New York State Attorney General Letitia James hammers conservative outfits over paperwork errors, but look how kind she is when the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a political ally, flouts state charity and elections law.
Thirty years ago, I had my first job in PR, at a small Midtown Manhattan firm. This was before HR complaints were really a thing, which was lucky for the managing director, because his behavior would have gotten him fired a dozen times over.He was also one of the most offensive human beings I have ever met, and the fact that I'm still thinking about him three decades later tells you he left a nasty mark in my memories..He thought he was hilarious. In meetings, he'd riff on the size of his own anatomy, brag about his sex life with his wife in raunchy details, and disparage women in the room, all while chuckling at his own material. It was grotesque. But everyone reporting to him laughed, because that's what you did back then. And that laughter did exactly what you'd expect: it convinced him he was the funniest man alive.I thought about that atrocious boss when I watched Donald Trump's hour-plus “bomb after bomb” performance at Friday night's White House Correspondents' Dinner at the Waldorf Astoria. There he was again.If Trump had been a contestant on Chuck Barris's old game show "The Gong Show," he would have been gonged in the first 30 seconds. That show existed to publicly end bad performances. Trump went on for more than an hour, only because there was no gong to stop him..The reason Trump thinks he's funny is the same reason my old boss did. He surrounds himself with people who laugh because they feel they have to, not because anything is funny. At his rallies, 90 minutes of obscenities and insulting tangents get cheered by a crowd that showed up already believing he's a comic genius. On Truth Social, his posts get flooded with laughing emojis from followers who treat everything he types as the epitome of comedy. Trump has built an entire ecosystem that reflects his own ego and inflated narcissism back at him, and he's never had to sit with the silence that follows a joke that simply isn't funny.Friday night, he got that silence. The Correspondents' Dinner crowd wasn't a rally audience or a Truth Social feed. And it wasn’t a room full of yes men like Howard Lutnick and Stephen Miller. It was a room of journalists, people who, for the most part, cover Trump rather than worship him, and who don't laugh on command. And don’t find him funny in the least.And it showed. As CNN put it, Trump's jokes mostly fell flat, and by the network's own account, "even he could tell, in real time, that many of his jokes were bombing."The clearest example was when he tried to tell a joke about aging lawmakers. Trump told the room about a senator who got a text from his wife asking him to "come up the stairs and make love to me,” to which the senator supposedly replied, "I can't do both." No laughs. No laughing emojis. No praise. Just total silence. Trump tried to explain the joke — that’s when you know you’ve told a dud — then explained it again, then gave up and told the crowd, "That was actually the only thing I thought was good in this whole, frickin' stupid speech they wrote." An 80-year-old man, mocking other aging men for being past their prime, using a joke ultimately about his own stamina and assumed lack of libido, and nobody in the room found it funny but him.Then there was Kaitlan Collins. About 10 minutes into the speech, Trump used her CNN award to needle her, again, for supposedly never smiling. "You're at CNN fake news. You should be a happy person. So smile, Kaitlan! Just smile,’ before bizarrely and incomprehensibly comparing her to trans activist Dylan Mulvaney. Watching that elicited a loud, “what the ...?” from me.It’s always been his way of telling a woman her job is to perform pleasantness for him, as misogynistically as possible. What's almost too ironic to invent is that he delivered that riff to a room of reporters who sat there largely stone-faced themselves. Trump complained about a woman not smiling enough, to a crowd that wasn't smiling at him — at all.So, Friday night was revelatory in so many ways — well, let’s say redundantly revelatory because we all know Trump stinks at being funny, except when he’s not trying to be funny.Take Trump out of the sycophantic loop that he's built for himself, the rally crowds, the Truth Social replies, the aides who write his material and the aides who laugh at his vulgarity, and what's left is a joke of a man whose jokes flat out stink, just like him.Trump is someone who's spent his entire life, even before the presidency, basically being laughed at on command. That’s why he seems incapable of recognizing the difference between real laughter and fake laughter. My old boss had the same blind spot. He never learned it, because nobody with power over him — at least as long as I had to suffer through him — ever let him feel the silence. Trump felt it Friday night, and the only thing that would have interrupted that silence would have been the bang of a gong.
