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Leno Asks NY’s Spitzer: ‘How Could You Be This Stupid?’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: APEliot Spitzer, the former New York governor who is now attempting a political resurrection, is willing to talk about the prostitution scandal that forced him to resign, but perhaps not crack a joke about it.

Spitzer, who announced on Sunday he would run for New York City comptroller, traveled to California on Friday to appear on “The Tonight Show” with Jay Leno, one of many TV comedians who has steadily made him the butt of jokes in the five years since the scandal.

Leno praised the former governor before asking Spitzer: “How can you be this stupid?”

“I don’t say that glibly. I don’t say that glibly,” Leno said. “You were a guy that seemed to have – every time they tried to get you – you seem to be the guy who crossed every “T” and dotted every “I.” How did you make this big a blunder?”

The former governor offered a somewhat serious defense: “Hubris is terminal.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Convicted Child Sex Abusers Sue For $10M, Claim NY State Program Violated Their Rights

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Photo Credit: rakkhiThey are some of the most sexually violent predators, convicted of hideous crimes, such as sexually abusing a five-year-old.

Now they want $10 million.

The civil case in Manhattan’s federal court pits half a dozen child sex offenders against the former governor of New York, George Pataki, and a slew of former state prison and health officials. The six are suing the officials over a 2005 state government program that was designed to keep child sex offenders off the streets, but was disbanded a year later after a New York court ruled against it.

The plaintiffs were serving their prison sentences for their crimes. But they claim that the program, “The Sexually Violent Predator Initiative,” violated their rights by confining them to psychiatric hospitals without a court hearing, just before their sentences were scheduled to be completed.

The lawsuit of lead plaintiff Kenneth Bailey says that “after twelve years behind bars, in the final days of his sentence, [he] was deprived of his freedom and civilly committed to an indefinite sentence in a state-run psychiatric facility. Although the New York State Corrections Law requires that a specific procedure be followed when an inmate is to be confined in a psychiatric facility, those responsible for putting plaintiff there blatantly and deliberately ignored the prescriptions of that law.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Newspaper That Published Map of Gun Owners at it Again (+video)

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Photo Credit: Fox NewsThe suburban New York newspaper that created a firestorm earlier this year when it published the names and addresses of gun permit holders has requested more data regarding legal owners of firearms, apparently to determine if handgun ownership patterns have changed in the last six months.

The Journal News, a Gannett-owned paper that covers suburban counties just north of New York City, requested more personal information in May. This time, it included statistical data, as well as names and addresses of gun permit holders from Rockland, Putnam and Westchester counties. Out of the paper’s reach are the names of those that opted out of the public records under the NY SAFE law, passed after the Journal News published an interactive map showing the address of every registered handgun owner in two counties it covers.

“The request indicated that it was in relation to a ‘news event,’” Westchester County spokeswoman Rosia Blackwell Lawrence told FoxNews.com.

The latest document request, made on May 15, sought the names and addresses of all permit holders in the Westchester database, along with other data that pertained to some 9,996 opt-out requests, including reasons for the requests, total number of requests received, and the total number of requests approved.

Read more from this story HERE.

NYU Evicts Chinese Dissident Reportedly Due to Pressure from the Communist Party of China

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

NYU brass grudgingly gave blind Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng an extra two weeks to move off campus — but warned he’ll have to find a hotel if he misses the deadline, The Post has learned.

The school this week told Chen — who came to New York last year after making a dramatic escape to the US Embassy in China — that he and his family must vacate NYU housing by July 15 “at the latest,” according to a source briefed on the situation.

NYU has prodded the human-rights hero to move quickly, according to insiders, telling Chen that another faculty member is slated to move into the Greenwich Village pad where Chen has stayed with his family for more than a year, according to a source.

“They told him, ‘The sooner, the better.’ ”

The move-out mandate comes as Chen plans a trip to Taiwan later this month, and grapples with worries that members of his family in China are being beaten and denied urgent medical care by authorities.

Read more from this story HERE.

Aspiring New York Actress Turned Amateur Detective Tracks Down Her Father’s Killer

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Photo Credit: Fox News

While she may aspire to play a detective on the big screen, Joselyn Martinez could have a career as a real life gumshoe.

The 36-year old Dominican actress from The Bronx showed her sleuthing skills by helping track down the man who killed her father in a dispute in front of the family’s Dominican restaurant nearly three decades ago.

It took her eight years and about $280 paid to Internet-background check sites, but Martinez sniffed out confessed killer Justo Santos in Miami.

“Knowing the person my father was, I couldn’t live with myself if (Santos) stayed free,” Martinez told the New York Daily News Monday. “I need to see him in New York to know this has really happened.”

Santos remained on the lam for 26 years after shooting Martinez’s father, José, in cold blood after an argument. José Martinez had booted the then 16-year old Santos and two other goons from Martinez’s Dominican Express restaurant after the boys made disparaging and sexual remarks to his wife, Idalia.

Read more from this story HERE.

Mayor Bloomberg Wants to Spend $20 Billion to Protect NYC from Global Warming

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Photo Credit: Newsmax

Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed a $20 billion plan on Tuesday to transform how New York City girds itself for storms and global warming, including removable flood walls that would be set up for much of lower Manhattan, a 15-to-20-foot levee to guard part of Staten Island, and a system of gates and levees to protect a Brooklyn creek.

