New york

Don’t call it a comeback! Rumors emanating from Dante’s seventh circle of political hell suggest that disgraced New York governor Andrew Cuomo could return to this mortal plane to challenge his replacement Kathy Hochul in a Democratic primary. Unnamed sources, who Cockburn is sure definitely aren’t former Cuomo employees and diehard loyalists such as Rich Azzopardi or Melissa DeRosa, told CNBC that the Luv Guv “has been fielding calls from supporters about a possible run against his former lieutenant governor” and that “his aides have been conducting their own internal voter polling on a potential matchup.

Clubhouse may be dead, but Cockburn hears from his niece that Twitter Spaces is the hot news tool for social media seppuku. According to murmurings on Twitter, congressional candidate George Santos may be its latest victim. Santos, a Republican, is running to represent New York's 3rd congressional district. He previously lost in 2020 to Democrat Tom Suozzi, who earned 55.9 percent of the vote to Santos's 43.5 percent. Santos describes himself as "America First" and has received the endorsement of New York congresswoman and House Republican Conference chair Elise Stefanik. However, earlier this week, he drew the ire of right-wing Twitter for suggesting that he could see himself supporting reparations for American descendants of slaves.

At the stroke of midnight on January 1, Bill de Blasio — New York’s bumbling, mildly sinister but profoundly incompetent mayor — got laughed out of office as his second term came to an end. Don’t let the door hit ya, the city collectively sneered...despite voting for the man twice. The new administration couldn’t even wait until morning to flip the official @NYCMayor Twitter account. One minute after midnight, it changed all its pictures over to ones of Eric Adams, before the man had even been officially sworn in. An image of the smiling new mayor loomed over de Blasio’s final message: a photo of he and his wife walking in shadow down a long hallway with their backs turned on a city they abandoned long ago.

So, you got a cold. It happens around this time every year, to almost everyone. You got the sniffles, your head is a little foggy, you have an occasional sneeze, there’s some persistent phlegm lingering in the back of your throat. It’s mildly annoying, and you’re reminded this is bound to happen at least once every winter, and life goes on as normal but with a few more tissues in your pocket. Give it three days, a week max. Maybe you take some over-the-counter medicine, have chicken soup for lunch, sleep next to a humidifier. Upon greeting friends or coworkers, you politely decline a handshake or hug. “Sorry, I’ve got a cold,” you tell them — and they appreciate your consideration. “Oh, I just got over that,” one might say, “something’s going around.

The Democrats' only possible path forward is to ensure that Trump does not run in 2024. So they want to lock him away in jail. With only three years left to go, the 2024 race is narrowing to Trump versus Some Democrat. By Election Day, President Biden will be a vaguely sentient eighty-two, VP Harris will likely have left the country, and the Dems' rainbow coalition of identity claimants will quickly winnow itself down to nobody as their collective lack of experience devalues their various claims of victimhood. What to do about Trump? You can convince some Americans for awhile that Trump is a Russian agent, or violated an Emoluments Clause thingie they'd never heard of before, just by saying it over and over.

When will our intellectual life return to normal, where facts come together into conclusions? Today, in service to ideologies like Critical Race Theory, conclusions are established and facts are manipulated or just ignored to support them. You can't argue intellectually against something so profoundly nonintellectual but you can take note of it in hopes that someday we will untangle ourselves. That's why today we're paying a visit to the Tenement Museum on New York's Lower East Side. When I joined the Museum as an educator in early 2016, it was a small, elegant, good place. Inside a restored 19th-century tenement apartment house, it told the story of some of the actual all-immigrant families who had lived there, from inside their actual apartments.

Imagine if former governor Andrew Cuomo had been as concerned with the safety of nursing home patients during the pandemic as he was with cranking out his crappy memoir. Perhaps more people would be seeing their grandparents this Thanksgiving. Alas, the Luv Guv had his eyes on a $5.1 million prize and therefore he had to quit, or at least check out of, his day job. Cuomo was not the only governor who mishandled the response to the pandemic — but his fall from grace was definitely the most captivating. After all, the media fawned over Cuomo. The talking heads drooled over his leather bomber jacket, his tough talk, his no nonsense press conferences and his possible nipple ring. Marie Claire dubbed him "America’s boyfriend" while Chelsea Handler wrote him a love letter.

Visitors to New York tell me how surprised they are to see so few masked up people on the streets. But a sizable portion of the NYC population isn’t letting go of the disgusting, soggy, disease vectors strapped to their faces — and they never will. This set aren’t true-believers in the still-unproven effectiveness of masks; for them, it’s both an identity and psychological disorder. On the streets of any city, the forever-masked are broadcasting their allegiance to authoritarianism, letting you know they’re most comfortable somewhere on a hierarchy of coercion, whether among the hopelessly obedient, or tyrants themselves. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. You now have a visual cue letting you know exactly who you’re dealing with and who to avoid.

Ex-governor of New York Andrew Cuomo has been named on a criminal complaint for “forcible touching the sexual or intimate parts for the purpose of degrading or abusing another person.” How the mighty fall. This time last year Cuomo was riding high on popularity nationwide as the go-to pandemic politician. There were whispers of him replacing Joe Biden on the ticket for president. All the major news networks fawned over him and helped him win an Emmy award for his “effective use of television during the pandemic.”  Cuomo and his giant ego later remarked that the Emmy board members forgot to mention his “sense of humor, charisma, good looks or charm.

Crime is the biggest issue in the New York mayor’s race, according to both candidates and the moderators of Tuesday night’s debate. No one bothered to pretend the current mayor, Bill de Blasio, has been anything other than a complete disaster. In just seven years, de Blasio turned the safest big city in America into a vast, lawless, festering homeless shelter. His successor apparent, Eric Adams, is a former police officer and the current Brooklyn borough president. New Yorkers mostly put up with the decline of their city, not wanting to acknowledge the failures of their aloof, ruling monoparty.