the Board of Health to scrap the requirement, substituting it with an agreement negotiated with a coalition of rabbis. The new program requires testing of any mohel after a herpes infection and, if found to be positive, banning him for life.

The mayor won praise from Muslims this month when he announced that the largest U.S. school system would observe the holidays of Eid al-Adha and Eid al-Fitr. An unintended consequence of that decision was that it drew scores of protesting Asian residents to City Hall a week later. They demanded that he honor his campaign pledge to recognize the Lunar New Year.

De Blasio has said he has no objection to a church in the Bronx renting space in a public school for services even as city lawyers have a case in the U.S. Supreme Court defending former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s 2010 decision to deny use of the school. The city’s rules, put in place in 2010, prohibit partisan political events, private ceremonies, and commercial uses as well as worship services. The former mayor is founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP.

“This is something that for years and years went on in our schools without contradicting the separation between church and state, based on a group having to apply, having to wait its turn in line, having to pay rent,” de Blasio told reporters February 23.

More troubling to civil libertarians has been the mayor’s quickness to permit prayer in public facilities or in city-funded school programs.

The issue arose this week as the administration began accepting applications to expand its universal preschool program to 70,000 children next year, after beginning with 53,000 this year. To achieve that, the city had to rely on religious organizations and community groups for space. About 5,000 seats are in religious facilities, of which about 3,300 are Catholic and about 1,300 are Jewish, according to Wiley Norvell, a mayoral spokesman.

De Blasio has said that in the next school year, he would have no objection to pre-kindergartens affiliated with religious institutions conducting 20-minute prayer breaks, so long as they didn’t count that time toward the required six-hour, 20-minute school day. Schools would have to make up the lost time with extra classes on Sunday or federal holidays, he said.

At stake for the groups allowing the city to use their space are millions of dollars in public funds to reimburse them at a rate of about $10,000 per student.

Some Orthodox Jews express dissatisfaction with the plan because they want to be able to practice their faith during the day without having to make up for lost time.

“This is not an option for us, because they must have religious instruction; it’s who they are as Jews,” said Maury Litwack, director of state political affairs for the Orthodox Union, a national advocacy group.

From Yeshiva Ohr Shraga Veretzky in Flatbush, Brooklyn, to the Catholic Archdiocese offices near Manhattan’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral, educators say the new rules have created more confusion than clarity.

Yitty Tillim, 38, who directs the pre-K program at Ohr Shraga, says she doesn’t know what would happen if the school included non-Jews who would have to watch as their four-year-old classmates went off to pray or say a blessing before and after each meal.

That issue couldn’t arise at present because although the program is open to anyone, all 20 boys in the class come from Orthodox Jewish homes. They receive religious instruction in Hebrew before the start of secular class at 9:40 a.m., she said.

At Catholic schools, the prospect of being permitted to pray in the middle of the school day opens new possibilities for religious training of four-year-olds, said Fran Davies, spokeswoman for the Archdiocese of New York’s education division. Educators hadn’t yet given any thought to how they would handle students of different faiths, she said.

“Now that we will have them,” Davies said, “we see them as an opportunity. We were used to the idea of boundaries between secular and religious, and we didn’t have a problem with those in the past.”

Note: The headline of this article originally contained a typographical error.

New York To No Longer Arrest For Small Amounts Of Marijuana

New York To No Longer Arrest For Small Amounts Of Marijuana

By Tina Susman, Los Angeles Times

NEW YORK — Possession of 25 grams or less of marijuana no longer will be grounds for arrest in New York City under a new policy aimed at ending the lifelong stigma that can follow pot users, city officials announced Monday.

The new law, which takes effect Nov. 19, marks a substantial shift in policing in the nation’s largest city, where arrests for marijuana possession so far this year number more than 24,000. But both Mayor Bill de Blasio and Police Commissioner William J. Bratton said the policy change was not a sign they favored going the route of Colorado and Washington state, which have legalized some recreational marijuana use.