Jackson, set to replace Graham Platner, is prominent workers’ rights advocate and a leading progressive voiceAs cinemagoers flock to The Odyssey, Democrats in Maine are hoping that their long and perilous quest for a political hero ends in Troy.They have nominated lumberjack Troy Jackson this weekend as their candidate to challenge Susan Collins, a veteran Republican in the US Senate, after the implosion of the party’s original candidate left them scrambling for a replacement less than four months before the midterm elections. Continue reading...
New York City Schools only held back 0.4 percent of students in grades 3-8 last year even as half of city schools consistently flunking their students.
America remains deeply divided over whether the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump. Millions believe the system failed them, while the media, intelligence bureaucracy, and the left have treated their doubts as something to suppress rather than investigate.The documents released this week by the Trump administration do not close the case. They reopen it — and make the “nothing to see here” narrative indefensible.Start with communist China.The released intelligence reports that approximately 220 million American voter records are in Chinese hands. Tens of millions of records across 18 states were bought, stolen, or hacked and included names, addresses, phone numbers, party preferences, and other sensitive information.A sovereign nation must know that the people selecting its government are its citizens. That does not prove China changed a single ballot, but it does prove Beijing possessed a political targeting asset. When a strategic rival aggregates enormous datasets and applies modern analytics, it gains the ability to identify, target, and influence American voters at industrial scale. The most disturbing disclosure involves the President’s Daily Brief — the president’s most sensitive and consequential intelligence product. In one released email, an official wrote: “We have deliberately massaged our one pending PDB to avoid any direct links to the election.”In a separate internal chat, a counterintelligence official boasted: “I’m basically running a shadow government across the FBI at this point.”The left has spent years ridiculing concerns about a “deep state” as conspiracy theory. These revelations make that ridicule look increasingly like camouflage.Then comes the voting-system reveal.A Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency report included in the administration’s document release identifies weak access controls, outdated operating systems, flat networks, inadequate monitoring, and legacy remote-access pathways across state and local election environments. During multiple penetration tests and red-team exercises, CISA assessors gained full control of election-office networks within hours or days.Separately, the report cites research involving one ballot-marking system showing that barcode-encoded votes could be altered without changing the human-readable selections displayed to the voter.The release also includes intelligence concerning methods allegedly developed by Venezuela’s Maduro regime to manipulate electronic totals while concealing the changes.Precision matters. A Venezuelan capability is not proof of an American operation. A demonstrated vulnerability is not proof it was exploited. The documents do not establish that American vote totals were secretly changed in 2020.But they demolish the claim that election technology is immune from manipulation. These are computer systems with software, databases, vendors, administrators, updates, and attack surfaces. Compromise must be anticipated and independently detectable.RELATED: America needs an artificial intelligence coalition, not an AI fortress Burcu demir/Getty ImagesA limited Department of Homeland Security review raises another alarm. The White House says it identified approximately 278,000 potential noncitizen registrations. DHS’ public follow-up described more than 250,000 preliminary potential matches in California, New Jersey, Nevada, and Pennsylvania — only four states.No serious person should dismiss numbers of this magnitude. Biden’s certified Georgia margin in 2020 was 11,779 votes. In 2016, Trump carried Michigan and Wisconsin by a combined 33,452 votes — and Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania by just 77,744.The media formula — “the documents do not prove vote totals changed; therefore they prove nothing” — is analytical malpractice. Absence of final proof is not proof of institutional innocence.The proper question is whether this new information raises the probability that foreign influence, intelligence suppression, ineligible registrations, or exploitable technology played a larger role in the 2020 election environment than Americans were told — and whether future elections remain at risk.The answer to both questions is yes.That is why Congress must pass the SAVE America Act before November. The House-passed legislation requires documentary proof of citizenship for federal voter registration and photo identification for federal voting.These are basic risk controls. Pew found that 83% of Americans — including 71% of Democrats and 95% of Republicans — support government-issued photo identification. A sovereign nation must know that the people selecting its government are its citizens. A constitutional republic must demonstrate — not merely assert — that its elections are accurate.Congress should stop stalling and pass the SAVE America Act.
The Post breaks down the top 10 players on the Knicks and the 76ers — set to be two of the Eastern Conference’s contenders next season — after LeBron James’ decision to sign with Philadelphia on Friday.
