September 23, 2013

"18 Fun and Utterly Fascinating Facts About Joe Lhota."

He's the GOP candidate for mayor in NYC. I'll highlight one, the most legal one:
6) Remember the Giuliani administration's showdown with the Brooklyn Museum over a portrait of the Virgin Mary that involved elephant dung? A lot of that was Joe Lhota! As deputy mayor, he spearheaded negotiations with the museum, threatening it with eviction and funding cuts. He admitted recently that his legal argument was flawed, saying, "I have a much clearer understanding of the First Amendment now."
 And now I'm following Lhota on Twitter. Sample tweet:

8 comments:

YoungHegelian said...

I'm sorry, but did I miss the Constitutional Law class where it was discussed why a polity can't de-fund an artistic organization that egregiously insults a large chunk of the electorate?

Since artistic license seems to trumps all, I guess we'll be seeing exhibits of "degenerate art" by Jews, Blacks & the other mud people, right?

Or, did I miss something?

William said...

There was an article about deBlasio in today's NY Post. He and his wife did a quick shuffle in Canada and then honeymooned in Cuba. In the eighties, he delivered non military aide to the Sandinistas.......You'll hear more about the Brooklyn art show and never hear about the Cuba honeymoon again.

Anonymous said...

I'm sorry, but did I miss the Constitutional Law class where it was discussed why a polity can't de-fund an artistic organization that egregiously insults a large chunk of the electorate?

You did, but you can catch up on what you missed here.

Guildofcannonballs said...

Who doesn't have a much clearer understanding of everything after Obama?

Leftists deserve tax dollars to stoke riots, while conservatives do not.

YoungHegelian said...

@Paul,

I still don't see it from your link. Are you really saying that taxpayer monies, once ever given, must always be continued to a private entity, not matter how obnoxious the 1st amendment behavior of that entity becomes?

Now, denying the non-profit status or zoning for for such an entity on the basis of offensive speech is clearly unconstitutional, but are you really claiming that the museum has a constitutional right to public monies?

If so, then would NYC be obligated to provide public funding for the museum to stage my hypothetical "Mud People" exhibit?

From Inwood said...

Where's Cedarford when we need him?

This is obviously a pitch to UWS/UES Libs, but in reality the Museum "Art" it was a planned insult to RCs. As such it was not even "edgy". Edgy would be art insulting the Wymyn's movement, Blacks, Islamofascists, Never gonna happen in NYC.

I'm sorry that Joe L feels he must apologize rather than just say what Young Hegelian wrote above.

Now in NYC it’s hard to think of an agenda more destructive than what the apparent Dem candidate, Bill de Blasio (not even his birth name!), offers: class warfare, Great Society spending and traditional, soft-on-crime liberalism.

But I'm not confining my scorn to UWS Jews, who live like Episcopalians but vote like minorities.

Beginning back in the 70s, for the most part, Catholic Liberals took up the most loony left-wing Liberalism, “McGovernism”, as a way to catch up with the world and leave the Catholic ghetto. In reality, they were exchanging what they saw as an intellect-free ghetto for the gulag of an intellectualoid Liberalism.

The other day I was speaking to an old friend guy (an Irish-American RC who’d grown up in Larchmont in well-to-do surroundings; he now lives on the Uppa West Side, on 94th St), who, all of a sudden, sniggered (I can use that word, no?) about my living outside Manhattan. (No impulse control. But I digress.)

I asked him how he, of all people could knock non-Manhattan with the clown-car election going on in NYC. He told me that Bill de Blasio would help the poor & that he, the guy on the phone that is, hated Republicans because he was for the poor & that Obama would’ve gotten a lot of things done if it weren’t for the obstructionism of the GOP Then he went into bumpersticker-ese propaganda about Social Justice (Gurgle, Gurgle).

I asked him how he, old & gray & full of sleep * nodding by the fire feels safe from the new "stop & rob" decision.& He replied “the cops will have to stop discriminating against Blacks.”

I started to try to explain to him that, forgetting politics, Conservative economic policies are good for the poor, you know encouraging the creation of wealth, which tends to drive out poverty, and thus most supportive of Catholic social teaching. But I quickly realized that it’s useless arguing with these people — moral exhibitionists espousing generous sentiment without the having to think of the costs to other people of the morally-appropriate policy which must follow — so I stopped & repeated something I’d just repeated my mantra about Obama being a hapless doofus, elected without any qualifications by well-meaning numbskulls, because of his skin color.

End of conversation.

Now? NYC is doomed to a return of the cycle of buying off unions and other interest groups, seeing cops as the bad guys, raising taxes, and driving out businesses? Some High Moral Ground, that.

Anonymous said...

are you really claiming that the museum has a constitutional right to public monies?

Just the opposite-- if the museum had a constitutional right to the money, you wouldn't need a Doctrine of Unconstitutional Conditions to explain why government can't withhold the money. What the museum has a right to is speech. As long as it restricts itself to speech that the government isn't allowed to ban outright, the government is also usually not allowed to bribe it into refraining from speech either. Imagine the potential for abuse if this were not part of our law!

From Inwood said...

[T]he willingness of the press to allow de Blasio to paint his support for the Sandinistas as part of the journey that led him to the mayoralty bodes ill for the city…

That may not be a disqualifying attribute to many New York voters, but it ought to give pause to those whose livelihoods and safety will depend on de Blasio and the wrecking crew he brings to City Hall next January not demolishing all that Giuliani and Bloomberg accomplished in the last 20 years.
To those who are either too young or too deluded by liberal propaganda to know better, the struggle against the socialism that de Blasio backed was the most important battle fought in the last half of the 20th century… It says a lot about de Blasio’s commitment to that vicious political faith that even after the Iron Curtain fell and the peoples of captive Eastern Europe celebrated the defeat of the Communist cause that he would make a pilgrimage to one of its last strongholds in Cuba to celebrate his marriage.

If de Blasio were willing to admit that much of what he said in defense of the Sandinistas and Cuba was wrong, there would be nothing to say now about his past other than to state that he had learned from it. But since he appears to be proud of his support for tyrants, it is fair game for his critics. More to the point, it is also worth asking just how much those experiences still influence a politician who will have at his disposal the vast powers of the mayoralty

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2013/09/23/oh-to-be-young-and-socialist-again-bill-de-blasio-sandinistas/