“It’s still against the law,” said Bratton, who held up a small plastic bag filled with oregano to demonstrate the maximum amount that a person could be caught with in New York City and avoid being arrested. “I’m not giving out ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ cards.”

De Blasio, a staunch liberal, also made clear he opposed marijuana legalization. “Any substance that alters your consciousness is a potential danger,” de Blasio said.

Under the new law, a person who is carrying 25 grams or less of the drug and not smoking it would be issued a summons rather than being arrested, taken to a police station, fingerprinted and photographed. Bratton said under some circumstances, a person could still face arrest. That could occur if the person with the marijuana was wanted on an outstanding warrant or if he or she was unable to provide identification to police.

A first offense would bring a fine of up to $100. Subsequent offenses could carry fines up to $300.

De Blasio said the shift was in keeping with his pledge to improve relations between the police and the city’s African-American and Latino communities, who were disproportionately affected by the department’s stop-question-frisk practices. Many of those stops led to arrests for small amounts of marijuana.

The mayor said such arrests often had “disastrous consequences” for individuals with otherwise clean records.

“When an individual is arrested even for the smallest amount of marijuana, it hurts their chances to get a good job. It hurts their chances to get housing. It hurts their chances to qualify for student loans. It can literally follow them the rest of their lives,” de Blasio said.

Bratton said the police department was hurt by the arrests too because it forced officers to spend “endless hours” in courtrooms while cases were prosecuted. “I don’t want them chasing down 25-gram bags of marijuana and tying themselves up in court,” he said.

The announcement came on the same day that new FBI crime statistics showed a drop in nationwide marijuana arrests in 2013. According to the FBI, 693,058 marijuana arrests were made last year, compared with 749,842 in 2012.

In a statement, a spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project, Mason Tvert, said the drop in arrests was a positive step, but Tvert said it was wrong to arrest even one person for “using a substance that is objectively less harmful than alcohol.”

“Every year we see millions of violent crimes attributed to alcohol, and the evidence is clear that marijuana is not a significant contributing factor in such incidents,” Tvert said. “Yet our laws continue to steer adults toward drinking by threatening to punish them if they make the safer choice.”

AFP Photo/Frederic J Brown

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Charity Declares New York Vegan Capital Of 2014

Charity Declares New York Vegan Capital Of 2014

New York (AFP) — Animal rights charity PETA declared New York vegan capital of the world on Wednesday as Scottish actor Alan Cumming unveiled a replica of the Manhattan skyline carved out of vegetables.

Dan Mathews, senior vice president of PETA, said the Big Apple was “2014 most vegan-friendly city” of the year due to a first vegetarian public school, vegan fast-food outlets, and increasing offshoots of vegan gourmet restaurants.

Mathews said celebrities such as Beyonce and Jennifer Lopez were among those who had taken the 22-day vegan cleanse, saying that incorporating vegan elements into diets was healthy.

“I am a vegan and to be in a city which is so vegan friendly is great,” Cumming, who went vegan a couple of years ago and currently stars on Broadway in “Cabaret,” told reporters.

“Everyone realizes that these things are delicious and good for you and I think it’s an indication of how we’re becoming more conscious about what we do to our bodies,” he added.

Previous winners of “most vegan-friendly city” are Los Angeles, London, and Austin, Texas, Mathews said.

The vegetable skyline took three days to carve from squash, taro root, radishes, eggplant, broccoli, carrots, lemongrass, banana leaves, and beets by food artist James Parker, organizers said.

It was shown to New York mayor Bill de Blasio, with whom Cumming said he discussed Thursday’s independence referendum in Scotland.

Cumming, who on Wednesday published an op-ed in The New York Times calling for independence, told AFP he would not be able to vote because he was in New York.

City Council member Corey Johnson said he was “thrilled” that New York was number one in vegetarian and vegan dining, saying there were more than 140 vegetarian restaurants in the city.

PETA, known for its media stunts, is the largest animal rights organization in the world, with more than three million members and supporters.

AFP Photo/Jewel Samad

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