Bloomberg’s proposals also include building dunes in Staten Island and the Rockaways, firming up the shoreline with bulkheads in various neighborhoods and considering building a levee and a new “Seaport City” development at the South Street Seaport that would echo nearby Battery Park City.

The mayor also is suggesting giving $1.2 billion in grants to property owners to flood-proof their buildings and $50 million to nursing homes to improve theirs; making hospitals even in rarely flooded areas to upgrade their pumps and electrical equipment; and expanding beaches and marshes.

“This plan is incredibly ambitious,” Bloomberg said in a speech at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, acknowledging that much of the work would extend beyond the end of his term this year. “This is urgent work, and it must begin now.

“Piece by piece, over many years and even decades, we can build a city that’s capable of preparing better, withstanding more and overcoming anything.”

Read more from this story HERE.

False: NY Times Says that NSA’s Surveillance Foiled Terror Plot Against NY Subways

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Yesterday both the NY Times and Reuters claimed the Zazi terror plot against New York subways was foiled by an NSA email collection program called PRISM. That was not the case. The key to stopping the Zazi plot was an arrest and investigation by British authorities.

Breitbart News reported the claim, made yesterday in a widely circulated Reuters story, that NSA’s PRISM program had helped foil the Zazi terror plot (including an expression of skepticism that PRISM was necessary to foil the plot). The claim that PRISM was responsible was also made by the New York Times. In a A1 story the Times claimed, “To defenders of the N.S.A., the Zazi case underscores how the agency’s Internet surveillance system, called Prism, which was set up over the past decade to collect data from online providers of e-mail and chat services, has yielded concrete results.”

But the mass collection of emails under PRISM apparently had little to do with stopping the Zazi plot. A blogger at a site called emptywheel raised questions about the Reuters story yesterday. Ben Smith built upon that in a piece at Buzzfeed. As Smith reports, already public information on the Zazi case shows the email account in question was flagged on a tip from British authorities following an arrest.

Read more from this story HERE.

California vs. New York as Nation’s Worst State

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Photo Credit: Kyle Platts

Whenever a free-market research or business group releases a “best and worst” list of states, my eye goes straight to the bottom: To see whether California is last or was edged out for the lowest rank by one of the other mismanaged liberal bastions. Illinois seems to exist to boost the self-esteem of Californians.

I can raise a glass of zinfandel to California’s great victory in the Mercatus Center’s recent “Freedom in the 50 States” study. The state didn’t place last. That distinction went to New York, thanks to its highest-in-the-nation tax rates and entrepreneur-crushing economic regulations. I owe an apology to residents of the Land of Lincoln.

For all the study’s detail about tax rates and regulation, this information jumps out as the most telling about New York: “9.0 percent of the state’s 2000 population, on net, left the state for another state between 2000 and 2011, the highest such figure in the nation.” Moving is the surest sign of dissatisfaction, especially when people relocate from a state that has long been an economic and cultural magnet.

Californians talk incessantly about high-tailing it to Texas or Nevada, yet New Yorkers flee at about double our rate. Migration numbers aside, I would still rank the Golden State as the Most Hopeless State. There are other studies that bolster that case, including Chief Executive magazine’s “2013 Best and Worst States for Business” that places California dead last, with New York in 49th place.

The magazine ranks states based on three categories: taxation and regulation, workforce quality, and living environment. Even with its natural advantages in the last category and high ranking in the second one, California still flopped because its officials have adopted a punitive environment in the first category. That takes some doing.

Read more from this story HERE.

NYC May Give Non-Citizen Immigrants the Right to Vote

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Photo Credit: AP

A controversial proposal in New York City to give voting rights to hundreds of thousands of non-citizen immigrants could make them into a key vote in America’s largest city.

The Big Apple proposal, though, could resonate with other municipalities, inspiring them to follow suit — and, if Congress approves an otherwise unrelated immigration overhaul, the number of newly eligible immigrant voters could swell into a potent voting bloc on the local level.

That’s because the national overhaul being considered in Washington creates a so-called pathway to legal status for millions of illegal immigrants. By itself, this does little in the near-term to give non-citizens the right to vote. But if New York City approves its plan to give its 800,000 legal immigrants a say in city politics, illegal immigrants could eventually join the voter rolls there as well. And they wouldn’t have to wait for citizenship to vote.

Read more from this story HERE.

Empire State DA: I Won’t Prosecute Cuomo’s New Gun Law

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Photo Credit: Human Events

An upstate New York prosecutor told Human Events he will not go after an individual for a misdemeanor violation of the Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement Act, signed into law on Jan. 15, in a extraordinary two-minute-drill session of the state’s legislature.

“As I do in all cases, I considered all of the circumstances surrounding the summons,” said Columbia County District Attorney Paul Czajka.

“I declined to prosecute one particular offense,” he said. If the DA had moved forward, it would be one of the first attempts to bring a violator of the new law to trial.

The incident in question took place May 12 at 9:45 p.m., two New York State police officers stopped 31-year-old Gregory Dean from Dutchess County on Route 22 in the town of New Lebanon after noticing that the license plate light on Dean’s car was broken, the DA said.

Thereafter, three summonses were issued, said the former Columbia County judge. “Dean was charged with driving with a suspended license; an inadequate license plate; and for unlawful possession of ammunition device, which is a Class B misdemeanor.”

Read more from this story HERE.